Towards a geography of voice-hearing

The social psychiatrists Marius Romme and Sandra Escher argue that boundaries are of critical importance in the therapeutic treatment of so-called ‘auditory verbal hallucinations’ (AVH), or, what is better known as, ‘hearing voices’. Limiting voices to a specific time and place, they argue, helps ‘voice-hearers’ to take back control from their voices. This paper draws inspiration from contemporary debates on sonic geographies to explore what it means for voice-hearers to engage in a complex relationship with their voices. We analyse a range of material and affective spaces to understand what it means for a voice-hearer to transcend, mediate and rework the boundaries between interior and exterior worlds. Besides a detailed conceptual discussion on the geography of voices and voicehearing, we conducted semi-structured interviews with a sample of thirty voice-hearers in North-East and South-East England to gain insight into their voice geographies. The participants move us to appreciate how voice-hearers construe relationships with their voices in complex and ambiguous ways. Some voice-hearers were able to challenge and even change the balance of power, allowing them to be ‘in control’, while others were not. The paper is aimed at introducing voice-hearing to a growing body of work on geographies of the voice.     

Beyond ‘voice’, beyond ‘agency’, beyond ‘politics’? Hybrid childhoods and some critical reflections on children's emotional geographies

In this paper I argue that a significant proportion of research on children's emotional geographies has been deployed to reinforce the importance of children's ‘voices’, their (independent) ‘agency’, and the various ways in which voice/agency maybe deemed ‘political’. Without wishing to dismiss or dispense with such approaches, I explore potential ways to go ‘beyond’ concerns with voice/agency/politics. Initially, I review studies of children's participation (and participatory methods), activism and everyday lives that mobilise emotion and affect in productive ways. I contrast such studies with important questions raised by a reinvigoration of interest in the need for children to be able to represent themselves. I then explore the possibilities raised by so-called ‘hybrid’ conceptions of childhood – which go beyond biosocial dualisms – to enable further strides beyond voice/agency. Drawing on examples from alternative education and contemporary attachment theories, I explore some potential implications for children's emotional geographies and relational geographies of age of what I term ‘more-than-social’ emotional relations. Yet I do not offer an unequivocal endorsement of these hybrid emotions. Thus, I end the paper by issuing some words of caution – both in terms of the critical questions raised by more-than-social emotional relations, specifically, and in terms of engendering broader debate about how and why scholars do (children's) emotional geographies.     

Comfortable and safe spaces? Gender,sexuality and ‘race’ in night-time leisure spaces

This article aims to contribute to the fields of emotional geographies and geographies of sexualities by exploring the relationship between emotions and gender, sexuality, and ‘race’ in sexualised night-time leisure spaces. By drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Manchester's Gay Village, the article highlights the importance of taking into account intersections of social identities when exploring how people feel in certain spaces. It explores how relations of ‘othering’ work through emotions, in particular how people are othered through feelings of comfort and safety. Whilst these feelings are triggered by a particular reading of bodies and spaces, they also produce bodies and spaces that are gendered, sexualised, and racialised (and classed). The article offers a rethinking of comfort and safety as not just feelings individuals have but as being constitutive of sexual, gender, and racial subjectivities and spaces.     

The emotions least relevant to politics? Queering autonomous activism

Studies of emotion and activism have often attempted to uncover ‘the emotions most relevant to politics’ (Goodwin et al., 2001). This suggests that only certain feelings are productive for activism, while other emotions have less relevance for activist theory and practice. In this paper I ask if the notion of politically ‘relevant’ emotions helps perpetuate a distinction between what is considered political and what is not. This paper builds upon a case study in which I interviewed self-identified queer-activists about their experiences of autonomous activism. These interviews reveal how the everyday emotions surrounding the ‘personal’ politics of sexuality/intimacy are often seen as either less important, a distraction from, or entirely irrelevant to ‘real’ political issues. Ultimately, I want to challenge attempts to neatly separate our intimate lives from the public sphere of activism. I argue that it can never just be a matter of politics and emotion, but also the politics of emotion (Ahmed, 2004). Therefore we should not just assume that emotions matter for resistance - without first realizing the importance of resisting these hierarchies of emotion.     

Emotional interactions and an ethics of care: Caring relations in families affected by HIV and AIDS

In the context of global processes of economic restructuring, the HIV and AIDS epidemic and socio-cultural constructions of care, many women and young people in low-income households have been drawn into caring roles within the family. Drawing on the literature on an ethics of care, emotional geographies and embodiment, this paper examines the emotional dynamics of the caring process in families affected by HIV and AIDS. Based on the perspectives of both ‘caregivers’ and ‘care-receivers’ from research undertaken in Namibia, Tanzania and the UK, we examine the everyday practices of care that women and young people are engaged in and explore how emotions are performed and managed in caring relationships. Our research suggests caregivers play a crucial role in providing emotional support and reassurance to people with HIV, which in turn often affects caregivers' emotional and physical wellbeing. Within environments where emotional expression is restricted and HIV is heavily stigmatised, caregivers and care-receivers seek to regulate their emotions in order to protect family members from the emotional impacts of a chronic, life-limiting illness. However, whilst caregiving and receiving may lead to close emotional connections and a high level of responsiveness, the intensity of intimate caring relationships, isolation and lack of access to adequate resources can cause tensions and contradictory feelings that may be difficult to manage. These conflicts can severely constrain carers' ability to provide the ‘good care’ that integrates the key ethical phases in Tronto's (1993) ideal of the caring process.     

Conference spaces as emotional sites for becoming campus sustainability leaders

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 and discourses in their daily campus-based work? Through multi-event ethnography and autoethnography of SHE events and comparisons with academic conferences more broadly in my role as a teacher-scholar-activist, I analyze how CSPs encounter and challenge ‘green’ knowledge claims emotionally. Vignettes from a sample of conference spaces demonstrate that SHE events provoke a confusion of conflicting emotions, all while promoting products, services and solutions to ‘fix’ the distressing emotions they provoke. Furthermore, the emergence of informal and formal wellness discourses and performances at SHE conferences re-directs CSPs away from critical questions of power toward self-centered, technocratic and technophilic solutions. A politics of failure can challenge audit culture, the bullshitization of sustainability work and neoliberal tropes of professionalism and self-improvement. Such a politics compliments ongoing efforts to center justice-oriented work in sustainability.     

Young people's emotional geographies of citizenship participation: Spatial and relational insights

The inclusion of more ‘active’ citizenship concepts within citizenship curricula has been a pattern noted in many countries in recent years. Yet, rarely are young people's citizenship identities, and how these are shaped by emotional and relational experiences of being citizens in communities, considered in such curricula. In this paper, I explore the citizenship narratives of young people from two New Zealand high schools and examine how emotions formed a significant aspect of their citizenship perceptions and participation. These emotions were constituted in and through relations and non-relations with other young people at school, as well as with members of their local communities at various inter-locking spatial scales. Focusing on emotional geographies of citizenship participation offered insights into how young people were forming their citizenship identities at the intersection of their geographies of gender, race and class, and how these experiences shaped, motivated and sustained citizenship participation. The study highlights the complexity of young people's emotional experiences in relation to their citizenship identities and participation and the need to understand this affectivity in greater depth, especially within policy contexts.     

Love in therapy: A qualitative study of how clients perceive their therapists’ emotions

Relevant literature on attachment theory has explored the importance of emotional experience inside the therapeutic setting, highlighting that the active engagement of the therapist with the client is necessary in the process of change. However, less is known about the clients’ perception of the therapists’ emotional expression during a session. In this qualitative study, we used narrative thematic analysis to examine 10 semi-structured interviews with clients in an enriched systemic therapy approach. Focusing on the similarities of clients’ experiences, what emerged from the interviews were specific ‘perceived emotions’ and the related facial expressions of the therapists that were given attention by the clients. Based on our findings, six emotional themes were identified and are considered prominent: (i) ‘excitement’, (ii) ‘calmness’, (iii) ‘affection’, (iv) ‘empathy’, (v) ‘anger’ and (vi) ‘sadness’. Also, the analysis revealed two distinct functions of the expression of the therapist’s emotions: (i) they are an essential part of the therapeutic relationship and, (ii) they provide clients with alternative ways of experiencing emotions and motivate them to change. Therapists are invited to recognize the importance of their own emotional and facial expression in therapy considering it a form of self-disclosure. Suggestions for further research are also provided.     

Emotional engagement in the context of development and spirituality research

An awareness of spirituality and religion is increasingly being integrated within development theory and practice in order to recognise the way that many people approach community development. There are significant implications for researchers and their methodological practice that arise in paying attention to this area of development studies, particularly with regard to spiritual aspects of emotional engagement for researchers. This paper explores some of those implications from an analysis of my participatory research into geographies of development and spirituality. Two community groups with self-identified Christian spiritualities took part: a Melanesian settlement in Fiji and a women’s church-based group in rural Tanzania. I argue that emotional engagement and spiritual engagement are implicitly connected and demonstrate how attention to emotional knowledge provides valuable insight within this area of research. In particular, I illustrate how a relational approach to emotional knowledge, inspired by the philosophic and psychoanalytic work of Luce Irigaray, is particularly suited to approaching human and spiritual relationships and resonates with key concerns within participatory and community development. Paying particular attention to the concept of fidelity and the spatiality of subjectivity within her work, this paper illustrates the challenge from Luce Irigaray’s work regarding the relational framing of emotional knowledge and the transformational potential implicit within all research relationships.     

A reflection on a humanistic approach to narrative inquiry into the lived experience of women casual academics

Qualitative research is said to add flesh to the bones of quantitative data, and narrative inquiry, more specifically, is described as emotionally comforting, reassuring and validating for participants who share their stories. But little is said of the impact of the flesh, bone and emotions of the narrative inquirer on the qualitative research process. This paper explores a humanistic approach to a narrative inquiry into the lived experience of women casual academics in Australian universities, and exposes the emotional and embodied labour involved in researching others’ stories. Through reflecting in and on her practice as a narrative inquirer, the author discusses how she was affectively and ideologically motivated to investigate the lives of women casual academics and demonstrates how her heart worked in conjunction with her head when ‘handling’ the narrative data. The author finally explores how reflecting on a humanistic approach to narrative research exposes that emotional and cognitive alignment can create research ‘flow’, and that fully embodied engagement with research aligns with ‘slow’ and feminist ‘in-the-making’ scholarship where journey and outcomes emerge and cannot be pre-determined.     

Emotional Justification

Theories of emotional justification investigate the conditions under which emotions are epistemically justified or unjustified. I make three contributions to this research program. First, I show that we can generalize some familiar epistemological concepts and distinctions to emotional experiences. Second, I use these concepts and distinctions to display the limits of the ‘simple view’ of emotional justification. On this approach, the justification of emotions stems only from the contents of the mental states they are based on, also known as their cognitive bases. The simple view faces the ‘gap problem’: If cognitive bases and emotions (re)present their objects and properties in different ways, then cognitive bases are not sufficient to justify emotions. Third, I offer a novel solution to the gap problem based on emotional dispositions. This solution (1) draws a line between the justification of basic and non‐basic emotions, (2) preserves a broadly cognitivist view of emotions, (3) avoids a form of value skepticism that threatens inferentialist views of emotional justification, and (4) sheds new light on the structure of our epistemic access to evaluative properties.     

‘That's just what I do’: Placing emotion in academic activism

In this paper, I wish to critically reflect on the role of emotion/s in how I position myself with regards to research, teaching and learning, drawing on experiences over the past three years as a human geography lecturer ‘doing’ research with refugees and asylum seekers in a local inner city area. While there has been increasing debate regarding what constitutes ‘the activist-academic’, in particular deconstructing any dualism or border between ‘academic’ and ‘activist’, the motivation for undertaking such a role is generally ascribed to an ‘ideological commitment’ to social and personal change of one type or another. For me, such a commitment cannot be separated from how I feel about the issues that I research, learn and teach about. In particular, I explore how emotions relate across different spaces and places in my life to produce motivation for activism and how that activism – specifically the encounters with people through it – feeds back into emotional geographies across my professional (and personal) endeavours. More broadly, I'm concerned with the ways in which emotional becomings and the interconnectivities across spaces of activity/ism and everyday life play out beyond my own individual subjective experience, but rather are caught up in ‘situated, relational perspectives’ (after Bondi, 2005). I argue that recognising the significance of emotion has implications for how we conduct and disseminate research.     

Moved to messiness: Physical activity,feelings, and transdisciplinarity

This paper is based on conversations that took place during a scholarly reading group on the sociology of emotions. The members of the group shared an interest in the body, movement, and culture, but our academic and ‘athletic’ backgrounds were quite varied. Our diverse socio-cultural understandings of emotions were complicated by our own (emotional) experiences of physical (in)activity, thus conversations cut a wide and varied path. One idea, however, continued to resonate throughout our discussions; we found the experiential, theoretical, and methodological notion of messiness to hold great possibility as it allowed us to avoid the urge to reduce diverse experiences to a singular voice (Christians, 2011, Cornforth et al., 2012, Ellingson, 2009, Noble, 2009). Consequently, our project here is twofold. First, we experiment with communal writing as a method for undertaking a study of physical activity. Second, rather than any one perspective taking precedence we use this practice as a way to demonstrate the potential of embracing messiness as a collaborative ethical and theoretical method for understanding the complexities of emotions in relation to (in)active bodies. Specifically, using a variety of disciplinary and theoretical lenses we explore physical (in)activity in relation to pain/pleasure, and the gaze and performance. The result is a conversation made up of traditional and non-traditional approaches to academic writing that work to reconfigure and to challenge traditional dichotomies and hierarchical understandings of the active body, understandings that potentially over-simplify and close-down our emotional experiences of physical (in)activity.     

The microgeographies of learning bodies and emotions in the ‘classroom-salon’

The role of the body and emotions in the workplace has become a fruitful area for sociological and, increasingly, geographical research over the past decade. This has been given particular emphasis and credence due to the growth of the service sector and its perceived ‘feminisation’, and the proliferation of work that focuses on the ‘improvement’ of bodies, most especially female bodies. This literature, though, has focused, as it suggests, on the processes of working and the geographies of the workplace, with those of training largely overlooked. Yet, given the emphasis on training for work and up-skilling in neoliberal economies, the sites and spaces of training warrant further attention. Here we focus on mothers engaged in training for massage and reflexology in the West London area, and draw together notions of body work and emotional labour to examine how bodies and emotions are learned and experienced through the microgeographies of the ‘classroom-salon’. In particular, the paper explores how the transformative space of the ‘classroom-salon’ is used to teach skills perceived simultaneously as natural and technical and how these link to perceived gender and maternal identities that extend beyond the classroom.     

Learning to feel at home. Governing homelessness and the politics of affect

The emotional and affective dynamics of homelessness are an established matter of concern in geographical research. Geographers have called attention to homelessness as an embodied phenomenon and to the emotional distress that affects people experiencing homelessness. What has achieved less attention though are the politics of affect that characterize spaces of care. Attempts to make homeless people ‘housing ready’ often target emotions and try to provide clients with a sense of belonging and feelings of responsibility in matters of housekeeping and homemaking. The paper takes these attempts to create emotionally stable ‘housing ready’ selves as a point of departure to open a set of broader questions concerning the nature of encounters between the welfare state and its citizens. It shows how spaces of care address ‘housing readiness’ as a personal ability and thereby abstract from the complex affective entanglements and prepersonal conditions that characterize dwelling. To highlight the paradoxical effects of therapeutic approaches to dwelling as a subjective emotional skill that can be mastered, I contrast the notion of ‘housing readiness’ with recent work in the field of affective geographies that allows for a different articulation of dwelling as a dense web of practices, atmospheres and relations between people, spaces and things.     

Learning to feel global: Exploring the emotional geographies of worldschooling

Worldschooling is a small but growing alternative education and lifestyle practice adopted by families who take their children out of conventional school settings and educate them while traveling the world. Many worldschooling families document their journeys on blogs and in social media forums, where they explicitly embrace the educational potential of travel and claim the world as their classroom. Drawing on a mobile virtual ethnography of worldschooling, including analysis of online materials along with interviews and field notes from seven months of fieldwork as a worldschooling parent, I explore the intersections of emotion, learning, mobility, and global citizenship in these accounts of worldschooling. While many parents design their mobile curricula around destination based content, they emphasize the repertoire of social and emotional skills their children learn while traveling around the world, often aligning these skills with aspirations of global citizenship. In this sense, global citizenship is about emotions as much as it is about exercising certain rights and responsibilities. In this article, I chart the overlapping emotional geographies that emerge around these performances of ‘feeling global,’ focusing especially on the tensions between individual emotions and broader affective climate of neoliberal globalization.     

Queer encounters of sexuality and class: Navigating emotional landscapes of academia

In this piece I consider processes of being (or becoming) on the academic map and the emotional disjunctures across time and place felt in occupying academia, in conducting research and in moving through intersecting spaces of teaching-research. The promise of entering and achieving in Higher Education is at once seductive (CVs produced, academic stars circulated internationally) and disturbing, felt and encountered across the university environment, via administrative, teaching and research concerns. These points of arriving, departing and travelling through institutional space intersect with what I feel about occupying academia. The emotional ‘stickiness’ of these contexts contrasts with the vision of the engaged, inclusive institution that now welcomes all through its door, with this rhetoric of arrival and belonging effacing starting points, varied journeys, different labours and divided recognitions. These are emotional matters manifest in teaching and research encounters, where a ‘critical pedagogy’ may be read as a failure, mobilised by the angry, emotional feminist academic, rather than her ‘neutral’ ‘objective’ ‘rational’ un-emotional counterpart. In arguing for an emotional presence constituted in and through teaching and research, I consider the emotional landscape of class and sexuality in particular, asking what is taken with us as we travel through academia, where feminist research in particular has been critical of the travelling subject (or ‘self’), who tells only their own story.     

Enacting musical emotions. sense-making,dynamic systems,and the embodied mind

The subject of musical emotions has emerged only recently as a major area of research. While much work in this area offers fascinating insights to musicological research, assumptions about the nature of emotional experience seem to remain committed to appraisal, representations, and a rule-based or information-processing model of cognition. Over the past three decades alternative ‘embodied’ and ‘enactive’ models of mind have challenged this approach by emphasising the self-organising aspects of cognition, often describing it as an ongoing process of dynamic interactivity between an organism and its environment. More recently, this perspective has been applied to the study of emotion in general, opening up interesting new possibilities for theory and research. This new approach, however, has received rather limited attention in musical contexts. With this in mind, we critically review the history of music and emotion studies, arguing that many existing theories offer only limited views of what musical-emotional experience entails. We then attempt to provide preliminary grounding for an alternative perspective on music and emotion based on the enactive/dynamic systems approach to the study of mind.     

Inside out,or outside in: meeting with couples

The complex difficulties often faced by couples require a range of models for effective help. Relational intensity is heightened in therapy by the ease with which the therapist can be triangled into the couple's relationship and by the influence of the emotional triggers from their respective internal worlds. This article draws on systemic and psychodynamic models and a transgenerational perspective for gendered stories. Different time frameworks link interpersonal and intrapersonal themes. In this sense, the therapist works ‘inside out’ and ‘outside in’. A framework of behaviours, emotions, feelings, meanings and beliefs is proposed to help link these perspectives. ‘Invisible contracts’ and the sense of there often being an unconscious ‘pact to disappoint’ are described. Clear models are not enough, for it is the intimate encounter between client and therapist that is the bedrock of therapeutic change and growth. There is no short cut to this sense of intimacy in the unique encounter between therapist and each new couple. Brief examples from practice describe how the issues discussed may be addressed in couples work.     

Emotions as practice: Anna Freud's child psychoanalysis and thinking–doing children's emotional geographies

The paper introduces Anna Freud's early writing from the perspective of the theory and practice of children's emotional geographies. Discussing especially Freud's view on the theory of defence mechanisms and her early arguments with Melanie Klein about the nature of the child's mind, it explores how children's emotions can be approached beyond children's own representational accounts of their emotional experiences. The paper advocates an engagement with Anna Freud's work and psychoanalysis that would account for different forms of knowledge produced in the intersubjective processes of research and for the significance of the relationships with child participants.