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Emotion, Space and Society 5 (2012) 174–176

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Emotion, Space and Society

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Guest Editorial: Practising emotions

1. Introduction

Emotional geographies can help to reveal the intensities ofeveryday life. They enable us to approach a realm of experiencethat is essentially non-representational, despite its biological mani-festations, yet as intrinsic to our objects of study as other tangibleand quantifiable geographies might be. This task needs a two-pronged approach: on one hand, a theorizing of what usuallycannot be said, and on the other an empirical investigation ofwhat is happening in concrete places, to whom and how. In ouropinion, research on emotional geographies has done both so farand with great success (Davidson and Milligan, 2004; Pile, 2010;Smith et al., 2009). We want to build on this existing strength.However, we are also interested in adding another significantdimension, which should help to further elucidate the emotionalgeographies we are keen to observe and understand. We are herereferring to the concept of practice, which has, apart from a fewnotable exceptions (Everts et al., 2011; Simonsen, 2007), not beenexplicitly part of the project of emotional geography. Though weacknowledge the emphasis on performance and practice placedby non-representational theorists (Thrift, 1996; Thrift andDewsbury, 2000), we wish to draw attention to the operationalisa-tion of theories of practice, like those of Reckwitz, of Taylor, and ofSchatzki discussed below. We consider these theories as parallelpathways alongside non-representational approaches to research-ing emotional geographies through their focus on the role ofactivity and embodiment in emotion, and how practices thereofemerge to be interpreted as significant.

One of the aims of emotional geographies as an academicendeavour is, we would argue, to present the non-representational in ways that recognize the intangible yet palpableperformance of empathy, both in an interpersonal realm and asanalysts of social life. Fostering this approach means investing inour understanding of what happens to people at specific timesand in specific places, and creating opportunities to relate theirlives and struggles in meaningful ways (Bondi et al., 2005). Wemight observe the increase of protests, riot or attempts to over-throw governments, for example, and attribute them to an experi-ence of social injustice, as reported by participants. Yet, we alsoseek to understand fomentations of activist politics of outrage,anger, grievance, and hope (Brown and Pickerill, 2009) that enableindignation to become protests, to become riots. These emotionsare an essential part of such research because they are indivisiblefrom injustice, and because they can be instigators in themselves.Not all participants in protest are direct victims; anger and indigna-tion can be shared by others, even those seemingly institutional-ized and complacent (Jasper, 1998), whose empathy leads to

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action. This example of practicing emotion is what this collectionaims to address: how we as analysts might engage in an everydaycirculation of emotions that exceed bodies, that are made tangiblethrough practices, and that become integral to our readings andreworkings of events in analysis.

2. Practice theory and emotions

First and foremost in this operationalisation of emotion isa notion of practice. Following Reckwitz (2002), practices consistof specific ways of doing and saying things, for example ways ofconsuming, working, or socialising. This includes particular waysof understanding, knowing how to use things, and states ofemotions (cf. Reckwitz, 2002: 249–50). In effect, practices rely onlearning and becoming skilful performers in contexts that arenecessarily interactive and inter-subjective, i.e. they are “social”practices by default.

Emotions are intrinsic parts and particles of practice. An earlyoutline of the intricate relationship between practice and emotionsstems from Charles Taylor. He states – in trying to illuminate onwhat grounds we are able to construct meanings from interpreta-tion – that our “actions are ordinarily characterized by the purposesought and explained by desires, feelings, emotions” (Taylor, 1971:12). But at the same time, Taylor continues, “the language by whichwe describe our goals, feelings, desires is also a definition of themeaning things have for us” (Taylor, 1971). In this way, vocabulariesdescribing meanings, feelings and goals are interlinked: meaningsare felt, and feelings cannot be separated from what they mightmean; changing emotional states of the body inform that momen-tary or lasting meaning.

Taylor stresses that practices should be the primary units ofinvestigation since the meanings implicit in them, “are not justin the minds of the actors but are out there in the practices them-selves, practices which cannot be conceived as a set of individualactions, but which are essentially modes of social relations, ofmutual action” (1971: 27). Later he clarified some of his intentionswhen developing “social practices” as a conceptual tool, definedby “ways that we regularly behave to/before each other, which(a) embody some understanding between us, and which (b) allowof discrimination right/wrong, appropriate/inappropriate” (Taylor,1984: 22). Inspired by this ontology, we are thus not only inter-ested in strong emotions that are usually thought of such aslove, joy, anger or fear but also small instances of bodily changesuch as feelings of appropriateness or inappropriateness, feelingsof being in the swing or not quite content with the flow of actions,feelings of ease in familiar situations or slight unease within unfa-miliar settings.

Guest Editorial / Emotion, Space and Society 5 (2012) 174–176 175

Building on the work of Taylor, Theodore Schatzki (2002)distinguishes between practical understandings, teleoaffectivestructures, rules, and general understandings that link doingsand sayings in ways that make them appear to pertain to one prac-tice and not another. Here, we are especially interested in his useof the term “teleoaffectivity” to sum up how feelings are directedtowards desired outcomes of a practice. On a very mundane level,we can imagine teleoaffectivity through the feeling of “doingthings right” as the organising principle of any practice, and anydeviation from this sense of teleoaffective “oughtness” is indicatedby a sensory, emotional, felt response of the opposite. Here, itshould become clear how the researcher, aware and attuned toher or his own emotions, feelings and affective movements, willbe able to render meaningful experiences from what is going on– how things happen at certain times and places the way theyought, or how struggles emerge from competing senses of appro-priateness. The “doing” of practices lies in this gap between thesense of knowing how things “ought to be” and the interpretive,representational meanings that get assigned to that gap. In short,practicing emotions is as much a promising field for furtherinquiry as it is a way of doing research.

3. Practising emotions

The following collection of papers reflects our methodologicalintentions in their execution of practice as an entry into emotionalgeographies. Each researcher is attuned to both what is said andunsaid, and the distance between their roles as observer andparticipant in journeys that are both literally and figurativelyemotional. They address the way emotions happen, how theywere felt and recorded as much as how they change whathappens next, becoming empirical through practices. The collec-tion is informative as well because these authors speak toemotional vibrancy in a variety of worlds, spaces and timelines– from the temporal-spatial distance of the “field” in ethnographicresearch to the proximity and regularity of the daily commute.They draw on the theoretical resources we have outlined here,both directly addressing practices of emotion and indirectlyapproaching through a range of theories, from psychological inter-pretations of affect to non-representational theory. Their contri-butions, individually and as a group, connect to a variety ofdisciplines informing how emotion operates through practice atmicro and macro levels, without reducing their applications toany particular scale.

Three of the papers have a more explicit focus on theresearcher’s own emotions, embodiment, presence and impact.While each of these authors set out to study particular instancesof social life and practices, it was the emotional experience thatprovided the key to understand the phenomena studied. Thus,emotion becomes both the focus of analysis and the embodiedtool through which research transpires. In a way, this strategycomplements calls for reflexivity by foregrounding emotions ofresearchers. It does not, however, entail projects of complacentself-description; rather, it helps the researchers to gain a betterunderstanding of the lives and environments the researcherscame to study in the first place.

Katie Pratt, writing on community activism in Latin America,explores how “community” happened between herself and a groupof colleagues on an at times arduous learning excursion. Pushingtheir emotions to the limit in what she calls, “representationalmoments along the way” – moments of emotional surfacing inthe non-representational practice-affect-emotion spiral – enableda cohesiveness to emerge within the group. She considers howthis assemblage of “community” might be better theorised bytaking such unpredictable moments into consideration.

Joey Orr offers a glimpse of a home in Atlanta in the recent past,inhabited by ordinary men whose shared queer domesticity isenlivened in archival materials. He approaches this historical mate-rial by, “mak[ing] gestures of attunement (or disruption, as the casemay be) rather than historical sweeps”, seeking to render theemotional vibrancy from the page. His attempt brings the contem-porary researcher into the historical material, as part of a triadbetween the researcher, the material, and the sources themselves,the individuals whose lives are being reconfigured througharchives.

Next, AnnetteWatson brings a more direct gaze onto the projectof doing fieldwork in geography and the conflicted presences andabsences of an embedded researcher. Recounting how causing anaccident became part of locating herself in her Alaskan “field”,she demonstrates how a researcher’s embodiment is swept intoemotional practices as a participant, both purposefully and inadver-tently. Her reflection goes beyond questioning her role as observeror participant by returning the gaze on practices of academic disci-plining as much as on her own emotional practices as a researcherwith unexpected impacts.

Then Hanne-Louise Jensen takes an alternate approach,focusing on how emotions take place in ordinary spaces, andhow space is made to accommodate emotions in mobile commu-nities. Through detailed fieldwork with commuters in Denmark,she considers the presence of emotion through phenomenologicalexamination of the everyday encounters and interactions ontrains. Over months of repetition in these journeys, she becomeslocated in the train along with fellow regular passengers, andperceptive to the pre-reflexive experience that characterizesemotional practice.

In collecting these papers, we aim to coalesce a node ofemotional geographies in practice through the examples set bythese authors. Each contributes a unique voice and pitch tothe implementation of methodologies discussing emotionthrough a focus on practice. By doing so, they each demonstratea model to debate on how this inherently non-representationalfield can be materialised in responsible research, produced bya reflexive and “teleoaffectively” aware practitioner, and takinginto account the data streaming towards us that is beyondspoken words. More so, they indicate what a rich potential liesin investigations into emotion when approached through themedium of practice.

References

Bondi, Liz, Davidson, Joyce, Smith, Mick, 2005. Introduction: geography’s ‘emotionalturn’. In: Davidson, Joyce, Bondi, Liz, Smith, Mick (Eds.), Emotional Geographies.Ashgate Publishing, Aldershot/Burlington, pp. 1–18.

Brown, Gavin, Pickerill, Jenny, 2009. Space for emotion in the spaces of activism.Emotion, Space and Society 2 (1), 24–35.

Davidson, Joyce, Milligan, Christine, 2004. Embodying emotion sensing space:introducing emotional geographies. Social & Cultural Geography 5 (4),523–532.

Everts, Jonathan, Lahr-Kurten, Matthias, Watson, Matt, 2011. Practicematters! Geographical inquiry and theories of practice. Erdkunde 65(4), 323–334.

Jasper, James, 1998. The emotion of protest: affective and reactive emotions in andaround social movements. Sociological Forum 13 (3), 397–424.

Pile, Steve, 2010. Emotions and affect in recent human geography. Transactions ofthe Institute of British Geographers 35 (1), 5–20.

Reckwitz, Andreas, 2002. Toward a theory of social practices. A development in cul-turalist theorizing. European Journal of Social Theory 5 (2), 243–263.

Schatzki, Theodore, 2002. The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Account of theConstitution of Social Life and Change. University Park, Pennsylvania StateUniversity Press.

Simonsen, Kirsten, 2007. Practice, spatiality and embodied emotions: an outline ofa geography of practice. Human Affairs 17 (2), 168–181.

Smith, Mick, Davidson, Joyce, Cameron, Laura, Bondi, Liz, 2009. Geography andemotion – emerging constellations. In: Smith, Mick, Davidson, Joyce,

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Cameron, Laura, Bondi, Liz (Eds.), Emotion, Place and Culture. Ashgate, Farn-ham, pp. 1–20.

Taylor, Charles, 1971. Interpretation and the sciences of Man. The Review of Meta-physics 25 (1), 3–51.

Taylor, Charles, 1984. Philosophy and its history. In: Rorty, Richard,Schneewind, J.B., Skinner, Quentin (Eds.), Philosophy in History: Essays onthe Historiography of Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,pp. 17–30.

Thrift, Nigel, 1996. Spatial Formations. Sage, London.Thrift, Nigel, Dewsbury, John-David, 2000. Dead geographies – and how to

make them live. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18 (4),411–432.

Jonathan EvertsUniversity of Bayreuth, 95440 Bayreuth, Germany

Lauren Wagner*Wageningen University, P.O. Box 47,

6700 AA Wageningen, The Netherlands

* Corresponding author. Tel.: þ31 (0) 31 48 25 07.E-mail address: lauren.wagner@wur.nl