Paper short abstract:

Drawing on contemporary research into affects and objects (Frykman & Povrzanović Frykman 2016) this paper explores what affects do more than what they are. Focus is on the conflicts and struggles between siblings when a beloved summer house is to be passed after the death of the parents.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on contemporary research on affects and material culture (Frykman & Povrzanović Frykman 2016) and following the ethnographic tradition, this paper explores what affects do rather than what they are. I look at the conflicts and struggles between siblings that take place when the beloved summer house is to be passed on after the death of the parents. Grief, shock despair - as well as compassion and affinity - create a sensitive space where affects and emotions run wild. Interviews and answers to questionnaires show how the summer house emerges as sensitized, not simply a property to be for sale Frykman 2016, 2018). From childhood on, the house has taken on an existential dimension, like a Foucauldian (1971) heterotopia, the perfected place where life was lived at the fullest. The many physical experiences from foraging in the surroundings, fishing and swimming, putting up tents and building huts, making new friends and meeting older generations made this to a place where one could gain personal autonomy within a safe social setting. The material collected demonstrates how the particular habitus (Bourdieu 1977) related to the summer house can make antagonists out of the previously amicable inheritors. Some end up in court, are forced into therapy or part in fury never to speak to one another again. While ordinary emotions like anger and offence mostly are possible to put into words and come to terms with, the attachment to the summerhouse is at the one time more physically profound and cognitively more evasive.

Paper short abstract:

Presentation will show landscape of emotions and lived in everyday life nostalgia behind the place of origin in context of sustaining group identity within Konkani communities in Kochi. In the lived experience of affect and emotion new notions of identity are created.

Paper long abstract:

The presentation will point out the landscape of individual emotions, lived in everyday life nostalgia behind the place of origin and sense of belonging in context of group identity within caste-based communities of Konkani speaking people in Kochi, South India. Konkanis came to Kochi from Goa in sixteenth century due to historical perturbations. Emotions associated with the past are re-called, lived and internalized, and at the same time new meaningful social shift is appearing promoted by community activists. In the fieldwork conducted in 2014-2018 I was witnessing phenomena of personal emotions emerging around subject of ethnic membership, as well as non-verbalized affectual situations where sense of belonging was transferred imperceptibly between members and non-members of Konkani communities, and through almost intangible was much more existing than classical studies on group identity used to present it. Having this as a base, Konkani activists consciously use the emotional landscape already existing in the community to promote stronger attachment to the notion of "being Konkani" and at the same time changing it from the local community to imagined one, from Kochi-based Konkani castes, where members know each other from everyday interaction, to the wider community of all-India Konkani language speaking people. In my research I am attempting to grasp what role emotion and affect are playing in identity building strategies. Emotions serve at the same time as a strategy of achieving certain political objectives, but they are also determinant of what is important for the community.

Paper short abstract:

The aim of the paper is to explore the connection between regionalization on the one hand, and food and taste on the other hand. The material of the analysis is based on fieldwork and qualitative interviews, in three different European food festivals.

Paper long abstract:

In the last decades the festival phenomenon has become a striking feature of European everyday life. There is a festival for almost every type of cultural activity, music, theatre, literature, art, etc. Also, the number of food festivals in Europe increasing. While, some is more like chef and culinary festivals, others are rooted in various dishes, and there are the wine and bread festivals, beer festivals, festivals of aquavit, hem festivals, etc. At the same time, the number of local food festivals, are increasing.

In this paper I will focus on the food of festival dwelling, connected to the body, moving, and materiality; and mainly the material as a 'sensual materiality'. The discussion will be based on empirical studies. Further, the theoretical approach will be based on the discussion of the food festival as 'making' and 'doing'. But it will also bring in foreground the phenomenological approach focusing on the study of the festival as 'being'. In both cases/ positions the discrete focus of ethnography and the sensual materiality are often missing.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on examples of recent public debates over political emotions, this paper will discuss how emotional performances are strategic and thus should be analyzed not as bodily and/or mental 'states' so much as cultural practices.

Paper long abstract:

Terror attacks, right-wing populism, and the debate over refugee policies in Europe have led to a broad discussion over the role of emotions in politics. This paper will present a few examples and argue that this discussion is happening because emotions are cultural practices used strategically. Drawing on a Bourdieuan paradigm of 'strategy' as well as of 'emotion', this paper is also a contribution to the discussion of the advantages (and drawbacks) of practice theory as an approach for the cultural analysis of emotional practices, contrasting and comparing it with the affect- theory approach. One aspect that is particularly important is that it allows us to investigate the entanglement of theory and practice in the 'doing' of emotion: At the heart of the debate over 'proper' political emotions is, I will argue, a conflict between two emotional ideologies which inform what counts as 'good' emotional practice.

Paper short abstract:

This paper sets out to explore how political active Cairenes are navigating suspicious places, spaces, bodies and non-living things in the cityscape of Cairo. It examines the ambiguity of familiar materialities in Cairo in the post-Mubarak era, in relation to agential acts.

Paper long abstract:

This paper sets out to explore how political active Cairenes are navigating suspicious places, spaces, bodies and non-living things in the cityscape of Cairo. It examines the ambiguity of familiar materialities, for example phones, bodies, cameras, recorders, public rooms, social media, and Internet, in Cairo in the post-Mubarak era, in relation to agential acts. Taking its starting point in how the ambiguity of familiar materialities fundamentally alters human relations and actions, this paper produces novel perspectives on the complex interaction between materiality, affective politics, and suspicion. Through the selected theoretical lens—an approach that blends theories of affect and materiality into an axis of analysis—not only well-known concepts such as (state and citizens) power, uncertainty and agency may be re-analyzed, but also the internal dynamics of oppression as well as how such regimes maintain its penetration of the (inter-)national air—in every breath of its citizens, the state is literally present. Interaction with things and other aspects of the physical environment's places and spaces is an important arena of social, political, and cultural articulation that accommodates experiences and sentiments that are otherwise too ambiguous and fleeting to be captured. Once manifested in the material world, I assert that otherwise vaporous sentiments of suspicion become graspable, at the level of everyday life as well as academic inquiry.

Paper short abstract:

The paper proposes 'affective integration' as a notion that captures migrants' material and corporeal experiences that tend to be overlooked in migration research although they underlie the often invoked but vaguely defined 'feeling at home'.

Paper long abstract:

My former research on migrants and objects (Povrzanovic Frykman 2019, 2018, 2016) suggests that an exploration of habitus, affect and materiality as closely connected can be productive in understanding some subjective aspects of processes of migrant integration. Building on insights gained in a recent project on museums as arenas of refugee integration in Sweden, I propose and discuss the notion of 'affective integration'.

While habitus refers to the capacity of the body of deploying itself in a particular environment (Hage 2013), habitual uses of places, material surroundings, objects, food - being in touch with people and things in a familiar context - are practices at the intersection of sociality and materiality that facilitate familiar senses. On the other hand, affects are a central factor in the process of subject formation; they increase or diminish people's agentive and existential capacities in relation to their surroundings, and establish and subsequently modulate individual capacities and dispositions (Slaby & Mühlhoff 2019). I therefore claim that the lens of affect can facilitate an understanding of the often invoked but vaguely defined 'feeling at home' and the related migrants' well-being, that is not linked to access to rights and formal inclusions, but rests on material and corporeal experiences that tend to be overlooked in migration research.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation describes the difficulties older jobseekers face when they do not get enough support. The presentation seeks to answer how looking at unemployment through the lens of affect and emotions can fill the gaps in the existent understanding of life without wage work.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation explores affects and emotions linked to unemployment. It is based on 30 interviews conducted with jobseekers aged 50+ in south-eastern Finland. The area where the jobseekers live has had relatively high unemployment rates and the participants have also experienced age discrimination which makes their situation difficult. The presentation deals with the affective practices linked to becoming unemployed, thoughts on continuing unemployment and the emotions provoked by (perceived) attitudes towards the unemployed. The research questions are what affective practices are there in the interviews and what consequences do they have in the lives of the interviewees.

This presentation describes the difficulties older jobseekers face when they do not get enough support and are left with few options for their future. Frustration, shame, guilt and bitter feelings were discussed by the interviewees. Affective strength supported by counselling and help from others, including the governmental employment services and peer-support were the possible positive effects identified in this study.

The presentation seeks to answer how looking at unemployment through the lens of affect and emotions can fill the gaps in the existent understanding of life without wage work.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will present personal story based on the process of dressing up in traditional costume, referring to different social roles and meanings of traditional costume in modern Croatian society. Applying the affect and emotion lens, gave new, creative potential to this "old-fashioned" theme.

Paper long abstract:

Observing traditional costumes through the lens of affect and emotion is a new approach to this subject and also a brand new creative potential of this research field. This paper will present one part of my research in which I observe traditional costume as a part of material culture that comes in direct touch with the body and has the power to change the way others look at the person that is dressed in it. On the other hand it is used to send a message in different social interactions. In short, traditional costumes cause different effects with each person differently, depending on the type of public social event. The research includes not only mine personal experiences of traditional costume, but also perspectives of the person dressing me up, persons watching me in the context of a religious event I was part of, and all the sensations while I was dressed, and after I took my traditional costume off. Also, the paper will describe the whole process of dressing up in traditional costume which demands specific knowledge and skills, but also meeting the specific social criterion.

Finally, connecting traditional costume with pain and discomfort on the one hand, and admiration and social approval on the other, the research reveals exceptional affective potential of traditional costume. Also, it implies great creative potential to the traditional costume research and a new glance on seemingly outdated theme.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation shows the engagement of emotions on the field and its actants, as well as on the researcher's side. It presents solutions to deal with the emotional engagement, using the methodological involvement of the senses for dealing with emotions as productive part of ethnographie research.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation explores the sensual and emotional engagement in two dimensions: The emotional process of the field's actants but also the emotional engagement of the researcher whilst doing fieldwork. Therefore I mainly discuss data from moving interviews during the research process of my PhD on spatial relations in triathlon.

After Merleau-Ponty (1974) and Drew Leder (1990), the connectedness of body and mind and therefore the inter-relatedness of physical practices and sensual engagement are obvious. Sports allow engaging deeply with the sensual and emotional processes (Groth/Krahn 2017). The example of research on triathlon sheds light on emotional processes like getting in touch with personal limits, or crossing the finish line. At the same time, the involved researcher engages with emotions during the research process.

Ethnographic research allows not only to reflect the involvement of emotions, but also uses those aspects of fieldwork in ways which widen the understanding. Therefore I present ways of methodological involvement of the senses for dealing with emotions as productive part of ethnographic research.