Researchers from the Collaborative Research Center “Affective Societies” at Freie Universität Berlin provide insights into the emotions that emerge from conflict.
Sigmund Freud is once reported to have said, “It is difficult to approach emotions scientifically.” The researchers at the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) “Affective Societies” at Freie Universität Berlin could hardly agree more. Emotions are rarely simple – joy is often accompanied by sadness, hope by fear, and love by anger. To study emotions is to study something that constantly changes its shape and color and that resists clear definition. The CRC’s new podcast Mixed Feelings confronts these complexities head-on. It explores why emotions become so tangled, why they can be so hard to make sense of, and what we can learn when we start taking them seriously.
Hosted by Polina Aronson, who coordinates public communication at “Affective Societies,” the podcast brings together researchers from within the CRC and voices from outside academia – writers, artists, activists, and practitioners – who deal with emotional dilemmas in their everyday work. Mixed Feelings connects scientific insight with lived experience in order to shed light on the messy, powerful, and often contradictory feelings that define contemporary life.
The first episode explores perhaps the most mixed feeling of all: love. Featuring literary scholar Dr. Gesa Jessen (Freie Universität Berlin) and writer and blogger Ole Liebl, the episode unpacks the scripts we have inherited, the fantasies we cling to, and the quiet revolutions reshaping our emotional lives.
Over the next two years, the CRC will release eight to ten more episodes, each lasting forty-five to sixty minutes. Upcoming topics include the emotional dynamics of conspiracy theories and the affective meanings of contemporary utopias. New episodes will be released every two to three months.
For anyone curious about why we feel the way we do – and how emotions shape politics, culture, and everyday life – Mixed Feelings offers fresh insights, surprising connections, and perspectives you will not find anywhere else.
Based at Freie Universität Berlin, CRC 1171 “Affective Societies” investigates affects and emotions as essential factors of coexistence in twenty-first century societies. The goal of the research center is to establish a new understanding of societies that emphasizes the fundamental importance of affects and emotions in the mobile, interconnected, and mediatized worlds of the global present. At the CRC, scholars from nine disciplines across the social sciences, cultural studies, and humanities are researching these questions in twelve sub-projects.
Further Information