Landing in affective atmospheres

Abstract

Studies on affect and affective atmospheres have been a topic of increasing interest in marketing, particularly in the management of consumption and retail spaces where service providers attempt to orchestrate a prescribed, collective affective response in consumers. This paper draws on the work of Sara Ahmed and Margaret Wetherell to bring the subject back to the fore, providing a more fine-grained theorisation of how individuals land in such atmospheres. We articulate surfacing and sticking as key dimensions of landing, highlighting the heterogeneity of our landing, whereby affect is individually felt through bodily reactions due to how our personal affective history intersects with the socio-political context. Using a poetic affective attunement method, we capture intensely affective atmospheres, namely spirit-permeated religious settings in Brazil; demonstrating how landing results in different orientations or disorientations through which often elided emotional experiences come into view, privileging some subjects and objects whilst disadvantaging others.

Time to imagine an escape: investigating the consumer timework at play in augmented reality

“…Escapism thus accommodates various temporalities and temporal flows by encompassing past and future selves. This also sheds light on why the affective experience of escape has multivalenced complexity and is experienced as more than simply pleasurable (Jones et al, 2020, p. 476;Preece et al, 2022a). Depending on the specific temporal flows and temporalisations consumers locate themselves in, they may feel anxiety about the future or regret about the past as well as experience more positive emotions; these affective responses are dynamic and fluid.…”

Religious Disorientation in the Digital Transformation: An Islamic Review

“…Altinyelken [17] highlights how learners experience religious and belief disorientation, which can be influenced by various factors such as the attitudes of educators and peers, language proficiency, age, and a lack of critical thinking. Additionally, Cohen and McClymond [18] identify moral injury as a form of disorientation that occurs when individuals or groups violate moral and religious values, leading to emotional experiences for religious believers [19]. Various sources also mention that religious disorientation can be related to conflict, stress, and changes in social and religious life for individuals and groups.…”

Where spirituality and religion meet gender and sexuality: Toward a research agenda for intersectional marketing theory

“…Perhaps unsurprisingly, experiences of personal or professional vulnerability triggered some panelists’ research interest in spirituality/religion (Baker and LaBarge, 2015). These panelists thus reflected on how their own subject positioning shaped how they had “landed” in the affective atmospheres of religion/spirituality permeated fields (Preece et al, 2022). One participant’s journey vividly captures how her encounter with non-patriarchal belief systems paved the way for a transformative journey of self-discovery:I was in an abusive relationship, and I was lost, it was my first year alone abroad […] I started turning to a friend who had become a tarot reader […] and consuming everything I could about spirituality and religion, especially the non-patriarchal ones.…”

“…Second, we recommend validating vulnerability and discomfort as interpretive and critical resources for research on gender/sexuality and spirituality/religion. Following recent calls for affective methodologies in feminist research (Knudsen and Stage, 2015), we encourage researchers to be more attuned to (Preece et al, 2022) and reflexive of the discomfort (see Chadwick, 2021) and disorientations (Ahmed, 2006) experienced during fieldwork. Fear, frustration, disgust, and other “negative” emotions experienced during fieldwork can be both empirically enlightening and epistemologically fruitful, whereby reflecting (McKenzie, 2017) on these “disorientating” affective responses to our research contexts (and our research informants) can in fact awaken us as researchers to new subjectivities (Preece et al, 2022), including realizations of our own (hidden) vulnerability (Downey, 2019).…”