Emotional Geographies. Eds. Joyce Davidson, Liz Bondi and Mick Smith (2007). Hampshire, GB: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. 258 pp. ISBN 978-0-7546-4375-3
Reviewed by Cheryl Cowdy Crawford, York University
“Whether joyful, heartbreaking or numbing, emotion has the power to transform the shape of our lives, expanding or contracting our horizons, creating new fissures or fixtures we never expected to find. But how do we articulate and negotiate such complex emotional landscapes?”
- Joyce Davidson, Liz Bondi and Mick Smith, “Introduction: Geography’s ‘Emotional Turn’,” Emotional Geographies, 1.
For this contract faculty member of York University, the question with which Davidson et. al. begin their introduction to the collection of essays in Emotional Geographies has had a particularly poignant relevance. The failure to negotiate a contract between my union and my employer has moved me from the front of the lecture hall to the “Northwest Gate,” the barren reaches of a northern parking lot on the edge of my suburban Toronto campus. For 85 days, I have been trying to write this review, thinking about the emotional relationality of people and places when I return home from the fraught space that has become my new emotional landscape: the picket line.
Never has the insecurity of my employment and status been so evident as it is on the physical fringes of the university campus with which I am affiliated, however casually or contractually. Never have I experienced so keenly and viscerally the complexities of the emotional landscapes I inhabit. In this space, I am suddenly an outsider, aware of the odd mixture of emotions I experience: illegitimacy, guilt, loneliness, alienation, disappointment, fear. But also solidarity with, and commitment to, the unusual mix of people who have become my new intellectual and emotional community, for the strike has brought together on the picket line at Northwest Gate three academic departments—English, Environmental Studies, and Kinesiology—who would rarely mix under usual circumstances.
It is interdisciplinarity at its finest, and the experience reminds me, as Davidson, Bondi and Smith do in their introduction to Emotional Geographies, that emotions have a place in the working lives of academics. Or, to put it more emphatically, “Clearly, our emotions matter” (1). Spatial affect is, in the essays included in the collection, recognised as materially important, not simply to the discipline of geography, but to other fields of academic study as well. Indeed, the editors express a desire to undermine rigid “disciplinary boundaries” (3). Contributors to the collection seek alternative perspectives in our understanding of the spatiality and temporality of emotions that will resonate with scholars as varied as our picket line, particularly those who are interested in the intersections of space, culture, and affect (3). While the editors define theirs as a “spatially-engaged approach to the study of emotions” in their introduction, it is quite evident that the text functions also as an emotionally-engaged approach to the study of space.
I must acknowledge that I am looking for something quite specific each evening when I return home – exhausted, numb, and chilled to the bone – and pick up this book, filled with an emotion that almost feels like hope. Ways to articulate and negotiate my relationship with the spaces and people of my intellectual community. An understanding of the “fissures,” in these relationships, ruptures which have been made effable by the change in the part of the landscape I can now inhabit. This is what I am seeking.
Admittedly, not all of the chapters in Emotional Geographies respond to the particularities of my emotional and research demands. As the editors explain, the volume is organised around three core themes: “the location of emotions in bodies and places, the emotional relationality of people and environments, and representations of emotional geographies” (3). In section one, “Locating Emotion,” each chapter explores the corporeality of emotions, including how dying, healing, and aging bodies intersect with place. Most intriguing are the chapters on travel, such as Jennie Germann Molz’s “Guilty Pleasures of the Golden Arches,” a study of emotional responses to McDonald’s restaurants in narratives of travel, and John Urry’s “The Place of Emotions within Place.” I appreciate Molz’s piece for its recognition of emotional ambivalence in our experiences of emotional landscapes, while Urry leaves me wondering if my desire to experience place meaningfully will always be hopelessly unrequited.
[Image: Gavan Watson, some rights reserved]
It is most obviously the second theme that speaks most to my emotional and spatial experiences of a labour dispute. Chapters in Section Two, “Relating Emotion,” each perform in different ways analyses of distinctive “emotional terrains,” to quote Hester Parr, Chris Philo and Nicola Burns, authors of chapter seven’s study of the emotional geographies of the Scottish Highlands. Something in their recognition of “the realities, processes and consequences of emotional repression as it happens in a distinctive geographical setting” rings true for me, especially now, as I return to this review in the aftermath of the strike at York (99). Their spatialisation of repression encourages readers to consider the ways emotional terrains—whether remote rural regions or the landscapes of educational institutions—may have trouble allowing emotions to matter, particularly when “emotional displays” are disruptive (87). (Repression is the most pragmatic of returns to the business of education, and so the evidence of the ways disruptive emotional displays marked the emotional terrain at York have long been removed, existing now only in photographs like the one above). Other chapters in this section, particularly David Conradson’s “Freedom, Space and Perspective: Moving Encounters with Other Ecologies” pose interesting questions about the nature of the relationship between self and landscape. “What might it mean” Conradson ponders, “to conceptualise the engagement between the self and landscape as a relational encounter”? (103) The essay lucidly draws on notions of affect from psychoanalysis and human geography to inform its analysis of people’s encounters with an English landscape, offering a unique perspective for those interested in eco-criticism.
As a scholar interested in representations of suburban space in literary texts, the latter section, “Representing Emotion,” is also of particular interest to me. Most compelling here are Deborah Thien’s chapter “Intimate Distances: Considering Questions of ‘Us’” and Owain Jones’ “An Ecology of Emotion, Memory, Self and Landscape.” Thien challenges in surprising ways some of my pre-conceived notions about the ethical relationship between intimacy and space, calling upon readers to reconsider the value of distance, difference and alterity when intimacy is examined as a “spatial affair.” I appreciate her work for its political commitment; likewise Jones, who reminds us that “emotions are intensely political, gendered, and spatially articulated” (207).
The collection ends appropriately and effectively with Liz Bondi’s “The Place of Emotions in Research,” which supplements the introduction’s defense of geography’s “emotional turn,” insisting on a more concerted appreciation of emotion in research practice. While she focuses on the necessity of acknowledging the emotional dimensions of scientific research in particular, scholars of all disciplines will certainly benefit from Bondi’s reminder that “our feeling states and our thinking are closely intertwined” (236). What strikes me most is Bondi’s assertion that it is quite possible to acknowledge our emotional and rational responses to research critically, and thus to sidestep participation in a more gratuitous “‘emotionalisation’ of culture” (237). Overall, Emotional Geographies elegantly succeeds in demonstrating just how critical participation in an emotionally- and rationally-engaged collaboration might look. It occurs to me that perhaps I have found something I didn’t know I was looking for during the process of preparing this review, which is a permission of sorts. Permission to recognize the place of my untidy emotions in all the colliding facets of my professional life. For this, I am most appreciative.