Within emerging fields of research focusing on neuro-urbanism, neuro-geographies, and biosociality, which experiment with using emerging mobile biosensor methods, few if any have used them to research socio-spatial life in communities that suffer high levels of violence and other socio-spatial injustices. Extending non-representational accounts of the body, emotions, and affect, this paper discusses an experimental geography-neuroscience collaboration, working in a favela of Rio de Janeiro to explore the embodied urban emotions and affects of violently bordered urban communities. Emphasising non-representational, corporeal spatial practices in a study of women living in Brazil's favelas, we use electrodermal activity biosensors to propose a novel methodological and analytical approach that focuses on forms of affective debilitation and resilience. Theoretically, we draw on biopolitical theory and border theory to propose a method that avoids oppositions between biopolitical and necropolitical accounts of borders. The aim of the research, conducted in June 2016, is to understand levels of affective debilitation or resilience among women living in the Maré Complex of favelas in Rio de Janeiro. Using a wearable biosensor, we took measures of electrodermal activity of eight women as they undertook one of their routine, everyday journeys within the favela. We also conducted an hour-long qualitative interview with each participant. We find that for all our participants, navigating the favela's violent border spaces subjects their bodies to very high levels of affective and cognitive demand. While some women responded to this with stress reactions that created acute levels of affective debilitation, others responded very strongly, showing exceptionally high levels of affective resilience. Our research highlights the affective labour required of women to co-construct urban borders, and emphasizes their agency and forms of everyday resistance in shaping the favela's affective atmospheres.Combined biosensing (electrodermal activity/galvanic skin response) data and interview data reveal that women living in the favela experience high levels of
This article offers a creative disjunctive feminist analysis of affective rhythms within a complexly bordered complex of favelas in Rio de Janeiro. It explores the gendered atmospheric constitution of authority in the favela’s violent border spaces, arguing that authority is partly embodied through a channelling of attention. Attention is conceptualised as involving not just conscious intentions, perceptions and emotions, but also non-conscious rhythms of autonomous affective self-regulation. The article is structured through a tripartite disjunctive form that expresses the bordering of city, body and experience. Drawing on qualitative interview data, quantitative electrodermal activity physiological data and creative writing, the article dwells with the materiality of words and the forms of affects to express material and physiological aspects of emotion and affect in journeys around the internal border-spaces of the city. Adapting the modernist tradition of ‘stream of consciousness’ writing, we style a ‘stream of attention’ form of writing that expresses multiple modes of embodied, conscious and preconscious attention.
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