The silent music sheet,the replica tin and the unsewn button: Materialising nostalgia in the Marks and Spencer's archive

This paper explores how nostalgia and collective memory are materialised, imagined, curated and orchestrated through the archive. Drawing upon the example of the Marks and Spencer's (M&S) archive, we argue that archives, particularly those containing objects, command nostalgia. They re-appropriate objects, memories and their histories into contemporary narratives. This paper adds to a body of work within and beyond geography and sociology exploring the potency and creativity of everyday materials and their ability to produce, imagine and memorialise affinities between people, places and past times. This raises questions about the politics of memory, the authenticity of objects and the nostalgic imaginaries they enliven, what we discuss as ‘faux nostalgia’. We illustrate how M&S is part of collective British memory, promoting middle-class ideals of British family life. The archive and objects on display materialise such imaginaries, creating a yearning for the spirit, values and opportunities of times gone by; interweaving them into contemporary narratives of family life to create unattainable ideals. We reflect upon the biographies of three objects from the archive: a music sheet, an unsewn button and a replica tin. By making these objects central to our account, we illustrate how they materialise and recollect nostalgia through the archive.     

Critical geographies of love and loss: Relational responses to the death of a spouse in Senegal

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 of responses to the death of a spouse in Senegal, based on in-depth interviews with Serer women and men in rural and urban communities. A heightened sense of relationality with the deceased surrounded widows' bodies, with permeable boundaries that needed to be contained and “purified” through widowhood-mourning practices in order to restore social cohesion. For men, the space of the home was transformed, sometimes unbearably, by the loss of a wife and mother due to their central role in home-making practices, transforming men's relational being. ‘Embodied relationality’, alongside material constraints, also shaped perspectives on remarriage. The paper reveals the diverse material, embodied, spatial, and often explicitly gendered, ways that the effects of the death of a spouse may be manifested in the experience of the living person and draws attention to the permeable embodied boundaries of ‘relational being’ that encompass the living and the dead.     

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.     

Staging atmospheres: Materiality,culture, and the texture of the in-between

The article introduces the special issue on staging atmospheres by surveying the philosophical, political and anthropological literature on atmosphere, and explores the relationship between atmosphere, material culture, subjectivity and affect. Atmosphere seems to occupy one of the classic localities of tensions between matter and the immaterial, the practical and the ideal, and subject and object. In the colloquial language there can, moreover, often seem to be something authentic or genuine about atmosphere, juxtaposing it to staging, which is implied to be something simulated or artificial. Nevertheless, people’s experience of the environment is sought manipulated in a variety of contexts, often without offering a less ‘true’ experience of a situation than if it had not been manipulated by people. In fact, orchestrations of space are often central to sociality, politics and aesthetics. This introduction seeks to outline how a number of scholars have addressed the relationship between staged atmospheres and experience, and thus highlight both the philosophical, social and political aspects of atmospheres.     

Parasitic pedagogies and materialities of affect in veterinary education

The present article contributes a critical post-humanist analysis of emotion, education, and human–animal relations, including a reinterpretation of previous research on “shared suffering” (Haraway, 2008, Porcher, 2011) in human–animal instrumental encounters. Considering how formal education, particularly a professional education program such as veterinary medical education that relies heavily on scientific “facts” about animals and biotechnology, recruits bodily and sensory affect to mediate techniques of animal exploitation, the article asks how we can begin to make sense of such an affective animal didactics? Drawing on ethnographic material from three events in theoretical and practice-oriented veterinary education, the article explores how bodily and sensory human/animal/technology intimacy enters education as a pedagogical device and as a subtle reinforcement of bio-economic parasitism on farmed animals' productive and reproductive capacities. The article reworks the notion of “shared suffering” into forms of modulation and distribution of affect to conceptualize a particular didactics of incorporating human/nonhuman interaction in the bio-economic microphysics of education.     

Locating hatred: On the materiality of emotions

How do we locate hatred in the social fabric of human life? Where is it, and how do we detect it? Recent scholarly engagements with emotions have provided (at least) two rather separate kinds of answer to such questions. One, largely espoused by philosophers and psychologists, has sought to conceptualize emotions as complex conglomerates of cognitive processes, bodily sensations and dispositions to act, experienced by an individual human subject. Another path, more affiliated with anthropology and STS, has been occupied with transcending the boundaries of the personal body-mind as the limit of affects and emotions, locating them also beyond the individual: in spaces, atmospheres, objects – dispersed, across and in between. In this article, I explore what can be gained from a constructive dialogue between these different agendas when trying to make sense of the location of hate. The article suggests that we can use the more detailed outlines of the textures of specific emotions, found in the philosophy of emotions, as a basis for thinking about hate as an assemblage of particular narratives, evaluations, actions, and bodily configurations that can be distributed across different kinds of materiality. These considerations will be anchored in analytical reflections on hatred and its potential spatial and material manifestations in the context of the German Nazi state.     

Technology and affect: Towards a theory of inorganically organised objects

This paper links debates around technology, materiality and affect to generate a theory of inorganically organised objects and affects. Drawing upon the work of Felix Guattari, Gilbert Simondon and Bernard Stiegler, the paper suggests that technical objects can be understood as assemblages of matter, which are organised by material thresholds that shape their capacity to affect. The paper then argues that technical affects are transmitted via material mediums such as air that it terms associated milieus. To understand the affective capacities of technology, one should understand how technologies reorganise and draw upon associated milieus' to generate affect and how the material thresholds of objects shape what these affects are. Developing a number of examples, the paper shows how inorganically organised affect reorganise the body and corporeally affects capacities to act and respond to the world. In conclusion the paper suggests an account of affect that focuses on objects has methodological implications for social scientists interested in studying technical processes and environments.     

The Real-Constitution in Hedwig Conrad-Martius’ <Emphasis Type="Italic">Realontologie</Emphasis>

In this work we try to distinguish five levels of the constitution of reality in Conrad Martius’ Realontologie (1923) (Real Ontology). The difference between “existential autonomy” and “existential relativity” seems to be the first one. The second level of the constitution of reality concerns the problem of “whatness” (Washeit) and the substantial reality (Realität). We can find the third level in the materiality from the eidetical point of view. The fourth level of the constitution of reality concerns the material formation as presupposition of a personal essence. Finally we can distinguish a fifth level of the constitution of the reality in the essential stratification.     

Methods of materiality: participant observation and qualitative research in psychology

This article challenges the hegemonic status of “language” as the primary substance of qualitative research in psychology, whether through interviews or recordings of naturally occurring talk. It thereby questions the overt focus on analyzing linguistic “meaning.” Instead, it is suggested that researchers should start paying attention to the material world (consisting of both human bodies and material objects) and what it means for how people live their lives. It is argued that this can be done by incorporating the concept of material presence to capture embodied and material layers of existence, and the method of participant observation is suggested as a viable approach to achieve this end. An empirical example of how authority is produced in a parent-teacher conference, not only through language but also through material objects and embodied being, is then presented. The article concludes by suggesting practical guidelines for incorporating attention to materiality in qualitative research.     

Souvenirs: Magical objects in everyday life

This article considers the role of souvenirs within domestic spaces. Souvenirs are ambivalent objects; at the same time the very epitome of tourism kitsch and personal objects for which the owner holds significant affection. Rather than pre-framing these objects either as ‘touristic signifiers’ or as personal memory objects, this article reflects on the roles they take as material and embodied co-habitants in domestic space, living - and communicating – with their owners. Hence, this paper departs from ‘humanistic’ accounts of cohabiting people and things and instead attempts to put human and non-human agents on an equal footing. It does so, by discussing the ‘magical capabilities’ of everyday objects that enable these to enchant the lives of their human cohabitants; animating them with affects and emotions, feelings of remembrance, affection, appreciation and loss. By drawing inspiration from autoethnography and in particular its potentials for interrogating objects, the author explores the ‘souvenirish’ qualities of five homely objects; using this exploration to enter into a dialogue with objects as well as theories and studies of objects. Considering the many faces of the souvenir - as utility item, mediator, fetish, tuner and artwork - the article suggests an opening for more imaginative thinking and explorations of how we live with objects in everyday life.