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 us to experience joy. They can thus also seem “external” affairs; we may “find” happiness on the beach, find that graveyards “cause” despair, or find that we are bored by classrooms and rainy days that “make” us long to be elsewhere. Emotions are, then, relational, caught up with (in and around) people and places in profoundly important ways, and geographers are well placed to investigate such phenomena that shape and are shaped by the different—sociocultural, economic, political, and so on—worlds we live in.

One of the projects undertaken by recent works in “emotional geographies” has been to uncover emotion's hidden histories in the discipline and to reveal its suppression as well as expression in our various ways of “writing the world.” Emotions have thus been shown to matter for geographies of all kinds, even those supposedly abstract or, say, economic. It is widely acknowledged that people's feelings about and “sense” of place will have an impact on the most significant purchase many make during their lives and can help transform those mortgaged houses into comfortable, comforting homes. Considering larger spatial scales, global financial markets are notoriously sensitive to consumer confidence or fears, and a population's aspirations and anxieties have long been seen as significant for political geographies too; the increasing presence and importance of “hope” in political discourse is becoming difficult to ignore, especially in the United States. Beyond such subdisciplinary concerns, emotions are clearly central for contemporary human geography—hardly surprising once we recognize how vital to human experience our emotions really are.

Recent geographical attempts to research and theorize emotions tend to coalesce around four main approaches or schools of thought. Feminist geographers such as Gillian Rose have been influential in questioning dualisms and insisting that all experience and knowledge is situated and relational, embodied and full of feeling yet never separate from or opposed to reason. Geographic phenomenologists such as Yi Fu Tuan and Edward Casey provide insights into perceptions of and emotional responses to particular places. Psychoanalytic/psychotherapeutic geographers, such as Liz Bondi and David Sibley, highlight the importance of the formation and maintenance of psycho-social boundaries for understanding the emotional intersections between selves and spaces. Finally, nonrepresentational theorists such as Nigel Thrift attempt to negotiate the challenges associated with articulating emotional relations and affects by focusing on performance, on what people do rather than what they say they do. While such approaches differ in many ways, their shared interests are substantial and help advance geographical understandings of emotions that motivate how and with whom we spend our time, how and where we live and work, and indeed what we, as geographers, choose to study.

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