Embodied World Relations: Resonance, Social Energies and the Body In Turbulent Times

Contemporary global turbulence is often analysed through the languages of institutional crisis, democratic erosion, ecological emergency, geopolitical violence, technological transformation and epistemic disorder. This session complements these diagnoses by interpreting the present conjuncture as a crisis of embodied world relations. Its central argument is that turbulent times are not only cognitively interpreted or politically negotiated; they are bodily lived, affectively registered and somatically processed.

Drawing on Hartmut Rosa’s sociology of world relations, the session understands resonance as a mode of relating in which subjects are affected by the world, respond to it, and are transformed through this encounter. From the perspective of the sociology of the body, however, resonance cannot be reduced to individual experience. The body must be understood as a sensing, vulnerable and responsive medium through which relations to others, institutions and the planet are constituted.

The sessiondevelops the concept of social & emotional energies to analyse how bodies become charged, depleted, mobilised or disciplined in turbulent times. Disinformation, ecological denial, authoritarian mobilisation and attacks on science generate bodily regimes of anxiety, resentment, numbness and defensive closure. Conversely, democratic movements, feminist and decolonial struggles, ecological activism and public sociology may be understood as embodied practices that regenerate resonant relations and collective agency.

By linking resonance theory, sociology of the body and global sociology, the session asks how sociology can analyse the bodily foundations of shared vulnerability, transformative knowledge and social change in turbulent times.