The symbolic life of rebellion: Reading Affective economies of contestation

Wednesday 25 Mar 2026, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/London

Zoom

Rebellion has become one of the most affectively charged genres of contemporary political life. Across the world, actors with sharply divergent politics, from far-right movements to abolitionist, environmentalist, and anti-colonial struggles, articulate their projects as rebellions against coercive power. Stories of rebellion saturate popular culture, even as (or precisely because) much of formal politics revolves around debates over what kind of rebellion is most dangerous and how it should be policed. Meanwhile, advertisers and corporate brands sell rebellion as hot commodity. Rebellion appears simultaneously as source of political possibility, vehicle for reactionary formations, and depoliticised aesthetic.

In this talk, Chris Rossdale outlines an emerging research agenda on the symbolic life of rebellion. The talk approaches rebellion not simply as a political practice, but as a symbolic and affective structure through which political life is organised and contested. It conceptualises rebellion as at once a set of political claims, a repertoire of action, and a felt orientation: a way of cultivating attachments and detachments and experiencing political antagonism. Rebellion functions, in this account, as a floating signifier that carries historical and affective traces, but lightly enough that different projects can inhabit it and struggle over its meaning. These affective economies of rebellion matter: whose rebellion is celebrated or feared, and whose rebellious emotions are read as sympathetic, excessive, or illegible, is shaped by, reproduces, and sometimes unsettles oppressive social hierarchies.

The talk sketches three contemporary formations of rebellion - reactionary, liberal, and radical - before exploring how struggles between these formations unfold across cultural and political life. Through discussions of the Star Wars franchise, far-right mobilisations at hotels housing migrants, and the proscription of Palestine Action, it examines how struggles over the meaning and feeling of rebellion are integral to contemporary political contestation. 

 Chris Rossdale is Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Bristol. They write about the politics of rebellion, the criminalisation of dissent, and militarism, policing and state violence, including in their 2019 book Resisting Militarism: Direct Action and the Politics of Subversion (EUP).”

Registration will close two hours before the event begins.