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.