Affective Encounter Research Articles

The ‘desk-chair countryside’: Affect, authenticity and the rural idyll in a farming computer game

Abstract Agricultural computer games engage millions of players world-wide in farming practices. This paper investigates how farm-based computer and video games act as sites of cultural production. I utilise a case study of Stardew Valley to assess how notions of idyllic rurality are staged, encountered and reworked both by and for the ‘desk-chair countryside’: people who engage in rural activities on their computers. Computer gameplay is a distinctive form of rural engagement, requiring active decision-making and performance of farming activities, immersing players in novel rural worlds through complex configurations of computer equipment and virtual world avatars. Drawing on non-representational thinking, and concepts from the ‘experience economy’, the paper focuses on how tropes of idyllic rurality are mobilised and challenged through the affective responses elicited in gameplay. I argue that imaginaries of peaceful farm life and happy (pet) livestock are reinforced through affective encounters that appeal to ‘referential authenticity’ (nostalgia) and ‘influential authenticity’ (the higher calling of caring for animals). In contrast, community interactions appeal to ‘natural authenticity’, progressively revealing human in-game characters as they ‘really are’ (flawed individuals dealing with life issues ranging from paternity to post-traumatic stress), utilising ‘influential authenticity’ to call players to support their neighbours. This integration of affective encounter with natural and influential authenticity enables the critical reworking of rural imaginaries to form what I term ‘authentic idylls’. I conclude with a discussion of the theoretical and methodological opportunities of computer-mediated virtual ruralities in rural studies research.

Beautiful radiant things: performance and its affects in applied theatre

ABSTRACT This essay considers what viewing performance as an affective encounter—an embodied experience of sensations and intensities—might mean for applied theatre. Using auto-theory, which joins personal narrative with theories of affect, new materialism and post-humanism, we write an affective encounter that catches up people and objects in relations of resonance. Specifically, we write how a caravan in visual artist Patricia Piccinini’s work The Couple resonates through our experiences of caravan as children. Here, performance is an event that activates new ways of perceiving the complex and multi-dimensional patterns of daily life and within them, the capacity to be moved.

Autoethnography as a Poetics of Worlding and a Politics of Becoming: Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects

This article analyzes the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects and the poet Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric as autoethnographies of affective encounter in which the authors stylistically fracture their positionalities such that the embodied evidence of experience becomes visceral political potential. In Ordinary Affects, Stewart uses autoethnography to conjure the intensities of affect that manifest in everyday moments and spaces of encounter, detailing disparate scenes of immanent force to provide an antidote to academic studies that render power inert as they employ totalizing systems such as “neoliberalism” to analyze its effects. Using “she” to index the difference between her first-person identity as a writer and a body that imagines and senses the political-as-becoming, Stewart invites readers to participate in a poetics of worlding during which the author does not play expert witness. In the American lyric Citizen, Claudia Rankine also splits her narrative voice and uses both “I” and “you,” while evoking affective encounters of racialization that are forces of habit and routines of violence. Her poem includes not only personal anecdote or feeling but also events and texts of popular culture, enlisting her readers to take part in a poetics of worlding and a politics of becoming through which the author bears witness to “I” through “you.” In effect, Rankine and Stewart use autoethnography to resist portraying political life as bound by discursive logics of self and subjecthood.

Can there be another Vikalp? Documentary film, censorship histories, and film festival publics in India

ABSTRACTThe Vikalp Film Festival of 2004 (Vikalp, meaning ‘alternative’ in Hindi) has been celebrated as a seminal event in Indian documentary history, an unprecedented, collective mobilization against censorship that also marked a distinct historical rupture in documentary film history in postcolonial India. In this article, I build on recent accounts of the festival by participants and scholars to explore (a) the nature of the interventions that ‘Vikalp’ sought to stage in the history of cinema censorship and (b) the shifts in political documentary film-making that it engendered vis-à vis histories of grassroots political activism in India, as well as emerging networked social movements globally. While Vikalp did not ultimately succeed in changing the colonial-era censorship regulations that continue to govern film exhibition in India, I argue that it changed the terms on which censorship debates had played out by reimagining the role that documentary film could play in protests. Enacting a shift from viewing individual films as ‘tools’ in political struggle, Vikalp focused on the affective encounter between documentary narratives and diverse new audiences in the new millennium. The documentary film screenings and festivals that Vikalp helped mobilize became one node for a documentary ‘counter public’ that called on a reimagining of the form and aesthetics of political documentary film-making, as well as new relationships between artistic practice and activism that continue to circulate across material and physical spaces of film production and circulation in contemporary India.

“Respeta mi idioma”: Latinx Youth Enacting Affective Agency

ABSTRACTAlthough hegemonic approaches to education privilege rationality as the sole legitimate form of knowledge production and consumption, research on emotion in socially transformative learning demonstrates that it is only through affective investment that intellectual engagement takes place and leads to social change. Hence, the agentive action of racialized youth to produce knowledge challenging dominant ideological systems is also an affective agency, the production of social action informed by and involving embodied, emotional encounter with the world. The article identifies three key components of affective agency—affective encounter, mobilization, and persistence—through ethnographic interactional analysis in an innovative after-school program for Latinx youth. The analysis examines one student’s emotional response to linguistic racism in U.S. political discourse and how this affective experience moved her to speak out for sociolinguistic justice for Spanish speakers. The article concludes that educators committed to antiracism and social justice must interactionally support students’ affective agency.

Affective Encounter: Repetition and Immersive Practices in Man of Valour

Affective Encounter: Repetition and Immersive Practices in Man of Valour

Louder Than Films: Memory, Affect and the ‘Sublime Image’ in the Work of Joachim Trier

“We have to believe that new images are still possible”. This remark by Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier during a recent event in Oslo entitled ‘The Sublime Image’ speaks to the centrality in his work of images, often of trauma, that aspire to the condition of photographic stills or paintings. A hand against a window, cheerleaders tumbling against an azure sky, an infant trapped under a lake’s icy surface: these can certainly be read as sublime images insofar as we might read the sublime as an affect—a sense of the ineffable or the shock of the new. However, for Trier, cinema is an art of memory and here too, this article argues, his films stage an encounter with the temporal sublime and the undecidability of memory. Offering readings of Trier’s four feature films to date which center on their refraction of memory through crystal-images, the article emphasizes the affective encounter with the films as having its own temporality.

Podcast as assessment: entanglement and affect in the law school

ABSTRACTThis article documents the “Orders in Decay” project, in which students taking the Law and Disorder module at the University of Warwick were required to produce a podcast as part of their assessment. The article situates the pedagogic benefits of student podcasting through the fields of legal storytelling, law and literature, and digital storytelling. It uses these to theorise three key moments in the podcasting process: the interview with an expert as an affective encounter with the ideas, the production of a complex and layered podcast that excites an affective response, and publication of the best of the podcasts to shift the students’ horizons of communication. Ultimately, the article suggests that the undergraduate is uniquely positioned between worlds – neither an expert nor a member of the public. As such, they are perfectly placed to mediate ideas and discussion in an affecting manner.

A cinema of sentience: The simian gaze in Godfrey Reggio’s Visitors

Abstract This article analyses the moving portraits and the gazes of a female lowland gorilla named Triska in the film Visitors (Reggio, 2013). By examining the formal qualities of her filmic portrayal and the biological and emotional affects that portraits and gazes potentially have on the human viewer, I propose that Triska’s gazes create a ‘cinema of sentience’ that not only represent Triska as a sentient being, but affect an awareness of her sentience and subjectivity. I argue that Reggio’s filmic portraits of Triska do not position the viewer as superior to her – our gazes do not conquer or consumer her, and they do not sentimentalise her – rather, her gazes serve to equalise her for the viewer at the level of representation and affect by encouraging the audience to experience a sense of affective empathy for the gorilla and her subjectivity, and to feel the sentience of the non-human other. In the filmic encounters with Triska, humans become aware of both their humanity and their animality, producing affective moments where biology and philosophy collide – an affective encounter that questions our cognitive philosophical assumptions about what it means to be human and what it means to be animal and simian.

Affective radicality: prisons, Palestine, and interactive documentary

ABSTRACTThis essay analyzes two recent interactive documentary projects: Sharon Daniel’s Public Secrets (2006), an exploration of the prison industrial complex through the testimonies of female inmates in California, and Zohar Kfir’s Points of View (2014) which “maps” Palestinian video advocacy projects made for and/or disseminated by B’Tselem, a human rights organization working in the occupied territories. I argue that the interactive documentary form, as deployed by Daniel and Kfir, draws on the legacies of radical documentary practice, but offers new possibilities for engagement and intervention. The interactive documentary form functions as a structuring device for a wealth of affectively powerful witnesses, testimonies, and varied forms of evidence. This essay explores how interactive documentaries allow viewers/users a multi-faceted affective encounter with a range of subjects and evidence. This form, in concert with a radical political stance, I argue, is a locus for the representation of and viewer/user critical engagement with broad systemic problems, renders visible hidden structures of violence and power, and engenders an “affective radicality” that moves viewers/users into larger networks of political discourse, militant activism, and practices of resistance.

Elephants as persons, affective apprenticeship, and fieldwork with nonhuman informants in Nepal

In this account of interspecies intimacy in the enclaved institution of the Nepali elephant stable, I explore not-just-human figurations of personhood and argue for the methodological inclusion of nonhuman informants as subjective actors and contributing participants in ethnographic research. I explain how my experience forming a trusting, working relationship with a female elephant in a hybrid community of humans and elephants revealed the conceptual limitations of a human-focused tradition of ethnography ill-equipped for the generative sociality of interspecies encounters. I discuss questions of nonhuman personhood and I consider developments in the animal behavioral sciences, while also investigating the cultural logic by which Nepali mahouts attribute personhood to their elephants. This exploration of apprenticeship, personhood, and affective encounter is situated in a distinctly interspecies strand of multispecies studies, and is a contribution to ethnoelephantology as an interdisciplinary approach t...

Getting comfortable to feel at home: clothing practices of black muslim women in Britain

This article explores the role of comfort as an affective encounter across bodies, objects (namely clothing) and spaces. I focus on how bodies that are marked as strange and a source of society’s discomfort negotiate this positioning through the presentation of one’s body. What does it mean for these bodies to be comfortable or uncomfortable? This question is answered through work done with Black Muslim women in Britain. By exploring how comfort is felt in relation to racially marked bodies, this article develops work on emotional geographies. Comfort is understood as both an emotional product and process that changes as bodies move across different spaces. In noting this movement, I also explore how boundaries around the body (enacted through e.g. the multi-dimensional hijab) presents a particular form of territorialisation that facilitates comfort as we present our bodies across different spaces. These boundaries can be both a source of comfort and discomfort through their positioning as deviant from social norms. In understanding the different roles of boundaries, I explore the social processes that construct comfort (or discomfort) as we move through different spaces. This is intertwined with furthering work on Muslim geographies by challenging the overwhelming focus placed on ‘public’ facing garments like the headscarf and abaya. Such a focus limits an understanding of the fluidity of Black Muslim women’s identities, and how these changes in our clothing practices affect and are affected by the relationships built across spaces.

Traces of the Virtual: Aesthetics, Affect, and the Event in Joel Meyerowitz’s Photography of Ground Zero

This article approaches Joel Meyerowitz’s Ground Zero photography in Aftermath through a theorization of aesthetics and the event. I attempt to move beyond the common scholarly claim that Meyerowitz’s images of ruins and destruction have simply functioned as government propaganda for the War on Terror. I draw from Jill Bennett’s recent work on aesthetics and Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense in order to conceptualize photography as an affective and aesthetic encounter with the event in its becoming. I contend that Meyerowitz’s more recent publication of his photography in Aftermath enables affective encounters through sublime and uncanny aesthetics. Approaching aesthetics as an affective encounter, a kind of sense event that is distinctive through its abstraction of the historical event, I argue that an examination of the affective dimensions of ruins might map the potential for viewers of Meyerowitz’s photographs to be caught between multiple and contradictory histories and geographies, memories and temporalities, affects and imaginings. I outline how the aesthetics of Meyerowitz’s Aftermath align with reactionary politics, but I also attempt to recover some of the ethical possibilities in these aesthetics, which are overwritten through the dominant discourses surrounding Ground Zero. Ultimately, I maintain that Meyerowitz’s Aftermath confronts viewers with the repressed imagery of ruins of destruction, imagery that uncannily communicates political anxieties, which both serve and run counter to the intense memorialization and victory culture narrativization of Ground Zero.

Musical Bodies: Corporeality, Emergent Subjectivity, and Improvisational Spaces

Interactive improvisational musical spaces (which is to say, nearly all musical spaces) involve affective relations among bodies: between the bodies of human performers, between performers and active listeners, between the sonic "bodies" that comprise the multiple overlapping events that constitute a musical performance’s unfolding. Music scholarship tends to focus on either music’s sonic materialities (the sensible; what can be heard) or the cultural resonances that locate in and through music (the political or hermeneutic; how meaning is inscribed in and for a listening subject). An embodied turn, however, has recently been manifesting, bringing music scholarship into communication with feminist theory, queer theory, and approaches that foreground subjectivity and embodiment. Exemplary in this area are works by Naomi Cumming (who asks a critical question, “does the self form the sound, or the sound the self?;” Cumming 7), Suzanne Cusick, Marion Guck, Fred Maus, and Susan McClary. All of these scholars, in various ways, thematise the performative—what it feels like to make or experience music, and what effect that making or experiencing has on subject-formation. All of these authors strive to foreground the role of the performer and performativity in the context of the extended Western art music tradition. While each makes persuasive, significant points, my contention in this paper is that improvised music is a more fruitful starting place for thinking about embodiment and the co-constitutive relationship between performer and sound. That is, while (nearly) all music is improvised to a greater or lesser degree, the more radical contexts, in which paths are being selected and large-scale shapes drawn in the “heat of the moment,” can bring these issues into stark relief and serve as more productive entry points for thinking through crucial questions of embodiment, perspective, identity, and emergent meaning.

Translation, Race, and Ideology in Oriki Orixá

In the midst of an influential career writing on Brazilian cultural production, the sociologist-turned-political marketer Antonio Risério publishes Oriki Orixá, a book of Portuguese re-translations of Yoruba oriki poetry (1996, reprinted 2013). Understanding translation as a partial and ideologically-motivated act of representation, the current article situates Oriki Orixá within an ideology of race in Brazil. I take into account textual and paratextual materials including the book’s introduction by Augusto de Campos; the editorial promotion of the work; its circulation within a literary network; and the highly mediated histories of the source poems. Oriki Orixá simultaneously promises a universal poetic “invention” and an ethnographic “recuperation” of a foreign text. Ultimately, the white author frames his translation as an affective encounter with an African literary tradition. This encounter participates in—and reinforces—a discourse of racial exceptionalism in which an abstract celebration of African-European contact occludes continuing histories of domination and inequality.

“Forever Just Occurring”: Postwar Belatedness in W.G. Sebald's <em>Austerlitz</em>

Critics frequently read W.G. Sebald’s work, and particularly his final novel Austerlitz (2001), through the critical framework of trauma and mourning. Such readings tend to focus on Austerlitz’s inability to retrieve childhood memories that would connect him not only to his own past but also to a collective memory of Jewish trauma. However, rather than representing such temporal divides as a lamentable lack of access to this past, Sebald resignifies them in ways that enable an innovative articulation of the past’s continued relevance in the present. Releasing physical artifacts and architectural spaces from the burden of memorialization, Sebald allows them to function as objects whose materiality inaugurates an affective encounter with the past. Taking seriously the affective engagement with such objects that attest to the past without overdetermining it, these new materialist methodologies enable us to move past static models of historical memory and politicized forgetting.

From the Mouths of Mothers: Can Drama Facilitate Reflective Learning for Social Workers?

This article explores and evaluates a cross-disciplinary small-scale project using applied theatre in social work education. The aim was to provide an ‘Affective Encounter’ where students could practice empathic engagement, understanding of the needs of children who have been sexually abused and their protective parents/carers and engage in the complexities of working with family members who may be resistant. The workshop took place five times over a period of three years and was attended by children and families social workers on a one year post-qualifying graduate diploma course. While the use of verbatim theatre does not offer a guarantee of factual truth, it provided the students with some performed moments of personal testimony which was taken word-for-word from mothers whose children had been sexually abused. This allowed the social workers to hear the marginalised narratives of the protective mothers and to practice without a negative impact on the service user. The evaluation identified from self-report the development of emotional and practical skills and knowledge of available resources. This paper focuses on the emotional skills reported and two emerging themes are discussed: learning for humane practice, and the use of this pedagogical approach to encourage affective reflection.

Multiculture and Public Parks: Researching Super‐diversity and Attachment in Public Green Space

AbstractSituating itself in encounter and public space debates and borrowing from non‐representational theory approaches, this paper uses data from the authors' 2‐year Economic and Social Research Council research project to consider how local urban parks can work as sites of routine encounter, mixity, and place belonging. The paper explores how parks as green public spaces are important as sites of inclusive openness while the materiality of parks is a key dynamic in affective encounter processes. Parks can work as animators of social interactions, participatory practices, and place affinities across ethnic and cultural difference. The paper concludes that the concept of convivial encounter can be extended to incorporate the concept of elective practices – choosing to be in shared public space can generate connective sensibilities that are not necessarily contingent on exchange. In using parks as a lens to examine localities and diversity, the paper critically reflects on research practices for understanding and describing heterogeneous formations of multiculture and outlines how the project's research design and the fieldwork methods sought to carefully and appropriately undertake research with complexly different places and populations Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Reviving social work through moral outrage

Inspired by Hessel’s (2011) call in Time for outrage and drawing on the concept of ‘moral outrage’, we argue in this article that addressing contraventions of human rights and social justice issues demands an emotional connection with the nature of injustice. We propose that contemporary social work in Western liberal democracies has lost touch with the moral imperative, sentiment and affective encounter as a positive impetus for collective action. We consider competing interpretations of why this might be the case and look beyond the incursions of neoliberal market methodologies towards a consideration of the complex relationships between power, subjectivities and collective emotion. Western epistemologies have viewed emotion as the antithesis of rationality and discouraged this type of thinking as somehow risky, tricky and dangerous. We seek to reconfigure this political and ethical (mis)appropriation of emotions and argue for its centrality within the social justice mandate of social work.

Introduction: The Affective Encounter

AbstractThis essay introduces articles in a comparative perspectives symposium on gender, perception, and art. Building on key feminist theoretical investigations of subjectivity and embodiment, the essay defines the moment of perceptual and sensorial interaction with an artwork as “the affective encounter.”