Professor Ben Anderson

Durham University

Ben is a Co-Investigator in the project, where he co-leads Work Package 2. He is cultural-political geographer whose research conceptualises ordinary affective life and examines how life is now governed through affect. He is particularly interested in researching how emergencies are governed and how emergencies govern as, over the second half of the twentieth century, ‘emergency’ shifted from being a term applied to a limited number of events to a term used in relation to almost any event. The research aims to understand how and why this change happened, tying it to shifts in ordinary affective life and transformations in the state’s relation to futures. The other side of Ben’s research has explored the implications of theories of affect and matter for what social and cultural geography is and does.