This paper aims to better understand the role of emotions in academia, and their part in producin... more This paper aims to better understand the role of emotions in academia, and their part in producing, and challenging, an increasingly normalized neoliberal academy. It unfolds from two narratives that foreground emotions in and across academic spaces and practices, to critically explore how knowledges and positions are constructed and circulated. It then moves to consider these issues through the lens of care as a political stance towards being and becoming academics in neoliberal times. Our aim is to contribute to the burgeoning literature on emotional geographies, explicitly bringing this work into conversation with resurgent debates surrounding an ethic of care, as part of a politic of critiquing individualism and managerialism in (and beyond) the academy. We consider the ways in which neoliberal university structures circulate particular affects, prompting emotions such as desire and anxiety, and the internalisation of competition and audit as embodied scholars. Our narratives exemplify how attendant emotions and affect can reverberate and be further reproduced through university cultures, and diffuse across personal and professional lives. We argue that emotions in academia matter, mutually co-producing everyday social relations and practices at and across all levels. We are interested in their political implications, and how neoliberal norms can be shifted through practices of caring-with.
This paper develops the concept of emotional citizenry, as exceeding a fixed status of citizenshi... more This paper develops the concept of emotional citizenry, as exceeding a fixed status of citizenship to be achieved in the formal political sphere, rather as a process grounded in the complexities of places, lives and feelings. Drawing on encounters between refugees, asylum seekers and more settled residents in a befriending scheme in Newcastle, England, it focusses on the emotional geographies of intercultural interactions, produced through everyday spaces. Contact in the scheme involves difficult negotiations of difference, yet it is precisely the emotional that opens up the potential of/for making connections, through which nuanced relationships develop, dualisms are destabilised, and meaningful encounters emerge in fragile yet hopeful ways. I argue that these emotional encounters evidence desires to (re)make society at the local level, beyond normalised productions and practices of citizenship as bounded in/outsiders, in which a politics of engagement is enacted. Analysis suggests that the felt, interpersonal dimensions of such praxis, the emotionality of these specific notions belonging and relationality, push at the concept of cosmopolitan citizenship to register something more. This paper contributes to debate on everyday practices of citizenship as already taking place, and poses questions to how individual relations may anticipate collective change in how we live together in an era of super-diversity.
Starting with the observation that social science research has had a relatively limited impact on... more Starting with the observation that social science research has had a relatively limited impact on climate change science, we identify the co-incidence of two historically unprecedented global processes - projected critical environmental changes and seemingly unrelenting urban growth – as a research opportunity to create social science knowledges that can make a key intervention in the climate change conversation. Treating these mega-changes as intimately connected social products, we use Jacobs' urban development theory to identify cities as special places for economic, social and political innovations. Thus our ‘urban century' may have the collective creativity necessary to deal with the travails expected of it as ‘crisis century'. The practical research implications of the theory are an eclectic bottom up approach to knowledge production wherein participatory action research and actor network theory are featured. As a final step we consider the possibility of a global ...
Starting with the observation that social science research has had a relatively limited impact on... more Starting with the observation that social science research has had a relatively limited impact on climate change science, we identify the co-incidence of two historically unprecedented global processes - projected critical environmental changes and seemingly unrelenting urban growth – as a research opportunity to create social science knowledges that can make a key intervention in the climate change conversation. Treating these mega-changes as intimately connected social products, we use Jacobs' urban development theory to identify cities as special places for economic, social and political innovations. Thus our ‘urban century' may have the collective creativity necessary to deal with the travails expected of it as ‘crisis century'. The practical research implications of the theory are an eclectic bottom up approach to knowledge production wherein participatory action research and actor network theory are featured. As a final step we consider the possibility of a global ...
Recent years have seen a rapid rise in the political saliency of the ever growing volumes of muni... more Recent years have seen a rapid rise in the political saliency of the ever growing volumes of municipal waste produced in the UK. In this paper, we examine how one particular part of the municipal waste stream biodegradable waste has come under the policy spotlight. As targets to ...
In this paper I want to talk about the use of participatory approaches to 'teaching', d... more In this paper I want to talk about the use of participatory approaches to 'teaching', drawing on my own efforts to explore research ethics with undergraduate students. I first critically address what we 'teach' regarding ethics in geography, given that 'codes of ethics' and 'good ...
Abstract: A new field of “public geographies” is taking shape (Fuller 2008) in geography's m... more Abstract: A new field of “public geographies” is taking shape (Fuller 2008) in geography's mainstream journals. While much is “traditional”, with intellectuals disseminating academic research via non-academic outlets (Castree 2006; Mitchell 2008; Oslender 2007), less visible is the “organic” work and its “more involved intellectualizing, pursued through working with area-based or single-interest groups, in which the process itself may be the outcome”(Ward 2006: 499; see Fuller and Askins 2010). A number of well-known projects ...
How do we engage with research ethics? How can we engage with research ethics? From 'doing&#... more How do we engage with research ethics? How can we engage with research ethics? From 'doing' them, to 'teaching' them, to sitting in committees about them This is a brief effort at teasing out some of the problems and potentialities of encapsulating issues that, I argue, are ...
This paper aims to better understand the role of emotions in academia, and their part in producin... more This paper aims to better understand the role of emotions in academia, and their part in producing, and challenging, an increasingly normalized neoliberal academy. It unfolds from two narratives that foreground emotions in and across academic spaces and practices, to critically explore how knowledges and positions are constructed and circulated. It then moves to consider these issues through the lens of care as a political stance towards being and becoming academics in neoliberal times. Our aim is to contribute to the burgeoning literature on emotional geographies, explicitly bringing this work into conversation with resurgent debates surrounding an ethic of care, as part of a politic of critiquing individualism and managerialism in (and beyond) the academy. We consider the ways in which neoliberal university structures circulate particular affects, prompting emotions such as desire and anxiety, and the internalisation of competition and audit as embodied scholars. Our narratives exemplify how attendant emotions and affect can reverberate and be further reproduced through university cultures, and diffuse across personal and professional lives. We argue that emotions in academia matter, mutually co-producing everyday social relations and practices at and across all levels. We are interested in their political implications, and how neoliberal norms can be shifted through practices of caring-with.
This paper develops the concept of emotional citizenry, as exceeding a fixed status of citizenshi... more This paper develops the concept of emotional citizenry, as exceeding a fixed status of citizenship to be achieved in the formal political sphere, rather as a process grounded in the complexities of places, lives and feelings. Drawing on encounters between refugees, asylum seekers and more settled residents in a befriending scheme in Newcastle, England, it focusses on the emotional geographies of intercultural interactions, produced through everyday spaces. Contact in the scheme involves difficult negotiations of difference, yet it is precisely the emotional that opens up the potential of/for making connections, through which nuanced relationships develop, dualisms are destabilised, and meaningful encounters emerge in fragile yet hopeful ways. I argue that these emotional encounters evidence desires to (re)make society at the local level, beyond normalised productions and practices of citizenship as bounded in/outsiders, in which a politics of engagement is enacted. Analysis suggests that the felt, interpersonal dimensions of such praxis, the emotionality of these specific notions belonging and relationality, push at the concept of cosmopolitan citizenship to register something more. This paper contributes to debate on everyday practices of citizenship as already taking place, and poses questions to how individual relations may anticipate collective change in how we live together in an era of super-diversity.
Starting with the observation that social science research has had a relatively limited impact on... more Starting with the observation that social science research has had a relatively limited impact on climate change science, we identify the co-incidence of two historically unprecedented global processes - projected critical environmental changes and seemingly unrelenting urban growth – as a research opportunity to create social science knowledges that can make a key intervention in the climate change conversation. Treating these mega-changes as intimately connected social products, we use Jacobs' urban development theory to identify cities as special places for economic, social and political innovations. Thus our ‘urban century' may have the collective creativity necessary to deal with the travails expected of it as ‘crisis century'. The practical research implications of the theory are an eclectic bottom up approach to knowledge production wherein participatory action research and actor network theory are featured. As a final step we consider the possibility of a global ...
Starting with the observation that social science research has had a relatively limited impact on... more Starting with the observation that social science research has had a relatively limited impact on climate change science, we identify the co-incidence of two historically unprecedented global processes - projected critical environmental changes and seemingly unrelenting urban growth – as a research opportunity to create social science knowledges that can make a key intervention in the climate change conversation. Treating these mega-changes as intimately connected social products, we use Jacobs' urban development theory to identify cities as special places for economic, social and political innovations. Thus our ‘urban century' may have the collective creativity necessary to deal with the travails expected of it as ‘crisis century'. The practical research implications of the theory are an eclectic bottom up approach to knowledge production wherein participatory action research and actor network theory are featured. As a final step we consider the possibility of a global ...
Recent years have seen a rapid rise in the political saliency of the ever growing volumes of muni... more Recent years have seen a rapid rise in the political saliency of the ever growing volumes of municipal waste produced in the UK. In this paper, we examine how one particular part of the municipal waste stream biodegradable waste has come under the policy spotlight. As targets to ...
In this paper I want to talk about the use of participatory approaches to 'teaching', d... more In this paper I want to talk about the use of participatory approaches to 'teaching', drawing on my own efforts to explore research ethics with undergraduate students. I first critically address what we 'teach' regarding ethics in geography, given that 'codes of ethics' and 'good ...
Abstract: A new field of “public geographies” is taking shape (Fuller 2008) in geography's m... more Abstract: A new field of “public geographies” is taking shape (Fuller 2008) in geography's mainstream journals. While much is “traditional”, with intellectuals disseminating academic research via non-academic outlets (Castree 2006; Mitchell 2008; Oslender 2007), less visible is the “organic” work and its “more involved intellectualizing, pursued through working with area-based or single-interest groups, in which the process itself may be the outcome”(Ward 2006: 499; see Fuller and Askins 2010). A number of well-known projects ...
How do we engage with research ethics? How can we engage with research ethics? From 'doing&#... more How do we engage with research ethics? How can we engage with research ethics? From 'doing' them, to 'teaching' them, to sitting in committees about them This is a brief effort at teasing out some of the problems and potentialities of encapsulating issues that, I argue, are ...
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