Emotions, Geography and

Emotions have always had an important part to play in the theory and practice of geography. This observation holds despite what might be seen as a recent “emotional turn,” or persistent academic desires to keep such affects under scholarly wraps. Among other reasons for their apparent absence from mainstream geography is the frustrating intangibility of emotions; they are impossible to [Page 892]locate, map, or measure in ways characteristic of the geographer's more typical field or object of study. Emotions are difficult to place but are nonetheless always everywhere. At times, they seem to come from “within” to affect the world around us, as when feeling “blue” all but blinds us to the beauty of a place that at other times (in other moods) can move ...