Affective Economy Research Articles

Converting the unconverted: Narrative and affect in a South African non‐governmental organization

AbstractThe Sonke Gender Justice Network, a South African non‐governmental organization that strives for gender equity and strengthening democratic institutions, was founded in 2006 and has a long history of diverse community programming and advocacy. In this paper, I draw on ethnographic work conducted within the organization's walls to show the ways in which employees’ narratives of becoming part of Sonke mirror the structure and language of religious conversion narratives. Within these narratives, I use the theoretical framework of “economies of affect” to show how affective experiences and displays serve as valuable tools that employees use to reach community participants. I propose that this analysis allows us a unique lens into NGO work around gender equality, as it considers the importance of affect and conversion in the creation of liberal masculine subjects.

“She Feels not Half What We Feel”: Oriental Affect Aliens and the Unhappy Queers in Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse

In Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf’s portrayal of Lily Briscoe’s and Elizabeth Dalloway’s “Chinese eyes” has drawn critical attention, but the lack of affective expressiveness in these characters needs further examination. Borrowing Xine Yao’s term “unfeeling,” this essay explores the relationship between Woolf’s use of Oriental imagery and disaffection. It argues that Woolf’s depiction of Oriental unaffectedness critiques Victorian patriarchal conventions and their constructed notions of happiness. However, in doing so, Woolf simultaneously perpetuates the stereotype of Oriental inscrutability. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s critique of happiness and her concept of the “unhappy queer,” this essay first examines Elizabeth’s restrained affective expressiveness, suggesting that Woolf’s characterization challenges the white sentimentality linked to the heterosexual definition of happiness in the late Victorian era. Yet, through the lens of Yao’s analysis of Oriental alienness, the essay contends that Woolf’s narrative still subscribes to Orientalism. Likewise, Lily Briscoe’s negotiation of her capacity for sympathy—especially in contrast to Mrs. Ramsay—highlights Woolf’s critique of patriarchal norms. However, Lily’s artistic vision is ultimately realised through her alignment with the Western affective economy, suggesting the author’s acknowledgement of sympathy and affectability as universal concepts—yet ones that are underpinned by a racial hierarchy.

Systematic review: locating qualitative academic publications for reviewing tenants’ and landlords’ renting experiences and interaction in the Majority World

This methodological protocol describes the step-by-step process of identifying the relevant international academic literature to be reviewed within the project ‘The affective economies of emerging private renting markets: understanding tenants and landlords in postcommunist Romania” (AFFECTIVE-PRS). It presents: (1) the preliminary decisions taken related to the breadth of the review (choice of databases, type of research, type of reference, searching fields); (2) the operationalisation of keywords and Boolean strings; (3) the further calibration of the searching parameters through piloting; (4) the final retrieval of relevant references through systematic and manual searches; and (5) the geographical coverage of the retained literature. While the paper demonstrates the rigour of the methodological approach taken, it also opens up the space for other scholars to scrutinise, replicate or adjust this approach to their own work.

The Perils of Privacy and Passivity: Antidemocratic, Racist, and Antisemitic Sentiments in Postwar West Germany

Abstract This article analyzes the affective economy of West Germany's postwar society. After delineating the intellectual history of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research's “Gruppenexperiment,” which consisted of 137 group interviews with different segments of West German society, my article focuses on one transcript of a 1950 group discussion of young fashion-designer apprentices. Based on a close reading, I study how the younger generation in West Germany constructed a passive and privatist self-image in which they could both articulate their emotional dissociation from National Socialism while clinging to antidemocratic, racist, and antisemitic feelings in metamorphosed form. The micrological focus of the analysis of the group's emotions is balanced by a rereading of both Helmut Schelsky's study about the “skeptical generation” and texts by researchers associated with the Institute for Social Research who came to markedly different conclusions about the West German youth.

Rhetoric Is Dead? The Fear of Stasis Behind Post-Truth Rhetoric

ABSTRACT Why does post-truth discourse feel true? This article argues that post-truth fears the death of rhetoric, rather than truth, and traces that fear to the voluminous, rapid, and intense production of stasis on social media. Social media enable and weaponize the production of stasis, and that production generates affects more aligned with death than life (stagnation, hopelessness) that explain why post-truth feels true. These fears and their concomitant hopes constitute an affective economy also present in philosophy’s predominant images of rhetoric. Some images picture rhetoric as movement, whereas others emphasize rhetoric’s capacity to secure the status quo. Social media beckon a supplementary image—a vortex—in which rhetorical movement functions to produce standstill. This image suggests the need to consider affects generated by rhetorical processes as much as from texts. Post-truth’s affective economy also drives stasis production generally, and scholars should attend to the affective economies driving various rhetorical modes.

The affective economy of democracy

The affective economy of democracy

Confessional Performance: Remorse and the Affective Economy of Parole

Abstract: Taking the popular podcast series Violation as its point of departure, this article examines the dramaturgy within the parole system, its affective politics, and its performative speech acts to consider its role in the perpetuation of mass incarceration in the United States. By training an eye on the affective economy of parole hearings, this article explores the retributive turn in the criminal legal process in the wake of neoliberal economic reforms. It focuses on the anxious performance of remorse within parole hearings as a key form of affective currency that could potentially secure release from incarceration. In the process, the article examines the significant role that remorse plays in parole hearings in entrenching a dispositional conception of personal responsibility in the criminal legal system.

Systematic review: locating qualitative academic publications for reviewing tenants' and landlords' renting experiences and interaction in the Majority World.

This methodological protocol describes the step-by-step process of identifying the relevant international academic literature to be reviewed within the project 'The affective economies of emerging private renting markets: understanding tenants and landlords in postcommunist Romania" (AFFECTIVE-PRS). It presents: (1) the preliminary decisions taken related to the breadth of the review (choice of databases, type of research, type of reference, searching fields); (2) the operationalisation of keywords and Boolean strings; (3) the further calibration of the searching parameters through piloting; (4) the final retrieval of relevant references through systematic and manual searches; and (5) the geographical coverage of the retained literature. While the paper demonstrates the rigour of the methodological approach taken, it also opens up the space for other scholars to scrutinise, replicate or adjust this approach to their own work.

Atmosphere, imminence and the Manchester Arena Inquiry: on the affective modalities of becoming situationally aware to urban terrorism

ABSTRACT Building situational awareness has become a central logic among contemporary security apparatuses for abating no-warning urban terrorism. Situational awareness, we contend, casts the sensory, perceptual and affective capacities of human bodies to decipher their immediate surroundings and attune to the non-representational and more-than-known of an enfolding situation, as essential to its execution. What modalities of sense-making and attunement, then, does this burgeoning security rationality demand? And what sensibilities, affectivities and subjectivities are (re)produced and legitimated across urban life? In this paper, we unpack these questions by examining the ways affective and atmospheric attunement(s) are infused within orthodox and emergent security approaches for developing and honing situational awareness. We argue that affective atmospheres in particular furnish the theoretical architecture for attending to the spatio-affective-material registers through which imminence becomes palpable. Empirically, by analysing the Public Inquiry following the 2017 Manchester Arena attack, we elucidate where the Inquiry advanced discussions on (the limits of) situational awareness and its sensorial, affective and atmospheric dimensions, thereby extending situational awareness into an atmospheric agenda within urban geopolitics. Finally, we reflect on how the impending UK Protect Duty might reconfigure the legal landscape of situational awareness, city resilience, and the affective economies of (in)attention.

The affective economy of removal: ethnographic perspectives on deportation and (In)voluntary return

ABSTRACT The removal of undocumented migrants has become a widespread preoccupation of current European migration politics and one of the most emotionally contentious state practices of our times. Not only right-wing populists and their constituencies demand an increase in expulsions, but also mainstream society. Others accuse these positions of being racist or lacking humanism and instead promote solidarity to help people seeking protection in Europe. These divisive views and migrants’ often long-term experience of being ‘unwanted’ and deportable provoke strong and often irreconcilable emotions. The ethnographic explorations assembled here zoom in on the ‘affective economies’ inherent in the arbitrary processes and unpredictable experiences of removals of people from Europe to different parts of the world. This special issue puts forward a twofold argument: First, conceptually, we argue that a focus on affects is indispensable in order to fully unearth the complexities of removal processes. And second, methodologically, we contend that an ethnographic approach, with its deep and often long-term commitment of researchers to their respective field(s) including multiple actors, is essential to comprehensively grasp the affective economy of removal.

Gendered Vulnerability in Necropolitical Bordering: Displaced Men’s Material and Affective Abandonment in Greece

The term vulnerability has become increasingly integral to humanitarian legislation, policies, discourse, and procedures in contexts of displacement. While people categorized as “vulnerable persons” are ostensibly entitled to specialized care, this categorization is widely used to divide people into those “legitimate” and “illegitimate” to receive basic rights and care. Critical feminist scholarship has highlighted how gender is the dominant lens through which vulnerability is constructed and recognized. This affects all people during displacement. However, here we address the implications of this framework for men’s experiences of displacement, exploring as a case study the issue of housing for displaced people in Greece. Drawing on our independent fieldwork and interviews with humanitarians and displaced men, we demonstrate how gendered conceptions of vulnerability are not only integrated into institutionalized immigration apparatuses but also circulate in the everyday discourses, practices, and affective economies that constitute the Greek care regime. The result is that a form of necropolitics is exercised against men, forcing them to reside in conditions of slow violence and permanent injury. We address the gendered nature of this necropolitics as well as the gender-specific consequences for men at Europe’s borders.

Modern Slavery and the Punitive–Humanitarian Complex

Abstract This paper provides a critical analysis of modern slavery (MS) policy, legislation and discourse in the United Kingdom. Challenging the suggestion that recent attempts to dilute protections and guarantees in the original MS framework represent a fundamental shift from a more humanitarian to a more punitive orientation, it argues that these two moments ought to be understood as products of a single, underlying articulation, the ‘punitive–humanitarian complex’. We first explore the context and discourse of the MS agenda, exposing an ambivalence within its core tenets, primarily manifested through the dichotomy between victims (slaves) and offenders (slavers). The paper then examines how the punitive–humanitarian complex engenders moral and affective economies and reflects on how it reveals the vulnerability of contemporary state power.

Feeling queer, feeling real: affective economies of truth in queer asylum politics

ABSTRACT This article discusses the role of affect in the credibility assessment process in queer asylum claims. Through 27 semistructured interviews with caseworkers, it explores how sexual truth, in the Greek asylum apparatus, is affectively produced and analyses how access to asylum is intermediated by affective control of who is considered the “good” sexual citizen. According to the research material, the process focuses on applicants' emotions, while caseworkers tend to assess the “authenticity” of applicants' feelings through their senses and intuition. Additionally, apart from the exclusionary politics of emotions in homonationalist border regimes, it discusses affect's transformative possibilities in legal decision-making. Reflecting on queerness as an affect, through those failed, unspeakable queer performances that have been rendered non-credible by the affective rules of spoken sexual truth, it aims to challenge white-centred definitions of “genuine” queerness and the binaries of compliance and resistance in slow-death apparatuses.

The affective economy of ‘self-deportation’: materiality, spatiality, temporality

ABSTRACT The increased securitisation of the borders bounding and intersecting Europe has led to the formation of makeshift tent settlements along established routes of irregular migration. Built at permeable border points, illegalised migrants live in these informal camps while they attempt to cross into a neighbouring country. One such camp, Dankix, lies on the northern French coast in the outskirts of Grande-Synthe. While its Kurdish inhabitants aim to cross the Channel to the United Kingdom, some return to Kurdistan using the state’s programme of retour volontaire, or ‘voluntary return’. I examine the affective economy of state-assisted return through the experiences of one family as they move between the social and juridical categories of illegalised and legalised. As they simultaneously cross borders thousands of miles apart, they circulate affective energies that contain particular material, spatial, and temporal dimensions. This affective economy both reveals and transforms the relationships between emplacement, belonging, and illegalisation.

The feeling of destiny: taqdeer and ‘voluntary’ return in the everyday lives of irregularised Pakistani migrants

ABSTRACT This article inquires into how rejected asylum seekers and returning migrants feel and make sense of their (im)mobility. Focusing on the emic concept of taqdeer (destiny), it explores how Pakistani migrants affectively experience and interpret restrictive mobility regimes. The article contextualises the value of destiny in the lives of irregularised migrants, (rejected) asylum seekers with an order to leave, as well as those who return under such circumstances. It explores how perspectives, narratives and feelings of destiny form an integral part of their lived experiences: How a shared understanding of taqdeer primarily serves as a means to communicate affective states but also serves as an important way to accept or contest diverse situations of (im)mobility, experiences of irregularisation and return. I argue that taqdeer is an integral part of the affective economy of (return) migration and often aids people in meaning-making and provides them with a way to engage with the vulnerabilities and gendered burdens of irregularised migration and return. The concept of destiny furthers ethnographic understanding of the intimate entanglement of the bureaucratic and divine dimensions of (im)mobility in the lives of irregularised Muslim migrants.

Affective recognition: examining the role of affect in education for peacebuilding in Cambodia and Kosovo

ABSTRACT In this article I develop the conceptualisation of affective recognition as a means of deepening understandings of education’s contribution to peacebuilding and social justice in conflict-affected contexts. Scholars have highlighted that one of the crises in peacebuilding education today is the failure to understand and harness the role of the transrational and the affective. I therefore bring together feminist theories of social justice and affective economies to analyse non-formal education programmes with young people in Cambodia and Kosovo and develop the concept of affective recognition. I contend that affective recognition demonstrates the central role of affect in enabling processes of peacebuilding and social justice through educational programmes.

Our Boy Whitey: Middle-Aged Women’s Happy Object on TikTok

This article provides an example of how middle-aged women rediscover and express emotions in digital media, mainly sexual desire but also the joy they feel among like-minded women of the same age. The ethnographic case is a community of European and North American women aged around 40 to 60 years who sexually desire 20-year-old TikTok celebrity William White. White went viral when he began lip-syncing to 1980s hits, particularly Barry Manilow’s “Mandy” while performing his flirtatious signature moves: the smile, the wink, and the eye roll. This study is based on 6 months of daily lurking in a digital community the women call Whiteyynation, structured around White’s accounts on various digital platforms. In trying to understand the meaning and function of a young male TikTok’er in the lives of middle-aged women, with Sara Ahmed’s theory of emotions, I describe how happy objects align individuals in a social community toward happiness. Specifically, I analyze how White, through a playful capitalization of 1980s music combined with a certain flirtatious look, functions as a happy object that is multiplied, magnified, and circulated in Whiteyynation. I explore the circumstances and conditions surrounding Whiteyynation as an affective space and affective economy, such as the production and distribution of self-produced content, gifting as a strategy for increased reciprocity, and the various currencies at play.

Affective economies in crowdfunding for cancer

Affective economies in crowdfunding for cancer

Desire, pride and profit: Affective economies of English in India

Scholarship on neoliberalism has shown how employability discourses compel students to invest in English. What remains underexplored is the role of affect in these processes, and how it works to anchor these discourses deep within people’s subjectivities. Drawing on ethnographic data from an English-teaching NGO in Delhi, I explore the affective economy of English in India in order to demonstrate how and why English becomes desirable, for whom, and with what consequences. In doing so, I map the webs of complex logics and actors that not only discursively (re)produce English as a thing to be desired, but also draw boundaries around who can and should desire it.

Affective Dimensions of Compound Crises in Tourism Economies: The Intermountain Western Gateway Community of Nederland, Colorado

Affective economies align people and places according to identities and emotional capital, particularly during compound crises such as COVID-19. Through an embodied research approach, affect becomes an integral part of furthering knowledge production within crisis management to understand individual and community resilience. This research explores how affective dimensions express individual and community resilience as part of crisis and disaster management of tourism-based economies. We contribute knowledge of sustainable destination management in the context of intermountain western gateway communities (IWGCs) to center residents as primary stakeholders within conservation and resilience planning. The IWGC of Nederland, Colorado, is presented as a microcosm of change through which the lived experiences of residents during COVID-19 are analyzed. This approach embraces the potential of affective scholarship for conservation and destination planning through creative qualitative methods of inquiry. Within a crystallization methodology guided by a feminist new materialist epistemology, we incorporate residents’ creative expressions to understand how affective dynamics influenced resilience throughout compound crises. Findings are presented via three themes including affective dimensions of resilience, identity, belonging and responsibility, and affective tourism economies. Affective knowledge centering resident experiences may inform future planning for crisis and disaster management across IWGCs and other gateway communities balancing tourism, conservation, and community planning.