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Journal ArticleDOI

Emotions and affect in recent human geography

Steve Pile1
01 Jan 2010-Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (Blackwell Publishing Ltd)-Vol. 35, Iss: 1, pp 5-20
TL;DR: The authors identify three key areas of agreement: a relational ontology that privileges fluidity; a privileging of proximity and intimacy in their accounts; and a favouring of ethnographic methods.
Abstract: This paper seeks to examine both how emotions have been explored in emotional geography and also how affect has been understood in affectual geography. By tracing out the conceptual influences underlying emotional and affectual geography, I seek to understand both the similarities and differences between their approaches. I identify three key areas of agreement: a relational ontology that privileges fluidity; a privileging of proximity and intimacy in their accounts; and a favouring of ethnographic methods. Even so, there is a fundamental disagreement, concerning the relationship – or non-relationship – between emotions and affect. Yet, this split raises awkward questions for both approaches, about how emotions and affect are to be understood and also about their geographies. As importantly, mapping the agreements and disagreements within emotional and affectual geography helps with an exploration of the political implications of this work. I draw upon psychoanalytic geography to suggest ways of addressing certain snags in both emotional and affectual geography.
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, a meta-analysis of recent critiques of geographical scholarship on "neoliberal natures" is presented, which juxtaposes distinct (and at times divergent) conceptualizations of neoliber...
Abstract: This paper presents a meta-analysis of recent critiques of geographical scholarship on ‘neoliberal natures’. The analysis juxtaposes distinct (and at times divergent) conceptualizations of neoliber...

383 citations


Cites background from "Emotions and affect in recent human..."

  • ...…the question of the coconstitution of humans and non-humans could be through engagement with scholarship on emotional and affectual geographies (see Pile, 2010, for a recent review).5 This literature suggests that relationships with non-humans are not solely instrumental (as conventional…...

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article reviewed the current scholarship in human geography which clusters around the four themes of deterritorialization/reterritorialisation; power; materials, objects and technologies; and topological space.
Abstract: Assemblage thinking and actor-network theory (ANT) have been at the forefront of a paradigm shift that sees space and agency as the result of associating humans and non-humans to form precarious wholes. This shift offers ways of rethinking the relations between power, politics and space from a more processual, socio-material perspective. After sketching and comparing the concepts of the assemblage and the actor-network, this paper reviews the current scholarship in human geography which clusters around the four themes of deterritorialisation/reterritorialisation; power; materials, objects and technologies; and topological space. Looking towards the future, it suggests that assemblage thinking and ANT would benefit from exploring links with other social theories, arguing for a more sustained engagement with issues of language and power, and affect and the body.

357 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
01 Mar 2011-Geoforum
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that resource access, use, control, ownership and conflict are not only mediated through social relations of power, but also through emotional geographies where gendered subjectivities and embodied emotions constitute how nature-society relations are lived and experienced on a daily basis.

356 citations


Cites background from "Emotions and affect in recent human..."

  • ...Drawing insights from the emotional geographies literature (e.g. Bondi, 2005; Davidson et al., 2005; Pile, 2010; Sharp, 2009; Smith et al., 2009), the article attempts to show the importance of heeding the various emotions and meanings attached to processes of resource access, use and conflict in…...

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  • ...Drawing insights from the emotional geographies literature (e.g. Bondi, 2005; Davidson et al., 2005; Pile, 2010; Sharp, 2009; Smith et al., 2009), the article attempts to show the importance of heeding the various emotions and meanings attached to processes of resource access, use and conflict in order to better understand the emotionality of the resources that exist in everyday struggles....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argue that the notion of affect as a kind of excess is unsustainable, arguing that the objective of affect research is to produce textured, lively analyses of multiple modes of engagement and to understand the working of power through patterns of assemblage.
Abstract: The recent ‘turn to affect’ in social and cultural research has been built on the notion of affect as a kind of excess. Affect is contrasted with the discursive and the cognitive, and distinguished from ‘domesticated’ emotion. The focus is on the presumed direct hit of events on bodies and on what is sensed rather than known. This formulation in combination with the need for new methods has disconnected discourse studies from research on affect. In common with other recent critics, I argue that the formulation of affect as an excess is unsustainable. I focus here, however, on the methodological consequences. The objective of affect research is to produce textured, lively analyses of multiple modes of engagement and to understand the working of power through patterns of assemblage. Intriguingly, fine-grain studies of discursive practice might realize these aims more effectively than some new, ‘non-representational’ methodological approaches. I contrast one example of non-representational empirical investigation with an example of discursive research on normative episodic sequences. My general aim is to build a more productive dialogue between rich traditions in discourse studies and new lines of research on affect and emotion.

316 citations


Cites background from "Emotions and affect in recent human..."

  • ...Like other recent critics (for example, Hemmings, 2005; Thien, 2005; Laurier and Philo, 2006; Gill and Pratt, 2008; Papoulias and Callard, 2010; Pile, 2010; Leys, 2011; Blackman, 2012), the separation of human affect from discourse, and from mindfulness, seems to me unsustainable....

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  • ...Pile (2010) makes the same point in his discussion of McCormack’s study: 356 © 2013 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1755-6341 Subjectivity Vol. 6, 4, 349–368 Like emotions, affects matter – but they cannot be grasped, made known, or represented....

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  • ...…analysis of affect and discourse is beginning to be extensively criticized (for example, Hemmings, 2005; Laurier and Philo, 2006; Gill and Pratt, 2008; Pile, 2010; Leys, 2011; Blackman, 2012; 354 © 2013 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1755-6341 Subjectivity Vol. 6, 4, 349–368 Wetherell, 2012, in press)....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors proposes a relational ontology that emphasizes the complex interactions among the elements of an assemblage, which produce emergent effects which themselves reshape the assemblages elements, and have implications for understandings of agency, subjectivity, and systemic change.
Abstract: This article proposes a framework for considering materiality in the field of geopolitics: assemblage and complexity theories. Drawing on literatures beyond the field to imagine a posthuman geopolitics, this article argues for a relational ontology that emphasizes the complex interactions among the elements of an assemblage. These interactions produce emergent effects which themselves reshape the assemblage’s elements. This has implications for understandings of agency, subjectivity, and systemic change. The article concludes by highlighting the methodological and ethical challenges that such a project would face.

310 citations


Cites background from "Emotions and affect in recent human..."

  • ...This latter position has been staked out by non-representational theorists (Pile, 2010), and refers to the transpersonal nature of affects which are understood to condition our subjectivities (Connolly, 2002)....

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References
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors take the politics of affect as not just incidental but central to the life of cities, given that cities are thought of as inhuman or transhuman entities and that politics is understood as a process of community without unity.
Abstract: This paper attempts to take the politics of affect as not just incidental but central to the life of cities, given that cities are thought of as inhuman or transhuman entities and that politics is understood as a process of community without unity. It is in three main parts. The first part sets out the main approaches to affect that conform with this approach. The second part considers the ways in which the systematic engineering of affect has become central to the political life of Euro‐American cities, and why. The third part then sets out the different kinds of progressive politics that might become possible once affect is taken into account. There are some brief conclusions.

1,594 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors describe a single day's walking along the South West Coast Path in North Devon, England, focusing on the distinctive ways in which coast walking patterns into refracting orderings of subjectivity and spatiality, into sensations of anxiety and immensity, haptic enfolding and attenuation, encounters with others and with the elements.
Abstract: This paper tells the story of a single day's walking, alone, along the South West Coast Path in North Devon, England. Forms of narrative and descriptive writing are used here as creative and critical means of discussing the varied affinities and distanciations of self and landscape emergent within the affective and performative milieu of coastal walking. Discussion of these further enables critical engagement with current conceptualizations of self–landscape and subject–world relations within cultural geography and spatial-cultural theory more generally. Through attending to a sequence of incidents and experiences, the paper focuses upon the distinctive ways in which coast walking patterns into refracting orderings of subjectivity and spatiality – into for example, sensations of anxiety and immensity, haptic enfolding and attenuation, encounters with others and with the elements, and moments of visual exhilaration and epiphany.

615 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
Ben Anderson1
TL;DR: In this article, the authors describe how hope takes place, in order to outline an explicit theory of the more-than-rational or less-than rational in the context of recent attunement to issues of the affectual and emotional in social and cultural geography.
Abstract: In this paper I describe how hope takes place, in order to outline an explicit theory of the more-than-rational or less-than rational in the context of the recent attunement to issues of the affectual and emotional in social and cultural geography. In the first part of the paper I outline an expansion of the more-than-rational or less-than-rational into three modalities: affect, feeling, and emotion. From this basis I question an assumption in the literature on affect that the emergence and movement of affect enable the multiplication of forms of life because they takes place ‘in excess’. In the second part of the paper I exemplify an alternative, more melancholy account through a description of the emergence of hope and hopefulness in two cases in which recorded music is used by individuals to ‘feel better’. Emergent from disruptions in various forms of diminishment, hopefulness moves bodies into contact with an ‘outside’. Becoming and being hopeful raise a set of issues for a theory of affect because of...

585 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A welling-up of emotion within geography, a surge of interest reminiscent of the fascination and exploration of embodiment that characterized much social and cultural geographies, has been witnessed in recent years as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Recent years have witnessed a welling‐up of emotion within geography, a surge of interest reminiscent of the fascination and exploration of embodiment that characterized much social and cultural ge...

577 citations