Taking Place: Affective Urban Geographies

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aking Place research group proposes to attend to the ways in which particular places elicit networks of affective resonances. The critical practice of examining emotive responses to the external environment has recently gained prominence across a wide spectrum of academic disciplines, including geography, literary studies, anthropology, history, and philosophy. Given its flexibility across diverse modes of analysis, the notion of affect can be deployed in an interdisciplinary context to open up creative new insights into the ways we encounter, live in, and move through particular places. For instance, our group intends to explore the ways in which affective relations to place vary in different geopolitical and socioeconomic contexts, such as the global south. Furthermore, issues of entitlement, displacement and spatially configured processes of identity formation can lead to substantially fraught types of affective geographies. We intend to push such concerns further in the 2013/14 incarnation of Taking Place, particularly by exploring non-western theoretical perspectives.