Holding onto emotions: A call to action in academia

This intervention foregrounds two contemporary political situations across two continents, to stress how emotions matter in space and society. We are compelled to write about these unfolding, complex, troubling situations, specifically their visceral and emotive dimensions, to foreground how holding onto emotions is critical to academic research, thinking and praxis. We present our reading of two situations: the Grenfell social housing fire in the U.K. and migrant and refugee detention in the U.S. We highlight these cases to draw out the argument that nuanced, relativist epistemological and ontological approaches, including the place of emotions, are required as much as, and alongside, quantitative research, to better understand spatial and societal complexity, and enable transformative change. We thus call for renewed attention to emotional geographies, and methodologies that attend to embodied and emotional ways of doing, being, becoming and (co)producing knowledges.     

Escalation in organizational decision making a case of recruiting an incompetent employee

This paper analyses a case of hiring a manager who subsequently proves to be incompetent. Analysis reveals the importance of structural factors in escalation, especially politics. When these are considered, persistence emerges as both escalatory and rational. Likewise, behaviours manifest of information bias are actually logical managerial strategies and may mask political calculation. New potential escalation variables are identified including power, visibility, and organization culture. Withdrawal reflects an intricate balancing of factors including risk and opportunity. The theoretical implications of the findings are discussed.     

Introduction: Desiring Politics and the Politics of Desire

What does thinking and acting with desire make possible that might otherwise and all too often be foreclosed? How might desire help orient action toward a horizon of becoming across which collective struggle can effect affective reparation and a more capacious politics? In some ways, desire seems to be taken for as much granted as space – that is, it's everywhere, but often difficult to articulate or analytically pin down. For us, what makes desire distinct, but not discrete, from the vocabulary of affect and emotion is that it operates as both absence and lack, on the one hand, and as a profoundly productive motor and motivating force, on the other. Desire moves in ways that presuppose, exceed, and complement the range of expressions that are taken up by scholarship in this journal. In this special issue, we privilege desire, in both senses, as central among the (dis)organizing, affective forces shaping political life.     

Talking about ‘Fairness’ in Football and Politics: The Case of Navad

ABSTRACT

We argue that sport in general, and association football in particular, are activities that invite spectators and players alike to talk about them. Using a Wittgensteinian approach, we argued more precisely that football, like any sport, may be understood as a form of life, and as such that it enables speakers to talk about it in quite specific ways, not least in the manner in which normative terms, such as fairness and bias, are used. Football thereby creates a metaphorical space, we suggest, in which there is a freedom to explore and play with language, and in particular normative language, even if that language-use is repressed in the wider political society. Using the example of the Iranian television programme Navad as a case study, we explore the ways in which talk about fairness in the context of football can develop and sustain a competence in the use of political and moral language-use even when that competence is under-threat elsewhere.     

Revising the Communication Mediation Model for a New Political Communication Ecology

A long tradition of research focuses on conversation as a key catalyst for community integration and a focal mediator of media influence on participation. Changes in media systems, political environments, and electoral campaigning demand that these influences, and the communication mediation model, be revised to account for the growing convergence of media and conversation, heightened partisan polarization, and deepening social contentiousness in media politics. We propose a revised communication mediation model that continues to emphasize the centrality of face‐to‐face and online talk in democratic life, while considering how mediational and self‐reflective processes that encourage civic engagement and campaign participation might also erode institutional legitimacy, foster distrust and partisan divergence, disrupting democratic functioning as a consequence of a new communication ecology.