Expanding feminist affective atmospheres

Between Westminster and Brussels: Putting the “Parliament” in Parliamentary Ethnography

“…Immersion in both parliaments also allowed for analyses of atmospheres, which is key to feminist analysis. Feminist considerations of atmospheres (Leff 2021, 2) attend to unevenness, stickiness, circulation, and opening new atmospheres for ethical exploration.…”

BETWEEN DEPRESSION AND HOPE: Affective Mediations of Urban Restructuring in Leipzig, East Germany

“…Contrary to Jakimow's (2020) detailed accounts of individual's affects, in this article I seek to understand affects as supra‐individual, relational phenomena, moods, or ‘atmospheres [that] have the potential to reinforce social inequity or build coalitions of resistance’ (Leff, 2021: 1). This supra‐individual perspective seems counterintuitive, considering the very corporal definition of affect as the ‘capacity which a body has to be affected … and to affect …’ (Anderson, 2006: 735), which, contrary to emotion, is considered non‐ or pre‐cognitive (Pile, 2010).…”

Organizing Half-Things: Knowing, Theorizing and Studying Atmospheres

“…Organization, we might say, is a process and an outcome of atmospheric struggle and division, of literal and metaphorical air-conditioning for some but not for others. Where Sloterdijk seems to envisage different spacetimes to be distinguished by levels and capacities of envelopment, recent feminist scholarship has shown how human bodies dwell in situations differently and unevenly: ‘Our angles of entry into atmospheric spaces can align us in solidarity or provoke dissonance’ (Leff, 2021, p. 7), depending on the attunement’s situated histories and the bodies’ corresponding modes of anticipation, on unexpected arrivals and on what specific (gendered, classed, coloured) bodies bring (Ahmed, 2014). In short, different bodies are ‘differentially enveloped by atmospheres’ (McCormack, 2018, p. 8).…”

“…While Schmitz's (2014b) neo-phenomenology presents a secularized version, these ancient interpretations suggest approaching the atmospheric as something sensed yet irreducible to either human bodies or an object that is fully present -as a half-thing, as it were. Beyond a phenomenological approach and in a more-than-representational register (Beyes & Steyaert, 2012, 2021, alluding to an atmospheric half-thing implies that 'something of it always remains beyond prehension, sense, or perception' (McCormack, 2018, p. 76).…”