Ordinary Affects

Feeling the Scope of Solidarity: The Role of Emotions for Volunteers Supporting Refugees in Germany

“…Responding to the need to offer persuasive reasons, rather than simply reflecting on intrinsic motivation, social agents are compelled to engage-often publicly-with private notions of what is accepted and understood as common sense, as well as with contested and opposing visions articulated in 5 The term 'atmosphere', used above in a rather colloquial way, can shed light on this problem: From a sociological point of view an atmosphere is a field of emergence, just as the metereological background of the metaphor implies. Rather describing a definite state of things (in terms of weather: rain, wind, temperature) it represents an impersonal intensity or environment (McCormack, 2008;Stewart, 2007) that "presses upon us" to think, act or feel in a certain direction, exerting a force on everyone who is surrounded by it. Just as the metereological ones, sociopolitical atmospheres result from the interplay of myriads of micro-level events, i.e.…”

Affect and discourse – What’s the problem? From affect as excess to affective/discursive practice

“…Research focused primarily on interpreting and working with patterns in talk and text seems unlikely to deliver. Scepticism about the value of discourse research extends across the range of discourse approaches: from Foucauldian inspired work on discursive formations and critical post-structuralist theory (for example, Massumi, 2002;Sedgwick, 2003;Stewart, 2007), to concerns about the overly docile bodies in discourse research (Cromby, 2007;Blackman and Venn, 2010), to doubts about qualitative research based on narrative (Clough, 2009), to critiques of more fine-grain work in discursive psychology and conversation analysis (for example, Blackman and Cromby, 2007;. Sedgwick (2003), for instance, argues staunchly that critical theory has become overly enmeshed in a paranoid reading strategy -the act of critical unmasking has become the only possible analytic mode.…”

Resonance of Unseen Things

“…Many people do end their worlds, unworlding what they've made (Stewart 2007), drifting off to spin a new one. After Carla left, the little UFO Experiencers group passed into the hands of a bright, intense, selfeducated young man named "Lenny," with a keenly organized, passionate take on every bit of literature he had ever seen on the topic of the paranormal.…”

“…At other times, my voice opens up to a play of reported speech, in a kind of ethnographic version of poetic ventriloquism (S. Stewart 1995) or a form of "contaminated critique" (K. Stewart 1991). 9 At times, in the critical mode developed by scholars such as Kathleen Stewart (1996Stewart ( , 2007, I try to represent other people's verbal style inside my own voice, presenting their words as reported speech inside a story I myself am telling-erasing neither of us, but opening up my memory and interpretation to their words, and compressing us both into the imaginative and hermeneutic zone that, through my writing, we share. I often let the narratives themselves perform their own analysis; as Feld puts it, "Stories create analytic gestures .…”

“…It makes sense, and remains mysterious at the same time. This effect produces rushes of feeling, like the "static state illed with vibratory motion or resonance" that pulses suddenly in ordinary unspoken moments (Stewart 2007). Like an art object, a sense of wonder resonates out from the story itself, moving beyond its borders; "for resonance, like nostalgia, is impure, a hybrid forged in .…”