EDITORIAL

Dr. Lars Cornelissen, ISRF Academic Editor

I write the editorial to the present issue of the ISRF Bulletin with something of a heavy heart. The issue marks the end of Louise Braddock’s tenure as the ISRF’s Director of Research. Having handed over her directorial duties to Chris Newfield earlier this month, this will be the last Bulletin issue for which she was asked to pen the opening note.

Although it was never framed as such within the ISRF team, to my mind this issue stands as a memorial to Louise’s intellectual legacy at the Foundation. The guiding theme of the issue is the concept of structures of feeling, coined and elaborated by the Welsh Marxist and cultural theorist Raymond Williams (1921–1988), which has become central to Louise’s own research agenda over the past few years. Her own contribution to this issue, “‘The Unconscious is Structured like a Structure’: The Role of Structure in the Social Transmission of Meaning,” documents her reading of Williams and her attempt to address some of the limits of the theoretical framework he articulated.

The way the remainder this issue came together stands as a testimony to Louise’s unmatched ability to bring different scholars and indeed scholarly styles together. The three opening articles, by former ISRF Fellows Mike Makin-Waite, Julie Parsons, and Henrique Carvalho, came out of a research meeting Louise convened earlier this year, when the ISRF—much like everyone else—was experimenting with the possibilities opened up by the Zoomscape. Asked by Louise to make their own research projects speak to the concept of structures of feeling, Mike, Julie, and Henrique all found ways of weaving it into their respective thinking, resulting in the articles presented here.

The ‘Curated Research Conversation’ that follows Louise’s own contribution to this Bulletin is likewise the result of a series of online research meetings, this time involving Louise’s research network.

Structured around a discussion of Louise’s piece on Williams, these meetings took up some of the questions she raises and—as any good research conversation tends to do—ended up generating even more questions. The conversation as it is included here is based on the transcript of one of those meetings, which was artfully edited by Niall Gildea. The resulting piece revives a classic ISRF Bulletin genre: the ‘curated’ conversation. When it is done well—as it is here—such a piece is capable of capturing both the breadth and depth of the research meetings on which it is based, which is undoubtedly why Louise has always been fond of it as a Bulletin genre.

The final article included in this Bulletin was written by Chris Newfield, the incoming Director of Research. It was prompted, as Chris explains at outset of the piece, by the very same research meetings that generated the curated conversation. Inspired by Louise’s generative use of Williams’s conceptual work, Chris wondered whether the analytics of structures of feelings might help one make sense of the ongoing hold on United States culture of white supremacy. Taking his readers through a step-by-step analysis, Chris argues that ultimately, the kind of anti-Black racism that is rampant in white U.S. culture draws much of its sustenance from a deeply rooted and psychologically embedded comfort with coercive, racially inflected hierarchies. This mode of ‘submissive individualism’ generates not only white supremacist but also anti-democratic sentiments, both of which must be understood if we are to understand the nation’s current crises.

What Louise’s departure will do to the structure of feeling within the ISRF team remains to be seen. In the meantime, my hope is that this issue of the Bulletin can bear witness, however modestly, to the legacy that she has left the Foundation. Not only does it reflect, in so many ways, Louise’s capacity to stage research conversations; more fundamentally, and like so much that the ISRF has achieved since its humble beginnings, this issue would not even have existed if it weren’t for Louise.