Presentation short abstract

This paper explores Irish Traveller emotional life, drawing on Ahmed, Anzaldúa, and the Black radical tradition. Emotions circulate between bodies, land, and state power, shaping resistance, commoning, and solidarities, revealing affect as a site of hope, care, and anti-capitalist transformation

Presentation long abstract

This paper explores the emotional landscapes of Irish Traveller life and struggles over land, commoning, and autonomy, showing how affect shapes both marginalisation and resistance. Emotions circulate between bodies, spaces, and institutions, producing belonging or exclusion and mediating encounters with state power, policing, and capitalist accumulation. Fear, anger, pity, and joy are not private feelings but relational forces that structure everyday life and influence who is recognised as part of a community, whose futures are constrained, and whose practices of land stewardship are delegitimised.

I draw on the work of Sara Ahmed on affective circulation, Gloria Anzaldúa on embodied and borderland experience, and scholarship within the Black radical tradition to analyse how emotions inform political strategies, ethical research relationships, and collective care. Emotional registers employed by the state and media often construct Travellers as outsiders, mobilising affect to justify enclosure, eviction, and the commodification of land. In response, participants cultivate embodied and collective forms of anger, love, and joy that sustain social ties, commoning practices, and hopeful futures.

By centring emotions, this paper demonstrates the analytic and political value of affect for understanding land-based struggles, connecting Irish Traveller experiences to broader conversations on Indigenous land rights, anti-capitalist resistance, and alternative futures. Emotions emerge as both tools and sites of transformation, revealing how communities resist oppression, reimagine shared relationships to land, and forge emancipatory political ecologies that challenge capitalist degradation and produce more liveable, relational futures.