Talking to others: analysing tourists’ communications on cultural heritage experiences

In the area of cultural heritage, tourists’ experiences emphasise not only the moment and its personal nature but also socio-cultural traits. These experiences when expressed (social communications) are an important gateway to knowledge about tourists’ sense-making processes. This paper reports on the mediation between tourists and heritage sites via comments on a digital platform (TripAdvisor) about two Spanish tourist destinations with opposing characteristics and four heritage sites, which are analysed. The methodology used seeks to transcend the individual and anecdotal aspects of tourists’ comments. Indeed, the results obtained show the relevance of the humanisation and the discursive weight of heritage contexts in emotional/personal stories. Tendencies observed in non-regulated contexts confirm the role of a complex negotiation at cultural heritage sites and highlight the need to explore possible exchanges of sense in tourists’ encounters with such sites.     

Rethinking the place of emotions in the field through social laboratories

The insights of feminist science and technology studies (STS) into the constructed and situated nature of knowledge have proved crucial to informing feminist geography. Since the rise of emotional geographies, feminist methodologies no longer simply reflect on questions of positionality, partiality, and power relations, but also on the role of emotions in the field. In this article, we argue that a feminist STS perspective has much to offer when thinking about the way emotions are engineered, controlled, and negotiated in research processes. Our engagement with what we call ‘social laboratories’ – i.e., spaces in everyday life where (experimental) research is conducted with human beings – advances debates in feminist geography, as these laboratories crystallize the emotional entanglements feminists encounter in the field. Looking at economic experiments in Ghana and fertility clinics in Mexico, we discuss the difficulties of doing feminist fieldwork in these experimental research spaces. We argue that the constant negotiation of emotions and ethics is crucial to access, assess, and do fieldwork in research settings that do not adhere to feminist ideals, but nevertheless have gendered effects on women's and men's lives. Rethinking ‘the place of emotions in research’ (Bondi 2005, in Emotional Geographies, edited by Joyce Davidson, Liz Bondi, and Mick Smith, 231–246, Aldershot: Ashgate) through social laboratories forges instructive links across feminist/emotional geographies and social studies of science.     

Painting Country: Spatial,Somatic and Linguistic Experience in Central Australian Aboriginal Art

A demonstration that the spatial experience informing some Central Australian Aboriginal art is topographically precise brings into question the relevance of structuralist methodologies for appraising these maps of country. Qualitative aspects of spatial, somatic, linguistic and emotional experiences are found to inform the way‐finding depicted in paintings by artists of three language groups.     

The origins of the modern emotions: Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and the embodied mind

In the history of European ideas, Princess Elisabeth is conventionally viewed as little more than a curiosity, a clever but ultimately unimportant exiled princess who became the confidant, critic, and muse of a far more famous man, René Descartes. Contrary to this view, however, this article argues that Elisabeth made a significant contribution to the development of western philosophy in her own right. Drawing on her letters to Descartes, as well the diaries and correspondence of her associates and a range of secondary sources, it demonstrates that an early understanding of the modern emotions akin to that which later found form in the work of the moral sentiment theorists can be found in Elisabeth’s thought. In particular, drawing on her understanding of the embodied mind, Elisabeth of Bohemia began to develop a hybrid understanding of the passions, identified a role for the emotions in the pursuit of virtue, and began to reconceive the relationship between reason and the emotions that had until then dominated seventeenth-century thought.     

Gay and lesbian emotional geographies of clubbing: reflections from Paris and Turin

Urban nighttime entertainment spaces, including bars, pubs, and clubs, are a crucial space for the performance of gendered social relations and the experience of sexual identities. This article investigates the emotional spaces of commercial gay and lesbian recreation in two different settings: lesbian nights in Paris, France, and gay clubs in Turin, Italy. This research was carried out through direct observation and auto-ethnographic fieldwork. Drawing on the literature from emotional geographies, the article proposes an alternative take on the geography of gay and lesbian clubbing by applying the metaphors of the island and the archipelago from cultural geography to the gay and lesbian scene. The island and archipelago are presented as metaphors that imply emotions, performance, materiality, spatiality, strategy, and imagination in the performance of the gay and lesbian playscape. The article argues that the club, intended as a type of gay and lesbian island, does not necessarily imply a condition of insulation. Rather, the island implies both metaphor and materiality, and movement may also be considered an emotional strategy for gays and lesbians in the heteronormative urban space.     

What Use Are Units? Critical Geographies of Alcohol Policy

Abstract: This paper interrogates the multiple spatialities bound up with the consumption of units as the dominant means of diagnosing “health‐related” alcohol problems and measuring “drunkenness” in international alcohol policy and research. In order to question the power afforded to units, we work at the intersection of theoretical debates concerning biopower and governmentality; emotional, embodied and affective geographies and actor network theory. Presenting empirical research from the UK we contribute to geographical agendas that seek to consider the ontological and epistemological understandings of alcohol, drinking and drunkenness. The paper concludes by calling for dialogue between social, health and medical scientists in order to develop more pertinent ways of understanding and representing the risks and benefits of alcohol consumption.     

Mapping reflexive communities: visualizing the geographies of emotion

Whereas ‘simple modernity’ was characterized by objective space, the grid of the map, and a removal of all subjective symbols or signs, ‘reflexive modernity’ is characterized by a re‐subjectivization of space. Within this space ‘reflexive communities’ emerge to make sense of emotions and experiences, reflecting particular ways of behaving, thinking and being. As geographers one task facing us now is to visualize and map the spaces of reflexive modernization. This paper presents a means of visualizing the text of emotions uncovered in the research encounter—a way of ‘mapping’ reflexive communities—and shows how we can articulate, negotiate and represent, complex emotional landscapes. The ‘maps’—which draw on spatial metaphors that permeate everyday emotions—such as ‘distancing’ ourselves, ‘engaging’, ‘joining’, ‘feeling detached’, ‘embracing’—were developed initially through analysis of in‐depth interviews with long‐term sufferers of myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). Although the key focus of the paper is the experience of long‐term illness, the method of visualizing emotional geographies of everyday life could be applied in any number of fields. As such, it adds to the search across the social sciences for understanding the reflexive nature of contemporary space.     

The empire of chance: How probability changed science and everyday life

Commerce changes the production of wealth in a society as well as its ethics. What is appropriate in a non-commercial society is not necessarily appropriate in a commercial one. Adam Smith criticizes Stoic self-command in commercial societies, rather than embracing it, as is often suggested. He argues that Stoicism, with its promotion of indifference to passions, is an ethic appropriate for savages. Savages live in hard conditions where expressing emotions is detrimental and reprehensible. In contrast, the ease of life brought about by commerce fosters the appropriate expressions and sharing of emotions. Imposing Stoicism on a commercial society is therefore imposing an ethic for savages onto a refined society – something to abhor. Smith’s rejection of Stoicism in commercial societies can thus be seen as a defence of commerce.     

Sukli: uneven exchanges of care work of children left behind in Filipino transnational families

ABSTRACT

This article explores the complicated affective realities of children in the Philippines who engage in the labour of caring from the place of being ‘left behind’. I explore how children demonstrate care for their migrant mothers through various schooling tasks, undergirded by emotional dissonance, and often not through an idealized notion of love or tenderness. These acts demonstrate children allocate care work in transnational families in spite of complex emotional underpinnings I argue that the emotionality in those acts may be anger or frustration but children left behind are making sense of their labour through a culturally localized concept called sukli that connotes uneven exchange in care work to maintain the operations of a transnational family. The paper adds to our understanding of children’s affective experiences of migration within an Asian context.     

The War of Seduction: The Anglo-American Struggle to Engage with the Portuguese Ruling Elite (1943–1948)

Emotions and perceived cultural differences have only recently been subject to sustained attention from international historians. By tracing the role of personal politics in Anglo-American relations with Portugal in the mid-1940s, this paper intends to introduce hitherto neglected culturalist approaches into the historiography. The purpose is to illustrate the importance of cultural factors to scholarly explanation of Anglo-American relations and rivalries, of the decline of British influence over Lisbon and of the continuation of the authoritarian Portuguese regime after the Second World War, albeit integrated into an American sphere of influence.