‘A citizen of all the different bits’: emotional scaling of identity

Abstract

Scale is a debatable term in the humanities and social sciences. Conceptualized in human geography as spatial categories of thought, as the arenas where social processes occur, as bounded political-economic frames or as unhelpful binaries privileging either the local or the global, scale intersects a significant body of geographical research. The unfolding and intermeshing of topological connections that help to share moments and experiences are important sources for the differentiation, renewal and recalibration of individual identities, but they often work as co-components to scalar identifications. Engaging with the recent discussion on scale and the upsurge of emotional geographies, I seek to understand how people contextualize space through situated scalar perspectives and how they realign and recognize their identities through embodied emotions. The analysis of the empirical material, that comprises 23 focus groups with locally and universally-orientated civic organizations in Finland and England, focuses on the ways people use landscapes and communities as emotional signposts in their scalar identification. I argue that scale is a situated category, whose spectrum individuals negotiate through the performance of social discourses and cultural practices. In such negotiation, people scale their identity narratives to overcome or emphasize the distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘others’.