Affective Geographies Research Articles

Gaming the City: The Monetization of Urban Affect and Homemaking in Popular Video Games

Digital gaming has become a major global cultural industry, and many popular video games feature cityscapes. While scholars have critiqued the neoliberal and dystopian representations of urban environments, much less attention is given to how video games offer players a sense of belonging: an immersive city where they can feel at home. Game developers create affective urban worlds to attract and maintain a large player base for continuous revenue. We argue that high-budget and popular video games balance a chaotic urban gamescape with opportunities for privatized homemaking that keep players engaged. First, they use emergent gameplay to simulate the urban environment as sensational places where players must prepare for unpredictable, often dangerous, and violent encounters. Second, they provide players with homemaking opportunities and the means to own and curate private spaces. These opportunities, however, reflect and perpetuate a privatized purpose of homemaking that perpetuates gendered and capitalistic assumptions, socializing players into engaging with urban life in a very selective manner. While we analyze several video games, GTA V provides a specific example of how this homemaking is monetized. Our analysis combines scholarly debates on affective geographies and gamescapes.

Emotion, memory and storytelling: postmemorial emotion work in Vietnamese American graphic narratives

The article demonstrates how graphic narratives become a medium for managing inherited emotions in Vietnamese American second-generation works, GB Tran’s Vietnamerica and Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do. Highlighting the intergenerational transmission of emotions in Vietnamese American families through parental stories about the Vietnam War, the article argues that the authors’ attempts to represent these family stories transform graphic literature into a medium for postmemorial emotion work. While drawing theoretical insights from the sociology of emotions, the study employs textual analysis to thematically close read Vietnamerica and The Best We Could Do to understand the graphic strategies that aid emotion work. The graphic recreation of stories, which are narrativised versions of their inherited trauma memories, can offer potential trauma resolution and autobiographical clarity while fostering communal bonding. The analysis finds that in the works, emotion work is facilitated by various literary strategies, such as affective genealogies, affective geographies, affective pasts, and postmemorial re-embodiment. In a broader sense, the study concludes that graphic narrative strategies can aid in postmemorial emotion work for second-generation refugees grappling with inherited trauma, incoherent autobiographical knowledge, and detachment from the community or family.

German Ways of War: The Affective Geographies and Generic Transformations of German War Films.By Jaimey Fisher. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2022. 250 pages + 41 b/w images. $150.00 hardcover, $37.95 paperback or eBook.

German Ways of War: The Affective Geographies and Generic Transformations of German War Films.<i>By Jaimey Fisher. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2022. 250 pages + 41 b/w images. $150.00 hardcover, $37.95 paperback or eBook.</i>

German Ways of War: The Affective Geographies and Generic Transformations of German War Films By JaimeyFisher, Rutgers University Press. 2022. pp. 250. $150.00 (hardback), $37.95 (paperback), $37.95 (ebook)

German Ways of War: The Affective Geographies and Generic Transformations of German War Films By JaimeyFisher, Rutgers University Press. 2022. pp. 250. $150.00 (hardback), $37.95 (paperback), $37.95 (ebook)

Affective geographies: Orientations and deviations in Jenni Olson’s Blue Diary

Blue Diary is the short film that defined the shape of Jenni Olson’s later cinema. Its straightforward structure, a visual composition of California cityscapes, combined with voiceover narration, fits within a tradition of American avant-garde landscape filmmakers. However, in Blue Diary, image and sound take divergent paths. This article argues that Olson’s filmmaking approach reconfigures – through voice and from a queer perspective – American urban spaces, generating new spaces of meaning and deviating from conventional representations.

The Absurdity of the Ordinary: The Fragile Affinity Between Imagination and Materiality in the Finnish Urban Periphery

This anthropological study focuses on spatially ordered dimensions of sociocultural life in Kontula, a suburban housing estate located at the urban margins of Helsinki, Finland. With a notorious reputation since its construction in the 1960s, it has come to represent the numerous ills of contemporary urbanity, from poverty and substance abuse to failed immigration policies. Its urban transformation is explored as the entanglement of imagination and materiality, a make-believe space that privileges neither the social constructionist nor the purely materialist perspective. I study the everyday life of its inhabitants as recurring and routinized episodes, occasionally interrupted by events that disturb its embodied flow and force inhabitants to reflect upon their spatially situated practices. I argue that the everyday encounters in rapidly transforming Kontula are simultaneously experienced as absurd and ordinary, and constitute the ordering principles of its affective geography.

Affective geographies and tribal epistemologies: studying abroad during COVID-19

Abstract This paper explores the relationship between epistemologies, tribalism and affect in the experiences of Chinese international students studying in the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on data from student diaries, interviews, and focus groups, it explores how boundaries between in-groups and out-groups were erected and dismantled through processes of socio-temporal scaling, whereby social actors configured affective geographies by linking local spatial relationships to higher level (national and international) scales. The analysis reveals how negative emotions like fear of infection led to practices of spatial distancing and the drawing of cultural boundaries between groups, while feelings of worry about family members in China shaped communication patterns and information flows across geographic spaces. At times, however, positive emotions like affection and sympathy helped participants transcend boundaries, leading them to readjust their emotional mappings of the world and reevaluate their beliefs about COVID. The study highlights the central role affect and emotional labor play both in the formulation of epistemologies around health and in the drawing of boundaries between groups.

Toward an affective geography of contemporary China’s state-owned enterprises: Ambivalence, assemblage, and affective socio-spaces

This article advances an affective geography of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in contemporary China. Drawing on existing theorizations of the potential roles of affect, emotion, and pre-consciousness in (re)shaping socioeconomic landscapes, we argue for an affective geography based on Ruez and Cockayne’s affirmative theorization of ambivalence. The paper contends that SOEs are affective socio-spaces with divergent possibilities arising through workers’ everyday life and not just a-priori institutional products of state power. The paper illustrates this framework with a close reading of the assemblage of workers’ everyday life with the emergent socio-spatial formations of SOEs. The original case is based on in-depth interviews and on-site observations in 13 SOEs in the Northeast provinces of China. Ambivalent affects include sense of belonging and human kindness. These embody ambiguities and transformation of intense feelings, further acting on workers’ ongoing employment practices to actualize the reproduction of SOE socio-spaces and workers’ affective practices of “stabilities” and “mobilities”. The results strengthen the affirmative meaning of ambivalence in (re)configuring SOE social, spatial and temporal relations. We thus call for further affective geographies that investigate the emergence of feeling-knowing-acting regime of ambivalence with possibilities for multiple becomings.

A mineral listening: digital soundscapes of geological time

Composed between 2020 and 2022 by Guillaume Malaret, Érodé is a musical piece created from field recordings at Eagles Nest, a tidal island in Australia’s Bunurong National Marine Park. Based on an interview with Guillaume Malaret, this article addresses several issues concerning digital representations, renderings, and ecologies of geological, hydrological, and sonic spaces, as well as the cultural geographies of landscape, embodiment, and affect. We explore the potentials of sonic composition and geophonic recordings for mediating bodily connections with difficult-to-imagine processes, such as environmental change over deep time. Our dialogue throughout this article contributes to emerging themes in digital ecological research by focusing on the materialities of digitization, digitally mediated creative practices in sonic geography, and the importance of different affective registers for comprehending environmental transformation.

Walking, storytelling and melancholy survivals: memorialization of the ‘Troubles’ in Belfast’s City Centre

This article explores the role of walking and storytelling as a mode of memory-making in Belfast’s City Centre, a ‘shared space’ that has largely been emptied of reminders of the 30-year conflict in Northern Ireland known as the ‘Troubles’. Memorialization remains a divisive and contentious process in Northern Ireland with two opposing narrative traditions and a lack of shared collective memory. In the absence of state-led and officialized memorials to the ‘Troubles’, I explore how urban heritage can be expressed in motion, through spatial stories told by place-based professionals (urban planners, architects, heritage practitioners, arts and community groups) in the City Centre. In particular, I employ David Lloyd’s idea of ‘melancholy survivals’ to describe the ways in which memories of conflict persist in the narratives we tell and in the small physical residues scattered throughout the City Centre, which we encounter through walking and spatial stories. I argue that walking go-along interviews with place-based professionals elicits storytelling that evokes a mobile mode of memorialization. I begin by discussing the context of memorialization in Belfast’s City Centre, its role during the ‘Troubles’, and its subsequent urban redevelopment as a ‘shared space’. I then map out critical discussions around my methodological framework, which considers spatial storytelling, geographies of affect and walking methods as ways to engage urban heritage in cities that have experienced conflict. This is followed by observations from the walking go-along interviews, which include stories of physical residues, the psychosomatic legacies of conflict and ways the difficult memories factor into narratives in Belfast’s City Centre.

Undocumented Bordering Practices: Protagonism and Spaces of Making

Abstract Borders are at the centre of everyday lives, often with gendered and violent outcomes exacerbating harm across space and time. The feminization of waiting is embedded in the power structures of borders. Yet, feminized waiting in the context of displacement can also be a necessary pre-condition for generating affective geographies of making, and transformative spaces of solidarity and contestation across borders. This paper draws on ethnographic and feminist participatory action research carried out in southern Mexico to document bordering practices ‘from below’, Undocumented Bordering Practices performed by women from Central America experiencing waiting in the Mexico–Guatemala borderlands. I expand the definitions of bordering and refugee protection by centring on women’s protagonism (self-authorship) and collective acts of making (art, food, and spaces of care) as they wait. I illustrate three processes of making while waiting: The making of a ‘mural-on-the-move’, a newsletter titled Breaking Barriers: When women migrate, life migrates, and intimate geopolitics of making and sharing food in borderlands.

Exploring the association between the settlement environment and residents’ positive sentiments in urban villages and formal settlements in Shenzhen

The promotion of residents’ positive sentiments is essential for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. However, there is limited evidence on the effect of the settlement environment (SE) on sentiment, especially in urban villages (UVs). By combining affective geography and social media data, this study aims to analyze the residents’ sentiments in UVs and formal settlements (FSs) in Shenzhen, while exploring the underlying mechanisms of SE variables that influence the positive sentiment index (PSI). The Weibo text data was analyzed using Natural Language Processing to obtain the PSI. Furthermore, we employed an XGBoost model, Shapley Additive Explanations and Partial Dependence Plots to explore relationships between SE variables and the PSI. We utilized the Interpretative Structural Modeling and Bayesian Network to analyze and verify the interdependencies and probabilistic results. The results revealed that the PSI exhibited spatial heterogeneity, with a trend of medium-high-low from central to suburban areas, and a clustering effect of high and low values. For FSs, we recommend enhancing health and well-being by increasing metro facilities, commercial density and fostering walkable neighborhoods. For UVs, prioritizing micro walk accessibility can improve settlement circulation. Additionally, we identified the potential of marginalized UVs to integrate with e-trade and transform into “special economic zones.”

Geographies of mobility justice: post-disaster tourism, recognition justice, and affect in Tohoku, Japan

This article investigates instances in which mobility justice is highlighted in post-disaster tourism in eastern Tohoku, Japan, a coastal area almost completely destroyed by the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami. After this unprecedented disaster, some of these towns have directed their recovery efforts toward the development of post-disaster tourism as a means to counteract outmigration and loss of jobs. By using the broader frame of mobility justice in tourism and geographies of affect, this article seeks to showcase how affective relations between people and post-disaster places, and between international tourists and locals, can foster a better understanding of the big and small injustices enacted at different scales in the area. In particular, this article focuses on the potential of ‘recognition justice’ to rebalance the scale between top-down policies and local needs. Post-disaster tourism performances utilize the mobility of information through global media, spreading survivors’ narratives, stories, and images. A politics of affect built around landmarks in the post-disaster landscape the tsunami has contributed to the creation of immobile nodes, which become locus of contestations and opportunities to leverage mobility justice and broader recognition justice for the local populations.

Affective geographies in pandemic times: An intersectional analysis of women's wellbeing in Aotearoa New Zealand

This article builds upon and extends a growing body of literature focused on how the pandemic has shifted human relations with space, place, and wellbeing. Working at the intersection of pandemic and feminist geographies, we focus on how the reconceptualizing of familiar spaces and places during the COVID-19 pandemic impacted women's embodied, affective, and subjective experiences of wellbeing. Drawing upon interviews with 38 women from diverse socio-cultural backgrounds living in Aotearoa New Zealand during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, we detail the emergence of different spatial arrangements and affective relations with familiar spaces and places (i.e., domestic, nature, and digital spaces). We then explain how these emergent affective and spatial relations prompted new understandings of wellbeing. The article also highlights the multiplicities of women's subjective experiences of wellbeing as shaped by their varied socio-cultural positionings in relation to pandemic geographies.

Getting the first gig: Exploring the affective relations of accessing place-based platform labour

Platform labour has established itself as a new form of work in recent years. The platforms themselves advertise the flexibility and freedom of being an independent contractor as beneficial characteristics of their working arrangements. However, existing studies show that these promises do not always correspond to workers' lived experiences. While manifold research discusses the often precarious working conditions of established platform workers, less is known about gaining access to gig work in the first place. This paper draws attention to onboarding processes in the place-based gig economy. From a feminist geography perspective and building on geographies of affect, this paper analyses the process of getting a first paid gig, focusing on how emotions shape platform workers' daily lives. Through autoethnography, I reflect on my own experiences of trying to establish myself as paid platform worker. Contrary to common assumptions, I argue that access to the place-based gig economy is not necessarily straightforward. The paper shows how the labour mediation processes implemented by the platforms create in- and exclusions from the beginning. By letting the workers chase a first gig, the platform capitalises on extended unpaid labour, which is key in maintaining the value production in the gig economy itself.

Affective Geographies: Cervantes, Emotion, and the Literary Mediterranean, written by Johnson, Paul Michael

Affective Geographies: Cervantes, Emotion, and the Literary Mediterranean, written by Johnson, Paul Michael

Comparative Spatial Intimacies and the Affective Geography of Home: Imaginaries and Sense-Regimes in the Soviet-Era Baltics

This essay investigates Soviet-era homesites in the Baltic states as combinations of home imaginaries and people’s affective, sensorial relationship to the materiality of their home space. The aspect of relationality is foregrounded: the primary level of meaning-making as regards one’s quotidian home life, the article suggests, takes place at the level of comparative spatial intimacies—that is, in relation to one’s own bodily movement in space and the objects, locations, impressions, but also the ideas, norms, and values encountered and embedded in these movements. Home experience unfolds on the scene of comparative studies, where different homes form dialogues and chains of movement in space. Both intimacies and imaginaries emerge as multiscalar, being deeply personal and closely family related, but also generational and class related, and including also transnational and/or officially endorsed ideas and values. The scene of comparative intimacies is exemplified on the basis of three homesites: Soviet prefab apartment buildings, pre-Soviet farm homes, and Soviet-era summer homes. The common homing model in the Soviet-era Baltics included at least two, if not three homely sites: while most people lived in urban environments, summer vacations were typically spent in a pre-Soviet farm home or in a recently built summer home. Of these different homescapes, each supported their inhabitants’ identities in their own specific ways, each offered a different regime of spatial sensibilities, a different combination of sensations, relationscapes, and imaginaries. The essay accommodates methods of geopoetics and includes analysis of fictional texts, life writing, and the embodied presence of the author.

Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora ed. by Melody Yunzi Li and Robert T. Tally, Jr (review)

Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora ed. by Melody Yunzi Li and Robert T. Tally, Jr (review)

Around Ruins: Some Notes on Feminist and Decolonial Conversations in Aesthetics

Although using different strategies, Portuguese artists Mónica de Miranda and Filipa César make us think about and reflect on the ruins of the Portuguese ‘empire’ but also on the ruins—and the remains—of European colonialism and its patriarchal backbone. Their work opens the possibility of discussing aesthetics from feminist and decolonial perspectives, departing from the category of ‘ruins’ and considering the many ways through which these ruins and their multiple inflections contribute to the creation of potential affective geographies and memories.

Pejzaże umierania i żałoby w polskiej literaturze ostatnich dekad

This article concerns the representations of loss and mourning in the recent Polish literature from the perspective of spacial turn. The author analyzes three literary works: Zapiski z nocnych dyżurów [Notes from night duty] by Jacek Baczak, Ostatnie historie [Recent stories] by Olga Tokarczuk and Sorge by Aleksandra Zielińska. The article seeks to demonstrate how such categories as affective heterotopia, emotive topography, affective geography and performativity of place can be useful to study the literary landscapes of dying, mourning and loss. The remarks aim to emphasize spatial, not only temporal, aspect of the experience of death.