Emotion Space and Society最新文献

This article examines how loneliness intertwines with young adults' (aged 20–35) sense of home during the Covid-19 pandemic, when lockdowns and restrictions altered the role of home in everyday life. Drawing from data gathered through an online questionnaire, I explore how loneliness has or has not shaped young adults' understandings of and attachments to their home during the pandemic. My focus is on young adults who live alone or in shared housing in Finland. I apply Sara Ahmed's sticky emotions and Margaret Wetherell's affective practices as I show in the analysis that young adults often (re)make positive meanings for home when they are lonely. Contrastingly, the pandemic has had a role in making living alone lonely for many, making loneliness to stick to home and shaping the home into a distressing, isolating place. I argue that also in non-pandemic times, it is important to note that the way loneliness shapes home is complex and ambiguous, and happens in relation to life beyond home, including diverse social encounters and relationships that cross the border of home.

In the last two decades, there has been a significant increase in the number of journal articles, events and research projects dedicated to the topics of emotions, affect, and spatial experiences in Brazil and Portugal. In this context, collaboration between Brazilian and Portuguese geographers is also increasing, despite the different epistemological traditions of the two geographic communities. With this in mind, in this paper, we reflect about the originality of Luso-Brazilian emotional geographies by looking at three dimensions: epistemologies, research agendas, and collaboration. We focus on how the epistemological perspectives and the social concerns of Brazilian and Portuguese geographers have shaped Portuguese-speaking emotional geographies, leading to the emergence of a research area for the study of the relations between emotions and space. We conclude this paper by calling for more attention to the constraints that Luso-Brazilian emotional geographies are facing.

The last two decades have seen an attention war play out between digital platforms, with social media as the main battleground. This has led to the development of techniques such as the hook model to capture users' attention and subconsciously direct their behaviour towards private ends. Bernard Stiegler has called this new form of governance “psychopower”. Drawing on autoethnographic research, this paper presents an analysis of the social media platform BeReal, focusing on the role of the platform's environment design in capturing users' attention. Our findings show that the platform succeeds in holding users' attention through nudges and habit formation. We also found a strong link between attention capture, emotional exchange and the experience of affects.

Geographic accounts of caving have critiqued the propensity of affects and practices which reinforce EuroAmerican coloniality and hubris, while also finding alternative paths of intimacy and lively relationality. Yet subsurface geographies can also reinforce cliched spatial and moral topographies. This article reflects on the production of an ambivalent affect of “dark humor” in caves, through caver social worlds, and in cave writing and song. I use a Bachelardian phenomenology of the imagination as a method of interpreting the geopoetics of cave space and cave emotion related topologically rather than topographically into easy interior/exterior or surface/depth oppositions. Through Jan and Herb Conn's cave ballads and poetry, imaginative place names, and accounts of irritating struggles with manganese, a different emotional culture of caving is produced than the masculine risk-seeking one might expect. Nonetheless, such phenomenological focus on immediacy of creative imagination risks precluding broader historical-political contexts of settler coloniality. Seeking a position between “ruthlessly critical” or “post-critically evasive” analyses, I consider how the Conns produced an “anti-heroic” attitude useful beyond caving and the politics of the subsurface but without purity or innocence.

Periods of localised social unrest are increasing in frequency and are usually described in terms of crisis. Events that unfold during these periods are often recounted retrospectively once a sense of stability has emerged. In contrast, this article contributes an empirical analysis of identity work undertaken by a group of individuals amid an unfolding crisis by drawing on interview data collected in one Hong Kong University across December 2019 and January 2020. We frame our analysis with the concept of liminality which draws attention to the space or state of in-between-ness occupied by people as they navigate and work to transition from ‘before’ to ‘after’ a time of great change. We explore linguistic representations of liminality by analysing the use of metaphors in these interview narratives. Metaphors, in this context, are considered key markers of complex cognitive and psychological processing. Findings of this analysis indicate the dominance of (dis)orientation to time and uncertainty about the future which are associated with liminality and identity work.

In human geography, many of us are involved in community-engaged and activist research, much of which is inspired by deep emotional commitments to progressive change. Yet, the last three years have taken a toll on academics. Many in academia are anxious and burnt out, as the demands of the neoliberal university remain relentless despite the seeming collapse of the world around us. We have witnessed a radical restructuring of research, teaching, and praxis as the pandemic changed our ability to do in-person work. Building solidarity and enacting social change under these circumstances has been challenging, to say the least. And while the Covid-19 pandemic has illustrated the critical global interdependencies between all of us and inspired new forms of mutual aid and support, it has also inspired rising division and growing right-wing movements based on imaginaries of fear and insecurity. In this paper, I discuss how emotional geographies are inherently woven through all human experiences and interactions, but they are especially implicated in issues of social and spatial justice. Given ongoing global crises, I argue that holding onto emotions in academic research, teaching, and praxis is more important than ever.

This paper proposes a mindful geography, in which mindfulness is understood as a research praxis and an alternative way to inhabit academia. Mindful geographies offer a resistance to ways the neoliberal university (and the discipline of geography) impacts the minds and bodies of those marginalised by this system. Firstly, to provide context to my argument, I situate myself within the literature pertaining to mindfulness. Subsequently, this allows me to focus on the ways geographers have engaged with mindfulness through the geographies of transformation, critical geographical perspectives on mindfulness, and non-representational approaches to the practice. This review allows me to engage with critical and transformational approaches to mindfulness through the interdisciplinary literature offering alternative pathways for the practice. Towards the end of the paper, I offer a different inflection for the ways that mindfulness might be used in geography. Here, I provide an explanation of the ways we might bring mindfulness into our geographical research practices to contribute to collective and individual development and healing. This work is prompted by personal experiences in the academy and seeks to promote a more mindful approach to academic knowledge and practice, one that foregrounds (self)care and slowness in the production of geographical knowledge.

Despite attempts to shed light on the precarity and resilience of international students, there has been thus far little engagement with the emotional dynamics of their lived experiences in times of crisis and the implications of these for the geographies of international student mobility. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 13 international (i.e., non-UK) doctoral students in a UK university during the COVID-19 pandemic, we examine how emotions are attached to different places and spaces, and how they are mobilised in various ways as students navigate uncertainties. Building on Kenway and Fahey's concept of ‘emoscapes’, we demonstrate that central to the (im)mobility of international students are emotions produced in and constitutive of particular spaces and in relation to various scales. We showcase the significance of the material and embodied dimensions of learning in the emotional life of internationally mobile students, which informs how the well-being of these students should be and could be supported at policy and practice levels. By illustrating the way in which emotional geographies are produced in pandemic times, we consider whether the emotional dynamics of international students in a time of crisis have the potential to both reconfigure and reproduce the uneven geographies of international student mobility.

This dialogic piece highlights how whiteness shapes the social ecology of different spaces and how positions change depending on space or the people in that space. Employing a methodology rooted in spatial experiences via participant observation and reflective dialogue about those experiences, we suggest that the complexities of whiteness, of masculinities, and of identities mean that there are fissures and moments that create the potential for disruption and for breaking apart hegemonic whiteness and masculinity. We discuss strategic resistance in white spaces, the racial spiral of whiteness, being subject to the white gaze of suspicion, strategic collaborative manipulation of whiteness, coalitionary whiteness, touristic whiteness, and white (mis)staking/(mis)taking.

Recent years have seen a growing number of studies on onward migration and specifically the motivations international migrants may have for leaving their first country of settlement. Many of these studies argue that onward migration occurs as migrants pursue opportunities to study, work and reunite with family members in different places. So far little research has been undertaken to understand how affect, emotion and imaginings of home also contribute to onward migration decision-making. This study aims to fill this lacuna in the research by focusing on the case of diasporic Iranians who initially moved to Sweden as refugees in the 1980s and 1990s, stayed for at least five years and then subsequently made the decision to move on to other parts of the Iranian diaspora. The findings of the study illustrate that the participants’ onward migration decisions may be related to their emotional encounters with places over time, and their evolving imaginings of what constitutes ideal homes in diasporic space. The study draws on rich material collected through multiple life history narrative interviews conducted with Swedish-Iranian migrants currently living in London, UK and Toronto, Canada.