Deathscapes are the spaces and places associated with death, dying, and remembrance. They are constructed and reconstructed by disasters, interventions following disasters, and local people and disaster-affected communities. We considered the deathscapes created by the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake and its memorialisation, and the implications for local people's sense of place (place attachment, place dependence, place identity). The earthquake in Sichuan Province, China, killed over 87,000 people and left 5.5 million people homeless. Hundreds of memorials were established across the disaster-affected area. Whether resettled or not, local people had to adapt to living in deathscapes among memorials, ruins and debris. Our research, undertaken 10 years after the earthquake, analysed 481 questionnaires. Results indicated that, when controlling for age, having a positive opinion of memorials led to a stronger sense of place. However, young people had a lower sense of place than older people, perhaps related to stage of lifecycle rather than the earthquake. Proximity and type of memorial also affected emotional experience of living in deathscapes and sense of place. We emphasize the importance of monitoring community views and evaluating post-disaster interventions. There should be inclusive, community-based processes of dialogue and negotiation around appropriate memorials and rituals in the post-disaster contexts.
This article explores how sensory memories shape affective geographies of belonging in migrants living in Spain. Drawing on phenomenology and affect theory, it analyses how smell, touch, sound, colour and taste act as vectors of memory and identity, transforming displacement into embodied continuity. Using an artistic and phenomenological-interpretative approach, the study examines 215 narrative interviews and self-referential artistic productions developed in the Sensitive Cartographies of Roots project. From an A/r/tographic perspective, images are not conceived as illustrations, but as spaces for thought where creation and research intertwine. The results show that domestic and everyday practices—cooking, listening, caring, organising objects—produce sensory atmospheres that sustain belonging beyond territorial stability. These affective cartographies reveal that home is not a fixed place, but a choreography of gestures that reorganises space and time through the senses.
Bearing witness and embracing vulnerability are central to feminist multispecies methodology. In this paper, I attend to the emotional costs of bearing witness to multispecies suffering and how emotions have an intimate and political function. In charting the emotional toll of bearing witness, I argue that affect is intrinsic to the praxis of witnessing non-human animal lives. To do this, I draw on vignettes from my research with humans and equines in northern Botswana and central Ethiopia. I consider the ethical decisions made in the field with animals, particularly in relation to the tensions between witnessing and intervention. The paper contributes to feminist multispecies methodology and the literature on emotions by engaging with multispecies research. To conceptualize animal suffering, this paper advances Berlant's (2011) concept of slow death as a multispecies experience that is multi-scalar, occurring at the intimate scale of the body but connected to global systems of capitalism.
This article explores interiority as a spatial phenomenon in relation to music and spatial experience. While physical spaces are accessible to many, interiority remains a uniquely personal domain; it can also contain an intangible yet real experience of space. This interior landscape exhibits characteristics of physical space: it can be vast or enclosed, illuminated or dark, in constant movement or still. While interiority has been examined across disciplines, its explicitly spatial dimensions receive little attention in contemporary academic discourse. Focusing on the spatial perception of a musical interval, this study employs an experimental-experiential methodology to document the researcher's engagement with inner spatial phenomena. Doing this requires deprivatising personal experiences, challenging and disobeying conventional academic paradigms that prioritise external, material phenomena. The article proposes that spatial experience forms a continuum linking bodily, aesthetic and supersensible dimensions of perception. Recognising this continuum invites more porous borders between disciplines and a re-examination of the epistemic conventions that separate art, consciousness and the study of space. By acknowledging interiority as a legitimate site of inquiry, it points toward a broader understanding of a continuum of perception, extending from sensory awareness to supersensible experience and questions the boundaries of what can be known.
The article examines the significance of storytelling in two participatory photovoice projects involving individuals experiencing homelessness and parents engaged in the child protection system. The study is grounded in the assumption that participatory photovoice projects create spaces in which an iterative storytelling process unfolds, metaphorically described by the authors as “wandering stories.” The analysis explores the meanings attributed to storytelling within both group and public contexts. Drawing on secondary data analysis and a thematic approach, the study analyses participants’ reflections to illuminate the emotional, relational, and political force of the stories they told.The findings show that sharing stories in group settings fostered trust, self-reflection, and collective identification, creating a “social mirror” through which participants could recognise similarities in their experiences and develop a sense of community. In public settings, storytelling facilitated critical civic dialogue, challenged institutional practices and dominant narratives surrounding homelessness and parenthood, and enabled participants to bear witness on behalf of others facing similar challenges. Public storytelling also opened pathways to new social roles, such as representatives or experts by experience, who can support the renegotiation of identity and foster social recognition.
This article introduces trac(k)ing as a methodological and analytical framework for more-than-human research, bringing into dialogue the practices of tracing and tracking. Based on archival and ethnographic research on human–large carnivore relations in the south-eastern Alps (Italy), it develops an epistemology of traces grounded in the tension between visibility and invisibility, presence and absence. It argues that tracking animals can be reinscribed within a broader act of tracing, in which knowledge emerges through situated, embodied, and technologically-mediated engagements with nonhumans. Moving beyond a purely biopolitical reading, trac(k)ing is conceptualised as an ecology of practices: an assemblage of practices and practitioners that combines sensory attunement, technical skills, local expertise, technologies, and scientific knowledge. Each practice of tracking is generated through relational encounters across human and nonhuman lifeworld, and enacts different ways of visualizing, representing and relating to nonhumans. Trac(k)ing thus calls for an ontological politics: a diplomacy between practices, practitioners and nonhumans that oppose epistemological and ontological reductionism. Drawing on ethnographic data, the article advances trac(k)ing as a method that unfolds human–nonhuman relations across networks, scales, and temporalities, and generates knowledge through three interrelated dimensions: reading landscapes, animating territories, and metamorphosis.
In this paper, we explore the mediation of time in the retelling of the 1990 Dobsonville naked women's protest. We examine what is illuminated when we pause on the affects generated between older Black women interviewees and a younger Black woman interviewer. This study's contribution is its explicit situation of South African naked body protests within black feminist geographies. It extends scholarship on affect into an under-explored spatial and political terrain. The study analyses interview data from three women who participated in the Dobsonville naked body protest in 1990. We read the interviews in relation to the documentary recording of the women in protest and their reactions to watching it 30 years later. Additionally, we walk through the site of the 1990 protests to read the landscape and temporality of protest for traces of lingering affects that connect the past to the present. We theorise this affective landscape and temporality through scholarship on Feminist Geographies and broader Black feminist geographies to situate our intervention in the rubble of racial capitalism and its demonic grounds. The findings suggest that affect saturates relations across temporalities of dispossession and liberation. Women's accounts of struggle through naked body protests disrupt affective, temporal, and spatial hierarchies. Defiance circulates affectively to challenge the spatial marginalization of Black women. Thinking with their younger selves, we observed that the older women reclaim queer temporalities of struggle and perseverance, and their actions inscribe a resistant Black feminist geography onto Dobsonville's physical and symbolic landscape. Our intervention points to how we might trace the durability of feeling in the debris of patriarchy and racial capitalism.
What makes dense urban form desirable, and for whom? Structured as a critical dialogue, this intervention puts psychoanalysis and affect theory into conversation with Marxian political economy to generate new insights about urban planning and contemporary cultural interpretations of ‘the good life.’ Urban density is conceived here as standing in for a range of sometimes-conflicting individual, professional, and societal desires. In this way, urban planning that takes high-density development as an axiomatic ideal fetishizes densification, obscuring the social relations of the production of space with the simplified idea that ‘if only’ cities and suburbs were as dense as they ‘ought’ to be, then a broad range of desires could be fulfilled. The gap between desire and its fulfillment, however, persists; cities and suburbs can always be denser, taller, better-serviced and higher-yielding. This examination of the ‘desire for density’ exposes the deeper, complex, libidinal impulse for (private-market driven) urban densification while also noting slippages within the field of urban planning that crack open dominant narratives and produce space for alternative fantasies of what the good urban life could be.
Researching elites unsettles feminist methodology, particularly when encounters unfold within institutional spaces structured by authority, surveillance, and performance. While feminist scholarship has prioritised marginalised standpoints, less attention has been paid to the affective and methodological dilemmas of studying women occupying positions of organisational power. This article develops the concept of the affective performance of the researcher to capture the embodied labour required to sustain access and negotiate elite research relationships. Drawing on interviews with women in finance and reflexive fieldnotes, it demonstrates how organisational environments shape what can be said, asked, and pursued, generating hesitation, fatigue, and tension. Interviews are understood as affective and spatial encounters in which authority, silence, and rapport are negotiated. To account for these dynamics, the article theorises the ambivalence of inclusion as the affective and methodological tension arising when participants are simultaneously privileged by institutional status and constrained by organisational expectations. By treating affect as methodological data, the article advances a feminist methodological framework that reconceptualises research encounters as embodied and spatially produced events through which institutional power becomes perceptible. In doing so, it contributes to emotional and affective geographies by demonstrating how institutional power is affectively experienced and made knowable through the research process.
This paper explores the abandoned Željava air base, situated on the Croatia – Bosnia-Herzegovina border, as a poignant symbol of the fragmentation and delegitimization of Yugoslav identity following the nation's dissolution. Drawing on semiotic landscape and sensory ethnography methodologies, the study examines the material dimensions of this place. It reveals the spectral presence of the base's past, now overgrown by nature, riddled with graffiti, and reduced to an eerie emptiness visited by dark tourism enthusiasts. The base serves as a ghostly reminder of Yugoslavia's unfulfilled vision, embodying both the physical decay of infrastructure and the ideological erosion of a once unified national identity. The paper ultimately argues that the delegitimization of Yugoslav-ness, through the site's neglect, reinforces (ethnic) divisions and positions the past Yugoslav National Army's crown jewel as a haunting emblem of collective memory and a fractured society.
This manuscript explores how I became haunted by traumatic encounters during fieldwork in migrant shelters throughout Guatemala, Mexico, and the U.S. After returning home from the field, I experienced anxiety, panic attacks, vivid recollections, and dreams. Focusing on these experiences, this manuscript develops haunting as a reflexive device that is related to but separate from trauma. Drawing from field diaries and field notes, it examines how haunting unsettled both the spatiality and temporality of fieldwork, disrupting where and when research occurred. Haunting raised key questions related to my accountability and ethical responsibilities to participants, ultimately exposing the power, privilege, and positionality associated with fieldwork. In doing so, this manuscript centers haunting as an integral part of the research process itself, contributing to understandings of trauma, haunting, and the larger politics of conducting fieldwork.
Turkish-Dutch clients in the Netherlands have been shown to underutilize and drop out of depression treatment more often than their ethnic majority counterparts. This paper posits that dissonances in emotional cultures during practitioner-client interactions may explain dissatisfaction with treatment, potentially shaping health decisions including treatment dropout. Drawing on Hochschild's work on feeling rules (1979) and emotion culture (1983), this study offers an exploratory inquiry into how cultural differences in implicit feeling rules may cloud practitioner-client interactions in mental health care, a topic insufficiently addressed in current literature. This study conducted an inductive thematic analysis of data from nine focus group discussions with Turkish-Dutch individuals and eighteen interviews with Dutch mental health practitioners. The data guided the research process and identification of emergent themes. This study explored the significance of latent conflicts of emotional cultures in Dutch mental health care. Variations in how negative emotions are expressed and managed surfaced in the data as contentious points shaped by cultural norms, or feeling rules, in interactions between Turkish-Dutch clients and Dutch mental health professionals. These findings help explain why some Turkish-Dutch clients may seek out Turkish-Dutch mental health practitioners or turn to Islamic religious beliefs and practices when they experience dissonant emotional cultures in mental health care. These results show how differences in emotional expression rules may complicate culturally responsive and personalized mental health care.
Immigration policies, politics and public discourse in the UK and elsewhere have become increasingly exclusionary and punitive. This includes the politics around binational relationships and family life; with legislation, rhetoric and decision-making often undermining family integrity and autonomy. This article draws on longitudinal research (2015-26) with UK couples and families consisting of citizens and foreign nationals seeking entry or Settlement, or challenging forced expulsion. From interviews, decision letters, and appeal observations, the paper explores these binational families' experiences and navigation of the UK's immigration system with one member's uncertain, illegalised or excluded status. It explores how people's intimate and affective lives are defined, proved, recognised and evaluated by Home Office and judicial decision-makers in immigration contexts, and the intersectional biases in operation. Family has long been integral to defining the identity and boundaries of the ‘nation’, and unions deemed ‘mixed’ have long been presented as problematic and threatening. The article argues that current policing and disciplining of binational families represents the contemporary face of a long history of governing ‘disruptive’ intimacy and affective lives that are (differentially) conceptualised, recognised, and in/excluded.
This article examines a Christmas gathering in Izmir, T & uuml;rkiye, organized by the Filipino community association United Filipinos in Izmir (UFI), to explore how migrant identities take shape through affectively mediated festive practices in urban space. The annual gathering brings together Filipino migrant domestic workers, primarily employed as live-in nannies in private households across the city. Drawing on ethnographic research, the analysis approaches the occasion as a situated event in which spatial, temporal, and material relations are momentarily reworked beyond the constraints of the domestic workplace. Informed by new materialist and affect theory, the study traces attendees' coordination, preparation, and participation practices as processes that generate differentiated positions and modes of belonging within the festive setting. In this framework, affect is conceptualized as constitutive of the spatio-material arrangements through which multiple identifications unfold, as microaffective intensities accumulate, circulate, and unevenly attach to bodies and roles. By foregrounding festivity as an affective atmosphere that modulates embodied norms, social relations, and authority, the study moves beyond labor-centered approaches to migrant domestic work. It contributes to emotional geography and migration studies by demonstrating how migrant subject positions emerge through contingent, situation-specific intensifications of identification, understood as ongoing reconfigurations rather than fixed or pre-given categories.
In this article we illustrate how learning from the emotional experiences of practice in action is central to enacting collaborative geographies. We discuss our work on a community mapping project created and led by Irish Travellers, an ethnic minority, from 2019-2022. Among the outputs of this project was the digital 'Traveller Community Mapping Coolock StoryMap', launched in November 2022. As an example of publicly engaged, research-led collaborative geographies, we firstly discuss this conceptual framework, placing public engagement under the umbrella of collaborative geographies. We argue that paying attention to emotional moments around the mapping allowed for richer collaborative geographies. We focus on a range of emotions, both our own and our interpretations of others, including: connection, surprise, concern and embarrassment. We consider how these four emotions, which were tied to the multiple space-times of enacting collaborative geographies, may have been difficult at times but also included moments of personal growth and group learning. We reflect on this project, noting the complexity of collaborative geographies, including paying attention to and working through the emotions that emerge while researching. We found that reflecting on emotional moments can reinforce respectful knowledge exchange. University and funding structures need to adapt to facilitate collaborative geographies.
The Australian government produced and circulated graphic videos depicting the death of migrants by drowning. Producers explained the rationale for disseminating these videos as attempts at saving migrant lives by deterring them from making dangerous journeys. I argue, however, that these deterrence campaigns are examples of necropolitical humanitarianism, what I describe as the conjunction of the often-empty humanitarian rhetoric about 'saving lives' with necropolitical logics that promote exposure to death - here, through drowning - to racialized, dehumanized migrant populations. An analysis of the visual and audio strategies from four representative videos circulated by the Australian government featuring migrant death by drowning finds that despite the humanitarian impulses behind these campaigns, the abstract death imagery dehumanizes migrants, and through the resulting emotional disconnection, facilitates increased exposure to death. The popularity of similar types of deterrence messaging across the globe means that increasingly, these types of advertisements have become an emotional means of enacting humanitarian violence.
This article explores how racialised, gendered, and classed emotions shape the governance of partner migration, drawing on an ethnographic study conducted at a French consulate in Russia in the mid-2010s. While research on marriage migration has highlighted its legal, procedural, and normative aspects, the emotional dynamics involved in its regulation and control remain less studied. Building on the emotional turn in migration and border studies, I argue that emotions are integral to bureaucratic practices: anger, fear, and compassion become attached to certain bodies, marking them as suspicious, threatening, or deserving. In the consular encounters examined, post-Soviet women are racialised through the figure of "Eastern women": either distrusted as potential deceivers who exploit marriage for mobility, or reimagined as compliant, caregiving spouses aligned with heteronormative ideals. The possibility to "pass" as white and respectable arises when couples' narratives and performances resonate with classed scripts of bourgeois masculinity and feminine domesticity. Simultaneously, suspicion remains the default emotional climate, particularly targeted at young, unmarried, childless women whose sexuality is seen as duplicitous and threatening. By showing how racialised emotions are always articulated through gender norms and class hierarchies, this article demonstrates how the affective responses of state agents actively produce intimate bordering, determining whose unions are excluded, doubted, or conditionally accepted. In doing so, it underscores the central role of affective economies in delineating the boundaries of national belonging and stratified forms of whiteness in contemporary Europe.
This Special Issue seeks to expand understandings of space, society, and emotion by studying spectral landscapes as those inhabited by spatiotemporally evasive social figures (ghosts), with meanings emerging and disappearing as they are assigned by and shift together with the viewer (or a senser). Specifically, the studies of spectral landscapes across geographical, geopolitical, and linguistic contexts conducted in Ukraine, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Zanzibar, Southern Saepmie in Sweden, and Oman and Saudi Arabia contribute to critical sociolinguistics, human geography, as well as other fields that understand place, memory, and people as relationally and affectively entangled. They do this by problematizing the metaphysics of presence in qualitative research, questioning what counts as ‘data’, interrogating the role of the researcher's body in knowledge production, testing out established and new methodologies, and finally, discussing the political and ethical endeavors with which ghosts confront us. While this Special Issue offers sociolinguistic ethnographies of absence in semiotic landscapes, it also joins a productive dialogue in qualitative methodologies that foreground the multisensory and multimodal means of meaning-making through the body, further developing affective, material, and sensorial directions in humanities.
This article considers the imminent loss of places to sea level rise, and whether this might be considered as a kind of dying of place. Grief for a place's passing heightens emotional connections to landscapes, and echoes the mourning for a loved one. The resonances between landscapes and people are captured in the concept of personhood, lending to the idea that a place that is suffering may be conceived of as a patient. Palliative care has the capacity to reveal how contradictory positions—such as living and dying concurrently—may be negotiated in constructive ways. In accepting that some patients cannot be physically healed, it turns its attention to helping individuals, and those who love them, to face the end of life on their own terms. We thus explore the potential of palliative care, as an ethos, to engage the complex emotions and losses wrought by global warming. Working with students to employ speculative design as a tool to actively think through these possibilities, we explore how the conceptual frame of palliative care might provide a provocative—even shocking—vision for how to negotiate the passing of places, and the navigation of the emotional consequences of climate change.
