This article develops the theoretical relationship between affect and the pre-individual. It does so to respond to a recent tendency to posit affect as vague form of relationality exceeding the individual. Instead, the article outlines how affect, as a concept that draws upon a certain Deleuze–Spinozian line of thought, is at least as much a process corresponding to virtuality and potentiality as it is one that pertains to embodied individuals. Instructing this move is the writing of Gilbert Simondon, a philosopher who conceptualises affect in terms of pre-individual potentials exceeding the individual. Engaging with Simondon’s conceptualisation of individuation and perception as a way to trace the importance of these pre-individual processes, affect is understood more precisely as a potentialised orientation of non-individuated relationality. More significantly, though, the article argues that Simondon’s notion of the pre-individual can be used to develop an ontogenetic logic of affect, through which thought is directed towards processes of individuation exceeding the individual but that, nevertheless, modify the genesis of affection, perception and action – an argument I make tangible through a brief discussion of John Hull’s writing on sense and perceptual experience. An ontogenetic logic of affect, I suggest, demands that the thought schemas through which social scientists evaluate processes of affect be open to these pre-individual potentials that orientate perceptive experience.

Post-humanist theories shaping contemporary geographic research have unsettled the privileged position of the "human" as a common reference to apprehend social life. This decentring of the human demands that we rethink our expectations of, and approaches to, methodological practice and the traditional distinctions made between the theoretical and the empirical. In this introduction and the following interventions, we explore how a material situatedness and attention to nonhuman agencies within post-humanist thought complement and extend existing methodological innovations within human geography. We do so with reference to a series of Masters workshopsa somewhat overlooked space of research-creationeach of which explored the implications of post-humanism on methodological practice. The introduction concludes with three key tenets that were followed in each of the individual workshops, and which set out an ethos for practising post-humanism more broadly. K E Y W O R D S experimentation, geographic method, Masters workshops, nonhuman intensities, post-humanist theory, theory/practice divide 1 | PRACTISING POST-HUMANISM: WHY NOW?Recently, there has been a push to explore more experimental orientations to the "doing" of research and to develop practices that problematise methodological assumptions pertaining to rigour, reliability, and representation within geography (Dowling et al., 2016(Dowling et al., , 2017(Dowling et al., , 2018Vannini, 2015;Whatmore, 2006). In this paper we contribute to these exciting debates by engaging with the way post-humanist theoretical innovations shaping contemporary human geography require us to rethink the empirical demands and methodological responsibilities of geographical research. In bringing the material and affective registers of social life to the fore, post-humanist theories have the potential to reconfigure our relation to research practices in ways that trouble the traditional distinction between the theoretical and the empirical. It is in this potential for capturing novel aspects of contemporary social and cultural life, in excess of human durations, that we situate our concern for the practice of post-humanism within human geography.Responding to the call to experiment methodologically, the turn to more-than-human geographies has done much to broaden the remit of contemporary research to include the agency of the nonhuman in shaping social life. As Bastian et al. (2016, p. 2) note, a key concern here is "to take nonhuman life, and the entanglements of human/nonhuman life seriously" in the production of geographical knowledge. This concern is precisely about the challenge of attending to diverse nonhuman agencies in ways that demand different approaches to the act of doing geographical research. In turning to the relationship between post-humanism and geographical research (Braun,

This piece intervenes by developing an understanding of the nonhuman power of images. It does so by attending to a different style of thought for approaching images and imaging practices: that is, as something composed of and open to a much wider ecology of experience. Engaging with a recent geographical concern with the affective power of images, it argues for the need to affirm in imaging a specific intensive power to defamiliarise human‐centred frames of thought used to think about the active powers of images.

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Writing at a time in which speculative ways of thinking appear to be undergoing a reprise across the social sciences and humanities – whether through engagements with speculative cosmology (Stengers, 2006), speculative empiricism (Debaise, 2017), speculative fabulation (Haraway, 2011), speculative research (Wilkie et al., 2017), or speculative realism (Bryant et al., 2011) – in this chapter we introduce Speculative Geographies and our motivation for assembling the collection as a way of considering what concepts and practices of speculation might mean for geography, and how speculation might itself be conceived as geographical. In approaching the relationship between speculation and geography, we introduce the book as a collective desire to complicate the modes of thought used to evaluate experience by crafting alternatives, pluralising perspectives, and thereby problematising the immediately given. Far from abstract thinking, in this chapter we conceptualise speculation, after A.N. Whitehead, as a task of thinking abstractions – a style of thinking that prioritises an openness to what thought might become, and which therefore reconfigures empirical problems beyond what seems given in an immediate experience. The chapter traces key genealogies of this speculative practice including speculative philosophy, speculative fiction, and speculative design. Finally, we provide an overview of how the three themes of the book – ethics, technologies, aesthetics – speak to the chapters making up this edited collection.