In harmony or out of tune: Affective and emotional geographies of all-male choirs in London,UK

This article examines the growing popularity of weekly amateur choral singing for adult men, with a specific focus in London, UK. This paper moves away from discourses of social health and wellbeing to bring together critical studies of masculinity with emotional geographies of sound, to better understand the links between choirs as an affective space and the complex, symbolic relationship between men and their voices. Where research has shown that non-competitive group activity is central to men's sense of connection and provides a space for men to express emotions, friendship and intimacy, there is great potential to analyse how the role of sound (volume, vibrations) and use of choral voice work (softening, blending, harmonies) directly facilitates this connection. This paper remains cautious of presenting group singing as an automatic panacea to disconnection, exploring the exclusions for those who are ‘out of tune’ and (musically and socially) unable to harmonise with others.     

Collective emotions

Research on collective emotions has been limited until recently to theories of irrational crowds, scepticism about genuinely group‐level psychological phenomena and analyses of the unconscious or ritual sources of mass affective experience. However, collective emotion is now a thriving research area that combines studies from philosophy, anthropology, sociology, social psychology and neuroscience. This article examines neo‐Durkheimian theories of collective emotions and relevant contributions of discursive psychologists and other social scientists influenced by the “turn to affect.” I argue that future theoretical and empirical investigations should do the following: (1) critically examine theories focusing on diffuse emotional energy and discrete collective emotions by also exploring the generation and production of genuinely collective mixed emotions; (2) clarify problems with “bottom‐up” models of causal mechanisms through exploration of “affective practices”; and (3) explore the implications of Tuomela's ( 2013 ) “top‐down” social ontology of “group agents” as a framework for theories and studies of collective emotion.     

Religion as practices of attachment and materiality: the making of Buddhism in contemporary London

This article aims to explore Buddhism’s often-overlooked presence on London’s urban landscape, showing how its quietness and subtlety of approach has allowed the faith to grow largely beneath the radar. It argues that Buddhism makes claims to urban space in much the same way as it produces its faith, being as much about the practices performed and the spaces where they are enacted as it is about faith or beliefs. The research across a number of Buddhist sites in London reveals that number of people declaring themselves as Buddhists has indeed risen in recent years, following the rise of other non-traditional religions in the UK; however, this research suggests that Buddhism differs from these in several ways. Drawing on Baumann’s (2002) distinction between traditionalist and modernist approaches to Buddhism, our research reveals a growth in each of these. Nevertheless, Buddhism remains largely invisible in the urban and suburban landscape of London, adapting buildings that are already in place, with little material impact on the built environment, and has thus been less subject to contestation than other religious movements and traditions. This research contributes to a growing literature which foregrounds the importance of religion in making contemporary urban and social worlds.     

Can the subaltern feel? An ethnography of migration,subalternity, and emotion

Drawing on biographical and migratory experiences gathered from Chinese marriage-migrants in Taiwan, this paper investigates the link between migration, subalternity and emotion. We examine how emotions are socially, temporarily and situationally constructed by migrant women, positioned in a condition of vulnerability during migration. Conceptually, we advance that emotions can be turned into resources, practices and competences that sustain migrants' social, economic and cultural positioning in the society of arrival. Through the identification of three empirically-rooted states of emotions – imaginative, implosive and mutual – we claim that, in a context of social contempt, familial exclusion and economic marginalisation, migrants' individual and collective performance of emotions contributes to ‘undo’ a condition of subalternity. Such states are purposely experimental and incomplete. Whilst they are as temporary and mutable as migrant women's emotional experiences and practices, this paper proposes that they could serve as a methodological and analytical tool for future research on migration and emotion.     

Disappointment expression evokes collective guilt and collective action in intergroup conflict: the moderating role of legitimacy perceptions

Research on intergroup emotions has largely focused on the experience of emotions and surprisingly little attention has been given to the expression of emotions. Drawing on the social-functional approach to emotions, we argue that in the context of intergroup conflicts, outgroup members’ expression of disappointment with one’s ingroup induces the complementary emotion of collective guilt and correspondingly a collective action protesting ingroup actions against the outgroup. In Study 1 conducted immediately after the 2014 Gaza war, Jewish-Israeli participants received information about outgroup’s (Palestinians) expression of emotions (disappointment, fear, or none). As predicted, outgroup’s expression of disappointment increased collective guilt and willingness to participate in collective action, but only among those who saw the intergroup situation as illegitimate. Moreover, collective guilt mediated the relationship between disappointment expression and collective action, moderated, again, by legitimacy perception. In Study 2, we replicated these results in the context of racial tension between Black and White Americans in the US. We discuss the theoretical and applied implications of the findings.     

‘You beat ‘em,we feed ‘em!’: Enfolding laughter and pride

In this article I use the affective politics of laughter as an entry point into broadening understandings of the political potentiality of the everyday geographies of pride, centralizing in my analysis a safe house for women involved in street level sex work. I look to the ways in which the encounters between laughter and pride in this space expose its inextricability from bodily vitality and survival, feelings of collective belonging, and structural realities and inequalities. Using Gilles Deleuze's concept of the fold to structure my analysis, I use laughter as a lens to advance an understanding of pride that emphasizes its entanglement with collective affect and its immanent multiplicity as it is embodied through everyday encounters with difference. I emphasize the affective component of laughter's foldings as a means to think through the way vibrational pulls, pushes, tenors and tones work to move bodies toward or away from collectives, spaces, politics, ideas, relationships and ways of living. Exploring pride through the affective politics of laughter is a way to advance understandings of pride as emerging always in relation to collectives, histories, and spaces, rather than as an individual trait. Such a reframing has implications for understanding affective politics as a resource for social justice projects.     

Affective geographies in pandemic times: An intersectional analysis of women's wellbeing in Aotearoa New Zealand

This article builds upon and extends a growing body of literature focused on how the pandemic has shifted human relations with space, place, and wellbeing. Working at the intersection of pandemic and feminist geographies, we focus on how the reconceptualizing of familiar spaces and places during the COVID-19 pandemic impacted women's embodied, affective, and subjective experiences of wellbeing. Drawing upon interviews with 38 women from diverse socio-cultural backgrounds living in Aotearoa New Zealand during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, we detail the emergence of different spatial arrangements and affective relations with familiar spaces and places (i.e., domestic, nature, and digital spaces). We then explain how these emergent affective and spatial relations prompted new understandings of wellbeing. The article also highlights the multiplicities of women's subjective experiences of wellbeing as shaped by their varied socio-cultural positionings in relation to pandemic geographies.     

Affective energies: Sensory bodies on the beach in Darwin,Australia

Emerging debates on anti-racism within white majority cultures centre emotion and affect to explore the visceral nature of racialised encounters that unfold in public spaces of the city. This paper builds on such understandings by conceptualising whiteness as a force that exerts affective pressures on bodies of colour who are hypervisible in public spaces. I show that these pressures have the potential to wound, numb and immobilise bodies affecting what they can do or what they can become. This paper argues, however, that affective energies from human and non-human sources are productive forces that are also sensed in public spaces such as the suburban beach. These energies entangle sensuous bodies with the richness of a more-than-human world and have the potential to offer new insights into exploring how racially differentiated bodies live with difference. The paper draws on ethnographic research conducted in Darwin, a tropical north Australian city at the centre of politicised public debates on asylum seeker policy, migrant integration and Indigenous wellbeing. My attention to affective pressures and affective energies contributes to understanding how bodies with complex histories and geographies of racialisation can inhabit a world of becoming.     

Mapping Contentious Collective Emotions in a Populist Democracy: Duterte's Push for Philippine Federalism

This article analyzes collective emotions toward political change in a populist democracy. Taking the federalization of the Philippines led by President Rodrigo Duterte as an exemplar case, we extend prevailing scholarship which focuses on populist leaders' electoral discourse by examining the affective landscape of the populist public in a postelectoral context. Utilizing a sequential mixed-methods design, we algorithmically classify the stance and sentiment valence of 18,535 Facebook comments about federalism, then we reflexively identify collective emotions based on major discursive storylines across each stance-sentiment intersection. Our integrated analysis reveals collective feelings of (1) hope and euphoria and (2) vindictive contempt among supporters of Duterte's federalism, while detractors of the campaign express (3) derisive amusement and (4) fear and skepticism. Two of these public emotions may be idiosyncratic to Global South populisms: public fear and president-invested salvific hope. We discuss the implications of our findings along themes of emotional polarization in a populist democracy, linking political affect with democratic participation through social media.     

Good boys,gang members,asylum gained and lost: The devastating reflections of a bureaucrat-ethnographer

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. And we highlight the insights of former employees undertaking reflexive feminist research into their past working life. Drawing on the memories of one such “bureaucrat-ethnographer” (Valdivia), and our shared feminist engagement together, we outline three key insights for research on state migration practice. First, that the training state employees undergo aims to develop objective, neutral, and emotion-free decision-making, yet it relies on highly affective and biased state assumptions about asylum-seekers and their motivations. Second, while this training fosters simplified understandings of the causes and impacts of violence, a feminist geographic lens makes visible its complexly power-laden machinations. Last, we assert that state employees face distinct emotional pressures as they deal with devastation: the state's, their own, and that of asylum claimants. Valuing the insights of bureaucrats who become, or are at once, undertaking critical research disrupts intellectual divisions and hierarchies and complicates our understanding of the migration control practices of the state.     

Affective atmospheres of weapons technologies: The case of battle drones,combat fighters and bodies in contemporary German geopolitics

Using the example of the defense and security sector at the Innovation and Leadership in Aerospace aviation fair in Berlin, this paper interrogates how the presentation of weapons technologies at German security and aviation fairs produces a/effects that influence the body and serve to legitimize political decisions. It examines to what extent the body becomes the site of geopolitical negotiation via affective atmospheres and how different scales interact within this process. First, I argue that affective connections between weapons technologies and spectators are essential for legitimizing warfare technologies. Second, I argue that affects of weapons technologies are subject to ambivalence and ambiguity, and that they are to be understood as entangled with other affects in the same body. Third, I argue that affects become effective across material and spatial scales. Drawing on geographic work on affective atmospheres, debates in intimate geopolitics and feminist science and technology studies, the paper contributes to critical geopolitics by unpacking the role of affective dimensions in naturalizing the development and acquisition of weapons technologies. In doing so, it also contributes to debates on the methodological operationalization of theories of affect and to emotional geographies of (in)security.     

Friction in the interstices: Emotion and landscape in Stone Butch Blues

This article analyzes the role of emotion in Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues. Widely understood as one of the first modern transgender novels, Stone Butch Blues depicts the bodily changes of its protagonist, Jess Goldberg, from living as a “he–she,” to passing as male, to living as neither male nor female. This article analyzes how Jess's body, identity, and feelings shape and are shaped by the spaces ze encounters throughout the novel. Finding that Jess experiences emotions as bodily boundaries and metaphorical geographies, I draw from the work of Sara Ahmed to argue that Jess's decision at the novel's end not to pass as female or male is a choice to push back at the gendered norms of hir world through a body and politics shaped by emotion. Turning to contemporary trans* – transgender, transsexual, and trans – movements for social change, I argue that Jess's politics of bodily and emotional abrasion can help in the development of a trans* politics of emotion.     

‘THE TURBAN IS NOT A HAT’: QUEER DIASPORA AND PRACTICES OF PROFILING

This article examines two facets of post 9–11 South Asian organizing in the US – that of South Asian queer diasporics and of Sikh Americans. Ironically, South Asian queer diasporic subjects are under even greater duress to produce themselves as exceptional American subjects, not necessarily as heteronormative but as homonormative, even as the queernesses of these very bodies are simultaneously used to pathologize populations of terrorist look-a-like bodies. As contagions that trouble the exceptionalisms of queer South Asian diasporas, male turbaned Sikh bodies, often mistaken for Muslim terrorist bodies, are read as patriarchal by queer diasporic logics and placed within heteronormative victimology narratives by Sikh American advocacy groups focused on redressing the phenomenon of ‘mistaken identity’. Both the queer diasporic and Sikh American logics are indebted to visual representations of corporeality. Hence, I re-read these bodies as affectively troubling – generating affective confusion and indeterminancy – in terms of ontology, tactility, and the combination of organic and non-organic matter. Reading turbans through affect challenges both the limits of queer diasporic identity that balks at the non-normativity of the turbaned body (even as it avows the pathological racial-sexual renderings of terrorist bodies) while simultaneously infusing the ‘mistaken identity’ debates with different methods of comprehending the susceptibility of these bodies beyond heteronormative victimology narratives.     

Disinformation as the weaponization of cruel optimism: A critical intervention in misinformation studies

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 role within misinformation studies, providing theoretical frameworks that help to highlight the structural and social aspects of misinformation, to integrate work across disciplines, and to guard against overly techno-solutionist interventions in misinformation. The paper makes this argument by reviewing core areas of study within misinformation studies and placing current research into conversation with Lauren Berlant's concept of cruel optimism. It demonstrates that all aspects of misinformation – from the structural changes that engender it to the disinformation campaigns that weaponize it – are undergirded by powerful affective tools. Unless solutions to misinformation account for these affective geographies, they risk failing or even making the political impact of misinformation worse.     

Collective memories,emotions, and spatial tactics in social movements: The case of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong

Recent studies have increasingly acknowledged the dynamic relationship between emotions and space in social movements. They, however, have seldom tied emotions and space to time when discussing activists’ emotions and their tactical choices. This paper studies the 2014 Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong and explores how collective memory and generational experiences—two intertwined notions of time—shaped how activists felt and how they designed and deployed a spatial tactic. The Umbrella Movement was characterized by miscellaneous emotions and intense disputes among activists regarding how to best use spatial occupation to fight for democratization before and during the struggle. Using a qualitative dataset that contains textual and interview data, I argue that while emotions and the political-cultural characteristics of contentious space were two factors in informing tactical choices, collective memory and generational experiences were key to understanding the rise of the movement and its characteristics. Experiencing different political events in their years of early adulthood, young and veteran activists felt differently in the context of 2013–2014, which led them to embrace disjunctive views on the pace, sequence, and bodily action for the same tactic of spatial occupation and dissimilar emotional management strategies. This created ongoing internal clashes before and during the movement.     

“What do gay Asian men want?”: Desiring otherwise in the work of Richard Fung

A vast literature on queer of color critique, and increasingly on queer of color geographies, has shed greater light on how queer people of color negotiate racialized sexual economies. This paper considers how cultural geography, informed by psychoanalysis and queer of color critique, might contribute additional sophistication and critical insight to conversations about sexual racism – by not only decrying sexual racism, but by shedding light on racialized people's complex forms of psychical agency, as well as political agency, in relation to it. It turns to the work of gay Trinidadian-Canadian artist and scholar Richard Fung, whose films and essays both proffer underrepresented images of racialized queer sexual subjectivities and grapple with the ways in which queer people of color can themselves become enlisted in racial-sexual hierarchies. Providing geographical and historical context for Toronto's stratified racial and sexual politics as they play out in ordinary life, I point to moments in which Fung's films both decry such inequality and meditate on alternatives that detour from dramas of mis/recognition by whiteness.     

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.     

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.     

Queer/Fear: Disability, Sexuality, and The Other

This paper examines the relationship between disability and “queerness.” I argue that the hostility frequently expressed against both disabled and queer individuals is a function of fear of the undecidability of the body. I draw on feminist, queer, and disability theory to help us understand this phenomenon and suggest that these different kinds of theories have a complementary relationship. That is, feminist and queer theory help us see how this fear works, disability theory helps us see why it exists.     

We Were,We Are,Will We Be? The Social Psychology of Collective Angst

Not all social groups survive the passage of time. Groups once in existence are now but memories of the past. If history is any indication, other social groups are likely to experience a similar fate and join the list of groups that once were. The concern that one’s group might one day join such a list is the focus of this paper. Specifically, we examine the social psychology of collective angst – a group‐based emotion that stems from concern for the future vitality of one’s social group. We begin by discussing the anatomy of collective angst and how it differs from other collective emotions. We then outline factors that foster collective angst. Importantly, we provide a novel theoretical framework outlining both constructive and destructive means by which members may defend against a future that does not include their group. For example, we examine collective angst as a facilitator of, among other things, ingroup cohesion and outgroup aggression. Finally, we discuss how collective angst has manifested on the world stage as well as implications for relations within and between groups.