Affectual intensities: Writing with resonance as feminist methodology

Abstract

This paper advances current debates about feminist methodologies in geography by attending to affectual intensities and their resonance. Affectual intensities emerge through encounters between different bodies and objects, and are deeply power-laden, enabling, disabling, transforming, and restricting geographic research. We attend to three moments of resonance that surfaced in Elisabeth Militz's field research on nationalism in Azerbaijan. In each, we show how attending to affectual intensities reveals much about the work of power in nationalism and in the constitution of geographic knowledge about it. The paper calls for an affectual methodology, a process of critical writing, reflection, and rewriting about moments of resonance between different bodies and objects in the field, and as we analyse, present, and write up our data. This is a layered, dialogic, and collaborative writing strategy that, we argue, enables us to write through and with affect. In particular, our work contributes a nuanced and multi-layered approach to uncover often-neglected power structures of predominantly white and heteronormative geographic research practice. K E Y W O R D S affect, autoethnography, Azerbaijan, feminist geography, nationalism, postcolonial research position 1 | POWER AND EMOTIONS IN FEMINIST GEOGRAPHIC RESEARCH PRACTICES Feminist geographers have long interrogated power in research encounters, arguing that "attention to emotions in research has the potential to reinvigorate feminist practices of reflexivity" (Laliberté & Schurr, 2016, p. 73). Ahmed's (2014) idea of "stickiness" or McKittrick's (2006) work on "bodymemory" (see also Crawford, 2018b) conceptualise how research encounters are always emotion-laden and imbued with power, reproducing and legitimating social hierarchy. We, as researchers, must recognise and critically reflect on the long histories of power relations in our, seemingly innate, gut feelings. Yet, how to navigate this terrain methodologically?In this paper we build on Noxolo's call to "'write' the body both as a social, political and economic location and as a sensory agent" (2009, p. 63; emphasis in original). We suggest a methodological intervention that centres layered, dialogic, and collaborative writing. We describe this as an affectual methodology by fusing the affective with the emotional (see also Tolia-Kelly, 2006). In so doing, our intervention forms part of a wider conceptual move to bridge intellectual divides between geographies of affect, informed by non-representational theory and feminist emotional geographies (see for example, Colls, 2012;Schurr, 2014). With Noxolo, Ahmed, and others, we understand an affectual methodology as the outcome of "how we come into contact with objects and others" (Ahmed, 2014, p. 208). Thus, how we produce, handle,

Critical Reflexivity in Political Ecology Research: How can the Covid-19 Pandemic Transform us Into Better Researchers?

“…Our second method, resonances, implied engaging with the emotions triggered by the reading of others' auto-ethnographies during the Covid-19 pandemic. The ways in which we related to our colleagues' emotions during research encounters, and discussing our own emotional and experiential knowledges of research, helped us unmask the privileging involvement of our bodily histories in research encounters (Militz et al, 2020). We are convinced that feelings of connection, disconnection, anger, frustration, irritation, and helplessness (Lee, 2019) expressed in relation to our colleagues' account on their research encounters during the Covid-19 pandemic contribute to revealing what normally tends to be silenced.…”

“…To navigate methodologically and collectively the fact that "research-encounters are always emotion-laden and imbued with power, reproducing and legitimating social hierarchy" (Militz, et al, 2020, 429), we use Militz, Faria and Schurr's affectual methodology. Affectual methodology is defined by Sara Ahmed as "how we come into contact with objects and others" [Ahmed, 2014, in Militz et al (2020. Affectual methodology situates the researchers and the research participants within research encounters in ways that call for transparency and positionality in particular to lay bare the researchers' privileges.…”

“…Like Militz et al (2020), we engage with two methods: autoethnography and resonances. Auto-ethnography is intended to "make the emotions and positions constituting research encounters and knowledge production more explicit" (Militz et al, 2020, 430) and to help unravel the workings of power in research processes.…”

“…And, nevertheless, critical autoethnography has the potential to force us to position ourselves, question our responsibilities and reconsider our power to affect others. Militz et al (2020) also report some of these limitations, explaining how autoethnography can challenge the reader's assumption, without necessarily challenging the researcher's biases. To try and overcome these limitations, just like Militz, Faria, and Schurr did, in this article we engaged in a collective affectual writing process-via resonances-, to make us individually and collectively problematize what we tend to take for granted, the reasons of feeling uncomfortable in certain situations, and how we sometimes tend to "normalize" discomfort, thereby reinforcing unequal power relations.…”

Feeling otherwise: Ambivalent affects and the politics of critique in geography

“…But it is also the case that work on affect, and by extension affirmation (and negativity), often emerges directly from feminist, queer, and postcolonial work, even if this work is not always centered in disciplinary conversations about the affirmative. The project to question modes of critique, to think otherwise, and to embed thought as an embodied activity indelibly connected to the researcher’s positionality is one that can be broadly associated with feminist geographies since their inception, albeit in myriad and changing forms (England, 1994; Militz et al, 2019; Rose, 1997; Sultana, 2007). From this perspective, it is not surprising that feminist and queer geographers have developed some of the most productive approaches to affirmative and reparative modes of inquiry precisely because, at their best, they bring to the fore questions of difference and politics.…”