Emotions

Abstract

Structures, industries and geographies have been carefully honed to circulate affects and emotions for political, capitalist, authoritarian ambitions, around the world and at all scales. Emotions produce real effects, with significant and often severe consequences, yet because we (as academics, as society) struggle to capture them in reason and evidence, they are seldom understood or treated as economies and polities. The analytic utility and radical potential of emotional geographies is in its attention to the role of emotions in social and spatial relations, and how they do different kinds of work in different contexts. Thinking emotionally has a vital role in progressive approaches to destabilizing normative, exclusionary structures and discourses. Normative academic writing, conference presentation, knowledge circulation has long been entrenched in Enlightenment, masculinist and colonial structures of exclusion. Working emotionally requires resisting analytic closure, not least since emotions are socio-culturally constructed and experienced.