Talk:
“The Wavelength”
by
Michelle Weitzel
Graduate Institute, Geneva (IHEID)
michelle.weitzel@graduateinstitute.ch
Date and Room Info
Wednesday, March 25, 2026, 12:30 p.m.
A-130
Abstract
Many scholars of the early 21st century believe democracies and the global liberal order to be in decline. This is documented along various dimensions, but in the contemporary securitized, prediction-oriented world, one area that has not seen an attendant decline is governmental capacity to control populations. In this crumbling order, affect, perception, and the specificity of the body emerges as an increasingly targeted and lucrative frontier. This talk traces the exploitation of the visceral register and the ascendance of affective governance through a politics of sound, uncovering social and political formations that are not grounded in material power, language, or even symbolic strength, but in feeling and the capture of attention. It introduces the Panaudicon–a regime of auditory control—to better understand how affective governance jumps scales from the microlevel to the global, presenting a grounded explanation not only of how aurality is coopted across disparate contexts, but also showing the outcomes of sonic forms of affective governance in diverse empirical settings.
Short Bio
Michelle Weitzel is Assistant Professor of International Relations and Political Science at the Graduate Institute, Geneva (IHEID), where she is affiliated with the Center on Conflict, Development, and Peacebuilding; the Gender Center; and the Global Governance Center. In Fall 2026, she is a Departmental Guest in the Politics Department at Princeton University. Her research sits at the intersection of security, and violence, and sensory politics. She asks how ambient sound, affect, and embodied experience constitute forms of political power — and what this means for how we understand domination, resistance, and governance in the Middle East and beyond. Her work has appeared in Security Dialogue, French Politics, Middle East Law & Governance, Borderlands, and Global Studies Quarterly, among other journals. She has been recognized with the Wilson Award and the Hayward R. Alker Award from the American Political Science Association, and her dissertation received the Honorable Mention for the Malcolm H. Kerr Award from the Middle East Studies Association. She holds a Ph.D. in Politics from the New School for Social Research, an A.L.M. in Government from Harvard University, and a B.S. in Journalism and History from Northwestern University.