GEOG 173 any house as a fellow landowner, as one who has stood up
QUIZ 3 REVIEWER to the elites and won.
EMBODYING EMOTION SENSING SPACE: INTRODUCING
EMOTIONAL GEOGRAPHIES (Davidson & Milligan)
 Our first and foremost, most immediate and intimately felt
geography is the body, the site of emotional experience.
Emotions, to be sure, take place within and around this
closest of spatial scales.
 There is little we can do with our bodies that we can think
apart from feeling.
 In attempts to articulate emotion, we embody it
linguistically. The articulation of emotion is spatially
mediated in a manner that is not simply metaphorical. Our
emotional relations and interactions weave through and
help form the fabric of our unique personal geographies.
 While we attribute emotional agency or capacity to a
surprising range of external sources, our heartfelt
articulations of emotion, themselves, acknowledge their
interactional quality.
 Our emotions matter. They have tangible effects on our
surroundings and can shape the very nature and experience
of our being-in-the-world. Emotions can clearly alter the
way the world is for us, affecting our sense of time as well
as space. Our sense of who and what we are is continually
(re)shaped by how we feel.
 The imagined or projected substance of our future
experience will alter in relation to our current emotional
state.
 Emotions are understandable—‘sensible’—only in the
context of particular places. Likewise, place must be felt to
make sense. This leads to our feeling that meaningful
senses space emerge only via movements between people
and places. Perhaps through an exploration of diverse
senses of space, we could become better placed to
appreciate the emotionally dynamic spatiality of
contemporary social life.
 Emotions might be seen as a form of connective tissue that
links experiential geographies of the human psyche and
physique with(in) broader social geographies of place.
EMOTIONAL GEOGRAPHIES OF DEVELOPMENT (Wright)
 Development tends to equate rationality with a state of non-
emotion.
 Both historically, and in contemporary life, the ‘othered’
are regularly portrayed as incapable of thinking or acting
rationally in direct contrast to the exalted rational, male,
white, heterosexual developed subject.
 Emotions are relational, they are found in between people,
and in between people and place. Emotions produce and are
produced by encounters.
 While emotions are heavily implicated in the production
and reproduction of colonialisms, they are also bound up
with the production of resistances and alternatives to
development. The effect of emotions is both progressive
and regressive.
 Development’s objects are feeling subjects, complex,
intense, and alive.
 The study: Hacienda Bino, Kabankalan City, Negros
Occidental
o Organizations: Paghida-et sa Kauswagan
Development Group (PDG), MAPISAN,
MASIPAG
 Emotions animate in complex, unpredictable ways. To act
is to respond to affect and to produce other affects.
 The meaning of success is defined in more-than-rational
terms. Success is to feel a lack of shame, to be able to enter
 Despite having a successful land reform project which
brought upon the distribution of land, among other things,
workers continue to struggle.
DARK TOURISM
People’s fascination with places where other people were brutally
killed or massacred or places where great tragedies happened
WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT WHAT
WE FEEL
 Home and workplace
 What we feel about spaces of inclusions and exclusions
 How sexuality is encouraged/discouraged due to society’s
normative reactions
THE EFFECT OF ‘AFFECT’
 Community lives (urban, rural)
 National lives (nation, nationalism)
 Global lives
THE SPATIALIZATION OF EMOTION
Emotion constructs and interprets the world
MEMORY
 Not a retrieval of the past
 Fresh, new creation
o Memories are retrieved into the conscious realism
and something new is created
o Memory is a spatial rearrangement
MEMORY AND GEOGRAPHICAL IMAGINATIONS
 Memory is spatial
 Bound by processes of place
 Emotional attachments to place (e.g. place of childhood)
 “being-in-place” = a being in one place
EMOTIONS IN RESEARCH
 Emotions are usually seen as non-scientific, irrational, and
non-modern. However, they are central to research in the
social sciences.
 How do we use emotions in research then?
o Emotions are gateways to information
o They reveal more insights than in
traditional/neutral data gathering
THE DANGEERS OF OVERUSING EMOTIONS AS
ANALYTICAL TOOLS
 There is a tendency to think of emotions as just one and
personal (individualized and not collective) and vice versa
 There is a tendency to equate suffering with the Global
South and pleasure with the Global North
REASON AND EMOTION
 “…reason does not, cannot, exist separately from emotions,
that emotions are what help define and create reason”
 We need to veer away from the modernist notion that does
not consider emotions in all aspects of everyday life
“DON’T DREAM, IT’S OVER”
 Consideration of emotions is imperative if we are to move
beyond development’s modernist roots towards more
postcolonial understandings
A CALL TO BE SENSIBLE
  Sensible to the diverse, complex, and nuanced worlds that
exist, that development, colonial powers, governments, and
myriad experts often refuse to see or acknowledge
SELF LANDSCAPE MANAGEMENT
 Emotion from environmental encounters
o Capacity to be moved when experiencing natural
surroundings
 Distance from everyday routines –
more attuned to inner self, the inner
monologue
 Emotional gains
 Landscapes as therapeutic settings
 Self and landscape
o Relational (good in others, distasteful in others)
o “ecology of place”
 Interest in the broad spectrum of
entities that comprise a place and the
interactions between them
 Complex dynamics of feeling that
sometimes lie “at the edge of semantic
availability”
o Individuals become imbricated within particular
ecologies of place
o Emotions – whether happiness, sadness, elation,
gloom, relief, or anger – arise in part from
embodied physiological and psychosocial
responses to the constituent elements of those
places
 Not a product of environmental
determinism
 Relations are typically characterized by
interplay rather than unidirectional
forcing
CASE STUDY: HOLTON LEE, DORSET, UK
 Access to Holton Lee is about access to a particular
emotional domain
 An environment which affords a certain sense of freedom
and internal respite
 Guests share reminiscences, make phone calls, recall
images and feelings from the landscape
 Internalize positive feelings of the landscape to fold them
into themselves
 Extend the temporal duration of the landscape’s affective
influence upon them
 It is about the relations carried within them, internalized
from other places
 Shaped less by their surroundings – not the place but their
relationalities
SELF-LANDSCAPE ENCOUNTERS: AN EPILOGUE
 Emotions from other ecologies are hinged on relational
aspects
o Ecological conception of place
o Perspective which takes place with interaction of
human, non-human, and material entities
 People remember the things that happened, more than the
place. There are also encounters with things and entities
that are not human.
Food and travelling are intertwined: Usually when people travel, food
tourism is a thing.
 Thomas Cook: Travel provides food for the mind
 Consumption of places is by literally ingesting the foods
available in those places
 Food consumption recurs as a key theme in travel
narratives
o Tasting the ‘other’ and experiencing other
cultures through food
o Eating familiar foods that signify home to the
traveler
MCDONALDIZATION
Familiar Golden Arches logo = global icon, symbol of Western
cultural imperialism
EMOTIONS FROM EATING OUT
 What are the paradoxical meanings and feelings that McDo
evokes for those eating at (or avoiding) McDo?
 The global reach of McDo’s standardized food and
environment
 A site of global homogeneity and a site of local specificity
(e.g. Maharaja Burgers in India, McKiwi in New Zealand)
PARADOXICAL FEELINGS
 A ‘taste of home’ even though, travelers claim, they never
eat at McDo’s when they are at home – they don’t like local
eateries, but prefer McDo because they can more or less
predict what the menu is
 McDo as global and local space; ‘home’ and foreign
 George Ritzer: There is a lot of emotional baggage wrapped
up in McDo, which it has built on and exploited to create a
large number of highly devoted customers. Their
commitment to McDo is more emotional than it is rational.
MIXED EMOTIONS
 Travelers don’t always or only feel devotion to McDo
 Emotional responses to McDo are complicated and varied
o Desire and delight
o Disdain and disappointment
o Shame and gratification – ‘ashamed’ and ‘hate to
admit’ that they ‘slipped’
MCDO AS ‘FORBIDDEN PLEASURE’
 Shameful pleasure of overindulging in something travelers
feel they’re not supposed to have
 ‘indulging’, ‘scarfing’, ‘gorging’, and ‘succumbing to
temptation’
 Tied into associations between overeating, eating disorders,
and obesity
SPATIALIZATIONS OF TRAVELER’S STORIES
 Travelers struggle to maintain a sense of an adventuring
identity
 Class distinction between ‘travelers (open-ended)’ and
other ‘tourists (come back, lower class)’
o Bolster the upper/lower class distinctions
o Cheap transportation, tourist packages
o Tourism became negatively associated with mass
travel and packaged tours to predictable
destinations
o Travel became associated with challenging
journeys off the beaten track and authentic
encounters with local cultures
 Traveler’s admission of ‘guilt’ are very playful, and not
hidden or private; more amusing rather than shameful
 Due to a wider cultural ambivalence regarding food
restaurants
 Due to travelers’ emotional responses to political and
cultural implications of globalization and their own global
mobility
IS MCDO A REMINDER OF HOME?
  What is ‘home’ in the global era where mobility is more
frequent?
 Familiar interiors remind some of home to maintain
‘sanity’; “taste of home”, “home cravings”
 Space of familiarity, predictability, cleanliness, orderliness,
and belonging
o McDo menus aren’t just the things that are
expected to be uniform across branches. It is also
the branding that comes with the style of
architecture.
 American-esque ‘wasteland’ of McDo
 Localizations of menu as a business strategy

MCDO AS A PARADOXICAL STATE

 Mixed emotions for what McDo represents
 Simultaneously home and foreign, local and lgobal

IN SUMMARY
 Emotional geographies – non-representational; affective
 Emotions are seen as important to better understand
everyday life, research and development, and how they
work in conjunction with reason and logic