Encountering Berlant part one: Concepts otherwise

Anderson, Ben; Aitken, Stuart; Baćević, Jana; Callard, Felicity; Chung, Kwang Dae; Coleman, Kathryn; Hayden, Robert F.; Healy, Sarah; Irwin, Rita L.; Jellis, Thomas; Jukes, Joe; Khan, Salman Hamid; Marotta, Stephen; Seitz, David; Snepvangers, Kim; Staples, Adam; Turner, Chloe; Tse, Justin Kh; Watson, Marthy; Wilkinson, Eleanor

doi:10.1111/geoj.12494

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 109 publications

(125 reference statements)

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“…From October to December 2020, a Padlet portfolio hosted our pandemic storying via hundred-word patches, hereafter called ‘hundreds’ (Anderson et al, 2022; Berlant & Stewart, 2019; Healy & Edwards, 2020). In early 2022, we once again came together prompted by a further call to gather for retrospective reflection.…”

Section: An Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Teaching and Learning in COVID-19: Pandemic Quilt Storying

Ritchie

Phillips

Brock

et al. 2023

International Review of Qualitative Research

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Something changed during the pandemic; we attuned to a call. A call to action, breathing, support, activism, care, well-being, community, minimised mobilities, planetary health and our relations to all these things, and more. We are women working in education spaces across multiple communities, responsive to ongoing matters of concern (Latour, 2008), aware that our rhizomic connections have no middle or end. We use the method and metaphor of the quilt in this collaboration and hold quilting as a Feminist intervention, a return to her-stories and ways of knowing through story as we stitch together cultural and material stories of place. Our COVID-19 chronicles are a creative, collaborative exploration of the initial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on learning and teaching across our respective countries. This paper is a collaboration of critical auto-ethnographies (Holman Jones, 2016), quilted and stitched together by a group of education scholars who united to research the impact of online emergency teaching that forced education site closures globally. Through this collaborative image quilting, we curated responses to our initial 100-word stories of pandemic life in 2020, that we had posted on a collaborative Padlet. Feminist, storying, and ethnographic theory inform alignment and stitching of each 100-word patch.

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Section: An Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Teaching and Learning in COVID-19: Pandemic Quilt Storying

Ritchie

Phillips

Brock

et al. 2023

International Review of Qualitative Research

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“…Berlant's explication of this double‐bind across scenes of adjustment to newly precarious presents is another iteration of their career‐long concern with attachment to normative fantasises and convention, although it is more orientated to the attrition of fantasy than their past work, where normativity becomes aspirational, and fantasy ‘ more fantasmatic’ (Berlant, 2011, p. 11, emphasis in original; compare with Berlant, 1991; Berlant & Warner, 1998). In Cruel Optimism we also see the various influences that are outlined in the introduction to Part 1 (Anderson et al, 2022); the intimacy and indistinction of the positive and negative from psychoanalysis; the questioning of attachment and the desire to induce detachments from Feminist and queer theory, whilst holding a position that is not simply anti‐normative; and the emphasis on the (dis)organisation of the historical sensorium and affective present from Marxist critical theory.…”

Section: Introduction: What Kind Of Thing Is Cruel Optimism?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“… 1 1 For an introduction to Berlant's work and the aim of the two Encountering Berlant pieces, see the companion piece Encountering Berlant Part 1: Concepts Otherwise (Anderson et al, 2022). As with the companion piece, contributors to Part 2 responded to an open call circulated through social media and list servs. …”

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Encountering Berlant part two: Cruel and other optimisms

Anderson

Awal

Cockayne

et al. 2022

Geographical Journal

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Part 2 of Encountering Berlant amplifies the promise of Lauren Berlant's influential concept of 'cruel optimism'. Cruel optimism names a double-bind in which attachment to an 'object' holds out the promise of sustaining/flour ishing, whilst simultaneously harming. The lines between harming, sustaining, damaging and flourishing blur, sometimes collapsing entirely. By holding together opposites the concept exemplifies and performs the centrality of ambivalence to Berlant's thought, as well as their orientation to overdetermination and incoherence. Geographers and others have found in the concept a way of understanding the intersection between affective and political economies in the crisis-present following the 2008 financial crisis. Together with Berlant's linked concepts such as 'crisis ordinariness' and 'impasse', cruel optimism has offered a way of understanding why detachment can be so difficult and how damaging conditions endure. Contributors begin from these starting points, amplifying the concept's promise: a new way of researching and writing about the reproduction of ordinary damage and harm.

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“…Given that 'affective infrastructure' has become a pervasive, even unremarkable feature of geographical research, this is an important question. It could be said that a successful concept should permit freedom at the edges and a certain degree of elasticity as a vocabulary or resource to think with (Anderson et al, 2023). Yet, while refusing closure or coherence can pluralise ways of intervening in the world, the ubiquitous and multifaceted use of a concept can also undermine its analytical purchase.…”

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confidence: 99%

Coming to terms with affective infrastructure

Wilson

2023

Dialogues in Human Geography

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Affective infrastructure has become an unremarkable feature of geographical research. By examining how ‘affective infrastructure’ has been mobilised within geography and political theory, and charting its distinguishing features – whether as metaphor, analogy, or material-technical system – I suggest that Bosworth's explication presents an opportunity for thinking about the role and development of concepts more broadly. Using the Tyne Bridge as an example of affective infrastructure, I reflect on the mechanisms through which a concept appears and ask whether ‘affective infrastructure's' ‘power’ comes from its circulation as a term or shorthand. In clarifying its analytical utility, I ask what implications there might be for ‘affective infrastructure's' spaces of connotation, and what is at stake when a concept appears.

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Encountering Berlant part one: Concepts otherwise

Cited by 6 publications

References 109 publications

Teaching and Learning in COVID-19: Pandemic Quilt Storying

Teaching and Learning in COVID-19: Pandemic Quilt Storying

Encountering Berlant part two: Cruel and other optimisms

Coming to terms with affective infrastructure

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