Affective Economy Research Articles

Shelter Vision: Compassion, Fear, and Learning to (Not) See Trauma along the Migrant Trail through Mexico

Within a context of shifting affective economies of racialised fear and reluctant humanitarianism that surround Central American migration through Mexico, this article draws on ethnographic fieldwork as a volunteer at a humanitarian migrant shelter in Central Mexico to describe how aid workers negotiated concerns expressed by visiting volunteers about compassion fatigue and vicarious traumatisation. Building on the work of scholars who examine intersubjective and relational dynamics of looking and being looked at beyond a lens of either surveillance or performance, I describe how shelter workers learned to (not) see trauma by negotiating the affective expectations of visitors. I argue that what visitors took to be indifference and insensitivity reflects what I refer to as ‘shelter vision’, a tacit and embodied form of competent looking developed through apprenticeship and enskilment. Such vision refuses racialised discourses that position undocumented migrants as either passive victims deserving of compassion or as a toxic threat to the body politic, both in the United States and Mexico.

ACTIVATING AFFECT AURA THROUGH ART

In this paper, we examine clothing and material fibers as affective elements that function as witnesses to a structure of power. Specifically, we consider them as material bystanders of the human’s encounter with state-level violence in two contexts: the Chilean dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and the militarization of the US/Mexico border region of the Sonoran Desert. Drawing from Sara Ahmed’s notion of affective economies, we first consider how each context mobilized affect to create a culture of hate toward the Other in which abuses became normalized and accepted. Then, we turn to the aftermath of state violence and how clothing perceived as witness is offered as a means of interrupting the violent legacy of these two contexts. By its past experience of mediating interactions within these violent spaces, we draw from Benjamin, Deleuze, and Ahmed to argue that clothing from contexts of political violence takes on elements of that atmosphere of mistreatment, retaining a history imprinted upon it by the subjects it clothed, an imprint we refer to as “affect aura.” We then examine how two artists have used this clothing in their art, drawing upon its affect aura to bring forth a testimonial potential that they mobilize to rehumanize and combat the violent past.

Architectural History or a Geography of Small Spaces?

Architectural History or a Geography of Small Spaces?

Digital Anticipation: Facilitating the Pre-Emptive Futures of Chinese Grandparent Migrants in Australia

In this article, we contrast the digital kinning and digital homing practices of PRC Chinese transnational grandparents in Australia from two migration cohorts. Our case studies demonstrate that these digital practices form an integral part of the ability to anticipate aging futures. This “digital anticipation” not only helps to safeguard and affirm social and cultural identities that are often at risk as people age in migrant settings, but also provides the potential to imagine either a future return to China that involves physical separation from children and grandchildren, or, conversely, a future lived in Australia while still maintaining connection and participating digitally in affective economies that extend beyond the nuclear family to encompass siblings, friends, and lifelong workmates. Here the role of facilitated digital access is highlighted as a form of care that can be provided by younger generations.

Globalization and Affective Economy of Othering in South Korea: Emotional Particularism in Orion Choco Pie Advertisements

This essay explores the affective economy of othering within globalization encounters by analyzing representations of foreign others in domestic advertisements for a globally bestselling South Korean snack cake. For three decades, domestic advertisements for Orion Choco Pie have thematized chŏng, a time-nurtured affective connection that blurs boundaries between self and other. The essay examines how the advertisements balance the representations of chŏng as uniquely Korean and inaccessible to outsiders, yet directly responsible for the treat’s international popularity. I detail how emotional particularism – affective-discursive constructions of indigenous sentiments that underscore their uniqueness and incommensurability – functions not only as a tool of ethno-nationalist self-fashioning but also of othering, while my analysis also contributes to critiquing the neoimperialist undercurrents of post-Cold-War globalization as it plays out away from the old imperial centers. I argue that the advertisements’ affective economy recruits the South Korean public to identify with globalizing South Korean capital and mediates a subimperialist desire for South Korean hegemony.

Book Review: Affect, Narratives and Politics of Southeast Asian Migration by Carlos M. Piocos III

Carlos Piocos’s ground-breaking book, Affect, Narratives and Politics of Southeast Asian Migration published earlier this year by Routledge, provides an in-depth analysis of the intimate labour(ed) landscape of Filipina and Indonesian migrant workers in Hong Kong and Singapore, and how their (im)mobilities are not just hastened and aggravated by the neoliberal framework of global labor and the policies of their sending and receiving nation-states, but also in terms of the emotionality that circulates within the global care chains network. Piocos specifically turns our attention to the “felt” politics that emanate from films and fictions of and by Southeast Asian migrant workers and how these cultural productions create an affective economy that, according to him, is not just “sticky” as feminist critic Sarah Ahmed describes, but demonstrates varying viscosities of “thickening and thinning out,” reflecting a “messiness” of feelings that do not necessarily coalesce in these texts (p. 10).

Hearts in Australia, Souls in Nepal

This article focuses on the intergenerational nature of migrants’ aspirations and the emotions that attach to them. Drawing on Ahmed’s (2014) notion of “affective economies” that emphasises that emotions circulate and accumulate affective value, I show how aspirations attached to migration or the “mobile aspirations” (Robertson, Cheng, & Yeoh 2018) are affectively experienced by their family. While studies have explored aspirations for permanent residency (PR) in the West, as well as the pathways to PR, less is documented of how parents experience their children’s migration aspirations, including for PR abroad. This article addresses this particular gap. Taking the case of Nepali education migrants in Australia and their transnational families, I explore the parents’ emotions when their children aspire for PR overseas. I argue that migration aspirations create a different kind of intergenerational affective economy between parents and children. This article is based on a multi-sited ethnography among Nepali education migrants in Sydney, Australia and their families in Nepal.

Contemporary art, affective turn and emotions

Due to the so-called Affective Turn, which is according to a number of scholars shaping present cross-disciplinary studies of various phenomena, art included, emotions are coming into focus of many different theoretical orientations. Among the authors concerned with issues of emotions, Sara Ahmed?s discourse on affective economies, and her understanding of emotions as practices that produce surfaces and borders that allow the collective and the individual to appear as objects proves to be particularly useful in the analysis of immaterial artworks. In regard to the leading poetic principles of contemporary art practices, starting from Bourriaud?s Relational aesthetics and the insights offered by Sara Ahmed, we will look more closely into emotions as key notions for understanding the aesthetics experience of art today.

Thinking in Crisis: Towards an Ethics of Speculation?

The paper critically explores tensions inherent in speculative thinking in the context of climate change. It argues that speculative thinking is not a supererogatory luxury or idle pastime, but rather an essential necessity, especially in the context of climate change. Understanding this requires becoming more aware of operative tensions of speculative practice. In particular, the paper focusses on how climate discourses intersect and engage our variable affective economies through the affect of fear and proposes two practical virtues (“speculative courage” and “contemplative attending”) to be cultivated towards a responsible practice of speculative thought in this context.

Ana María Laguna and John Beusterien, eds. Goodbye Eros: Recasting Forms and Norms of Love in the Age of Cervantes

Ana María Laguna and John Beusterien, eds. <i>Goodbye Eros: Recasting Forms and Norms of Love in the Age of Cervantes</i>

The Politics of Rightful Killing: Civil Society, Gender, and Sexuality in Weblogistan

The Politics of Rightful Killing: Civil Society, Gender, and Sexuality in Weblogistan

‘We hugged each other during the cold nights’: the role of affect in an anti-deportation protest network in Finland

ABSTRACT This article analyses the role of affect and emotions in Finland’s first large-scale anti-deportation protest, the 2017 Right to Live protest in Helsinki. Despite deportation protests having recently gained scholarly attention, their emotional dimensions have not been sufficiently studied, especially as concerns the emotions of protestors with vulnerable legal status. This article is based on in-depth interviews with key activists in the anti-deportation protest network in Finland, including asylum seekers, refugees and Finnish citizens. The article argues that in order for the protest of asylum seekers facing the threat of deportation to become public and visible, it was important that citizens who supported the cause not only offered material assistance but also shared their emotions. The article applies Margaret Wetherell’s theoretical concept of affective practices to analyse interactions between asylum seekers and their supporters, and Sara Ahmed’s circulation of affect and affective economies to explain how affect and emotions played a role in mobilizing protesters and sustaining the protest. The article concludes that the circulation of affect within the network of asylum seekers and supporters produced lasting affective value during the protest and after the protest ended. Strong affective ties enabled the protesters’ network to function effectively in a challenging political climate and despite the network’s lack of formal organization, leadership and shared ideological premises.

Volume 13, 2021 Number 1: General Issue under Continuous Mode Number 2: Special Articles on Health Humanities and General Articles Volume 12, 2020 Number 1: General Issue under Continuous Mode Number 2: General Issue under Continuous Mode Number 3: Special Collection on “India and Travel Narratives”, guest-edited by Ms. Somdatta Mandal, PhD Number 4: General Issue under Continuous Mode Number

This paper aims to examine the representation of animals in Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers (2015), a multi-awarded novel about an academic’s struggles on coping with the grief of losing his wife. Previous scholarship on Grief is the Thing with Feathers focuses on an anthropocentric approach to grief and melancholia. However, I argue these emotions can be approached through an examination of the Crow, a fantastical talking bird who makes itself known during the funeral, against the human protagonists of the novel. My approach focuses on how the Crow manages to facilitate what Sara Ahmed calls an “affective economy” which aids the human characters to process their emotions. I critically analyze in this paper how the novel blurs the boundary that separates the human and beasts through its representation of animal emotion. I speculate on how the moments of encounter between the crow and humans emphasize the acts of touching and smelling as a mode to cope with melancholia and grief. Lastly, I look at how its hybridization of prose and poetry performatively imitates affective and emotional responses to personal loss.

Affective Economies in Blood Banks and Biobanks: Vital Accounting from US Transfusion Medicine to Genetic Research, 1935–1990

Summary Medical blood banks and research biobanks are frequently figured as immobile middlemen in the larger machinations of biomedicine, possessing little power to influence the meaning or mobilisation of the biomaterials they accumulate. However, as the institutions that facilitate the collection and circulation of blood for a variety of purposes, blood and biobanks—much like their financial namesakes—legitimate certain practices and constitute the conditions of possibility for others. By following the ‘banking’ metaphor from its origins in 1930s US blood banking through global research specimen collection in the latter half of the century, this essay argues that economic rhetoric has worked to reproduce systems of classed and raced inequity within the circulation of blood through US medicine and research, in turn shifting the affective valences of raced and classed bodies as donors, patients and research subjects.

AFFECTIVE DISCOURSE ANALYSIS AND SOCIAL MEDIA: METHODOLOGICAL INNOVATIONS IN THE CROSS-PLATFORM STUDY OF EMOTION AND RACE ON TWITTER, GAB, AND FACEBOOK

In the context of the so-called "post-truth" crisis, emotions have resoundingly replaced facts in our fast-moving, affectively-driven internet-based culture. Scholars are challenged to develop innovative methods for studying emotion and affect within studies of social media, and political communications. What is an effective interdisciplinary approach to the study of affect and communications in our rapidly-evolving media ecosystems? While the "affective turn" makes sense in the humanities, disciplines studying elections and populist sentiments traditionally draw upon quantitative and qualitative methods that tend to reduce and measure emotions as simply negative and positive. Further, political communications scholarship on "affective polarization" tend to define "in-groups" and "out-groups" solely in terms of partisan differences, missing much complexity of social identities and race relations. This three-year, funded research project draws from the politics of emotion to inform an innovative grounded theoretical study of emotional expression related to narratives of racism in social media. draw on Sarah Ahmed's concepts of sticky emotions and affective economies (2004) and Arlie Hochschild's concepts of feeling rules and deep stories (2016). This talk presents methodological innovations and research findings from our cross-platform digital ethnography of social media from Twitter, Gab, and Facebook, and qualitative discourse analysis of 1800 social media posts related to Black Lives Matter and the Capitol Riots. The paper provides a significant contribution to a nascent field of studies by specifically engaging an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that includes affect theory or politics of emotion alongside qualitative research of social media.

‘For better or for worse, there is history, there is the book and then there's the movie’: Foregrounding and Marginalizing African American Women in the Film Hidden Figures (2016)

This paper critically examines the representation of gender and race in the biographical drama film Hidden Figures (2016), directed by Theodore Melfi. The film is based on Margot Lee Shetterly’s nonfiction book of the same title, which spotlights previously hidden figures in US history: the black female mathematicians who worked in the early US space program. The movie was released to critical acclaim and embraced by audiences as empowering African American girls. At the same time, the film was criticized for including a ‘white savior’ scene in which the black female protagonists are marginalized.&#x0D; After providing background information on Shetterly’s book and the film’s critical reception, this paper conducts a close formal analysis of a pivotal sequence in the film, which is compared to the events told in the nonfiction book. To shed light on the power structures that the film sequence projects, the results of this analysis are, subsequently, related to critical theoretical approaches to Hollywood cinema, as well as to Sara Ahmed’s concept of ‘affective economies.’ In conclusion, we argue that Hollywood filmmakers’ expectations about the desires of ‘mainstream’ audiences work to perpetuate the repression of previously repressed herstory on the ‘silver screen.’

Affective enactments: the pedagogy and cultural politics of reading in an Australian classroom

ABSTRACT This paper concerns the pedagogical work affect does in an Australian Year 11 literature classroom. Thinking with Ahmed’s framing of affect from the viewpoint of cultural politics, I consider how affect aligns some bodies within particular social groups and situates some outside. Three key moments of affective charge are drawn from observations: students’ written responses, group discussions, and interviews. Analysing these moments from the perspective of Ahmed’s affective economy foregrounds the value of detecting students’ orientations towards or away from the classroom space, discourses, and practices. It indicates the potential for constructing the classroom as an inclusive and relational space allowing room for the different knowledges implicit in students’ experiences. It shows that students often find themselves interpellated by conflicting discourses that emphasise how they read themselves and their texts. Allowing opportunities to name, share, and process these conflicts can expand the efficacy of reading practices.

Home Is Where the Heart Is: The Rise of Emotional Spaces in the German Late Enlightenment

The emergent political arena of the late eighteenth century, and the literary one that preceded it, were claimed to be based upon a functional dichotomy between a private sphere of emotive ties and associations, and a “public sphere” of rational criticism (Habermas, 1962). This categorical distinction, however, scantily registered the emergence of a corollary affective economy in this period, which redefined social, political, and physical spaces according to their emotional content, or lack thereof. This article focuses on the rise of emotional language, its spatial configurations, and its dissemination during the late German Enlightenment in three thematic contexts: the “popular Enlightenment” (Volksaufklärung) and its emphasis on the enhancement of literacy among the lower classes to achieve emotional refinement; the visual representation of domestic emotional scenarios in the context of the Franco-German cultural exchange surrounding the French Revolution; and the emergence of “homeland” (Heimat) as an increasingly ubiquitous emotion-bound metaphor in the nationalization of space toward the century's end. These contexts reveal major shifts in the cultural dynamics of space and emotion in this period: first, the reaffirmation of emotion as a culturally viable interpretive mode, set against earlier concerted attempts to suppress or control it; second, the osmosis between private and public that enabled emotional protocols to transgress supposedly natural boundaries of class, status, and gender across society, and establish new contacts between exclusive and excluded communities; and last, the article shows how the spatial imaginary that emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century—despite its reliance on older dispositions regarding space in German culture—deployed emotional vocabularies for engendering new forms of sociability, which went on to became central determinants of Germanness in the early nineteenth century.

Surviving Digital Asia: PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds and the Affective Economy of the Battle Royale

Surviving Digital Asia: PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds and the Affective Economy of the Battle Royale

Managing risk, managing affects: The emerging biopolitics of HIV neutrality

Discourses of HIV status neutrality have emerged in the wake of advances in biomedical technologies for HIV prevention and treatment of HIV. The combined effects of Treatment as Prevention (TasP) and Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) give rise to the possibility of dramatically curbing new HIV infections and nurture fantasies about an HIV-free/risk-free futurity. In this article, we consider the possibilities of HIV neutrality as a social-material assemblage entangling different institutional investments and practices, discourses about HIV risk and prevention, historical memories, political rationalities, and as a generative point of contact between and across different actors, institutions and objects. We explore the different logics and sentiments that are being drawn together in three different sites where HIV neutrality is configured. Borrowing from cultural and social science approaches that grapple with emotions and feelings as ‘distributed phenomena’ that carry political and social significance, we interrogate the work of HIV neutrality in effecting new tensions in the affective economies underpinning gay sexual socialities’ relation to HIV/AIDS and HIV risk. Our analysis suggests that as these new social-material strategies emerge to manage HIV risk, they entangle historically sedimented effects of HIV/AIDS. We ask to what extent these assemblages are productive of new intimacies and alliances, and possibly renewed entrenchments of bio-social boundaries cutting across gay male socialities in North America.