‘Knowledge that moves’: emotions and affect in policy and research with young migrants

ABSTRACT

Migration is an emotional experience, and so is the policy and research work associated with it. Yet, discussions on emotions and affect remain largely absent from the literature on children and youth migration. Writing auto-ethnographically, I revisit my research with/about young Lao migrants with the aim of teasing out how emotions, of young migrants, of my own and in policy making emerged in relation to various dimensions of young people’s migration. On this basis I make the case for appreciating emotions as knowledge. While emotions are ‘moving’ in an affective sense, I proceed by arguing the productive dimension of emotions through the idea of the emotive as ‘knowledge that moves’. I substantiate this point by discussing instances in which emotions as a particular form of knowledge ‘move’ research decisions, policy making processes, theorizing the youthful dimension of migration as well as the interpersonal relations through which ethnographic research is realized.     

Making the emotional connection: transnational eldercare circulation within Sri Lankan-Australian transnational families

The scholarship on care for older parents within transnational families focuses mainly on the experience of unskilled migrants and is presented largely from the perspective of caregivers. Few studies consider the case of affluent, skilled migrants, and their wealthy older parents who also cross borders to visit and provide care for their migrant adult–children. Through Baldassar and Merla’s concept of ‘care circulation’ and the lens of emotional transnationalism, the article illustrates that despite affluent transnational family members’ mobility and access to resources that should facilitate successful circulation of care, care is not easily exchanged at an intimate level. Drawing upon 30 transnational family case studies of skilled migrants residing in Australia and their urban, high to middle-income older parents from Sri Lanka, I argue that older parents construct both caring across distance and in proximity as an attentiveness to their emotional care needs, and the time and effort taken to engage in emotion work; a task that is more challenging for migrant sons than daughters. The article reveals the manner in which gendered care practices both enable and inhibit care circulation between transnational migrants and their older parents.     

‘Home,and not some house’: young people's sensory construction of family relationships in domestic spaces

Drawing on recent work highlighting sensory experience of space, this paper argues that understandings of children's and young people's relationships, including difficult family circumstances, may be enriched by taking greater account of their embodied, sensory experience of the domestic spaces in which these relationships are lived. In a study of young people's family life in the context of parental substance misuse, we found that respondents often made sense of difficult family relationships, at different times and in particular spaces, through sensory experience. They also employed sensory and spatial strategies to construct safe and secure domestic places for themselves.     

Queering the family home: narratives from gay,lesbian and bisexual youth coming out in supportive family homes in Australia

Geographical literature has predominantly presented the heterosexual nuclear family home as an oppressive environment for gay, lesbian and bisexual (GLB) youth, reporting that homophobic abuse, violence and expulsion are not uncommon outcomes of coming out at home. While not denying the widespread reality of these experiences, little consideration has been given to GLB youth whose disclosure at home is affirmed by parents and siblings, nor the reasons for and consequences of this acceptance and support. This article begins to fill this gap, contributing to geographies of sexuality, home and family. Through a critical reading of autobiographical coming out narratives from Australia, I reconsider the experience of the nuclear family home for well-supported GLB youth, arguing against the normalization of the homophobic nuclear family home. Through the support of parents and siblings, family homes can become sites of resistance to wider practices of heterosexism, and support for GLB youth. Heterosexual identity does not ‘essentially’ generate heterosexist reactions and attitudes: some heterosexual parents and siblings welcome and nourish sexual difference, and this provides fissures in overarching structures of heteronormativity which allow for the generation of non-heterosexual subjectivities and desires. I contend that this actually ‘queers’ the family home, providing a space for the fluorescence of non-heterosexuality within an apparently heteronormative site.     

It's safe: food as a way of expression for children in Warsaw

ABSTRACT

The role of food in family relations is often discussed with a focus on discipline and control. This paper shows how food can also be used to create children’s safe spaces, defined as the social conditions that allow relatively independent expression of opinions, emotions and practices. Based on ethnographic research conducted with families in Warsaw in 2012–2013, I discuss different ways in which food is used to create and express such safe spaces. Firstly, I look at how children use food to create their own, personal and hidden safe space, in opposition to parental rule. Secondly, I analyse how food is used to build a safe space between adults and children. I argue that within often antagonistic family food relations there is in fact a space for children’s expression. Thirdly, I discuss the role of food in creating safe spaces for children during the research process. This paper takes a relational approach to the concept of safe space, and considers what kind of social relations and processes enable children’s autonomous expression with the means of food.     

The Stereoscope and Popular Fiction: Imagination and Narrative in the Victorian Home

The stereoscope was a popular parlour toy that provided a powerful psychological viewing experience in the heart of the domestic space. In this article, I consider the stereoscope’s position as an instrument that was experienced, and often represented, in relation to the imaginative narrative processes of memory and fantasy. By reading the stereoscope’s position within popular fiction, the article seeks to uncover the way in which the stereoscope was consumed. The article shows that for many in the mid-Victorian period, the stereoscope operated as an everyday narrative-forming experience with a strong relation to the popular periodical fiction that was read alongside it in the domestic space. The first section of this article considers the cultural and psychological position of the stereoscope within the home, reading this alongside a number of short stories published in the popular periodic press. The second section consists of an analysis of the stereoscope’s involvement with psychological dualism and self-doubling, issues which stem, in particular, from the device’s reliance on photography. These aspects of the device are explored in relation to a nineteenth-century short story which draws a problematic relation between one’s self and one’s portrait. Finally, the article draws these issues together to show the importance of imaginative narratives within the stereoscopic experience. The viewing conditions of the stereoscope encouraged viewers to engage in an anticipatory, open-ended, and imaginative fantasy narrative. It is this unique narrative character of stereoscopic viewing experiences which most prominently distinguishes the device from other visual media.     

Irrational Exuberance: Hope,Expectation, and Cool Market Logic

This article examines expectation, optimism, and future-oriented affective postures in financial markets in conversation with theological debates about hope, fanaticism, and enthusiasm. I identify a tendency in economic discourse to valorize calculative and calm rationality over against emotive enthusiasm in market behavior. In recalling the theological debates over passions and interests that proved influential at the inception of capitalism, I argue that the denigration of exuberance in economics bears genealogical links to theological condemnation of the fanatic and enthusiast in early modernity. Retrieving this theological precursor provides an analytical lens for considering the ongoing traction of the language of rationality in economics.     

Worker Co‐operatives and Spaces of Possibility: An Investigation of Subject Space at Collective Copies

Abstract: If we are to understand the organization and growth of capitalist space, should we not also seek to understand the organization and expansion of noncapitalist economic spaces? In contrast to methods employed by theorists such as Harvey, Smith and other geographers focused on capitalist space, the diverse economies framework opens up to investigation such noncapitalist spaces. In this paper, using Gibson‐Graham's “politics of possibility”, I explore the production of work space and time in a growing worker owned co‐operative copy shop in order to gain insight into the organization and growth of co‐operative space. I argue that, in this instance, co‐operative growth emerges from the transformative experience of workers having a say in their daily work lives, having equal authority to govern work space and time and to appropriate and distribute surplus.     

Poetic child realism: Scottish film and the construction of childhood

With this essay I suggest a move towards poetic realism in the representation of children in Scottish movies. After a brief discussion of the landscape context of film geographies I turn to the roots of Scottish film realism in British Free Cinema, with specific reference to filmmakers’ use of landscape and place‐characters. I then argue that Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay moves most fully towards the context of poetic child realism. Ramsay frames and foments a quirky poetic realism with non‐professional child actors placed in carefully crafted landscapes to create important moral and social stories that evolve from a series of shocks and an emotive collision of ideas.     

Women of the Sisters' Hall: religion and the making of women's alternative space in Taiwan's economic restructuring

Against the background of Taiwan's recent economic restructuring, this article investigates the lives of a group of working-class women who were believers of I-Kuan Tao, a sectarian religion, and who had by and large decided to remain single in order to better practice their religious teaching. They lived together in an I-Kuan Tao temple. This article situates singlehood in the literature of resistance and sees it as a strategy of these women seeking an alternative lifestyle from the culturally prescribed roles of wife, mother and daughter-in-law. Three interlocking factors are particularly important to an understanding of these women's experience: cultural (the Taiwanese patrilineal family), religious (I-Kuan Tao), and economic (Taiwan's post-World War II export-oriented industrialization and its recent economic restructuring). Paradoxically, while trying to establish an alternative social space, these women were also seeking cultural legitimacy for their choice. Marriage resistance, in this case, was an act of both transgression and conformity. Yet the different readings that these women and their families applied to their situations, as well as the ingenuous strategies they deployed to solve their predicaments, also added new elements to the cultural repertoire which, collectively considered, might broaden the range of options for future Taiwanese women who attempt a similar life trajectory. In this article, I therefore caution against a totalizing understanding of the concept of resistance based on its final result, but call for a more nuanced analysis focusing on the process.     

Against a fatal confusion: Spinoza,climate crisis and the weave of the world

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I take up the theme of Spinoza's ars vivendi in relation to its temporality; duration as the very rhythm of life. In the face of an intensifying climate crisis, our experience of the rhythm of life in the everyday and its implications for the deep time of climate futures seem increasingly out of joint. Building on Morfino's argument of the necessary relationship between ontology and history, I explore the connections between the rhythm of life and our (Western) comprehension of the climate crisis. This framing provides insights into a fatal confusion. This confusion is fueled by the chrono-topography of the modern capitalist city, its intensification of a perceived separation of daily life from bioenergetic processes; and it is amplified in object-oriented ontology, which, in its treatment of climate as a hyperobject, both accepts and reifies a split between ontology and history. I argue, in contrast, that to think of the world as multi-relational and multi-temporal provides us with tools to assess the politics of the multitude in relation to the climate crisis, to better comprehend the complexity of the conjuncture and the schematization of divergent climate futures, and to fashion a responsive and response-able ars vivendi.     

Femininities on transnational journeys and sexual health risk: experiences of Chinese immigrant women in Canada

Negotiations at work in a globalising China in regard to femininity, sexuality, and family relationships have been well documented from the 1990s. Nonetheless less is known about them in a transnational context, and femininities are far less explored than masculinities. Drawing on interview data from a larger research study of transnationalism and gendered HIV vulnerability, this article investigates the intersection of femininity, sexuality and sexual health risk through Chinese immigrant women’s narratives about their experiences in Canada. It examines to what extent these intimate negotiations within China are re-enacted through Chinese immigrant women’s transnational experiences in Canada. These women live ‘in-between’ China and Canada in terms of identity, space and time with their cross-cultural connections unveiling both virtual and actual relations. Gender norms and roles, intimate and sexual experience, and family relations are realigned in the transnational lives of these women and are impacted by both their home and host societies, as well as their past and present experience in China. Used in the article as a concept and an analytical lens, gender is acknowledged as a key organising principle in post-immigration individual and social experience.     

Arendt’s Promise to Civil Society: Bridging the Social and the Political

In Arendt’s political theory the concept of civil society is often read as an extension of her concept of the social and is therefore dismissed as irrelevant to her political vision. This view leaves Arendtian theory in an exclusivist position with regard to contemporary political contexts and experiences. My aim in this essay is to address this problem by discussing the relationship of Arendtian theory and the concept of civil society in the context of contemporary political experience. This calls for not only a particular reading of the social in Arendt but, more importantly, for a joint reading of Arendt’s concept of the council state and civil society. Here, civil society is defined as the associations institutionalized by the voluntary engagement of active citizens, which definition, I argue, is compatible with Arendt’s concept of politics as action, plurality, and participation.     

Beyond the Right to the City: Territorial Autogestion and the Take over the City Movement in 1970s Italy

The cry and demand for the Right to the City (RttC) risks becoming a cliché, merely signifying urban rebellion rather than proving its practical content on the ground. I explore the limits of the thesis via its fraught entanglement with private property rights and the state‐form; and through Lefebvre's radical critique of the state, political economy and rights elsewhere. Rights claims, I contend, unintentionally reify the uneven power relations they aim to overcome, while routinely cauterising the hard‐fought collective social force that forces social gains. As a counter to the RttC thesis, I explore the autonomous Take over the City (TotC) movements of 1970s Italy, arguing that these largely neglected eminently immanent forms of territorial community activism, brought here into dialogue with Lefebvre's conception of territorial autogestion, surpassed the RttC thesis in praxis. The experience of “Laboratory Italy” thus provides highly suggestive lessons for a contemporary politics of urban space.     

THE HISTORY OF EMOTIONS: AN INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM REDDY,BARBARA ROSENWEIN,AND PETER STEARNS

The history of emotions is a burgeoning field—so much so, that some are invoking an “emotional turn.” As a way of charting this development, I have interviewed three of the leading practitioners of the history of emotions: William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns. The interviews retrace each historian's intellectual‐biographical path to the history of emotions, recapitulate key concepts, and critically discuss the limitations of the available analytical tools. In doing so, they touch on Reddy's concepts of “emotive,”“emotional regime,” and “emotional navigation,” as well as on Rosenwein's “emotional community” and on Stearns's “emotionology” and offer glimpses of each historian's ongoing research. The interviews address the challenges presented to historians by research in the neurosciences and the like, highlighting the distinctive contributions offered by a historical approach. In closing, the interviewees appear to reach a consensus, envisioning the history of emotions not as a specialized field but as a means of integrating the category of emotion into social, cultural, and political history, emulating the rise of gender as an analytical category since its early beginnings as “women's history” in the 1970s.     

4. REASON,AGENCY, AND HISTORY: REMARKS ON KANT AND BENJAMIN

This essay begins by determining the nature of Richard Eldridge's project. Referring mainly to writings by Immanuel Kant and Walter Benjamin, I view his attempt as considering what it involves to be an agent in a historical setting. According to Eldridge, the correct answer will have to involve the right combination of Kant's emphasis on rational self‐determination and Benjamin's account of spontaneous (yet nonrational) self‐transformation. In response to this answer, I suggest that Benjamin's view may not easily lend itself to being made compatible with Kantian thinking. In particular, Benjamin's effort to think experience in terms that do not make any reference to rational self‐determination must be viewed as deeply foreign to Kant's project. I also argue that Kant's third Critique, in particular its conception of reflective judgment, could have provided Eldridge with a view of agency and experience that does not deviate substantially from Kant's project elsewhere. At the end of the essay, I argue that the duality we find in Eldridge's exposition should be viewed as not only related to individuals but to society in general. An attempt to resolve it must involve reflection on how historically constituted social forms create such stark oppositions between reason and its other.     

Drought policy in Australia: gender mainstreaming or gender blindness?

Australia is experiencing a major drought, one that has devastated the landscape and people for up to ten years. This major disaster has accelerated ongoing rural restructuring and created changes in the way farm family members order and live their lives. Yet despite evidence that drought is a gendered experience, that is, that generally women and men experience and respond to drought differently, and despite a rhetorical move to gender mainstreaming in Australian policy circles, drought policy remains significantly gender blind. In this article I use the example of emergency support to poverty stricken farm families to show how agricultural departments that attend to a notional norm of family farming as a unitary male pursuit can actively discriminate against women in their efforts to preserve the farm and support their families. The article exposes gender mainstreaming as an ‘empty signifier’ that is contextually grounded and that its success is highly dependent on making these issues transparent. For gender equity efforts to reach women at local levels, I argue that gender mainstreaming requires international collaboration by gender specialists to facilitate greater attention to gender assessments by national bodies. It also requires national coalitions of gender expert units, women's organisations and academics to work together to expose culturally specific gendered issues and discriminatory outcomes.     

HUMAN SPACE, TERRITORIALITY, AND CONFLICT: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO ISRAEL AND THE WEST BANK

This brief and speculative paper focuses direct attention on Totem, in particular certain totemic concerns with space as place. Through adopting an overall structuralist perspective, Eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel, is considered as a totemic space. This is developed against the broader backcloth of Jewish societal development and advanced through a brief study of the continuing Jewish settlement of Samaria. It is suggested that no deeper comprehension of the proceeding settlement initiatives is attainable unless the importance of such a perspective is realized. The brief review, short case study, and pointers to proceeding work provide crucial subjects for further attention. The contentious, indeed emotive, nature of the paper is to be emphasized     

‘Mɔn’ (to marry/to cook): negotiating becoming a wife and woman in the kitchens of a northern Ghanaian Konkomba community

In this article, I consider the kitchen as domestic space that is at once gendered and gendering in its construction and use by women as they negotiate their social position across the life course. Deeply rooted patriarchal values structure Konkomba society in northern Ghana, and a woman's role is to be a wife, to prepare food in support of her husband's family and community. Although the normative definition of woman's role in society stems from a clear-cut division of labor between women and men, a woman must negotiate her social position and ability to fulfill these labor obligations; she becomes a woman and wife by working to gain access to and control over resources and labor. I explore the shifting dynamics of women's work and social position across the life course, emphasizing the transition from young woman to woman-as-wife-as-cook in her husband's community. These negotiations take place in the kitchen – a fiercely feminine space in which a woman becomes a wife when she earns the right to place hearth stones and prepare a ceremonial ‘first meal’ for her husband and his community.