Passionate technologies, passionate scholarship: Falling in (and out of) love with your research
Jenny Sundén Södertörn University

This presentation is about passionate scholarship. It is about working with and through one's passions as a researcher, and of allowing for such feelings to guide and shape ways of thinking and writing scholarly texts. In particular, it is an attempt to think and write embodied ways of knowing by drawing on the affective attachments to technologies central to contemporary fan cultures, using as core examples the practices of online gamers as well as of steampunks. The academic discussion of affect is usually ontological rather than epistemological and only rarely spells out the methodological consequences of making sense through sensation. For what does it mean to work in an analytical register of embodiment and emotion? What do we, as researchers, make of our own 'gut feelings' and desires in research? In what ways may bodily remembering, relating, and belonging be used as sources of knowledge? And what happens when we are not feeling it, or simply stop feeling it? Jenny Sundén is Associate Professor in Gender Studies at Södertörn University, Sweden. Her research interests are primarily in new media studies, cultural studies, feminist theory, ethnography, and games. She is the author of Material Virtualities: Approaching Online Textual Embodiment (Peter Lang, 2003) and Gender and Sexuality in Online Game Cultures: Passionate Play (Routledge, 2012, with Malin Sveningsson), as well as a co-editor of Cyberfeminism in Northern Lights: Gender and Digital Media in a Nordic Context (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007). Jenny Sundéns visit is made possible with support from the QUMU-network at Umeå University. See their webpage for more info: http://www.qumu.se/