Keynote – Habit, Affect, and the Unconscious
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Carolyn Pedwell gave the keynote address at the University of Hertfordshire’s ‘Complexity and Management Conference 2025’.
Held at the Roffey Park Institute in West Sussex from 6th-8th June, the Complexity and Management Conference 2025 gave participants an opportunity to dwell in a group and pay attention to patterns of relating which never repeat in exactly the same way, and thus offer the potential for novelty to arise.
As the conference website notes: ‘We are shaped by society, but at the same time we shape society in our continuous interactions with each other. Better understanding our relationships and habits, which have a quality of regular-irregularity, tells us something about each other, but also about how society works. Unpicking our socialisation, past and present, gives us some insight into broader social patterns. And this also points to the importance of working in a group – an individual can only work out so much on their own through reflection, given our own biases and habits of thought’.
Carolyn’s talk at the event, ‘Transformative possibilities in the everyday – habit, affect and the unconscious’, spoke to themes from her recent book, Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation (McGill-Queens UP, 2021).
See conference host Professor Chris Mowles’ response to the talk.
