This article contributes to a scholarly conversation about humanitarianism and the representation of refugees by interpreting how and why visual artists use maritime safety objects to intervene in the European migrant crisis. The amalgamated detritus of life jackets, parts of rubber dinghies, and other refuse from migrant crossings that have been left behind on the island of Lesbos, Greece have inspired

This paper investigates the emotions of transnationalism, when coming from the small, remote British Overseas Territory of St Helena. This paper captures how St Helenian islanders migrate for new opportunities and to escape island monotony. Even though dispersed, the St Helenian islanders retain a strong sense of attachment and belonging to their island, often establishing emotional and material ties

This article examines the life stories of two young Polish women who have faced severe marginalization and homelessness. The main aim of this article is to investigate how the notions of (in)visibility and (im)mobility are shaping participants' everyday lives and life stories they tell. Using concepts drawn from social sciences, as well as cultural and literary studies, this article attempts to reconstruct

Emotions about climate change are the subject of a growing area of interdisciplinary scholarship. But so far scholars have not studied the emotions expressed by self-declared climate change skeptics; nor have social scientists turned to affect studies to develop nuanced understandings of the constellation of emotions related to fear. Our team conducted 33 interviews and 1000 surveys with self-identified

Research on participation has advanced our understanding of children's everyday lives by increasingly bringing into focus what society perceives as ‘meaningful’. This piece is driven by a desire to extend this investigation by sharing a creative research journey. Here, we have combined our theoretical musings, initial conversations with children, and evolving methodological approaches to show how our

This paper applies a feminist political ecology approach to ask: How do sustainability in higher education (SHE) conference events co-produce the subjectivities and expertise of campus sustainability professionals (CSPs) emotionally? Specifically, how do SHE conference spaces cultivate particular embodied practices and discourses in CSPs who are meant to translate at times irreconcilable practices

Early childhood educators engage in complex and emotional work in their professional role educating and caring for children aged from birth to five years. The aim of this paper is to promote autoethnography as a most suitable method of understanding the role emotions play in the actualisation of young children's participation rights in early childhood education services. The author is a practising

What does a postcolonial ethics of care mean for feminist geographers doing archival work? Feminist geographers have long called for ethical research engagement. This asserts the importance of caring relationships with research mentees, collaborators, participants, and spaces. But care comes both with promise and pitfalls. As postcolonial and antiracist geographers argue, we must emplace care. That

This article takes as its focus a politics of affect and its potentially transformative effects. Drawing on feminist new materialism and the process philosophy of Deleuze, I map moments in which this politics is enacted as school children encounter museum exhibits designed to address issues of class and race. Taking affect to be a matter of the capacity of bodies to affect and be affected, I attend

A hill of salt in the Belfast docklands shimmers like an iceberg at sea. A laminated photograph of Sergei Eisenstein drifts in front of a camera as it moves amongst the streets of Mexico City. A grey mist hovers across Stockholm, obscuring the city behind it. These three images are from a sequence of essay films directed by Mark Cousins. In this paper, I discuss the work of Cousins in terms of its

More often than not, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) excludes emotion and qualitative analysis from studies of people-place relationships in favor of quantitative approaches. We employ emotional cartography as a form of qualitative GIS (qualGIS) to elevate emotions from the periphery to the center of dialogue about children's well-being. We highlight the ontological parallels between qualGIS,

Marriage practices in the Majority world may differ considerably from dominant cultural ideals in the Minority world of ‘romantic love’ and ‘companionate marriage’ based on monogamous relationships. Similarly, mourning in the ‘Rest’ of the world often diverges from assumptions within Anglophone bereavement studies of a ‘grieving journey’. This paper provides a gendered, spatial, relational analysis

Failure is a pervasive yet rarely articulated reality of being an academic. From grant rejections to fieldwork mistakes, this editorial introduces a special issue that engages with the notion of ‘failure’ within the neoliberal university. Highlighting the uncomfortable impacts of ‘failure’ across contrasting spaces and career stages, the authors explore its politics, power, and emotional resonance

Studies of street performance have highlighted its potential for creating vibrant and inclusive urban places, yet have largely neglected its atmospheric, affectual and emotional dimensions. Building on a growing body of work on atmospheres and dynamics of affect and emotion, I examine the formation of atmospheres by street performances in Taipei and its affectual and emotional resonance on space and

Confinement, hindrance, and time bring anxiety, fear, and stress, often accompanied by confusion and desperation. In the case of undocumented immigrants in the Sonoran Desert, such conditions are manipulated by way of surveillance and policing. These conditions, in combination with physical exertion, augment a physiological stress response that coalesces with existing traumas and fear. We undertake

In this intervention we desire to document and celebrate our own international research collaboration as an intimate long-distance relationship that sustains us amid a global pandemic of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. We share “love letter” poems that we wrote to each other, in response to a poem by Yayoi Kusama titled “Residing in a Castle of Shed Tears,” incorporated into her mirror room installation

This paper investigates how affective space is located and constructed in post-disaster places. In elaborating this concept, we observe the media narratives developed around the debris created by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in the Tohoku region of Japan. The tsunami waves washed away over 20 million tons of debris, some of which was retrieved in foreign countries and brought back to Japan to be

State institutions and their acts of indifference, valorization, and violence operate through relationships, emotions, legal framings, and people. Engaging feminist geographic interventions, in this article we center state employees and their quotidian, affective relationships to asylum-seekers and the asylum process. We show how these actors embody state migration control through their daily practices

This paper is informed by interdisciplinary research, practice and activism (Allegranti and Silas 2014; 2016, 2017) combining dance movement psychotherapy, cognitive neuroscience and the Afro-Brazilian art of Capoeira. Framed by feminist new materialism and posthumanism (Manning 2013; Harraway 2012; Barad 2007), and as an antidote to our global crisis, this writing foregrounds conceptual and political

Since the onset of the Greek economic crisis in 2010, thousands of highly educated and skilled Greeks have migrated abroad in search of better career prospects and living standards. This recent migratory wave has been termed ‛new’ Greek migration (Panagiotopoulou et al., 2019). The lives of new Greek migrants are characterised by a mélange of conflicting emotions: loss of belonging, irritation at Greek

In the context of debates on ontological risk, ‘border work’, and the transformative potentials of encounter, the paper offers a critical examination of the workings of discomfort to ask what is at stake in both its embrace and refusal. Focusing in particular on the deliberate production of discomfort and its perceived political, ethical, and pedagogical potential, the paper draws on ethnographic research

Over the past five years there has been an explosion of mis- and disinformation, with negative social and political impacts felt around the globe. The spread of misinformation has also generated huge scholarly interest but, unfortunately, critical theory has not played a strong role in driving or organizing this research. This paper argues that scholars of emotion and affect should play a stronger

This article examines the tensions between failing when researching policy and researching policy that itself will inevitably tend towards failure. Putting geographic scholarship on policy mobilities into dialogue with recent attempts to reclaim academic failure, I discuss the emotional struggles that can punctuate the geographies of researching, mobilising and critiquing public policy. Supported by

This paper draws upon research undertaken to understand the role of self-storage in the lives and losses of those who use it. For many renting self-storage is a temporary solution at a time of stress and/or transformation in their lives, including family bereavement. This paper will demonstrate how self-storage affects practices of mourning and remembrance, in particular by distancing and delaying

Whilst there has been a recent rise in research within the social sciences which has sought to explore the topic of ‘precarity’, to date there has been very little discussion around the precarity inherent in the research process or in following an academic pathway, and its subsequent impact on the wellbeing and mental health of the researcher. Within this intervention piece, we expose some of the uncertainties

The odds of failure are greater than those for success when applying for research funding. Yet academics are expected to be successful and win research funding to advance their own careers and the esteem of their institutions. This intensification of applications for research funding means that failure is a fact of life for researchers. In this intervention piece I examine how failure to secure research

This article, argues that migrant workers’ social practices within the local contexts in which diverse actors (co-workers, relatives, employers, agents and officials) and factors (such as wages, victimisation, bereavement and remittance) interact, creates emotions, and affects on both sides of the border. The diverse social practices and consequent emotions can either conserve or transform relationships

Secure units for adolescents are emotion-filled places. This paper examines how secure unit staff are socialized to match emotions to violent situations in a dynamic social context according to different feeling rules. The analysis applies theories about emotional culture as well as feeling rules. The article builds on 53 semi-structural interviews with staff at three secure units for detained boys

The Idol by Palestinian filmmaker Hani Abu-Assad is a film that is inspired by the true story of Mohammed Assaf, a young man from Gaza who became a sensation in Palestine when he won the Arab Idol contest in 2013. Abu-Assad's rendition of the story in The Idol is not faithful to real life, but instead offers an affective lens to Assaf's extraordinary rise to fame. My paper will argue that Palestinian

This paper stems from my long-term involvement in asylum activist communities in London and Berlin and is an analysis of the emotional work of borders. It describes asylum seekers’ daily journeys through endless spaces of discomfort and depletion, which I conceptualise as affective border violence. Stories about different public and private spaces such as the post office, gay clubbing and Berlin's

Our skin functions as ‘the unstable border between the body and its others’ (Ahmed, 1998: 27), serving as a crucial site through which social relations are constructed, including in ways that cause various kinds of discomfort. During fieldwork for two distinct research projects in and around my hometown, the South Indian city of Chennai, I was often forced to confront my ‘sanctioned ignorance’ (John

This article discusses the narrative and cinematic strategies used by activist documentaries on migration to enhance the empathy of spectators for the experiences of refugees. Empathy is not simply an emotion but an intersubjective skill of accessing the world of others and sensing our human interconnectedness. The paper focuses on Exodus, Our Journey to Europe and Exodus, The Journey Continues, a

The article highlights the introduction of new coloured illumination technology in healthcare environments. Through sensory ethnographic fieldwork, the article showcases the cohesion and clashes between human bodies, hospital spaces and new sensory technologies, exemplified by a case of delivery rooms in Denmark. By addressing how midwives experience and practice lighting during the process of labour

Despite well-established screening for hearing problems, and objective, diagnostic techniques aimed at dispelling uncertainty, some parents spend months waiting for clear diagnosis of their child's hearing loss. In the clinical setting, providers use international best-practice policies in diagnosing and managing childhood deafness, yet limited attention is given to the role of emotion in this context

The resettlement of refugees catalyses complex geographies of care, friendship and community. LocalHouse is a non-government, volunteer-run organisation that is entangled deeply in these resettlement geographies. It offers what it describes as ‘friendship-based support’ to refugees arriving in Wattle City through Australia's formal humanitarian program. This paper seeks to understand the everyday geographies

Drawing on 40 economic life course narrative interviews with migrant women entrepreneurs in Sweden from 26 countries, the aim of this paper is to explore the role of emotions while women navigate the Swedish policy field targeting entrepreneurs and thus asks, what role do emotions play in policy fields for migrant women entrepreneurs? Despite widespread acknowledgement that emotions are central to

In this paper, we critically analyse our experiences of initiating participatory research in the challenging context of the Atacama Desert, Northern Chile. We use our experience of organising participatory workshops with Aymara and Quechua women community leaders to reflect on the politics of participation/non-participation, and explore these experiences in light of our multiple and overlapping positionalities

This Intervention discusses an eight-year collaboration among four feminist geographers using a collective biography methodology to investigate the academy. Beginning from an epistemological-ontological direction rather than a topical one, we used joy as our way “in” to issues around subject formation, intimacy, flows of power, and the care of the self. Using a question and answer format, as though

This article reflects on insights from an action research project where we worked with students whose university experience was inhibited by the fear of failure. In contrast to the popular concept of ‘learning from failure’, which involves intellectualizing the experience and distancing ourselves from it, our findings demonstrate the importance of a ‘present tense’ focus on emotions and affects in

This article explores the role of non-verbal communication, emotions and tensions in co-productive research on peace and memory. Drawing on the work of peace and memory activists in early twenty-first century Peru and Colombia and data generated at the Peace Festival encounter, an event organized by the authors in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia in 2017, it addresses the lack of site-specific critical

Smells can evoke strong emotions and convey social meanings associated with people and places. This study explored the perceptual process of smellscape perceptions through a case study in Sheffield Railway Station and Bus Interchange. Walk-along interviews were used to collect data on people's perceptions onsite. It aims to understand how people make sense of their emotions triggered by smells in real

During the feminist march on March 8, 2019 in Santiago, Chile, a group of women carried out an intervention called “Espacio de las ausentes” (Space of the absent) in which the arrangement of the bodies showed and stressed the presence of the absent bodies from the demonstration, particularly of the women murdered by patriarchal violence. The phrase is flashy and could sound like an oxymoron. How can

Stemming from feminist and postcolonial theory, there exists a wealth of literature investigating the politics and ethics of knowledge production in contemporary research. This paper explicates how a methodological and conceptual focus on the uncomfortable emotions experienced by researchers and participants within fieldwork can initiate new conversations on the ethical tensions littering the ethnographic

Drawing from our fieldwork conducted at three Canadian parks inscribed as Natural on the UNESCO World Heritage list (Kluane National Park, Dinosaur Provincial Park, and Wood Buffalo National Park) this paper describes wildness as an atmosphere. Through three ethnographic vignettes we paint a picture of wildness as a kind of ephemeral and uncontrollable event that can be felt and sensed, something that

What can we learn from emotional challenges in research with marginalised groups? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with undocumented young people in Canada, I examine how difficult emotions illuminated ethical tensions in research. I show how I overcame these challenges when I shifted my approach and took a more engaged role. In this article, I call for the need to rethink emotions at an epistemological

This paper explores how the material and imaginary aspects of emotions embedded in cherished possessions contribute to home-making practices at the scale of a formal care setting for older adults in a non-western context. This study examines three types of care homes with residents from different socioeconomic backgrounds in the state of Kerala, India. Data include in-depth interviews, observations

Our academic life is ripe with failures and things abandoned, with hurt and feelings of defeat and despair. Already as students, we learn how to hide and tuck away such experiences and the impact they have on us. As a result of this the surfaces of our texts, our presentations, the things we make, have come to resemble certain industrial products, cleansed of any traces of dirt, human toil, crookedness

In this paper, I aim to explore my nexus with a prohibited place and its emotional meaning, reflected over a 30-year period. This exploration involves evocative autoethnography in which I discuss my process of bonding to a place. Varosha, a quarter originally built by the Greek Cypriots in Famagusta, Cyprus, was unwillingly abandoned by them after the island was fragmented in 1974. Since then, entry

The peer respite model is an emerging model of community mental health support in the United States, yet, it remains understudied and undertheorized in post-asylum geographies and posthuman scholarship on recovery. A focused ethnography sought to address this gap by considering the sensibilities and urgencies that emerged at a peer respite in the U.S. Southwest. More broadly, this paper describes atmospheres

This article reviews and reconceptualises – remembers and imagines – previous and possible methodological approaches to the study of the concept of school climate. Mapping three methodological approaches to school climate, we consider how each approach brings the concept of school climate into being, and the in/exclusions at work in each approach. Questions are raised about the politics of forming

This article contributes to the rethinking of failure within the neoliberal university, particularly in relation to ethnography. It is grounded in the ethnographic setting of a boxing club and focuses on one unusual dynamic of which I was aware during the research, but for which I could not – and still cannot – account for in theoretical terms. One or more members of the boxing club recurrently stole

The news media has an important role to play in constructing and maintaining memories of disasters. This paper examines newspaper reporting on the anniversaries of significant disaster events. In particular, the article focusses on the role of emotions in reporting of a devastating flood in the Queensland cities of Brisbane and Ipswich in 1974. The paper traces anniversary reporting in newspapers from

In this intervention piece, I attempt to understand the role of anger and silence in creating beyond-human multispecies worlds always involving or ending in failures. Drawing on vignettes from archival, autoethnographic and interview research, this paper explores how silence and anger are entangled political forces implicated within failures of caring for animals in worlds that do not. Exploring the

A decade of austerity and cuts to local services have had severe impacts on coastal towns in England, resulting in high levels of inequality and precarious employment prospects for many residents, including young men growing up in working class families. Forms of care typically provided by the family and the state are are becoming unavailable, and access to secure employment has become difficult, especially

Discussions of stigma (Goffman 1963) have often focused on elements of one's character, something which makes people nervous, uncomfortable, and afraid. In discussions regarding reproductive rights and reproductive justice, however, stigma can be discussed in relation not only to elements of an individuals' character, or a stigmatised behaviour, but also the taboo that surrounds specific decisions

Collaboration in qualitative research is increasingly encouraged and rewarded in many national and global funding schemes. Collaboration by scholars in (radically) different disciplines using different methods is becoming common, however less attention is given to collaboration using shared approaches across closely-related disciplines. This paper considers the ethnographic insights of four researchers

Human space travel has largely been understood through a physiological and psychological lens but rarely sociologically or anthropologically. Drawing on astronaut testimony, experiences of microgravity environments, laboratory experiments and art practice this paper argues that gravity, or rather its absence, offers a unique vantage point through which to consider the human relationship to emotion

Studies of the museum increasingly highlight the significant role of emotion in conveying information and shaping its reception by audiences. Representations of the family as an ‘emotional unit’ provide a key resource for museums in this process, where naturalised displays of familial affective connections can be used to reinforce particular messages to visitors, notably around the make-up of the nation

Racism in Australia has been both present and pervasive since invasion. One potentially important setting where work against racism might occur is within families. Responses to racist talk within families have received little attention within the anti-racism literature. The first aim of this paper is to explore how families negotiate racist talk, taking the view that the rules and practices that guide

What kind of failure is it to lose interest and detach from a project, empirical scene, or cause? Should we always stay interested in our work and attempt to interest others? Through discussion of two ongoing but perhaps failed projects alongside reflection on various failures over my career, I explore the relationship between affects of failure and the event and relation of interest. Staying with