Free webinar on 26 May on Affect with Giovanna Colombetti

This spring & summer we are hosting a series of free webinars themed "The Enactive Approach to Trauma and Dissociation"

In the second webinar, Ellert interviews the esteemed Prof. Dr. Giovanna Colombetti. Ellert has been closely following Colombetti’s work after reading her book "The Feeling Body: Affective Science meets the Enactive Mind”. Dr. Colombetti is scheduled to present on the second day of the Conference on an Enactive Approach to Trauma and Dissociation on 18.-20. October 2023.

NEW DATE: May 26, 17h-17h30 (Berlin/Central European Time)
Recording: available upon request, click on “register now” below.

Cost: Free
Registration required

Why Ellert invited Prof. Dr. Colombetti as a keynote speaker

“Giovanna puts a heavy emphasis on affect. There is a lot of talk about embodied cognition, making us wonder how cognition relates to affect? More recently, Giovanna focuses on how we relate to objects. Often this relationship is more than just a "technical relationship". This relationship has an experiential affective value. In trauma, we have the reverse movement. Where, for example, the traumatised individual relates to his or her own body as if it is a ‘thing’. Trauma therapists need to try and help the individuals who are traumatised to regain a second person perspective, in the relationship to their own body and their own affects.”

Professor Colombetti is an accomplished researcher in the field of emotion, affectivity and 4E cognition. The 4E approach to cognition proposes that cognition does not occur solely “in the head”, but instead is embodied, embedded, enacted and even extended. Colombetti’s research draws from several disciplines including phenomenology, analytic philosophy, cognitive and affective science, and material culture studies. In her work she has argued that affective phenomena should be understood from a dynamical, embodied-enactive perspective, and more recently that we need to understand them as thoroughly situated or “scaffolded” by the environment. She is currently interested in particular in how we use material things to regulate our affective states.