The Politics of Feeling: Populism, Progressivism, Liberalism

In this talk, Prof Ben Anderson and Prof Anna Secor (Durham University) will argue that today’s competing political forms – populism, progressivism, liberalism - offer differentiated affective responses to shared conditions of uncertainty amid the ongoing, perpetually deferred end of neoliberalism.

Rather than naming coherent programs of political thought, these popular political forms operate as arrangements or modes of attachment and intensity. Each one suggests a different way of remembering the past, imagining the future, and making the present politically meaningful. Each one offers distinctive structures of feeling amid today’s crisis times. Each one elevates some affective orientations over others and thereby etches differences of race, class, and gender within its structure.

Summarising the arguments of the recently published (2025, Goldsmiths Press/MIT), we offer a set of propositions about how each political form works affectively, including: ‘Liberalism promises nothing need ever change’; ‘Populism is optimistic’, and, for progressivism, ‘everything matters now’.

Alongside these propositions, we update our analysis by reflecting on the affective politics of the turbulent period since the 2024 UK General Election and 2025 inauguration of Donald J Trump, including the rise of Reform and the Green Party in the UK, the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City, and emergent fascisms.

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SPEAKERS

• Ben Anderson is Professor of Human Geography at Durham University - here
• Anna J. Secor is Professor of Human Geography at Durham University - here

LOCATION

• Theatre C, Simon Building, University of Manchester
• UoM Map at: https://www.manchester.ac.uk/about/maps/

HOSTS

• HCRI: https://www.hcri.ac.uk/
• UoM Geography: https://www.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/geography/

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