This session will be streamed, recorded, and archived on the site until June 25th, 2023

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Description:

Emotion, Space and Society Inaugral Lecture

Emotions, and their intersections in the spaces and places of our everyday lives matter. This inaugural lecture will begin, what we hope to be, a long-standing engagement, with discussing how and why emotions matter. The journal Emotion, Space and Society provides a forum for multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary debate on theoretically informed research on the emotional intersections between people and place. These objectives are broadly conceived and seek to encourage investigations of feelings, encounter and affect in various spatial and social contexts, environments and landscapes.

The Inaugural Emotion, Space and Society lecture provides an opportunity for the journal to highlight the scope of its critical scholarship on emotional geographies and strengthen the importance of theoretical and methodological engagements with emotion as a social, cultural and spatial phenomenon. Among our core authorship and readership are geographers, who are well equipped to critically consider the multiplicity of spaces and places that produce and are produced by emotional and affective life. Geographers and geographic scholarship frequently engage in research with the capacity to incite emotion and affect, which is felt by researchers, participants and readers, in different quantities.


Emotional Entanglements in a World That’s Falling Apart, Professor Kate Swanson

In human geography, many of us are involved in community-engaged and activist research, much of which is inspired by deep emotional commitments to progressive change. Yet, the last three years have taken a toll on academics. Many in academia are anxious and burnt out, as the demands of the neoliberal university remain relentless despite the seeming collapse of the world around us. We have witnessed a radical restructuring of research, teaching, and praxis as the pandemic changed our ability to do in-person work. Building solidarity and enacting social change under these circumstances has been challenging, to say the least. And while the Covid-19 pandemic has illustrated the critical global interdependencies between all of us and inspired new forms of mutual aid and support, it has also inspired rising division and growing right-wing movements based on imaginaries of fear and insecurity. In this paper, I discuss how emotional geographies are inherently woven through all human experiences and interactions, but they are especially implicated in issues of social and spatial justice. Given ongoing global crises, I argue that holding onto emotions in academic research, teaching, and praxis is more important than ever.

Non-Presenting Participants