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Paper short abstract

On the periphery of globalised modernity, how would a politics of emotion be framed? How might other configurations of affect, power, and place throw new light on our own micromanaged, monetized emotional world? This paper proposes an approach through ethnographic narrative.

Paper long abstract

Can there be a politics of emotion any more than a politics of thought? If emotions motivate, orient, and comment on all action, 'setting up' social reality (Solomon), how best to apprehend them in a political frame? Not by severing - or artificially rejoining - praxis from affect, abstracting from context. Real emotions cannot be grasped in a snapshot, still less in a model. Embedded in situations, dramas and interpersonal histories, only narrative ethnography can capture their recursive, dynamic, proleptic role within fluid networks of influences and persons. Without narrative context, emotions are drained of personal significance and biographical resonance, robbed of their constitutive time-bound property. They become theoretical fictions, not models but fakes.

In this paper I explore conceptual issues in emotion theory and intersections with 'affect theory' pertaining to place, time, and power. Building on arguments in Emotional Worlds (2019), I focus on two Indonesian societies, one (Nias) in which performed emotions are the vehicle of a power play on the anxious fringes of modernity; the other (Java), in which a loosely-structured society, 'modern' yet 'traditional', functions through a relativistic modulation of emotion and place, in which specifically spatial emotions orient political actors. Narratively framed, these cases offer a naturalistic alternative to approaches that exclude what counts in emotional episodes (whatever makes action emotional). Only by putting emotions back into a narrative weave, can we see how political they actually are, how emotions - like politics - are comprised of backstory, positions, stakes, judgments, selves, and consequences.

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Paper short abstract

The paper proposes the concept of "multi-layered melancholy" to describe the feeling of sadness that emerges during personal or collective loss following spatial, ethnic, and gender inequality among a discriminated group of citizens who are located at the margins of Israeli society and urbanity.

Paper long abstract

Based on the feminist theory of intersectionality, with a specific focus on emotions, this paper proposes the concept of "multi-layered melancholy" to describe the feeling of sadness that emerges during personal or collective loss following spatial, ethnic, and gender inequality among a discriminated group of citizens who are located at the margins of Israeli society and the urban sphere. The case study explored is the Hatikva neighborhood, which was originally a lower-income neighborhood of Mizrahim (marginalized Jews who immigrated to Israel from North Africa and Asia during the 1950s( and which has undergone a dramatic process of change in recent years following the arrival of African migrants and the subsequent contraction of the veteran community. Following anthropological field work I conducted in the Hatikva neighborhood from 2010 to 2013, the analysis shows the multi-layered articulation of spatial, ethnic, and gender melancholy in the urban sphere, and contributes to the current writing on these concepts by showing how they connect to one another and operate simultaneously in practice. While this feeling of loss arises sporadically in specific contexts, I argue that the older Mizrahi women I met in a local day center for the elderly embody a three-dimensional melancholy due to their gender, ethnic, and spatial marginality.

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In this presentation, I intend to demonstrate that looking - as a geographer using ethnographic and artistic methodology - at emotions in urban public spaces of the global South (Johannesburg) and North (Paris) could be a way to both politicize and decolonize emotions.

Paper long abstract

The project I will present aims at looking through art at the role of emotions in public spaces in large cities (Johannesburg, Paris), that are characterized by neoliberalization and its consequences in terms of privatization and securization of spaces. In this context, I will wonder if the emotions felt and expressed by city dwellers in public spaces could (re)connect individuals among themselves and with urban spaces, so as to thwart the processes that lead to an atomization of individuals (Mitchell, 2005) and a fragmentation of spaces (Guinard, 2014), or if, on the contrary, these emotions reinforce such processes by confining every individual in his/her own subjectivity, every group in its own emotion and space. What is at stake is thus the capacity of emotions to create bonds between people in and with public spaces.

This project thus intends to challenge various dichotomies that oppose representations/perceptions, public/private spaces, global South/North. Studying emotions in urban public spaces of the global South and North will allow me:

- to apprehend the sensitive and bodily manifestations of city dwellers' affective states, as well as the verbalization of such states by city dwellers themselves.

- to investigate the ways in which individual affects can turn into collective expressions, if not political demonstrations.

- to contest a tendency to overlook emotions in the global South, or to focus only on specific, often negative, ones (e.g. fear).

As such, this project aims at politicizing and decolonizing emotions. To do so, I will implement an innovative research-creation methodology.

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Paper short abstract

This paper explores the politics of vision and visibility in state-socialist and post-1989 Prague, employing the perspective of 'affective relatedness' and defining emotions as embodied processes and practices that occur within wider affective environments.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on theories of affect and emotion, this paper explores the politics of vision and visibility in state-socialist and post-1989 Prague. The analysis employs the concept of 'affective relatedness', criticizing person-centric theories of emotion and agency and defining emotions as embodied processes and practices that occur within wider affective environments. The paper discusses a three-hour walking interview in October 2019 with a Czech sculptor, when I asked him for his response to eight monuments that had been unveiled between 1878 and 1984, and his personal experiences at the different locations. His emotional reactions highlight the ideological significance of material-focussed policies of in/visibility, and emphasise the complex affective dynamics between human and non-human interactants, especially when examined over longer periods.

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Paper short abstract

We investigate the mobilization of individuals who participated in the 2011 protests in Tel Aviv and New York. It found four emotional shifts connected to cognitive frames which enable us to read the conditions of the young, middle-class protesters and characterize their response to globalization.

Paper long abstract

In 2011, a wave of protests spread to over 700 cities around the globe. These protests, including the protests in Tel Aviv and New York, were characterized by the participation of young, well-educated members of the middle class; the occupation of public spaces; the use of non-hierarchical decision-making processes; the use of social media; and calls to decrease inequality, move towards direct democracy, and curtail the political power of corporations. The empirical analysis of hundreds of documents from the 2011 protests in Tel Aviv and New York, including meeting minutes, in-depth interviews, and first-hand reports of the protest, allowed for the identification of mobilization processes, with a focus on processes happening at the level of individual decision-making. The research found set of four emotional shifts that interacted with framing processes in people's decision to participate in the protests. The emotional shifts characteristic of these protests were both results of, and fed into specific elements of the 2011 protests. These findings propose a relationship between emotions and frames in the process in which people decide to participate in protests. They also tell us about life in global and globalizing cities, about protest in these cities, and about understanding protests and waves of protest. These findings suggest that there is a specific politics of inequality, and that changes brought by globalization and changing technology bring not just a characteristic set of results - of patterns of winners of losers, of changes in urban life - but also characteristic responses to those patterns.

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Paper short abstract

Through an analysis of two high-profile coup trials in Turkey that goes from the courtroom to the public protests conducted by military families on the streets of Istanbul and Ankara, this paper traces the role and spatial manifestations of emotions in the making of legal and political subjects.

Paper long abstract

Previously situated outside and above the law in Turkey, military officers have become one of the primary actors of the country's legal scene in the past decade in their role as defendants across treason and coup trials. Marking a momentous shift in Turkish politics against the military's impervious position, these trials have sparked much debate in the public realm and led to a rupture of emotions, both for their defendants and victims of state violence in Turkey. This paper examines the entanglement of emotions, politics, and protest both inside and on the margins of Turkey's legal spaces by focusing on two of these proceedings: the controversial Sledgehammer case, an alleged coup plot dating back to the early 2000s, and the trial of the 1980 coup, the bloodiest military intervention in the country's history. Specifically, I demonstrate how a demand for justice and anger against continuing injustice ironically marked the reactions of both military defendants on trial and the victims of military coups and examine the spatial manifestations of these emotions. By drawing on particular moments from the two trials, I discuss how interruption, compartmentalization, and continuity of time marked different legal actors' relationship with the courtroom space and trickled into the political protests conducted by military families on the streets of Istanbul and Ankara. Finally, I also reflect on the question of what happens when those who belong to an institution long associated with violence and rights violations become the ones to seek justice.