Affective Geographies Research Articles

Geographies of Affectivity in the Writings of Margarita Karapanou: Phenomenological and Psychoanalytic Interpretations

In novels written between the early 1980s and the 2000s Greek writer Margarita Karapanou employs experimental, fragmented narratives, and extensive spatial and topological metaphors, to describe affective personal and social relationships. In Karapanou's writings, these affective relationships develop within specific geographies that are often intimately involved in the precarious conditions of existence of the portrayed characters. Situated at the intersection between phenomenology, psychoanalytic philosophy, and contemporary affect and queer theory, this article revisits relationships of subject/object and mind/body in the context of affective geographies, as they are described in four novels by Karapanou: O Ypnovatis [The Sleepwalker] ([1985] 2001. Northampton, MA: Clockrootbooks); Rien Ne Va Plus ([1991] 2009. Northampton, MA: Clockrootbooks); Nai: Mythistorema [Yes: A Novel] (1999. Athens: Okeanida); and Lee kai Lou [Lee and Lou] (2003. Athens: Okeanida). By drawing on phenomenological and psychoanalytic theories, the article makes the case for reconsidering social attachments to geographies through affect and queer theory. It further argues for the critical potential for rethinking an affective sociality and its geography in order to exceed normative schemes of affectivity.

Going out, getting about: atmospheres of mobility in Melbourne's night-time economy

Drawing from recent affective geographies of drinking and drunkenness, this article explores the affective atmospheres of spaces of mobility in Melbourne's night-time economy and how these atmospheres shape the experience of alcohol-related problems. Our discussion is grounded in the analysis of interview data collected in 2012 among 60 young adults living in Melbourne. Participants included youth residing in the inner-city who reported taking a tram, walking or cycling to nearby venues along with youth from periurban communities who used trains, buses or taxis to travel to and from venues in the inner-city. Each group reported spending varying amounts of time on the move during a night-out drinking, although the atmospherics of mobility differed for each group. Inner-city participants described ‘comfortable’ or ‘fun’ journeys on the tram, walking or cycling, whereas participants from periurban communities spoke of ‘boring’ or ‘unpleasant’ journeys via train, night-bus or taxi. Moving beyond reports of the ‘priming’ effects of affective atmospheres, we conclude that these atmospheres are (co-)constituted in encounters between bodies, human and non-human, as they move. We close with a brief discussion of the implications of our analysis for the study of alcohol-related problems in the city at night.

Networks of affect, male homoeroticism and the Second World War: a soldier's archive

While geographies of affect are increasingly influential and geographies of sexuality well established, there is considerable potential for enhancing links between these subfields. This article explores the archive of a gay World War II veteran, revealing the intricacies of an intense same-sex wartime affair in New Caledonia and introducing the concept of ‘networks of affect’: the interconnected pathways through space and time that provide conduits for emotion and desire. This account of networks of affect, read through archival materials, provides rich insight into wartime homoeroticism and allows us to further develop embodied geographies of affect and sexuality.

Yael Navaro-Yashin, The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012). Pp. 296. $89.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Yael Navaro-Yashin, The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012). Pp. 296. $89.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.

The Make‐Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity. YaelNavaro‐Yashin. Durham: Duke University Press. 2012. xxi‐270 pps.

The Make‐Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity. YaelNavaro‐Yashin. Durham: Duke University Press. 2012. xxi‐270 pps.

Smoking spaces as enabling spaces of wellbeing

A persistent emphasis on the negative biomedical effects of cigarette smoking effectively glosses over the affectual-sensual and social wellbeing that smoking can enable. In addition, while tobacco research has recently been more attuned to the stigmatizing affects brought about by smoking de-normalization efforts, a lot less attention has been placed on how smokers negotiate these feelings of stigmatization so as to restore their personal spaces of wellbeing. In this paper, I situate my investigation of smoking geographies in the burgeoning literature on enabling spaces which focuses on how places co-constitute our ability to act/affect in empowering ways. By deploying qualitative research methods such as in-depth interviews, I argue that an acknowledgment of how smoking spaces in Singapore can be enabling along affectual, sensorial and social registers is long overdue. While it is not my purpose to systematically downplay the damaging health effects that smoking can engender, a focus on enabling smoking spaces emphasizes the role of smokers as creative agents capable of (re)fashioning their own holistic and subjective versions of wellbeing. In so doing, I hope to contribute to the existing research on smoking spaces and a recent profusion of work on relational geographies of affect.

The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity by Yael Navaro-Yashin (review)

Reviewed by: The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity by Yael Navaro-Yashin Olga Demetriou Yael Navaro-Yashin, The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. 296 pp. Although affect has recently aroused anthropological interest, it still remains ethnographically underexplored. In The Make-Believe Space, Yael Navaro-Yashin addresses this gap, charting new theoretical ground in the discipline. She focuses on the legacy of the Cyprus conflict as written in the environment and psychic worlds of individuals living in northern Cyprus, which was established as a governmental entity separate from the Republic in the south (generally associated with Greek-Cypriots) after the war of 1974 yet internationally unrecognized. In so doing, she also steers clear of the ruses often associated with theoretical argumentation: attacking straw men, embracing the extreme of the argument, opting for a predictable middle, or leaving ethnography to trail behind the theory. Two relevant issues on which discussion seems to lapse into such argumentation spring to mind. One is the treatment of materiality in actor-network theory, and the second is the condescension towards Foucault in post-Foucauldian treatments of subjectivity. Both of these questions, materiality and subjectivity, are discussed in depth throughout the book and presented in ways that open up rather than close down the space for analytical exploration. The concept of affect is brought to bear on these questions not as an answer that supersedes them, but as one that can explain those situations that ethnographic data throws open to complementary interpretation. A constant see-saw is the metaphor Navaro-Yashin uses to communicate the choices that theory proposes most of the time: this or that, or in this specific instance, interiority or exteriority in thinking about subjectivity. But rather than the well-known rejection of dualism and the “it’s always more complicated” approach, she argues for a “both and,” and shows how this is possible. The remarkable thing about this book is [End Page 935] that sight of the ethnography is never lost. Posters that cover bullet holes in the walls and the pained nonchalance of a woman that has lived through the aging of squalor in Nicosia’s border area keep the “both and” firmly anchored in the data. In this book, Navaro-Yashin turns her attention to the politics of affect. Agreeing with the central project of affect theory for the need to go beyond discourse in looking at the construction of subjectivity, she nevertheless argues convincingly that the “beyond” cannot be only in the materialities of things per se. Affect is discharged and transmitted (by spaces, objects, buildings, rubbish), but the anthropological question must remain focused on the people who live with, collect, avoid, and encounter these objects if it is to remain ethnographically relevant. The result of this argument is an ethnography that embroils affect in the politics of violence and asks the difficult questions of how people re-inhabit such spaces by revisiting (in discourse, in thought, in feeling, or imperceptively) those violences. She therefore proposes an “affect-subjectivity continuum” (27) over the either/or question that approaches such as those of actor-network theory have posed in relation to Foucauldian ones. Throughout, she maintains a strong grasp of ethnographic analysis, allowing the data to steer the analysis rather than imposing an explanation already worked out. This makes for compelling reading which refuses to alienate those unfamiliar with the concepts discussed. The Make-Believe Space is therefore not only an ethnography of the Cyprus conflict, nor a theoretical discussion of affect. It contributes to both without privileging either. Take the ethnography of Cyprus, for example. One of the virtues of the anthropological approach is the ability not only to look at situations from new angles, but to also invent the vocabulary to describe these perspectives when former approaches and methods are found wanting. The anthropology of Cyprus has sadly not really taken advantage of this until now. The reason for this can be instructive for other places where topics of concern have centered on one central issue of a definitively international dimension: “the Cyprus conflict” has for decades been the prerogative of political science and cognate disciplines...

Congressional ‘drug warriors’ and U.S. policy towards Colombia

In the late 1990s, the Colombian National Police became the central channel for U.S. material and symbolic support to that country, thanks in large part to the work of a cohort of Republican members of Congress known as the ‘drug warriors.’ In the Congressional sphere, debates over the impact of illicit drug use often began with the abused bodies of American youth, but debates over the appropriate response frequently focused on the bodies of Colombian police and military as the site of suggested state intervention. Drawing on Judith Butler’s analysis of what deaths are grievable in the public sphere, I examine how the Colombian National Police came to be positioned as the central object of policymaker solidarity. Travel played a central role in the construction of distinct sensory, affective and moral geographies: Congressional delegations focused on militarized technology, weaponry and enacted scenarios of counternarcotics operations. These excursions were channeled into larger political fields valorizing militarized expertise and delineating the boundaries of appropriate policy debates. This analysis illuminates the ways in which Congressional debate and practice played a central role in U.S. foreign policy during this period, through an examination of how Congressional expertise was constructed and deployed, which foreign policy actors were selected as the object of U.S. official solidarity, and how the boundaries of policy debate was constructed through a focus on military knowledge.

The Make‐Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity. YaelNavaro‐Yashin. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. xix + 270 pp.

American EthnologistVolume 40, Issue 2 p. 400-401 Book Review The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity. Yael Navaro-Yashin. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. xix + 270 pp. ERDEM EVREN, ERDEM EVREN Zentrum Moderner Orient, BerlinSearch for more papers by this author ERDEM EVREN, ERDEM EVREN Zentrum Moderner Orient, BerlinSearch for more papers by this author First published: 10 May 2013 https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12029_2Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Volume40, Issue2May 2013Pages 400-401 RelatedInformation

Navaro‐Yashin, Yael. The make‐believe space: affective geography in a postwar polity. xxiv, 270 pp., map, illus., bibliogr. London, Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2012. £16.99 (paper)

Navaro‐Yashin, Yael. The make‐believe space: affective geography in a postwar polity. xxiv, 270 pp., map, illus., bibliogr. London, Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2012. £16.99 (paper)

The make-believe space: affective geography in a postwar polity, by Navaro-Yashin, Yael

<i>The make-believe space: affective geography in a postwar polity</i>, by Navaro-Yashin, Yael

Love and the Other: A response to Morrison et al. (2012)

This response to Morrison et al.’s work on love focuses on the uncritical use of ‘the Other’ in geographic scholarship and in geographies of affect and emotion more centrally. While broadly sympathetic to the arguments outlined in ‘Critical geographies of love as spatial, relational, and political’, I am concerned that in trying to critique the social sciences for an uncritical account of love the authors may fall into the same essentialist trap. The accounting of a singular and amorphous ‘Other’ in geographic scholarship flattens out difference and creates exclusionary boundaries that reinforce theoretical and subjective divisions that become sutured to the workings of white supremacy both within the discipline and also in wider society.

The body, the shelter, and the shebeen: an affective geography of homelessness in South Africa

Geographies of homelessness mainly address issues of social exclusion, especially in contexts of urban public space. Recent research focuses on spatial regulation and surveillance, and strategies used by homeless people to resist these forms of control and create spaces for themselves in the city. Relatively little attention is paid, however, to the embodied, affective, emotional and relational geographies of homelessness. We address this absence through an exploration of how material spaces and practices shape a sense of belonging for a group of men living in a homeless shelter in Cape Town. Theorizing belonging as constituted through the materialities of both self-identity and social connections, we examine the three spaces that are most affective in our participants’ everyday lives: (i) their bodies, (ii) the shelter where they live, and (iii) the shebeen (tavern) where they drink. The discursive and embodied accounts of two participants in particular serve as a case study that illuminates the complex ways in which belonging is shaped in spaces of homeless life. These men’s experiences reveal some of the ambivalences and ambiguities of homelessness which are only rendered visible through a theoretical lens that respects their status as emotional and relational subjects, rather than as objects within structures of exclusion. Drinking in particular emerges from this research as an important factor in understanding the contradictory behaviours and feelings in these men’s daily lives. Damaging their bodies and social relationships, alcohol nonetheless provides a sense of belonging by facilitating both a sense of self and connections with others.

Carceral Geography and the Spatialities of Prison Visiting: Visitation, Recidivism, and Hyperincarceration

Geography, as a disciplinary lens, brings a valuable perspective to the study of the carceral, and carceral geography's concern for the spatial could provide a new explanatory perspective to the consideration of some accepted tenets within criminology, whilst at the same time offering a productive and useful ‘grounding’ of contemporary geographies of emotion and affect. In the context of hyperincarceration and the carceral continuum of recidivism and repeated reimprisonment, this paper considers the long-observed relationship between prison visitation and reduced recidivism, posits prison visiting rooms as underresearched carceral spaces, and develops theoretical and methodological innovations which nuance the understanding of prison visiting.

Families and food: beyond the "cultural turn"?

This paper provides some personal reflections on the cultural turn in human geography including a tentative chronology of events. It outlines some of the characteristics of the cultural turn and some of the criticisms that have been levelled against it. In the body of the paper, I attempt to assess the value of the cultural turn, conceptually and methodologically, as applied to two recent research projects on the geography of food and families. The paper concludes that the cultural turn greatly enriched the study of human geography through its analysis of discourse, representation and practice. But other approaches are required to explain broader changes in political-economy and the materiality of nature. While the cultural turn contributed to our understanding of materiality and our place in a more-than-human world, geographers are now also embracing other approaches such as those informed by actor-network theory and geographies of emotion, embodiment and affect. The paper concludes with an agenda for future research on the political and moral economies of food, focusing on contemporary consumer anxieties at a range of geographical scales.

What Use Are Units? Critical Geographies of Alcohol Policy

Abstract: This paper interrogates the multiple spatialities bound up with the consumption of units as the dominant means of diagnosing “health‐related” alcohol problems and measuring “drunkenness” in international alcohol policy and research. In order to question the power afforded to units, we work at the intersection of theoretical debates concerning biopower and governmentality; emotional, embodied and affective geographies and actor network theory. Presenting empirical research from the UK we contribute to geographical agendas that seek to consider the ontological and epistemological understandings of alcohol, drinking and drunkenness. The paper concludes by calling for dialogue between social, health and medical scientists in order to develop more pertinent ways of understanding and representing the risks and benefits of alcohol consumption.

IIAffect and Intention: A Reply to William E. Connolly

Previous articleNext article No AccessCritical ResponseIIAffect and Intention: A Reply to William E. ConnollyRuth LeysRuth Leys Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 37, Number 4Summer 2011 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/660994 Views: 246Total views on this site Citations: 21Citations are reported from Crossref © 2011 by The University of Chicago. 00093-1896/11/3704-0009$10.00. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Ruth Leys Measuring the American Soldier’s Spiritual Fitness for Warfare: How the US Army Converts Different Forms of Belief into Different Ways of Being, and Why This Matters, (Nov 2022): 199–224.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13367-1_9Donovan O. Schaefer The Evolution of Affect Theory, 22 (May 2019).https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108765343Steffen Krämer Of fillings and feelings: locating affect, attention, and vagueness, Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory 20, no.11 (Jan 2019): 101–117.https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2019.1566156Asta Smedegaard Nielsen White Fear: Habitual Whiteness and Racialization of the Threat of Terror in Danish News Journalism, (Aug 2018): 111–134.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74630-2_5Francis Mckay Telic Attunements: Moods and Ultimate Values (Among Meditation Practitioners in the United States), Ethos 46, no.44 (Oct 2018): 498–518.https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12217Gail Crimmins The Silence of Women Casual Academics in Australian Universities, (Dec 2017): 1–12.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71562-9_1Paul Ashmore Of other atmospheres: football spectatorship beyond the terrace chant, Soccer & Society 18, no.11 (Nov 2014): 30–46.https://doi.org/10.1080/14660970.2014.980743Marshall Alcorn Affect and Intention in Rhetoric and Poetics, (Dec 2017): 299–322.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63303-9_11Francesca Ansaloni, Miriam Tedeschi Understanding space ethically through affect and emotion: From uneasiness to fear and rage in the city, Emotion, Space and Society 21 (Nov 2016): 15–22.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2016.09.006John Cromby, Martin E. H. Willis Affect?or feeling (after Leys), Theory & Psychology 26, no.44 (Jun 2016): 476–495.https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354316651344Otniel E. Dror, Bettina Hitzer, Anja Laukötter, and Pilar León-Sanz An Introduction to History of Science and the Emotions, Osiris 31, no.11 (Oct 2016): 1–18.https://doi.org/10.1086/687590Edwin Ng Buddhist Critical Thought and an Affective Micropolitics of (Un)Becoming, (Jul 2016): 179–207.https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54990-7_8Ana Dragojlovic Affective geographies: Intergenerational hauntings, bodily affectivity and multiracial subjectivities, Subjectivity 8, no.44 (Oct 2015): 315–334.https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2015.15Wendy Anne Lee The Scandal of Insensibility; or, The Bartleby Problem, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 130, no.55 (Oct 2020): 1405–1419.https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2015.130.5.1405Nada Moumtaz Refiguring Islam, (Apr 2015): 125–150.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118475683.ch7Grant David Bollmer Pathologies of Affect, Cultural Studies 28, no.22 (Aug 2013): 298–326.https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2013.826264Clive Barnett Geography and ethics III, Progress in Human Geography 38, no.11 (Feb 2014): 151–160.https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132513514708Grahame Thompson From Artisan to Partisan, Journal of Cultural Economy 7, no.11 (Oct 2013): 95–120.https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2013.838599Paul Ashmore Not a Drama: Things Affect in Herbert Read's the Innocent Eye, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31, no.55 (Jan 2013): 935–950.https://doi.org/10.1068/d4711Susan Lanzoni Introduction: Emotion and the Sciences: Varieties of Empathy in Science, Art, and History, Science in Context 25, no.33 (Jul 2012): 287–300.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269889712000105Charles Altieri IIAffect, Intentionality, and Cognition: A Response to Ruth Leys Charles Altieri, Critical Inquiry 38, no.44 (Jul 2015): 878–881.https://doi.org/10.1086/667429

Ethics, Space, and Somatic Sensibilities: Comparing Relationships between Scientific Researchers and Their Human and Animal Experimental Subjects

Drawing on geographies of affect and nature - society relations, we propose a radical rethinking of how scientists, social scientists, and regulatory agencies conceptualise human and animal participants in scientific research. The scientific rationale for using animal bodies to simulate what could be done in human bodies emphasises shared somatic capacities that generate comparable responses to clinical interventions. At the same time, regulatory guidelines and care practices stress the differences between human and animal subjects. In this paper we consider the implications of this differentiation between human and animal bodies in ethical and welfare protocols and practices. We show how the bioethical debates around the use of human subjects tend to focus on issues of consent and language, while recent work in animal welfare reflects an increasing focus on the affectual dimensions of ethical practice. We argue that this attention to the more-than-representational dimensions of ethics and welfare might be equally important for human subjects. We assert that paying attention to these somatic sensibilities can offer insights into how experimental environments can both facilitate and restrict the development of more care-full and response-able relations between researchers and their experimental subjects.

Visceral Geographies: Mattering, Relating, and Defying

AbstractThis study explores the task of doing ‘visceral geographies,’ enrolling many areas of body‐centered scholarship in the task of better understanding the visceral realm including geographies of affect and emotion, non‐representational theory, sensuous and haptic geographies, health and disability studies, and scholarship on performance and movement. The authors desire to open lines of connection and communication between and beyond the current bounds of this scholarship. In doing so, the authors attempt to clarify the goals of visceral geography, particularly in terms of political action and social change. Three goals stand out: first, visceral geographies advance understandings of the agency of physical matter, both within and between bodies. Second, visceral geographies move beyond static notions of the individual body and toward more contextualized and interactive versions of the self and other. And third, visceral geographies encourage a skepticism of boundaries by insisting on the imagining and practicing of our (political) lives in, through, and beyond dualistic tensions.

Emotional, embodied and affective geographies of alcohol, drinking and drunkenness

This paper develops dialogue between geographers’ engagement with emotion, embodiment and affect, and geographical research on alcohol, drinking and drunkenness. In doing so, we focus on the long-running ‘moral panic’ relating to alcohol-related violence, disorder and drunken behaviour in urban public space. We argue there has been an ontological and epistemological impasse in ‘alcohol studies’ between approaches that have considered the biological, physiological and psychological impacts of alcohol consumption and those focused on social and cultural practices. While there has been an artificial separation, and hence under-theorisation of the relationships between emotions, embodiment, affect and everyday uses of alcohol, we develop an argument that signals the possibilities of a more nuanced and sophisticated approach. We present empirical research from the UK and offer theoretical, methodological and policy-relevant conclusions.