Emotions, Geography and

In the history of the discipline, despite there having been no explicit body of work (until recently) related to emotional geographies (geographic knowledge written with and/or on emotions) or the geography of emotions (a mapping of different emotional states), much work in human geography speaks about how people emotionally embody space and place. Forming a wide-ranging and sophisticated intellectual backlash against the silence of positivistic and masculinist human geography on questions of embodied human, humanistic, feminist, psychoanalytic, and nonrepresentational approaches in the discipline all have conceptualized diverse emotional relations and spaces in everyday life.

In general, references to emotions, feelings, and affect in academic work indicate an interest in intense physical and social experiences (commonly represented as love, happiness, sadness, etc.) that have profound impacts on individuals, their relations with others, and their relations with things in the world. To be more precise in defining emotions, we can say that these are simultaneously embodied, psychological, social, cultural, and physical states of being. There are debates in academia as to whether these states are universal or culturally specific phenomena, but there is agreement that they are multifaceted and complicated and cannot be easily explained by either biological or social determinants alone. A further explanatory distinction refers to the difference between emotions and feelings. It is possible, for example, to associate feelings with intense and immediate bodily sensations (e.g., people refer to shivering with excitement) and to regard emotions as cultural productions whereby we consciously understand such bodily responses as[Page 129] particular sorts of emotions. Hence, conscious emotional experiences make sense to us through the cultural resources available as we learn what it means to feel certain sensations. Thinking through how such embodied intensities are encountered, recognized, reflected, and acted on through different sorts of spaces is the key work of the geographer interested in emotions.

To use a topical example that might demonstrate the importance of thinking through emotional geographies, we could highlight the range of human intensities felt as a result of the events on September 11, 2001, in New York. Due to a mixture of political, terrorist, and military maneuvers, people in both the United States and Iraq, for example, embody a range of everyday emotional states in relation to a range of spatial scales from the body to the home, to the city, to the nation, and beyond. Intense embodied feelings of fear, insecurity, and threat might accompany emotional anger, for example, and be manifest through these scales in different or similar ways for the people who live in these two places. Attention to these states of being and the geographies through which they are configured could take different directions and could include changing senses of place (perhaps using a humanistic approach), women's fears about public spaces (using a feminist approach), feelings about Western and non-Western difference (using a psychoanalytic approach), and remapping bodily consciousness during times of war (using a nonrepresentational approach). There is insufficient space here to unfold the nuances of these possibilities in terms of approaches to this example, but this list indicates something of the orientation that each might have toward the emotional geographies in question. Overall, geographers are contributing to the study of emotions by paying attention to how emotions are thoroughly implicated in our everyday spatial experiences, and such work tells us that although emotions are difficult to define and complex, they are nonetheless central to the ways in which we live in the world.

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