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Emotional Geographies conference

• Abstracts of panel presentations
• Abstracts of papers
   

Abstracts of panel presentations

Panel 1. The emotional geographies of education

1. Getting emotional about 'brain mobility'
Prof Jane Kenway and Dr Johannah Fahey, Monash University

In relation to 'the knowledge economy', a shifting but patterned global assemblage exists regarding knowledge production, circulation and consumption. Nation-states and regional blocs are differently positioned within the power–knowledge geographies of this assemblage. Prosperous but peripheral nation-states are of only moderate importance in such global power–knowledge geographies. Being tangentially positioned has the potential to impact on their national sensibility. So, one of the ways in which they position themselves within this geography is to emote the nation. We have coined the term emoscapes to help illuminate how emotion circulates within the global assemblage of power–knowledge. Emoscapes involve the political mobilisation and movement of emotion on intersecting global, national and personal scales. The national space of assemblage is where emotion is mobilised with regard to nation-state identities and identifications and researchers' roots and routes. In this paper we show how the wealthy nation-state of Australia tries to mobilise a national temper and identity in relation to knowledge and those who produce it. Here mood is put to work by the state thus leaving us with questions about territorial entitlements and mobile affinities in the increasingly mobile world of the academy.

2. The emotional geographies of neo-liberal school reforms: spaces of refuge and containment
Dr Karen Nairn, Otago University, NZ, and Dr Jane Higgins, Lincoln University, NZ

In research about the post-school transitions of New Zealand's neo-liberal generation we interviewed young people during what they thought would be their last year of high school about their post high school plans. Our participants included a group of four young men excluded from school and redirected to an alternative education program. Their accounts of their experiences at school differed starkly from what they said about their alternative education program. The emotional content of their accounts reveals how the social and material practices of these respective education sites are constituted differently. Alternative education operated as a space of refuge from alienation experienced in mainstream schooling as well as a site of containment, separating alternative education students from their mainstream peers. Focusing on the emotional geography of one alternative education program provides important insights into the emotional geographies of mainstream schooling and, more broadly, of neo-liberal education reforms. Drawing on Massey and Bondi's ideas, we demonstrate how alienation is produced and manifested at different scales: teacher–student interactions, school exclusions and policies establishing alternative education. One alternative education program is used here as a barometer of the broader emotional geographies of New Zealand's neo-liberal education reforms. These emotional geographies are configured in unexpected ways: although alternative education occupies a marginal position, students' more positive experiences there could be instructive for improving the emotional geographies of mainstream schooling.

3. Teachers' tears and the affective geography of the classroom
Dr Megan Watkins, University of Western Sydney

In his book A tear is an intellectual thing, Jerome Neu argues that we cry because we think, viewing tears – or at least some tears – as an expression of emotion and emotions as 'a kind of thinking'. I have been reflecting on why several teachers during interviews about their pedagogic practices and histories shed tears. These reactions appeared almost automatic, an involuntary response of the body that seemed to bypass thought, demonstrating a physical investment in teaching. Teachers' tears fell as they evoked their relationships with students, the effects of their pedagogy, the act of teaching and their role in the classroom. These tears, however, were not simply a function of fond memories but resulted from the affectivity of the profession, that is, the bodily impact of the teacher–student relation, the ways in which, Spinoza explains, the body can retain impressions or traces of past experience. Through an examination of what brought these teachers to tears and why they cried, this paper will explore the affective geography of contemporary classrooms, raising questions about current pedagogy and the desire to teach.

Panel 2. Sensualities and spaces of emotion

In the late 1980s and early 1990s anthropologists of emotion worked to 'pry emotion loose from psychobiology' (Abu-Lughod and Lutz), with a focus on emotion as discourse and as social judgement. Such a focus yielded fruitful insights into social constructions and interpretations of emotion. The shift toward embodiment and the senses suggests new ways of conceptualising emotion. There is a need to return to the body to reconceptualise the sensual experience of emotion.

This panel engages with Ross' call to take seriously 'the ways that we engage in and with space/place, filling it with activity, relations, sensual engagements, interpretive activity, [and] emotions'. We invite contributors to consider how the nature of particular spaces evokes or constrains the senses and emotion. Contributors may reflect on the relationship between specific senses and emotions, and their spatial expression. How is space composed through the sensation of emotion? And does the sensual experience of spaces render them more amenable to particular emotions?

1. Motherhood and mental illness: space and emotions within a mother/infant psychiatric in-patient unit
Sonia Masciantonio, University of Adelaide

This paper will explore the range of emotions found in women who have been diagnosed with acute to severe postnatal mental illness and have been admitted into a psychiatric mother/infant in-patient unit. It is based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork within the unit which focused on the construction and experience of postnatal mental illness by mental health staff and patients. This paper considers the range of emotions displayed by new mothers and their families dealing with mental health difficulties, along with the emotions evoked in the staff who are treating the unwell patients and their children. In addition, this paper demonstrates how the unique psychiatric environment can determine how emotions are expressed and experienced within the space. This paper notes that spatial and sensual separation between mother and infant in this environment, in particular of the sense of touch, is often seen as indicative of emotional distance. While emotions are quite often thought to be spontaneous, ethnographic research in this psychiatric unit has also uncovered a range of induced, forced and restricted emotions, depending on both the individual's physical location with the psychiatric facility and their role within the in-patient unit.

2. 'Being then': nostalgic praxis and living the past
Micah Peters, University of Adelaide

This paper uses the notion of nostalgic praxis to explore how contemporary Japanese re-live the past through leisure activities that maintain a sense of historical continuity with the past. Invented traditions are powerful ways of asserting belongingness and authenticity in a world where attachments to time and place have become problematic. Leisure pursuits that foster the appraisal of tradition and authenticity can effectively allow people to experience the past imaginatively in order to legitimate contemporary identities. This paper is based upon fieldwork conducted in Japan and focuses upon dining experiences and leisure pursuits in Japan's rural areas. My work explores the importance of maintaining 'authenticity' in the contemporary world through activities that are perceived to be legitimate and traditional cultural practices. These practices are inherently about experiences of place; precisely the imaginative and sensual experience of certain 'traditional' places. In this way, contemporary Japanese people are emotively transported back to an authentic time through their interaction within and with places and landscapes.

3. Authentic Pontic dance: a bodily way of making absence present
Valerie Liddle, University of Adelaide

Pontians have a unique way of dancing that that developed over many centuries in the Pontos area of northern Turkey. Their dance practices survived their exile from that region in the 1920s as well as their migration to Australia 30–40 years later. In this paper I discuss how Pontic dance embodies the loss Pontians feel they have suffered as a result of these ruptures. Pontians assert that it is necessary to have a certain 'feel' in order to dance these dances in an authentic way. Although this 'feel' may manifest itself in the bodily movements of the dance, it is an expression that comes from an emotional sense of loss that Pontians inwardly feel: a loss of place and a waning of cultural practice. This is referenced in two ways. First, historically, the dances, their execution, costumes and musical instruments come to embody the loss they feel over their former homeland. Secondly, the bodily movements of the dance outwardly express the passion they feel from an inner sense of what it means to be Pontian. Hence, for Pontians, because the 'feel' of the dance is real in both its historic and passionate sense, then the loss is real and so comes to presence the absence they feel.

4. Creating the right 'vibe': exploring the utilisation of space at hip hop concerts in Adelaide
Dianne Rodger, University of Adelaide

A successful hip hop concert is a dynamic event that overwhelms the senses. The music is loud enough to damage your hearing, the bass can be felt as well as heard and the whirling lights create a dramatic atmosphere. Hands are thrown in the air, heads are nodded to the beat, and people yell, clap and cheer their appreciation. Yet not all hip hop concerts evoke these kinds of reactions and emotions. Hip hop concerts can be exciting and inspiring, but they can also be tedious and tiring. This paper examines how space was utilised at hip hop concerts to promote certain sensual experiences and is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out amongst the Adelaide hip hop community. I explore how hip hop promoters, artists and venue staff attempted to imbue venues with specific emotional characteristics. In particular, I consider how light and sound were harnessed to try to foster certain crowd reactions and to create what hip hop fans colloquially referred to as the 'vibe'. I argue that creating the right 'vibe' was a highly important factor in determining the perceived 'success' or 'failure' of hip hop events. I use ethnographic case studies to analyse how the practical realities of particular venue spaces (size, layout, stage equipment, licensing etc.) influenced the experiences of the individuals attending hip hop concerts and the presence, or absence, of the 'vibe'.

5. 'Dancing for joy': exploring sensual links between emotion, movement and space in rural Papua New Guinea
Dr Alison Dundon, University of Adelaide

Among the Gogodala of Papua New Guinea, a predominantly rural population in the Western Province, dance is a site of considerable emotion and, at times, contestation. Owama gi – 'dancing for joy' – is particularly so, a spontaneous series of sensuous movements that women use to express their pleasure and pride in the beauty, agility or efficacy of their male kin. Women, from young, single girls to grandmothers, express their desire to dance at these occasions in terms of emotional compulsion, exemplified in expressions like 'you cannot help yourself'. In this paper, I examine the performance of owama gi as the sensual and embodied representation and experience of happiness in relationships between these women and their sons, fathers and brothers, as well as a public expression of the central role that women play in the lives and achievements of their male kin. I also analyse the ways in which, although understood as spontaneous expressions of pleasure and joy, these dances and those who perform them are highly prescribed, involving certain bodily comportment and stylised movements within specific spaces. The paper seeks to contribute to an analysis of the substantive connection between sensory experience and human emotions through an exploration of the ways in which emotion both generates and is generated by certain kinds of gendered relationships, spaces and sensual experiences.

6. Sensual feasting: transforming emotions and spaces in Lihir, Papua New Guinea
Dr Susan Hemer, University of Adelaide

In April 2002 an opening was held for the Petztorme Women's Centre and for the Tutorme Training and Sewing Centre in Lihir, PNG. This paper explores how this opening ceremony was a feast for the senses that transformed the space of the centres and the emotional dynamics that surrounded their construction. The building of these centres was financed by Lihir Management Company (LMC), the company that managed the Lihir Gold Mine, and was surrounded by conflict and controversy among women and between Lihir women and the mining company. The opening ceremony, arranged by Lihir women, was aimed to overcome months of simmering conflict. The two-day event was a sensual feast of food, displays, music, dance and fashion parades which shifted the mood of the space from dispute and shame, to triumph and pride. Being a major customary feast, it also marked the space of the centres as being locally owned and gendered rather than as LMC company-leased land. This opening ceremony provides a context through which to reflect on the relationships between the sensual experience of space and emotions.

Panel 3. Streets of sadness: emotional geographies and histories of Tokyo

In this interdisciplinary panel we consider the emotional geographies of the streets of Tokyo and other major cities in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Streets are a liminal space between the spaces of work, home and entertainment. Streets may also, however, be the sites of political demonstrations and performances. Where political violence has occurred, the streets become sites of mourning and melancholy. For gay pride marchers, the streets are a site of celebration; while 'queer' spaces in the city are the sites of alternative forms of sociality and alternative temporalities. For those without work or without homes, the valency and connotations of the streets may be reversed. For the unemployed or the homeless, the streets take on a new importance, different from their previous meaning as a place to be traversed on the way to work or home. Our papers draw on the methodologies of cultural geography, cultural studies, cultural history, performance studies, and gender and sexuality studies, in order to map alternative histories and geographies of the metropolis of Tokyo.

1. Negotiating the physical and emotional geographies of twenty-first century urban Japan in Tokyo sonata
Assoc Prof Romit Dasgupta, Asian Studies, School of Social and Cultural Studies, University of Western Australia

The focus of this paper is the ways in which the contrasting emotional and physical geographies of comfortable, middle-class suburbia and the contemporary reality of homelessness and socio-cultural despondency act as a backdrop to the unravelling of the hegemonic gender ideology of postwar Japan in Kurosawa Kiyoshi's multi-award winning 2008 film, Tokyo sonata. Through the experiences of one family, the film poignantly captures the fragmentation of this gender order, premised upon the middle-class white-collar 'salaryman' husband and full-time housewife family unit, in the context of the post-1990s economic recession. The Sasakis are the embodiment of the nuclear family of urban, middle-class Japan. Their seemingly snug suburban world of middle-class complacency starts unravelling the day the husband, Sasaki Ryûhei, is laid-off from his white-collar, middle-management job. Unable to reveal his unemployed status to his family, Ryûhei continues to maintain the façade of the salaryman husband and father. He leaves for work each morning, dressed in his suit and tie, but spends his days fruitlessly looking for white-collar work, or hanging out in a park inhabited by homeless men, including other laid-off salarymen. Ultimately, he finds employment as a cleaner in a shopping mall, where he spends his days cleaning restrooms and wiping floors. At home, despite his attempts to the contrary, his authority as the salaryman father and husband starts to crack and splinter, as the family begins drifting apart emotionally and spatially. Ryûhei's journey from white-collar salaryman to menial worker, and the unravelling of the middle-class ideal he had bought into, is set against the backdrop of the intermeshing physical and emotional scapes and contours of early twenty-first century recession-era Tokyo. I argue that the challenges to the hegemonic gender ideology played out in the film cannot be fully appreciated unless these physical and emotional geographies of suburban nostalgia and urban reality are factored into the discussion.

2. Street kids: Japanese popular culture fantasies of homelessness
Assoc Prof Alisa Freedman, Japanese Literature and Film, University of Oregon

Described from children's perspectives, social problems achieve new meanings and emotional impact. This is clear in recent popular culture representations of urban homelessness experienced or observed by fourteen-year-old boys, especially the cross-media 'homeless student' phenomenon. The growing number of homeless is slowly being acknowledged but is still rarely helped by the government. In the current popular imagination, the homeless are generally seen as men who could be productive citizens if cleaned and employed. Male students have historically represented potentials and failures of Japanese modernisation projects. According to Japan's penal code, fourteen is the age at which a child becomes criminally responsible for his or her actions. The 2007 autobiographical novel Homeless junior high student (Hômuresu chûgakusei) by comedian Tamura Hiroshi, who became homeless at age fourteen in Osaka, has sold millions of copies and has been adapted into television drama, film, manga and children's books. Continuing the commercial success, the story was retold in 2008 by Tamura's brother Ken'ichi in Homeless university student (Hômuresu daigakusei), also televised. I read the Tamuras' stories alongside gentle portrayals of homelessness in author Ishida Ira's 2002 award-winning collection 4-teen. I question the implications of these uplifting accounts on efforts to stem real poverty and crime. By pairing issues of homelessness and adolescence, do authors provide insights into lived experience or inadvertently perpetuate stereotypes? Do they place blame only on individuals and erase women? These stories stress family as shelter from the cruel city, which is, in turn, depicted as a microcosm of society. They also convey the belief that hard work will always be rewarded, which has propelled Japanese national growth. I examine these works in the context of the popularity of fiction about labour issues and urban guides by young artists, who, although compassionate, often glamourise homelessness as a new form of ecological living.

3. Queer streets in Tokyo: counter-hegemonic memory and subjugated knowledge
Assoc Prof Katsuhiko Suganuma, Center for International Education and Research, Oita University

The Shinjuku Ni-chôme district of Tokyo is said to house hundreds of bars frequented since the 1950s by a variety of sexual minorities including gay men, lesbians, transgenders and bisexuals. In 2006, the neo-conservative mayor of Tokyo metropolitan government, Ishihara Shintarô, otherwise known as a prominent novelist and critic, made a controversial comment describing Shinjuku Ni-chôme as a district 'unfitting' or 'damaging to the decency' of the Tokyo metropolis. In this paper, I discuss the ways in which the space of Shinjuku Ni-chôme has been a discursive site of resistance to the hetero-normative narrative of the city of Tokyo. Reviewing an array of literature on Shinjuku Ni-chôme both in the past and preset, I demonstrate that this 'queer town' has functioned as a landscape through which to express the subjugated knowledge of Japanese sexual minorities, and connect affectively the memory of the past and the present to evoke the futurity of Japan's queer culture. I argue that Ni-chôme serves its function of providing a queer temporality that intervenes in the linear narrative of hetero-normative progress and development. I also consider the ways in which the existence of queer space underlines the importance of dealing with critical issues such as 'mainstreaming' and 'de-queering' LGBT communities themselves in recent years. The internet also could be said to provide some forms of 'queer space'. While the internet allows queer individuals to customise their own private cyberspace, a spreading of political apathy and a dilution of activism becomes an ever more pressing concern. I suggest that the geographical and material significances of queer streets in Tokyo continue to help us understand the conditions facing Japanese LGBT communities.

4. Mis-performing and misbehaving in Chikatetsu Hiroba (Underground Plaza), 1970
Dr Peter Eckersall, Senior Lecturer, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne

This paper discusses some of the protest-performances from Keiya Ouchida's Chikatetsu Hiroba (Underground Plaza), a film from the Japanese underground cinema movement made in 1970. Chikatetsu Hiroba documents the appearance of 'folk guerrillas' – anti-Vietnam war folk singers and student protestors who began gathering at the underground plaza linking the west and east exits of the vast Shinjuku train station in February 1969. The paper analyses these protests by highlighting their apparent search for a new praxis, a pure spirit of life-giving ideology, while instead often showing complicated broken threads and disconnections between politics and action. It will give a sense of the space of Shinjuku and suggest how the film captures an exploration of the dialectics of that space where activists were hoping to connect with utopian ideas of the polis. Through occupying and restoring other uses of the space, protestors hoped to remake the city as a forum for ideological confrontation and revolutionary aesthetics. This too is not realised for as the film unfolds it is clear that we are watching the end of the possibility of a collective-utopian polis, the final moments of the dream of a 'Shinjuku commune'. Finally, the paper aims to give a sense of the great intensity and violence of all of the protestors actions marked in the film. How to understand the meaning of this violence is an important question that reflects on both the existence of alternatives in late 1960s Japan and gives a critical shape to the idea of performance in and as forms of counterculture activity more broadly.

5. Memories and memorials of protest in central Tokyo
Vera Mackie, ARC Australian Professorial Fellow, Historical Studies, University of Melbourne

In June 1960, the streets surrounding the Diet building in Tokyo were the site of the largest demonstrations ever seen in the metropolis. The demonstrations were in opposition to the renewal of the US–Japan Security Treaty (Ampo), which kept Japan in a subordinate postion vis-à-vis United States foreign policy and defence policy. For a time it seemed as if this were to be the highpoint of postwar democracy, but hopes were soon shattered. The bill for the renewal of the treaty was rammed through the Diet in a late-night session; and a young woman, Kanba Michiko, was killed in the disorder of the ensuing demonstrations. The streets as a space of democratic protest were transformed into a site for mourning and memorialisation. The melancholy surrounding the death of Kanba Michiko became fused with melancholy over the failure of the democratic protest movement. In this paper I will examine the changing emotions attached to the Diet building and the surrounding streets in postwar Japan, as we approach the fiftieth anniversary of the Ampo demonstrations and the death of Kanba Michiko.

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Panel 4. Media technologies and affect

This panel considers the various ways in which media technologies function as affective spaces, from the radio to mobile phones to social media services such as Twitter. In particular, the focus is on how media interfaces mediate and modify our relation to others and the environment.

1. Mobile emotions: the affects of network listening
Assoc Prof Kate Crawford, Journalism and Media Research Centre, University of New South Wales

How do we listen in to others in networked spaces such as Twitter and Facebook, and how do we share what we've heard? How is interest, fear, anxiety or love expressed, and how is friendship experienced? Drawing on data from a three-year study in progress, this paper will consider the ways in which mobile and social media function as affective spaces, where personal, political and cultural passions are regularly expressed (and, conversely, communicative fatigue often experienced). In particular, I look at the case study of the 'greening of Twitter', where users turned their avatars green to express their concern about the demonstrations in Iran after the presidential elections in June 2009. This act, which spread virally through the network, was both championed as a sign of compassion and pilloried as a pointless act of 'emoticon politics'. What is the function of these emotional exchanges and displays? Do they constitute a kind of outsourcing of political feeling, a form of what Zizek has termed 'interpassivity', or is there more to this networked emotional scene that connects mobiles and social networks? This paper brings together these concerns to address the emotional ecologies of mobiles and their networks.

2. Mobile media and the affordance–affect relation
Dr Ingrid Richardson, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Creative Technologies and Media, Murdoch University

This paper explores the complex relationship between affordance and affectivity in the context of mobile media interfaces, focusing on the practices of texting, mobile phone photography and mobile photo sharing. This connection will be discussed in light of insights gained from a moblogging case study involving twenty participants in Western Australia aged between fourteen and seventeen, conducted in 2008–2009 and funded by the Telstra Foundation. The project used the video capture and web capabilities of newer generation mobile phones to build on young people's existing new media skills and literacies, enabling them creatively to author, edit and publish their own mobile content around personal, local and community 'happenings'. Using a deep ethnographic approach, the study sought to interpret critically how Australian teenagers flexibly mix and match the affordances and affectivities of virtual and face-to-face modes of media and communication, and effectively embed hybrid, mobile and network media into their sense of self, agency, place and community. In this paper, I will focus on the texting and photo-sharing practices of the participants in terms of the particular affordances and correlative affects pertaining to each communicative modality. Texting and photo sharing will be shown to afford different kinds of 'being there' across a complex spectrum of absent presence, co-located presence, remote presence and ambient or implicit presence, and each modality of presence will be considered in terms of its particular affective enablements and constraints.

3. Technologies of sound and affect in domestic space
Assoc Prof Jo Tacchi, Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology

This paper draws on research into domestic soundscapes, to explore the ways in which people affectively manage everyday instabilities. How are sound technologies used to alter 'mood', to combat loneliness, and/or to get people through routine and mundane domestic tasks that they would otherwise struggle with? The research reveals everyday life as, to some extent, an enterprise in overcoming negative emotional states – in establishing and reinforcing social and emotional cohesion on a domestic level. Today, managing one's affective state, relationships and 'affective identity' appear to be of central importance in everyday life (and arguably especially through some applications of new media). The research found that, in everyday life, through the use of mediated sound in the home, links are made to intangible and non-visible or non-speakable aspects of the world – to feelings, moods, connections through time and space, and fantasy and imagination.

Panel 5. Pleasure travel, affect and multiple desires: loving, lusting and other feelings away from home

Pleasure travel brings about and presumably heightens and intensifies an array of emotions and affective dimensions of personal and collective experience: joy, happiness, frustration, anger, distaste, lust, love, longing, desire and so forth. Travel to faraway or foreign destinations is imbued with the expectation of, and even the longing for, emotional experiences that 'move' us beyond our presumable everyday lacklustre and passionless realities of work and domesticity. What are the specificities of these affects? What is the relationship between emotion at home and emotion while on vacation out of the country and across national boundaries? How do recent forms of tourism, such as volunteer, medical tourism or reproductive tourism produce or give rise somehow to new emotions, a new way of feeling? So far, little scholarship on tourism has explored the emotional and affective dimensions of international pleasure travel even when referring to sex tourism, in favour of the rational motivations of tourists, or the economic structures. Yet erotic desires (the love or lust for the Other) are accompanied by and intertwined with multiple desires in tourist quests for pleasure, intensity, assuaging of guilt and so on. Essentially we want to think more closely about human movement away from home structured by pleasure travel and its affects.

1. Holiday 'marriage': intricate relatedness and new heteronormativitities
Dr Ana Dragojlovic, Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University

This paper, based on an ethnographic research in Bali, explores intimate liaisons between western women and Balinese men as they take place in Bali. The particular focus of this paper is on the couples who maintain intimate relationships over years while living in different parts of the world. Western women and offspring from these unions live in the West and visit Bali and Balinese men commonly once a year during the holiday season. During this time Balinese men spend time with their western woman and their children. Commonly, to the knowledge of the western women, the Balinese men have a Balinese wife and family. Many western women refer to the Balinese men as 'partner' or 'husband'. What are the interpretative understandings of home, family life and emotional attachments in these relationships? What are the relationship between mobility and temporality of these liaisons and the ways women feel and interpret their feelings while at home or on holiday? This paper explores affects of these new forms of relatedness and emotional attachments they produce. It will, ultimately, attempt to untangle how these relationships are played out in the development of new forms of heteronormativity.

2. 'He made me rondon soup': food, appetite and carnal tourism in Costa Rica
Assoc Prof Susan Frohlick, Department of Anthropology, University of Manitoba, Canada

Tourism is often thought of as a source of nourishment for the human soul. We nourish our soul through the promise and pleasures of travel. Hospitable locals nourish tourists hungry for alterity, intimacy and new experiences. This paper explores the idea that touristic travel produces new appetites, in terms of both gustatory and sexual appetites, and that sexual longing and desire is produced through the consumption of food in tourist destinations as affective spaces of taste within transglobal, translocal cultural economies. More specifically, I want to use 'appetite' as an analytical lens for looking at what heterosexual subjectivity feels like and for tracking the production of heterosexuality within global movements of cross-border attractions and intimate relationships taking place in global tourism and international travel. How do appetites for particular men change between home and away? How is the taste for new food linked to the taste for different sexual experiences? To begin to answer these questions I focus on research I carried out in a small fishing village-cum-transnational tourist town on the Atlantic coast of Costa Rica, where Euro-North American women seek out numerous bodily and sensual pleasures – surfing, swimming, dancing – as well as sexual relations with local men. Within these asymmetrical encounters, the material-erotic exchanges are sometimes obscured within the realm of food making and eating. 'He made rondon soup for me' suggests linkages between food, appetite and carnal tourism in Costa Rica where heterosexuality is a particular affective experience. Following Rosi Braidotti's 'materialism of the flesh' and Elspeth Probyn’s work on 'carnal appetite', I attempt to explore the production of heterosexuality in this specific context, and to trace the 'intermingling of the sexual and the alimentary' (Deleuze and Guattari) and the interconnections of food and sex as bodily enactments and corporeal practices of identity and subjectivity.

3. Searching for the 'authentic' beach boy: the fluidity of gender and culture in sex tourism research
Lauren C Johnson, Department of Anthropology, University of South Florida, Tampa, USA

The issue of sex tourism is one that is most frequently explored as a gendered practice involving relationships between male tourists and female sex workers. By using the case of sex tourism in Jamaica, this article explores the fluidity of gender roles in an environment where foreign female tourists exchange money or material goods for sex with local males. I argue that the significance of sex tourism work is its illumination of flexible aspects of gender and culture that seem to be rather stable and fixed in the overall societal context. Female sex tourism demonstrates the gender performativity of men who are excluded from various sectors of society and have found a way to use masculinity, sexuality and cultural identity in order to profit from a practice that has become commonplace in many Caribbean tourism destinations. The practice also entails the gender performances of women who exert the powers of relative wealth and privilege, in addition to femininity, that they may not be able to in their home environments. This article situates female sex tourism in relevant literature on gender and tourism in order to examine unexplored aspects of this particular type of tourism, and also contextualises sex tourism in the political economic background of the Caribbean tourist destination.

4. Emotional places, emotional experiences: tourists' experiences at screen-tourism locations
Sangkyun Kim, Department of Tourism, School of Humanities, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia

The purpose of this paper was to investigate the extent to which audiences' emotional engagement with a serialised TV drama affects their actual on-site screen-tourism experiences at filmed locations. As an empirical study, an on-site survey was conducted at Daejanggeum Theme Park, the main filmed location of Jewel in the palace, known in Korean as Daejanggeum, in Yangjoo, South Korea. Since its release in 2003, Daejanggeum, a serialised historical Korean TV drama, was one of the most popular Korean TV dramas both in South Korea and in Asia. Daejanggeum Theme Park then has become the most popular tourist destination associated with screen-tourism among international audiences in South Korea.

The results indicated that audiences' emotional experiences of the TV drama positively affected on-site screen-tourism experiences. Such emotional experiences determined and created a contextualised package in which attractions and experiences they, as screen-tourists, anticipated could be grounded and embodied. Screen-tourists as former audiences not only retrospected that they were emotionally and behaviourally (eg crying, talking to characters) touched by the story and characters in the screened reality, but also confirmed specific icons that were distinctively portrayed or symbolically presented on screen. Furthermore, some screen tourists were determined to anticipate and even perform re-enactments of particular scenes by which they were deeply touched with an emphasis on action, fantasy, memory and emotion.

Therefore, this paper argues that repeated exposure to the TV drama would allow audiences to (re)produce and (re)perform emotional personal engagement with its story and characters so as to create personalised symbolic meanings beyond the filmed locations. Such considerable emotional commitment and symbolic meanings would help develop audiences' sense of connection and belonging to the filmed locations. This paper also provides insights into the importance of affective bonds, intimacy and emotional commitment generated by audiences to better understand the complexity of on-site screen-tourism experiences in the context of the screen-tourism phenomenon.

5. Between 'paradise' and 'hell': European women's sexualised travels in the Northeast of Brazil
Adriana Piscitelli, University of Campinas, Sao Paulo, Brazil

Several places in the Northeast of Brazil acquired a reputation as international heterosexual male 'sex tourism' hubs. However, little attention has been paid to sexualised female travels in this area. In Ceara State, some towns with beautiful beaches attract foreign female tourists. Many of them seek sexual/romantic relationships with local men and several moved to these places. Drawing on research conducted with an anthropological approach in two small transnational towns, in this paper I analyse the emotional, affective and sexual experiences of white women travellers, mostly European. The fieldwork took place at different moments from 2002 to 2008 and is part of a broader study about international tourism and sexuality in the state. The interviewees are aged between 20 and 60 and their lengths of stay range from two months to sixteen years. They engaged in intensely eroticised relationships with sexualised/racialised local men, perceived as embodying (black) 'Brazilian masculinity'. In the women's narratives, the sensual pleasure connected with these relationships is associated with the delight offered by experiences of freedom and choice. 'Freedom' entails changing lifestyles in organised countries, considered as predictable, stressful and dull, for the adventures offered by an intimate contact with wild nature and a primitive lifestyle, in a lawless land. 'Choice' materialises in romances with men placed in highly inferior social positions, in relationships that challenge homogamic, 'homochromatic' and sometimes generational norms, when local lovers/husbands are significantly younger. During the early phases of these relationships, passion contributes to blur their transactional nature. My main argument is that these affective dimensions, inextricably linked to the privileges associated with the women's economic, racial and national status, are disrupted when the latter turn into migrants. In the process of abandoning the tourist status, the 'fluidity' of those sexual-economic exchanges disappears and 'paradise' turns into 'hell', with particular cruelty for the oldest women, when the unequal local gender codes imbalance these women's privileges.

6. At the junction of the aesthetic and erotic: towards an anthropology of pleasure
Dr Tom Selywn, School of Oriental and Asian Studies

The paper seeks to outline contours of a curiously (as it seems so clearly to lend itself to anthropological investigation) neglected topic: anthropology of pleasure. It has three parts. The first looks at aspects of the emotional geographies of different sorts of travel focusing in particular on the close relationship in various contexts and settings between travel, aestheticism and eroticism. For example, both diarists and scholars have written at length about journeys by northern Europeans searching for both aesthetic and erotic experiences in the warm south and east. On a more general level, writers and other artists of various kinds have presented travellers' relations with landscapes (sometimes using particular landscape features such as hills, valleys, gorges, rivers, forests and so on to do so) in terms of interpenetrating aesthetic and erotic structures and processes. The second part uses insights gained by this initial consideration of travel to re-visit some starting points of what might have, and/or might become, an anthropology of pleasure. Does not, for example, the intense pleasure to be gained from being a crocodile in a sea of others represented totemically suggest that pleasure itself depends, inter alia, on the interpenetration of individual sentiment and desire with collectively held ideas and values (even when the former is constructed in opposition to the latter)? By now we have two intersecting axes, one that links the aesthetic and the erotic, the other that links the individual (individual body, individual desire) with the collectively held ideas that shape these. The third part thus follows directly from both of the previous sections and argues, with ethnographic examples, that one place to look for an anthropology of pleasure is at the junction between these two axes.

Panel 6. Mediated feeling: generating affect across distance

Distance, however it is figured, is no obstacle to the experience of affective states. Indeed, counter to a series of orthodox considerations about the ways in which time (or space) might 'heal all wounds', it is the contention of this panel that it is distance itself – actual, imagined, mediatised – that functions as a key term in the production and consumption of affect. Affect, as we explore it, functions both as a commodity generated in order to promote particular kinds of consumptive relationships between celebrities and consumers, and also as a marker of the kinds of intensities necessary for those relationships, experiences, events and feelings to be 'authentic'. In succession, panel papers will focus on the performance of post-feminist masculinity, the carnality of celebrity constructions and experiences, the consumptive activities of the distanced fan, and the mediated affect of reality television, in order to situate these examples of affective production, generation and consumption in a framework that uses distance as a constructive factor.

1. Emotion, performative affect and male stars in contemporary Hollywood
Dr Hannah Hamad, Lecturer, Media Studies, Massey University, New Zealand

This paper will explore the role of heightened and intensified emotionalism, as communicated through motifs of performative affect, in articulating the post-feminist masculine personae of Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson. In current cultural conceptualisations, mediations and rhetorical articulations of ideal post-feminist masculinity, emotionalism, and its embodiment through a celebrity figurehead such as the high-profile Hollywood actors under consideration here, are frequently prerequisites for the popular cultural mediation of this ideal.

This said, there are some interesting commonalities and specificities in the manner in which emotionalism manifests through male stardom and celebrity in Hollywood that do reveal some of the boundaries that post-feminist culture places upon the extent to which, and the nature of the way in which, male stars are afforded the opportunity to articulate and express emotion (whether through performative affect or in extra-filmic moments of apparent 'authenticity'), in pursuit of the attainment of this cultural masculine ideal. They reveal that the expression of intense emotion in a controlled and directed manner can be a boon for a star's embodiment of ideal post-feminist masculinity when it communicates traits like sensitivity and dedicated involved fatherhood, commensurate with post-feminist culture's requirements for credible normative publicly mediated manhood.

It is in this way that intensity of emotion through performative affect in some of the latter day films of Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson, such as War of the worlds (2005) and Signs (2002) among others is in evidence to the benefit of their filmic personification of ideal masculinity. Repeatedly this manifests through performances given in climactic scenes that serve ultimately to affirm, redeem or define the masculine identities of their characters in keeping with the ideal put forth by post-feminist culture. However, the affective power of emotionalism to influence public understandings of the masculine identities of these figures is equally in evidence extra-filmically in more supposedly 'authentic' and less performative mediated discourses, in instances where the credibility of their ideal post-feminist masculinity is undercut by lack of emotional control and a misdirection of emotional effusion that does not sit well with the requirements of post-feminist culture and the limits it places on acceptable masculine behaviour.

Cruise's 2005 appearance on Oprah, his on-camera altercation with a prankster who squirted him with water and his heated debate about the validity of psychiatry with American TV's Matt Lauer are all instances that undercut his then dominant persona of post-feminist masculine hero, in part due to the misdirection of emotion (whether love or anger). Also, having constructed a screen persona similarly centred on ideal post-feminist masulinity, Mel Gibson's emotional public outbursts of rage and/or hate (such as his Malibu drunk driving arrest) have likewise confused his otherwise relatively coherent public persona as a post-feminist male (which has recently performed a total about face from the Christian family values model it rested on). What is at stake in this paper therefore is the extent to which a mediated intersection between emotion, celebrity and performative affect has the potential to contribute to our understandings of current gendered cultural norms as mediated through and by post-feminist media culture.

2. Touching celebrity
Dr Sean Redmond, Victoria University of Wellington

In this paper I would like to explore the idea that touching the celebrity is one of the key ways in which they are made meaningful, and identified with at the level of bodily satisfaction. I will suggest that there are three levels to this carnal offering. At the level of representation, of image making and storytelling, the celebrity is often codified in fantasy contexts in which their bodies are idealised and framed in ways that ask the viewer/reader to reach out and touch them – a form of celebrity to-be-touched-ness, to appropriate Mulvey's famous formulation of looking relations in screen culture. Second, in terms of the public arena and mediagenic contexts such as the red carpet walk, the celebrity is seen to reach out and touch the adoring fans, confirming in that moment their status as auratic personas and the phenomenological 'truth' that they are also made of flesh and blood. Finally, in heart-felt confessionals, charity campaigns, adoptions and fund-raising initiatives, the celebrity touches the viewer/reader/listener – at the level of affect and emotion – with their honesty, authenticity, compassion or human-ess. This touching the celebrity, then, involves a series of rebound effects/affects. At the level of representation, touch is relayed through a haptic lens in which the carnality of the celebrity makes sense – for the viewer/reader – at the level of carnal comprehension. In the public setting, the fan whose hand is touched, or face kissed, or who is embraced by the celebrity, undergoes an embodied and emotional connectivity of heightened intensities. At the level of outpouring and outreach, the celebrity registers in the body as a bodily thing. The trajectory of this paper will try to move the discussion beyond the para-social readings that dominate the discussion of celebrity culture to one that recognises the way in which touching and being touched is key to the way the celebrity comes-into-being in the cultural world, registering as haptic, carnal, intimate, sensorial phenomenon.

3. 'Touching from a distance': affective geographies in distanced fandom
Dr Scott Wilson, Senior Lecturer, Unitec School of Performing and Screen Arts, Auckland

Across the literature of fan analysis, the most often assumed (and thus overlooked) factor is the proximity of the fan to the cherished object. Generally, analyses either consider the fandom of transnationally mediated forms (television/cinema) or assume a primary proximity of the fan to the object (music and band fandom). Such analyses prioritise primary access as the marker of authentic fandom and give little thought to the possibility of spatially or temporally distanced fandom. Inherent in such discussions are issues of race, ethnicity, sexuality, nationalism and gender, all of which are problematised by a distanced fandom that often ignores such codifying structures in the generation of its own forms of performed authenticity and affective construction.

Distanced fans are active constructors of affect – necessarily so since the primary experiences of fandom are denied them. In place of this, greater store is placed on what items and aspects of fandom can be performed and, in the absence of the luxury of primary contact, distance and difficulty are themselves factored into the affective relationship constructed by the fan in order for this relationship to be conducted between the fan and what is, necessarily, an increasingly imagined fan-object. Thus the distanced fan, as an image of a 'perfect consumer', generates for themselves the ways in which specific acts of construction and consumption might prove their dedication to the object of their affection.

In this paper I consider the ways in which distanced fandom uses what would ordinarily be considered obstacles to an 'authentic' fan experience (distance, both spatial and temporal; paucity of fan-objects; absence of fan community; scarcity of knowledge) and uses these as ways of constructing a form of fandom that renegotiates authenticity in its own terms.

4. Mediatised affect: feeling across the small screen
Dr Misha Kavka, University of Aukland

The facile criticism that reality TV isn't in fact 'real' assumes a viewership that conflates what plays out on one side of the screen – framed as spectacle – with what happens on the other – grounded in the actual world. The more serious jumping-off point, however, must be to recognise that viewers know perfectly well that reality on RTV is mediated, even manipulated, according to the demands of formats and the television apparatus itself, and yet the appeal of reality TV lies in its performance of reality underpinned by feeling. This, I argue, is because the once-firm division between spectacle and the real, between the staged event and actuality, is bridged in reality TV programs by affective intimacy.

The relationship between viewer feeling and the televisual construction of reality is reciprocal: our affective response 'proves' that this reality matters (ie it must be real because we feel it so strongly), while the fact that these events, people and dramas are in some way 'real', or non-fictional, justifies our having an affective response (ie real people give us a reason to care). Reality TV forces us to consider that 'what is real' operates affectively – by mattering – in zones other than palpable, material reality. Further, it draws attention to the unexamined ethics of emotion that underlie our normative grasp of reality: appropriate objects of feeling are considered to be only those that are materially real, disavowing those that may be mediated but are affectively real. Yet our emotional uptake of the real denies such a strict division (witness the tears at the death of Princess Diana, Jade Goody, Michael Jackson). Reality shows teach us a lesson about media(ted) intimacy. Media intimacy does not abrogate the 'proper' sphere of privacy but indicates the expansion of the field of the intimate through mediatised affective relations.

Panel 7. A palpable absence: affect, space, story

This panel roams between and among scenarios of place and its occupancies. Rather than account for place as a structure the papers bear witness to movement as co-presence with place. In disparate ways, the presentations address a radical ungrounding of bodies and places, proposing intercorporeal affiliations as zones of cultural contact. As Paul Carter would have it, by witnessing and eyewitnessing we bring poiesis to bear on the making of another place.

1. Barrow and cart: keeping life, keeping love
Dr Vicki Crowley and Dr Lisa McDonald, University of South Australia

From the residue of meaning, an ensemble of shadows. From the glint of souvenir, pliable impressions. In this paper, we work a poetics of encounter, of being, keeping, homage, of paying homage to fragility, to object and to interspecies – ways are found to engage motion from within and around co-extensive bodies. Suppleness appears and asks from this intricacy its manner of emergence; how are these bodies persuaded? With the consolation of images, we follow the terse rhythms of routine and street where dwelling is a case of affective dissent. Zones of departure seem the only form and appear through testimony as well as chance. A footfall brings us as observers into a quiet space that (also) refuses self-estrangement as we travel by way of an unquiet ground. Breath, respiration, aspiration. Precipitation. Sculptures of mist are also the language of lives, of kinship between object, footfall and air. There may be a man, a dog, a barrow. There may be a woman, a cart. Air.

2. Affective pedagogy: art and the re-imagining of youth at risk
Dr Anna Hickey-Moody, University of Sydney

In this paper I take up concepts of place and affect as modes of reading youth performance. In so doing, I analyse two sites of cultural production: a school site consisting of mainly Indigenous Australian students and a performance group composed of Sudanese migrants and refugees. These two demographics present diverse sets of social issues, each of which shape students' engagement with school spaces and curriculum. Deleuzian concepts of place and affect can be mobilised in order to understand the various significances of the arts projects and texts generated by these communities. These concepts also offer ways of understanding the politics of schooling articulated through the performance pieces being analysed. I argue that re-appropriating cultural and physical places or increasing the number of spaces inhabited by marginalised young people is a key aspect of arts work that is often under-examined. I also mobilise Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the rhizome and the principle of 'asignifying rupture' in order to understand the cultural acts of re-appropriation undertaken via the arts events I examine. I explore the cultural politics of reclaiming social and physical space for marginalised youth and unpack the ways in which performance texts work across space and time to fold places and times into live art works. I contend that the re-appropriation of physical spaces through rehearsal and performance is just as significant a task as the cultural, political and creative re-appropriation that is evident in these young people's work. Perhaps more importantly, that of which a space speaks is also a determining factor in the kind of work that happens within it. Such materialist concerns inform my concept of 'affective pedagogy'.

3. Animal synonyms: fauna, creatures, beasts, wildlife and us
Assoc Prof Julie Matthews, University of the Sunshine Coast

Derrida asks us to consider the violence we do in the name 'animals'; the internal distinctions between species elided and at the same time amplified in their sameness and their difference from us. Animal philosophy and geography challenge the animal–human binary that haunts western thought, valuable though this critical work is it offers few clues to alternative ways of understandings animal–human relations. In light of their 'palpable absence', this paper interrogates 'affect, space and story' through images that seek to occupy and refigure the synonyms that displace and disconnect animals, fauna, creatures, beasts, wildlife and us.

Panel 8. Border panic? Rethinking emotions on the edge

Despite utopian predictions that the age of globalisation would do away with the anachronism of borders, the post-9/11 security environment has intensified border politics as new security technologies, procedures and regulations are used to police the edges of the nation-state: in airports, coastal waters, walls and fences. As the falling of the Berlin Wall fades from memory, new borders emerge supported by new surveillance technologies and practices. While research on 'border panic' and 'border anxiety' is voluminous, there has been relatively little interrogation of the actual emotions and affects of borders and border crossing. Is this fear, panic or anxiety? And how do these manifest at the border?

Yet this focus on border panic/border anxiety fails to take into account the complexity of emotions we feel at the borders: from the boredom of the airport lounge to the fear and trepidation of refugees fleeing across borders, from the sadness of leaving loved ones to the joy of starting anew. Perhaps too, if we listen carefully at the edges of the state we may find here the shame of the transgressor meeting the disgust of those who feel transgressed. The border re-invents itself, re-aligns itself and embeds itself in our bodies, in our most visceral beings, forcing us to confront not just the borders of the nation-state but the borders of our communities and bodies. What work does emotion do in the production of borders? What emotions do different borders evoke?

In a similar vein, emotions themselves transgress the borders of our bodies as they spark resonances in our surroundings, across other spaces and to other bodies. How does emotion travel across borders? Can e-motion subvert borders and boundaries? Why are some emotions attached to particular localities while others are presumed to transcend political geographies? What are the emotions and affects of migration and travel?

1. 'Emotional baggage': refugees and the movement of feeling
Dr Anna Szorenyi, Lecturer, University of Adelaide

Refugees are often identified as a cause of 'anxiety' for settled nations concerned to protect their borders. Less often pointed out are the ways in which this anxiety is constructed within pre-existing global emotional landscapes. This paper surveys some of the ways in which (as Sara Ahmed points out) certain emotions become attached to the bodies of refugees, so that their movement becomes a movement of and within geographies of feeling. If, as Judith Butler maintains, contemporary politics is often organised around aggressively defended distributions of vulnerability, then the movement of refugees can be seen to be anxiety-provoking precisely because it threatens to destabilise, and hence highlight, the boundaries of peace and privilege that are seen to constitute 'good' emotion. Hence refugees are assumed to be seeking the good emotions that 'belong' to the host nation, yet are feared because they might carry with them unassimilable 'bad' feelings (for instance the argument that Sudanese refugees are too war-traumatised to fit into Australian society). In this circulation of fear from asylum seeker to host, and back again in the form of persecution and exclusion, the bodies of both refugees and nation become constituted as emotional bodies, bodies defined in terms of emotions – but one is seen to be constituted by bad feeling, while the other claims good feeling as its own, and in the process licences the global closure of borders that maintains inequitable distributions of terror. Hence the paper addresses the question not only of what work emotions do in the production of borders, but also of what work borders do in the production of emotions.

2. Unlocking the emotional borders of home: managing publicity, privacy and intimacy
Dr Andrew Gorman-Murray, Research Fellow, University of Wollongong

A sense of security and feelings of comfort often go hand-in-hand. This coupling has been an obvious feature of the post-9/11 security environment, with cultural commentators arguing that heightened fear and suspicion has intensified, simultaneously, policing of borders and aspirations for safety and comfort. Patrolling borders to secure comfort at the national scale has, it seems, heightened the desire for like processes at the residential scales of everyday dwelling – the house and neighbourhood. This has renewed scholarly interest in the permeable boundaries of home, insinuated in complex webs of public and private associations. In this paper, I investigate what home means in this context of heightened awareness of fluid domestic borders, and how emotional needs are entrenched in their management. I draw on interviews, diaries and home tours with inner Sydney residents, arguing that contrary to the popular logic of privacy-for-self as a key emotional locus of home, both personal (private) needs and wider (public) connections underpin domestic values for people living centrally in this global city.

Certainly, creating a private setting remains important, intended to support personal and (immediate) familial wellbeing. But equally, unlocking borders is a primary homemaking practice, focusing on connections with wider family, friends and neighbours, and thus generating an open, hospitable environment for building relationships with a broader circle of intimates and acquaintances. For the respondents, this was achieved by various means: befriending neighbours, hosting family and friends, share-shopping and communal gardening with neighbours, and local parenting networks. Emotions are deeply implicated in these border-management processes in several ways. The emotional exigency for interpersonal relationships is the key that unlocks domestic borders; in turn, unbolting these borders has reciprocal emotional benefits. Indeed, opening the home for domestic hospitality enhances entwined feelings of security and comfort in one's residential environment, expanding the fields of safety and belonging that mark the permeable boundaries of 'feeling at home'. For the respondents, then, comfortable and secure homemaking does not entail closing and locking domestic boundaries, but rather loosening and unlocking the emotional and physical borders of home, and thus actively managing home's insinuation in the public–private binary in order to facilitate emotional wellbeing and intimate relationships.

3. Sounds of home: listening and the emotional practices of place making
Ass Prof Gordon Waitt, University of Wollongong, and Dr Michelle Duffy, Monash University

Susan Smith in her article 'Soundscapes' explicitly asked geographers to consider the importance of sonic qualities in how places are forged through the body. Within her conceptual project is a call to pay greater attention to listening practices in the analysis of society and space. If we bring her understanding of soundscapes to discussions of the importance of making and remaking the emotional boundaries of home, we can use the soundscape as a conceptual framework to think beyond the arguments of home as singular bounded space. Rather, the emotional boundaries that constitute home become contingent on listening practices, embodied histories, and structures of feelings. In this paper these ideas are illustrated drawing on solicited 'sound diaries' recorded by participants living in the 'sea-change' town of Bermagui, New South Wales, Australia. These sound diaries contain sounds and music that were meaningful to participants. In subsequent conversation, insights were given to the ways in which people listen to place and the meanings attributed to what is heard, experienced and felt, that then help constitute ideas about Bermagui as home. In practical terms, the implications are that research into soundscapes offers important insights into the role of emotional triggers in how different people conceive of what belongs, or not, in those places they call home.

4. Touching bodies, touching hearts: bodily boundaries and the limits of compassion
Genevieve Berrick, PhD student, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne

This presentation examines how bodily contact was used to appeal to affective response in the case of the Australian national hanged in Singapore for drugs-related charges in 2005 – Nguyen Tuong Van – examining the possibility that 'touching bodies touch hearts'. Examining this notion of the body as focal in a selected corpus of Australian and Singaporean print journalism, the use of 'touch' (as the meeting point, or point of encounter) is interrogated for how it might operate to place body against body.

In the 'Van' case, the relations of bodies, the variable access of bodies to the encountering and touching of one another might be seen as a key journalistic entry to the case – through a pervasive focus upon the accused's mother, twin, friends, lawyers and the nations involved. Here, relations of bodies are examined for how they are mediated by 'feeling', as in the 'touch' of compassion: 'Compassion can be a touchy subject, touching, as it does, on what touches the heart by seeming to put us in touch with something other than ourselves while leaving us open, in the process, to being read as an easy touch' (Edelman, 2004, p 159).

It interrogates how 'contagion' is taken up in the case with regard to these embodied 'feelings' in, for instance, attempts to spread compassion through the proliferation of the image of Nguyen's handprint. This image was mobilised as part of a symbolic 'sea of hands', calling the public to represent their compassionate response to the case through this image, demanding humanitarian responses, representing also Nguyen's (in)ability to touch his mother before execution.

Of particular interest is what this case might reveal about bodily boundaries and the limits of compassion in determining bodies that matter. Arendt's 'collective responsibility', as responsibilities due to membership in a collective such as in the nation, is placed against the call to compassion. 'We call compassion what I feel when somebody suffers; and this feeling is authentic so long as I realize that it is, after all, not I but somebody else who suffers' (Arendt, 2003, p 148).

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Abstracts of papers

1. Embodiment of care, emotional labour and gender: the undervaluing of nurses' work in residential aged care

Dr Valerie Adams, Research Centre for Gender Studies, University of South Australia

Caring labour is embodied in a gendered construction of care as women's work. Care and nurturance have been designated as feminine activities since the time of the ancient Greek philosophers such as Aristotle. Feminine characteristics of connection were viewed as being part of nature and were seen as subordinate to masculine characteristics such as detachment. This binary reached new heights during the Enlightenment with the Cartesian separation of 'mind' from 'body'. Privileging the mental over the physical, the Cartesian world view has portrayed the mind–body divide as natural and rational. Care work often involves the use of the carer's body to provide physical care to the recipient and the expenditure of emotional labour to provide good quality care. The physicality and emotional labour embodied in nursing has positioned nurses as subordinate to doctors who are engaged in medical 'science'. In health care, nurses' work and the embodiment of a relationship between the caregivers and care recipients has been less highly regarded and rewarded than doctor's work with a care versus cure dichotomy privileging 'curing' over 'caring'. Although human relationships and emotional labour are intrinsic to caring work, nurses' work has been categorised as 'dirty work' because it deals with bodily functions. In residential aged care, nurses care for people with ageing bodies. As many residents have a diagnosis of dementia, they also care for people with cognitive impairment. The breakdown of both mind and body in old age positions aged care as less prestigious than acute care with its increasing use of technology. Qualitative data from a doctoral study of residential aged care nurses' work and a postdoctoral pilot project investigating nurses' work caring for people with dementia from culturally and diverse backgrounds are used to provide empirical evidence that emotional labour is intrinsic to providing good quality care and should be valued as such.

2. Relaxation and the reaffirmation of a sense of self: the emotive role of leisure spaces for western development workers in PNG

Jack Aisbett, University of Newcastle

Development work in Third World countries although rewarding is also considered to be stressful, frustrating and sometimes scary work. Western development workers will often need to find places within the country to relax and unwind, and find some relief from the stresses of their work. Yet little research has been conducted on the places that development workers associate with relief and relaxation while in country. Inspired by Ahmed's (2004) 'affective politics of fear' and Molz's (2005) study of the 'guilty pleasures of the Golden Arches', this talk investigates where western development workers chose to relax while in Papua New Guinea (PNG). Using journal articles and interviews with 20 Australian HIV and AIDS development workers, the talk establishes that working on HIV and AIDS development in PNG was often a stressful and frightening experience. Western development workers would often frequent leisure spaces that would help strengthen a western identity and values, and exclude certain less 'white' PNG bodies. These places included resort hotels or the royal yacht club and country clubs. Although there was ambivalence towards using these places they gave development workers a sense of comfort, safety, familiarity and a connection to home. Alternatively the rural village was another place of leisure that was frequently visited by western development workers. This place held with it the rural ideal of simplicity as well as sense of adventure and an association with a more traditional (and arguably more acceptable) black body.

3. The ordering of emotions: religious ecstasy, gender and 'race' in colonial India

Prof Margaret Allen, Gender, Work and Social Inquiry, University of Adelaide

In 1905 many of the Indian women at the Mukti mission near Pune in India were caught up in a fervent religious revival. Mukti became a place of 'repentance, confession and revival'. The women were crying, stricken with sin, praying and weeping, trembling violently, speaking in tongues, pleading with the unsaved, exhorting others and later laughing, filled with joy, singing and dancing. The conversion of some eight hundred of these women caused exultation among many of the European 'holiness' missionaries in India, who had been waiting for a sign, a sign that the Holy Spirit would descend upon India, just as it had in Wales, at the Australian revival meetings led by Torrey and Alexander, in the Khassia Hills, near Assam and other early sites of revival.

A number of the women missionaries at the nearby Poona and Indian Village Mission (PIVM) were excited by the revival and joined in the efforts of the Mukti mission to gain more conversions. They went out into the countryside with praying bands of these Indian women to conduct prayer meetings and to evangelise. This great outburst of emotion had the potential to validate more exuberant forms of worship and to challenge the male leadership of the PIVM. Furthermore, it had its racialised aspects for it seems that the women missionaries did not themselves engage in these highly emotional outbursts. Paradoxically this emotional exuberance challenged imperial notions of the development of appropriate emotional order and control among colonised subjects.

The paper explores these dimensions of imperial emotions while also discussing the impact of this revival dominated by the women at Mukti, including its iconic founder, the Indian Christian Pandita Ramabai, supported by the American Minnie Abrams and Australian women, such as Amy Parsons, upon the leadership of Charles Reeve at PIVM.

4. Sentient spaces, intimate encounters: emotional tensions between 'hosts' and 'guests' in Sydney's tourist/leisure/residential geographies

Dr Fiona Allon, Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney

'Sentience takes us outside of ourselves.' (Walter Benjamin)

Big cities are spaces of sensory immersion where a great array of different kinds of people live together cheek-by-jowl, side-by-side. Global mobilities such as travel and tourism have increased the opportunities for new and novel proximities and intimacies. As Kevin Robins has argued, the globalising urban arena is about 'immersion in a world of multiplicity, and implicates us in the dimension of embodied cultural experience' (2001: 87).

In a 'world city' such as Sydney, the sentient experiences on offer have given rise to distinctive sensory economies and, in turn, to particular economies of consumption. The sentient economy at work here is very much a part of the everyday, cultural, political, economic and libidinal life of the city, played out in the increasing importance of industries such as leisure and tourism, and in a highly marketable reputation for self-indulgence, sensual profligacy and hedonistic play (from the 'surf city' of Bondi Beach to the 'sin city' of the Mardi Gras). Large numbers of tourists and travellers arrive in Sydney actively seeking to experience the spaces of taste and consumption provided by this economy. This paper examines tensions between local government authorities, residents, and travellers in Sydney's beachside suburbs. It focuses on the kinds of embodied, emotional encounters occurring when the spaces of taste, consumption and leisure experiences associated with these travellers become overlaid on, and in conflict with, the patterns of occupancy and governance of gentrified residential communities. These encounters activate very culturally specific, intimate, bodily responses and different states of sentient arousal, feeding into emotional experiences as diverse as pleasure and joy, fear, revulsion and disgust. The sensitivities they arouse provide insights into hierarchies of consumption and lifestyle, and the connections between emotions and space in the changing geographies of contemporary cities.

5. Films, friends and place: the emotional geographies of Australian rural cinema attendance

Karina Aveyard, PhD candidate , School of Humanities, Griffith University

Contemporary Australian rural cinema is regularly portrayed in terms of its inferiority and lack of desirability in comparison with the metropolitan experience. Similarly the emotional connections between rural audiences and their local cinemas are also characterised as predominantly negative. The supposed lower rate of attendance among rural audiences is often attributed to feelings of disappointment and dissatisfaction arising from the inadequacy of the cinema experience available to them. However, this paradigm, with its emphasis on the hegemony of the metropolitan experience, is too limited and simplistic. It over-estimates the significance of the metropolitan, which is critically lacking in relevance in many rural towns because it is so far removed from the experiences and feelings associated with everyday life. Further, detailed examination of the film industry data on cinema going frequency suggests assumptions of lower attendance lack validity and that rural cinema audiences, on average, attend the cinema just as often as their metropolitan counterparts. New research questions the traditional view of Australian rural cinema going and suggests the emotional connections between audiences and their local cinemas are often very positive and enriching. These attachments transcend merely reluctant adaptation or acceptance of inferior or unsatisfactory circumstances. Positive emotional attachments to the cinema arise not only from participation in a popular entertainment event and the viewing of particular films. Cinema attendance materially enriches interpersonal relationships and reinforces and extends social networks within small communities. There is also evidence that rural cinemas have an important role in helping people to feel more positive and hopeful about the place in which they live.

6. Whaling: affect and meaning in the context of an industrial museum

Janice Baker, PhD candidate, Curtin University

This paper considers the affective space of an ex-whaling station which is today an industrial museum. 'Whale World', located at Albany on the south coast of Western Australia, retains all the buildings and artefacts of the last whaling station in Australia. It provides detailed didactic information about the processes and mechanics of the industry. The site understandably generates powerful affects. The tools and artefacts of whaling are exhibited in situ across various locations of the site including flensing decks, vats and oil silos. Numerous photos convey the daily work and lives of local men who worked at the site and the significance the industry held for the regional community. Written in a ficto-critical style, the narrator provides a tour of the museum and recounts her personal responses to the buildings and objects on display. The paper seeks a method with which to express the non-discursive nature of affect in the making, or dis-assembling of meaning in museum and memorial spaces. As the tour engages with the dynamics of affect and a sense of the ethic of moving toward the other-than-human, it draws on Herman Melville's great whaling tale Moby Dick.

7. Safety, pleasure and identity: reading the emotional qualities of space through the action of children

Rita Gomes Batista, MSc, Researcher in the Faculty of Architecture, Technical University of Lisbon

This paper reflects the role of emotions expressed by children in use of space with patrimonial value. The research takes place at the Astronomical Observatory of Lisbon (AOL), originally established in 1860. In the nineteen century the need to build a new observatory near Lisbon, Portugal, was an opportunity to create, for the first time, an independent institution dedicated to astronomy. Today the old instruments that measure time and distances between stars are useless due to the pollution of the sky of the city that enlarged its boundaries. Nevertheless, astronomers and visitors are impelled to preserve the main building as testimony of their predecessors. The initial study of the action of children at the AOL proposed the identification of special features of the interior space. These features should be revealed in the program of the future museum of the AOL. To do this, we tried to support our observations not only in our main area of research, architecture, but also in psychology. Specific activities were embraced by groups of 4 to 7 children, between the ages of 3 to 6 years old such as: telling a story, visiting the space, drawing and taking pictures. The case studies were recorded in video and audio formats, and all the data was collected and organised applying a protocol previously settled. The children responded differently in each room and pointed out their attraction to particular spaces and objects. We accessed their responses through the interpretation of phenomena of attachment, play and empathy that revealed the feelings of safety, pleasure and identity. The characteristics of the rooms were associated with the interpretation of these emotions (classified by frequency and intensity). This way we could identify what we call the 'emotional qualities of space' which provide us crucial information to evaluate the habitability of the building.

8. Marketing subjectivity through the affective domains of media culture

Anne Begg, PhD Candidate, University of Otago, New Zealand

Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's statement that 'marketing is now the instrument of social control', this paper claims that marketing maintains social control through the affective domains of brand management and that neo-liberal subjectivity is modulated as an ongoing, self-branding or marketing exercise within the paradigmatic logic of media culture and informational capitalism. I argue that informational capitalism is based less on direct command over a productive process and more on indirect command of the conduct of conduct and on access to the affective spaces inherent in human sociality. And media culture underpins informational capitalism not only because it uses 'immaterial labour' and communication technologies to provide a mediated framework within which everyday life unfolds, but also because it relies on processes of 'affective labour' to produce affinities and 'virtual' communities that can be appropriated for profit. Branding mechanisms function to guide the investments of affect in spaces of consumption and taste and media interventions like reality television play a key role in orchestrating and disseminating our individuation and subjectivation according to the marketing mantra. However, as the affect-driven logic of informational capitalism reveals, individuals are not the discrete and closed personalities posited as homo economicus in neo-liberal society and affective attachments cannot be limited to the emotions of the excluded other of rationality. It is my contention that affective dimensions should be conceptualised in terms of human vitalism, indisputable interdependence and productive relationality. This paper concludes therefore, that ethical subjectivity demands vigilant critique of how we think who we are, and requires thoughts and actions that are 'a constant generator of de-individualisation'.

9. Patinas of place: Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City

Dr Marsha Berry, School of Media and Communication, RMIT University

This paper will explore the complex relationship between place, memory and emotion in late socialist Vietnam since the economic reforms in 1986 known as Doi Moi, which aimed to shift the economy from socialism and central planning to one that is market driven in Vietnam. The built environment in Vietnam is in constant transition yet the past remains inscribed to create urban palimpsests where its traumatic history remains inscribed. Cultural memory, an integral part of national identity, is contested and adjusted to reflect new aspirations. There are tensions between generations, between the colonial past and the present, and between memories and postmemories of the American War in Vietnam. Similarly there are tensions between public and private spaces. Each of these tensions is played out in the public places and non-places in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. The methodology used will be drawn from the work of Andreas Huyssen and Pierre Nora to explore how lieux de mémoire function in an expanded field altered by globalisation. There is a restructuring in the affect of space and time in Vietnam that is driven by global forces such as mass media and the internet being expressed in numerous art works that are concerned with memory and identity. This paper will analyse the works of Vietnamese artists who engage with discourses of emotion, memory and geography. It will interrogate the works of Bui Xuan Phai, famous for his desolate streetscapes of the Old Quarter in Hanoi before the Doi Moi reforms; Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, a video artist living in Ho Chi Minh City who explores Vietnamese history and displacement through evocative images such as cyclos underwater; and Pham An Hai, one of Vietnam's best-known abstract painters.

10. Hope as an emotional landscape

Assoc Prof Peter Bishop and Prof Alison Mackinnon, Hawke Research Institute, University of South Australia

This paper explores an emotional geography of hope. Drawing on recent research with youth on the margins of Australian society, it maps an everyday world within which various modalities of hope are embodied and experienced. Reflecting on hope, encouraging it or expressing it can be profoundly emotional, particularly when it takes place around the margins of mainstream social expectations. The paper also examines the emotional labour of working with hope, both for the participants and the researchers. The presenters draw on varied disciplinary approaches including cultural studies, gender studies and social policy.

11. Intimacy and authenticity in non-places

Dr Yvette Blackwood, University of Tasmania

'Essentially, tourism, as a search for meaning, with the ludic sociability it favours, the image it generates, is a graduated encoded and untraumatising apprehension of the external, of otherness.' (Rachid Amirou, quoted in Michel Houellebecq, Platform (38))

Marc Augé in his book Non-places: an introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity argues that in postmodernity we are always and never at home. Augé claims this is due to the fact that many westerners spend an increased amount of time in 'non-places' such as highways, airports, trains and planes. Hotels, to the extent they function as 'non-places' might be considered focal points of loneliness and ennui in late postmodernity, or 'supermodernity'. Augé argues that non-places make intimate relationships between others and with the environment impossible. Much of Augé's work on non-places is useful in this paper; however, his clear delineation between place and non-place, between historical space and new space, is problematised by two 'supermodern' hotel narratives: Platform, by Michel Houellebecq (2000) and Lost in translation, by Sofia Coppola (2003). The hotels in these narratives are non-places according to Augé's definition, but they also complicate the clear binary Augé establishes between place and non-place. Both narratives, dominated by hotels, use the expectation that hotels are alienating non-places as an opening premise, relegating the protagonists to the role of lonely outsiders. The narratives then invert this idea, showing how intimacy and authenticity unfold in the hotel. This paper both supports Augé's insistence on the significance of non-places in supermodernity, and refutes his argument (via Deleuze and Guattari's writing on the refrain in A thousand plateaus) that non-places are characterised by a complete break from history, and by anonymity and isolation.

12. Private grieving, informal memorials and appropriating public space

Assoc Prof Gerry Bloustien, Hawke Research Institute, University of South Australia

On 25 June 2009, a few hours after the announcement of Michael Jackson's death, fans in London gathered outside a West End theatre and began to create a communal shrine of remembrance composed of photos, personal letters and tributes. Some crayon-scribbled notes and paintings were from children seemingly far too young to have ever known the pop star's music in his hey-day or to have a personal sense of loss. All were from individuals who could only have known such a public figure through his media persona. But the object of such outpouring of grief doesn't have to be a public figure. The phenomenon of collective memories, informal 'shrines' and the reclaiming of public space is duplicated everyday in the roadside ephemeral memorials at the site of fatal road crashes or violent, untimely death, occurring around the world. This paper, which draws on a number of case studies (during 2006–09) undertaken in Australia and the UK of such ephemeral roadside memorials, explores the powerful creation of affect and emotional dislocation that such occurrences produce from the combination of place, space and time.

13. 'I'm fine as I am! ... I'm all right! There's nothing wrong with me!'

Kristina Bradford, speech pathologist in private practice and in a South Australian brain injury rehabilitation unit
Su Upton, psychologist in private practice

People who have difficulty recognising and interpreting emotions may be unsuccessful in maintaining positive relationships and integrating into the community. For clients who have experienced an acquired brain injury this can be further exacerbated, potentially resulting in social isolation. Equally clients who are integrated into the community can find there are unexpected emotional gaps in their ability to respond to an emotional crisis. we will use single-subject case studies based upon Tomkins' (1962) conceptual framework of physical indicators of nine innate affects to illustrate how emotions impact upon engagement and positive outcomes in therapy. We will use specific therapy models in these case studies.

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14. Spatial enjoyment in the central square of a Yucatec Maya town (Mexico)

Assoc Prof Denise Fay Brown, Department of Geography, University of Calgary

The Maya towns in Central Yucatan, Mexico are characterised by a square central area void of vegetation and material structures. Visitors to the towns and Mayas alike are impressed by the central 'empty lot', but often for contrasting reasons. Outsiders, including Mexican government officials, consider this to be an empty lot, ideal for downtown development and use. Mayans see this as a key spatial indicator of a city, a significant space full of meaning. Samuels (1994) calls such spaces 'theatres of memories', but memories are frequently acted out through social practices, not necessarily reflectively 'remembered'. This paper argues that this material space not only serves to structure the experiential but also to stimulate the memory and the emotions. During 50 weeks of the year, this site attests to the strength of the Mayan urban project (the cah). It is a politically charged space of resistance to outside and imposed structures and practices. It is a spatial understatement, on a main square architecturally dominated by the twin-spired colonial Catholic Church and the fortress-like Municipal Government building. This changes during the annual festivity when the 'empty' space becomes the focal point of all regional Maya inhabitants. The space which is full of meaning during a normal day becomes recharged with meaning during this celebration which is called cha'an (enjoy) in Maya. The activities and practices change, as do the emotions surrounding the use of this space. This paper explores this particular 'theatre of memories' as a contested place.

15. Contested spaces: American abortion clinics

Assoc Prof Lori Brown, Syracuse University

Abortion clinics have been politically and spatially polarised places in American culture for many decades. These sites, uniting strongly held beliefs about productivity and women's bodies, have instigated reactions as diverse as candlelight vigils, armed confrontation and rallies of supporters. Imagine a space where both those who work there as well as those who are patients fear for their safety while walking through protesters, chanting or a series of security systems in order to just get into the building. What makes these spaces so much more emotionally charged than other places of medicine? How does the spatial organisation and flow of particular clinics alter how these spaces are perceived? What other things can be done to create a safer and more relaxing environment? How does architecture impact the emotional qualities of the space?

Violent protests in the 1990s resulted in the areas around clinics becoming heavily policed and monitored, creating havoc for all in the vicinity. These spaces are highly charged and emotive spaces. We are reminded of this by the recent death of Dr George Tiller, one of the few late-term abortion providers in the United States. Murdered while in church, Dr Tiller had been a target of anti-abortion groups for over fifteen years.

As an architect, I am interested in the relationship between space and its occupants and how they affect one another. Using feminist spatial readings, the project connects ideas of the emotional to how these particular spaces provide agency for the patients, their families and the clinic employees. Security, often a major consideration for clinics, is studied and reconsidered not as an impediment but as a possible contributor to the space's physical and emotional foundation. In addition, the project explores how the clinic's identity both physically and emotionally is spatially constructed.

16. Losing Face in Desire: Race, Affect, Ethics

Dr Gilbert Caluya, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Hawke Research Institute, University of South Australia

For Charles Darwin and Silvan Tomkins the face is the seat of emotional expression, whereas for Levinas the face is the site of ethical revelation. This paper draws on my previous research on gay Asian men to explore the relationship between ethics and emotions in the context of racialised queer desires. Drawing on autoethnographic research in the intimate spaces of gay clubs, I trace the ways that desire can be mobilised differently across faces, which allows us to experiment with a postcolonial ethics of queer desire.

17. At the museum: 'legitimised' affects and the visitor–victim relation

Rosa Campbell, University of Sydney

This paper will explore the affective space of the Holocaust museum with specific focus on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington DC. Whilst affect is often considered uncontrollable, this museum is a space of constructed affect where grief and horror at the Holocaust are legitimised and encouraged. It will trace these affects to the intersubjective relationship between the viewer and the Holocaust victim, arguing that the viewer is encouraged to embody the position of the Jewish Holocaust victim. Further, the USHMM will be considered as a space of American nationalism, where pride-in-nation is sanctioned. The museum's position on the Washington Mall will be discussed. In conjunction with the museum's interior, this geography constructs the Holocaust as an event in American history. This re-historicisation subsumes the Jewish Holocaust victim within American history, constructing them as American subjects. It will ask what this means for the alterity of Holocaust victims and the particularities of current Jewish-American experience. It will discuss the museum from the perspective of a non-American visitor, arguing that in order that the museum's affective narrative make sense, the visitor must occupy the subject position of the North American in tandem with that of the Jewish Holocaust victim. Finally, as this is a space of 'legitimised' affect, this paper will discuss which affects are delegitimised and deemed inappropriate by the discourse of the USHMM. I will ask what happens when legitimate affects puncture each other, that is when national pride collides with grief. I will look to these renegade affects as holding within them possible pathways for less consuming, more ethical relations between the visitor and the Holocaust victim.

18. Tasteful feelings: the taste politics of emotional style as sexual style in The L word

Sarah Cefai, Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney

'Damn she's so fuckin' sexy ...' reads one among thousands of almost identical online comments, many of which are accompanied by their female authors' self-avowed claims to heterosexuality. While Shane's character remains steadfastly lesbian through all six seasons of the TV series The L word, the sexiness and confidence she delivers in clichéd lines like 'Sexuality is fluid. Whether you're gay, straight or bisexual, you just go with the flow', aptly describes the context of her character's reception: her emotionally withholding sexual style is met with viewers' desires that 'just go with the flow', i.e. desires that flow despite orientation. While those with good taste rush to confess their sexual desire for Shane, tastefulness is also expressed through disdain. The criticisms and unfavourable feelings that mark lesbian viewership bring into relief tasteful structures of community participation that precede and supersede the show and its capacity to 'represent'.

What alignments between different kinds of feeling and structures of identity are set in motion by articulations of 'tasteful feeling'? What kinds of concepts are necessary to understand these alignments? What kind of game of power is played in the intersection of emotional and sexual styles? This paper debates the political value of understanding feeling as an articulation of taste. Thinking of feeling as a style of embodied awareness that performs cultural pedagogies in places, texts, images, imaginaries, identifications, tactile touches, corporeal proximities, emphatic gesticulations, and so on, can aid our theorisations of lesbian representation; tasteful feelings shift lesbian thresholds beyond the epistemic stalemate of gender transgression as the apotheosis of lesbian identity.

19. 'Ah the serenity': emotional geographies of outer suburban creative industries

Dr Christy Collis and Dr Emma Felton, Queensland University of Technology

This paper investigates the emotional geographies of the creative industries. Creative industries discourse and planning tend to make an appeal to specific emotional geographies: spaces of tolerance, urban buzz and excitement, and diverse and lively street life (for example Florida 2002). Harnessing the affective domain is also implicit in contemporary urban planning, with efforts to create cities that are exciting and stimulating places to live by using strategies of high-density mixed-use urban villages, 'buzzing' urban creative precincts, and massive urban 'flagship' art precincts. While there is no question that some creative industries workers and firms are attracted to such spaces, this paper investigates whether hip urban high-tech and flagship spaces are really the only emotional geographies that drive – and that are generated by – creative industries activity. Drawing on the findings from an Australian Research Council-funded project, 'Creative suburbia', this paper provides an alternative topography of creative industries' emotional geographies. Counter to common understandings, this interview-based project has found that creative industries workers in outer Australian suburbs value what they perceive as the calm, the freedom from conformist urban style, and the natural environment; this drives both their decision to locate in the outer suburbs, and their commercial creative work.

20. Landscape as emotional space

Dr Michel Collot, Professor of French Literature, University Sorbonne

As the morphology and the etymology of the word indicates, e-motion is not a merely internal state of mind, but an impulse (motion) through which the subject goes out of himself and identifies with an object and the outer word, as phenomenology assumes. Emotion fills the whole field of our life and gives another shape and meaning to our environment. It implies a kind of spacialisation of the self, who needs space to ex-press himself. It contests the Cartesian distinction between res cogitans and res extensa. Landscape is a remarkable example of such 'emotional experience of space'; its atmosphere (Stimmung) relies on an affective exchange between the self and the world, so that it became since Romanticism a major theme of literature, and particularly of lyric poetry. Landscape is a one of the most appropriate expression of this 'intrication' between the inner and the outer world, on which lyricism, along Staiger, is based. I intend to show its place and part in modern poetry, which uses words and world as an emotional matter (matière-émotion), through two striking examples. With the help of the organising committee, I would choose the most suitable to the public of the conference: two romantic English poets (Wordsworth and Shelley), two famous French poets of the twentieth century (Char and Ponge), or two young contemporary French poets (Olivier Domerg and Michael Batalla).

21. Monumentality, affect and the Mostar Bridge

Andrea Connor, PhD candidate, University of Technology Sydney

In The social production of space the philosopher Henri Lefebvre described the monumental place as a form of 'social condenser' a strong point or anchor in a textured social fabric covered by networks and webs of social relations. As social objects held in common monumental sites can come to occupy a privileged place in the social imaginary manifesting a material and symbolic force, an 'affecting presence' as potent sites of meaning and memory making. Monumental sites can thus work to generate 'affective bonds', a shared sense of identity and belonging to an 'imagined community'. But what happens when such an object/place is destroyed? In 1993 the Mostar Bridge, a much-loved piece of Ottoman heritage, was destroyed during the vicious fighting that eventually lead to the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia. The longest-span arch bridge in the world the 'Stari Most' had stood for over four hundred years and was deeply embedded in the social fabric of the small multi-ethnic city of Mostar in Herzegovina. Its destruction caused an outpouring of grief and mourning across the former Yugoslavia and was condemned by international organisations such as UNESCO. Over a decade later the bridge has been re-built as an exact replica of the original in the hope of fostering a climate of reconciliation amongst the peoples of Bosnia Herzegovina through recognition of their common heritage in Mostar. But the war has transformed people's 'affective ties' to place and Mostar has become a spatially divided city shaped by ethno-nationalist political interests working to reinforce the segregation of the city. In such a context the process of heritage construction and reconstruction is both highly contested and potentially divisive. This paper seeks to understand the place of this 'new old bridge' as a resurrected symbol of 'national unity' and its potential to work as a site of memory through which to transform people's emotional sense of place and re-imagine a unified city.

22. Making space for stillness: experiencing places of retreat in contemporary Britain

Dr David Conradson, Department of Geography, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

Against a backdrop of shifting expressions of spirituality and pressures on work–life balance, there is growing popular engagement with places of retreat in contemporary Britain. These places, including Christian and Buddhist retreat houses, are typically understood by those who visit them as offering particular opportunities for stillness, reflection and reframing. Here I draw on organisational case studies to consider the experiences of those who visit such places. What happens in retreat centres, what is their attraction to guests, and how are the forms of subjectivity they enable woven into a person's wider flow of life? I look in particular at the emotions experienced within such settings, how these emerge and the ways in which guests may seek to keep certain feelings 'alive' after leaving a retreat centre. These questions emerge from a broader project that is asking what popular engagement with places of retreat might tell us about the attractions of stillness in so-called fast societies and the nature of contemporary spirituality. The intellectual context is cultural and health geography, work on therapeutic environments, and discussions of emergent forms of spirituality and belief in the West today.

23. Public sphere and space, natural heritage, emotional environment (examples of Marais d'Orx and the Domain of Abbadia)

Claire Damery, Geographer, University of Pau, France

This research, which is from my PhD, is interested in the new forms of the contemporary public sphere and space, from the study of the inherited natural places of the Orx Wetlands and the Domain of Abbadia (natural parks in Pyrénées-Atlantiques, France). So, it joins in a wider movement of the scientific community which tries today to think the conditions of an emergence of the public sphere, when the ties between citizens and policy are opaque. Our specific approach is to enlighten the public sphere issue with the natural heritage question. At first, we consider the natural heritage place as a potential of the public sphere's emergence, from the visitors' experiences of the studied sites. This work allows us to enlighten the emergence of the public sphere's moments, from the visitors’ experiences of the ambivalent meanings of places. The observation of a specific 'emotional environment' of these natural heritage places leads us then to propose a model to define the necessary conditions for the emergence of a public space. The study of the relation of the visitors with natural heritage places enlightens then the strength of both the scenography and the emotional environment, to explain the new forms of emergence of public space. So, it supports the policy's need of spatiality and the necessity of taking into account affects to understand the process and the circumstances of its emergence. This research so opens perspectives to identify new modalities of management of public spaces in the fields of heritage, planning and town planning.

24. Forgetting books

Dr Andrew Dearman, University of South Australia

Many Danish family photo albums from deceased estates make their way to Australia to be sold off in second-hand markets as a result of death duties in Denmark. This practice of economic, emotional and geographical displacement emphasises the complex narrative structure of the family photo album when viewed far from the time and place of its original construction. The displaced albums engage notions of forgetting – the problematic other of remembrance, as discussed by Paul Connerton in his text 'Seven types of forgetting' (2008), in which he argues that, while forgetting is often seen as a failure in comparison to remembrance, it performs a necessary social (and by extension, emotional) function. As an object of research, the family photo album presents a broad range of readings, through the internal complexity of its space – its content, construction and materiality. Of significance here, is its outside – the contextual and geographical space in which it is read, and the emotional attachment (or lack thereof) of the viewer/reader. It is at once; an object containing the individual (both inside and outside of its pages) within traditional practices of the family; a complex spatial and temporal location device – the 'I was there' tourist photograph, presented alongside the picture postcard obtained from same location; and an object for the performance of remembrance – of absence and presence. This paper presents a reading of some of these albums – as artefacts exiled to the antipodes – in a space situated between Geoffrey Batchen's practice of remembrance and Paul Connerton's assertion of the necessity to forget. The paper proposes an overarching theoretical framework in which the displaced album performs a function similar to that of Foucault's conception of the heterotopia – an idealised actual utopia containing profound internal contradictions.

25. Landscapes of an unforgettable past: WWII memorialisation in Poland

Dr Danielle Drozdzewski, UNSW

The localisation of collective cultural memories in public spheres occurs commonly at designated landscapes of memorialisation, such as at Anzac Cove in Gallipoli. In Poland, however, war commemoration is an intrinsic part of the everyday urban fabric because of the plethora of sites of commemoration. Memorials of war serve to remind us that crimes so gruesome in nature occurred in everyday places – where we now go to shop, work or just walk by. In this vein, cultural memory transmission in public places and the ensuing emotional responses ensure that reminders of the nation's past are tangible and virtually unavoidable. This paper examines several World War II memorials in Kraków, Poland, which are emblematic of the importance of (re)producing and transmitting cultural memories of the war in Poland. Such memorials are emotionally loaded places and convey narratives of national significance – they evoke memories not only the loss of loved ones and but also of national suffering. Heffernan (1995: 295) has argued that the commemoration of war and a nations' war dead takes place within a 'complex geography'. This geography not only involves the ceremonial rituals of commemoration, but also the (re)negotiation of narratives of war into the national identification of past and present. As such, memories of war in Polish public spheres underline the Polish nations' resilience and struggles, but also highlight the significance of the emotional responses to war in contemporary conceptualisations of Polish national identity.

26. Beauty and the bush: environmentalism, tourism, and images of reconciliation

Dr Debra Dudek, School of English Literatures and Philosophy, University of Wollongong

Children's texts such as the film Ferngully: the last rainforest (1992) and Jeannie Baker's wordless picture book Belonging (2004) call upon viewers' emotional engagement with the environment as a way to advocate for large- and small-scale environmental activism. In Ferngully, the audience falls in love with the rainforest when they fall in love with the fairies, who live there in place of the original Indigenous inhabitants. In Belonging, a protest to reclaim the street runs parallel to a protest for a national apology to Australian Indigenous peoples. In these two texts, readers are positioned as agents of social justice, who can change the future by saving the environment, while sidelining Indigenous rights. Similarly, Baz Luhrmann's film Australia (2008) uses the figure of a child to create an emotional bond between the audience and the child that replicates the parent–child relationship that is represented on-screen. The film invites non-Indigenous Australians to face a past in which Indigenous children were taken from their parents while educating international audiences about this part of Australia's history. More troubling than the white paternalism – and maternalism – upon which the film relies is the use of this same child character (and actor) in the Tourism Australia commercials that were released in tandem with the film. In the advertisements, the Indigenous child from the film becomes a fairy-like figure that recalls the fairy knowledge that influenced human action in Ferngully. Instead of saving the rainforest, however, the troubled humans of Luhrmann's advertisements are sprinkled with Indigenous fairy desert dust so they can save themselves by travelling to Australia and immersing themselves in the picturesque Australian environment. Instead of affecting viewers in a way that encourages them to work towards social justice, the commercials exploit Indigenous connection to country in order to sell a nation to itself and abroad.

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27. The drifting body: the role of affect and practice in the production of place

Dr Cameron Duff, Monash Fellow, Social Sciences and Health Research Unit, School of Psychology, Psychiatry and Psychological Medicine, Monash University

The felt sensation, the feel and emotional resonance of place, defines much of the routine and tumult of city life. Cities abound with discrete places, forged in the manifold ensembles of design, practice and sociality that connect the diverse niches and hubs of the modern metropolis. Each such place calls forth a series of affects, habits and encounters, shaping the experience of place while adding to the meaning or sense of the city's myriad identities. The imbrications of place, affect, habit and meaning suggest what Ed Casey (2001) calls the 'implacement' of the body/self. Casey goes on to distinguish between 'thin' and 'thick' places, stressing that the self's 'concernful absorption' in thick places works to deepen the subjective experience of belonging. These 'thin' and 'thick' places were the subject of a recent ethnographic study of young people, place and urban life conducted in Vancouver, Canada. This study sought to elucidate the links between place and belonging, and the role of place in the development of young people's social networks. Ethnographic research was conducted in four Vancouver neighbourhoods between October 2007 and June 2008, among a sample of 36 youths aged 15 to 18 years. Participants reported a range of 'place attachments' and the ways local places mediate the ebb and flow of sociality and connectedness. Thick places support a range of distinctive affects and feeling states, which mark such places out from the thin, indifferent places that surround them. Analysis indicated that thick places structure the experience of 'belonging in place' through the intensification of affective experience. Participants described seeking thick places out both for the positive feeling states they avail, as well as the practices and social interactions such affects make possible. The paper will close with a discussion of the links between affect, practice and the production of place in urban landscapes.

28. Mapping Africa in Mile End: injera and forgiveness

Dr Jean Duruz, University of South Australia

Although Yenensh G has not seen her mother in Addis Ababa for more than thirty years, the taste of chili-spiced stews and injera – the traditional bread of Ethiopia – has travelled well. Re-invented by Yenensh, these dishes are staples on the menu of Addis Ababa Cafe, a small 'ethnic' business in Adelaide's western suburbs. Nearby, Gaganis Brothers, wholesalers of Greek, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern foods, provide familiar ingredients for Yenensh's cooking or, if unavailable, possibilities for creative substitution (rice flour instead of injera's usual t'ef flour). Down a suburban side street, the African Village Cafe operates behind closed doors. Open these doors and you find a pool table, smell the coffee, hear the sounds of conversation. You sense you are 'out of place', but enquiring looks are not unkind. This paper examines fragments – local places, peoples, stories, affective landscapes – to trace micro-spatialisations of 'Africa' in a historically 'mixed' Australian neighbourhood. In sketching these traces, the focus is on the emotional economies of small businesses like Addis Ababa Cafe – on the project of producing a comforting 'place' of transnational belonging: 'place' as refuge, renewal, intercultural interactivity and entrepreneurship. Conceptually, the paper approaches the question of 'successful' ethnic community building and cultural exchange from two directions. Firstly, it reflects on Addis Ababa Cafe as a case in point for Sandercock's (2003) 'love song to our mongrel cities' – cities inscribed with difference, negotiated through 'memory, desire and spirit'. Secondly, it worries at Derrida's (2001) conceptualising hospitality and forgiveness as paradoxical. Do their contradictions preclude productive analytical connections, even when connections are haunted by ambivalence? Commensality based on alliances of 'others' might challenge (at least, in part) ethnocentric assumptions of who offers hospitality, who forgives. As a result, different 'mappings' of affective landscapes – in and out of Africa, and Mile End – might be imagined.

29. Women, risk and resilience: the alchemy and cartography of affect

Dr Angelique Edmonds, University of South Australia

This paper presents work from a research project that considers the appropriateness of the contemporary public health setting in Australia for the diversity of women accessing maternity care. In contemporary public maternity care there is a danger that the state of emergency is no longer the exception but the rule. The alchemy of one body becoming two is a threshold experience, at the heart of which there is no singular territory of language, yet reason attempts to make the same story for everyone. The research asks: If we celebrate intuition and creativity as alchemical, what is at stake when responsibility for the safe passage of childbirth has been handed over to the high priests and settings of science? In declaring superior authority, their practice has corralled the significance of childbirth into a procedural focus of managed risk in a hospital setting. To what emotional affect? What does this say of our culture?

This paper will reflect on Levi Strauss' example of Cuna women in Central and South America and discuss experiences from southeast Arnhem Land, as well as those reported by culturally and linguistically diverse women accessing public maternity care in Australia. The literature addresses a specific but only latently acknowledged correlation between place/context and resilience, and this paper begins to speculate on how this correlation may be better understood.

The research project from which this work is derived considers the extent to which attention to the impact of environmental design contexts may assist in ameliorating feelings of vulnerability and fostering emotional resilience for these women.

30. Affective attachment to land tested by fire

Dr Jan Elder, Adjunct Lecturer in Sociology, James Cook University

It is more than seven months since bushfire ravaged large areas of countryside in Victoria. As a 'victim' of the February 7 conflagration, I am frequently asked 'Will you rebuild?' Initially the answer was obvious and easy, but now it is less certain and more complex. This paper explores my emotional responses and my observations of the reactions of others in similar circumstances. The paper will examine several dimensions of attachment to place in a very personal but hopefully reflective manner. Within rural sociology affective attachment to land is often qualified by a dichotomy between rural 'lifestyle' residents and rural producers. Though it is generally acknowledged that these categories overlap, certain assumptions tend to underpin discussions of 'love of country'. This is a notion often proffered as a reason for rural living by 'lifestylers', and though even the most business-minded producers do express a love of the land and rural way of life, it may be seldom stated or more likely self-consciously or defensively referred to by farmers in specific social circumstances. The implication being that attachment to country is more deeply held by producers and that a lesser, more ephemeral emotional attachment – sentimental, possibly naive – is characteristic of lifestylers and hobby farmers. Historic family connections and economic necessity traditionally mediates and strengthens farmers' links to the land while lifestylers are often labelled 'incomers'. This dichotomy informs, but is not central to, the discussion which explores the emotional impact of 'natural disaster' (in this case bushfire and drought) on 'relations to nature in place' and personal identity as sensual experience and knowledge of local country.

31. Emotional capital? Barrier or enabler for physical activity and play in inner city children?

Christina Ergler (presenting author), Robin Kearns, University of Auckland and Karen Witten, Masey University

This paper reports on work seeking to understand inner city and suburban neighbourhoods in terms of constraints to, or support for, physical activity and outdoor play in Auckland, New Zealand. In this research, set within the context of the obesity epidemic, we are exploring not only where children are physically active and play within an urban environment in the summer and winter, but also how emotions around physical activity are linked to seasonality and architectural features. Feelings have tended to be neglected within previous research on this theme. Although the emotional nature of everyday geographies has been highlighted in children's geographies, it is often only implicitly expressed. To address this gap, a theoretical framework based on the thinking of Bourdieu will be presented. This discusses the possibility of integrating 'emotional capital' into obesity-related research. Drawing on qualitative interviews and elicited maps produced by children aged 8–10 years, the paper will discuss how place experience and emotional attachment to places changes with seasonality and meteorological conditions while children are physical active. The paper will offer novel insights into how feelings and perceptions are interwoven within contrasting neighbourhood settings.

32. The point: surfing, geography and a sensual life of young men and masculinity on the Gold Coast, Australia

Dr Clifton Evers, University of NSW

The beach has long been a privileged site in Australian culture, and surfers have become icons of it. These men are often referred to as straight as steel, strong as granite, austere and inviolate. Drawing on over three decades worth of surfing I unpack this hegemonic understanding of men who surf, and reveal in its place the importance of feelings and bodies to their lives. Through an analysis of going surfing I articulate the role feelings and bodies play in how men belong, how they bond with their 'turf', come to understand themselves as masculine, and how they learn to do masculinity.

33. Conflicting emotions of the backpacking food tourist

Emily Falconer, Manchester Metropolitan University

As part of my current PhD research, I aim to uncover how female backpackers relate their emotions, experiences and desires for more sensual encounters in their travel destinations. This paper focuses on sensations relating to food, consumption and digestion, and will specifically seek to address the conflicting emotions surrounding food, tastes and eating practices whilst embarking on a backpacking journey. There has been a growing interest in food tourism within the social sciences which moves beyond regarding food as simply an attraction but also as an impediment to the tourist experience (Cohen and Avieli 2004). However there is little focus on the heightened and often problematic emotions associated with food and eating for backpacking travellers. Drawing on two months fieldwork in India where I interviewed 34 women travellers about their experiences of food and eating, I will describe some of the strong emotions associated with the everyday practice of consumption whilst moving through unfamiliar spaces. Largely perceived as a key determinant of their experience, many of the participants invested significant amounts of energy into seeking new tastes and culinary experiences to compliment their journey, often resulting in feelings of elation, pleasure, frustration and disappointment. For those participants who found food and eating a persistent challenge, I will explore emotions of fear, anxiety and intimidation. Furthermore, due to the changing geographies of culinary globalisation and the increasing number of establishments catering for western travellers, this paper will discuss how guilt, shame and embarrassment are very prominent emotions in the participants who appreciated the accessibility of more familiar food and customs, as this often conflicted with their wider perceptions of themselves as robust, cosmopolitan travellers. I will argue that the realm of the backpacking journey intensifies both positive and negative emotions relating to food and consumption, and discuss how this fits into wider theories of embodiment in backpacking tourism.

34. Psychopathology and emotions at Cordoba's psychiatry (Argentina) in the early twentieth century

Dr Fernando Ferrari, Faculty of Psychology, Cordoba, Argentina; doctoral student, researcher and fellow of the Ministry of Science and Technology

Starting with Ian Hacking's reading of Michael Foucault's archeology, I intend to study the relationship of psychopathology and emotion as they were constructed in Cordoba, Argentina, in psychiatric practice. The paper attempts to establish the nodal point for understanding the process by which the practices on emotional life were shocked by the introduction of psychoanalytic theory. I analyse the main institutions that were the settings for policies on emotions and their relation to the morbid condition of the psyche: Provincial Neuropsychiatric Hospital and Dr Leon Morra, Neuropathic Institute led by Dr Gregorio Bermann, also teacher at the Faculty of Medicine (1922–1936), Dr Licurzi Ariosto, substitute teacher in the same faculty (1932 and 1937), Alien Asylum Cologne Olive, with Dr Ferrer Conrrado, Dr Barrancos Aristides, Dr Vidal and others.

The article shows the process by which important aspects were modified from the classification of psychiatric diseases by introducing a problematic reading of Freud's work from 1915. This process took place at the centre of a profound conceptual transformation, involving the collapse of alienism and the emergence of mental health. In this framework, various theories of emotion applied to clinical practice were modified for the emergence of new objects, new ways of describing the symptoms and new ways of intervening in mental pathology. In Cordoba's psychiatry we can appreciate two prospects: a conservative who argued humanistic conceptualisations justified by the Christianity of St Thomas, relating to Galton's phrenology (sustained unusually late: 1947–), and on the other hand a biologist, secular and progressive line that introduced a combination of psychodynamic materialists and biological theories of mental illness. These two lines of psychiatric practice were articulated to political movements at the University of Cordoba.

35. In the kingdom of the sick

Prof Kay Ferres, Dean, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Griffith University

Diagnosis is often represented as a critical point in illness narratives, a turning point or decisive break. But diagnosis is an accretion of singular events, involving a series of entrances into and exits from clinical spaces, departures from and returns to the spaces of everyday life. Soon enough, clinical spaces are everyday spaces. Susan Sontag's phrase, 'the kingdom of the sick' registers both the emotional climate of this new landscape and the reorientation that is required of those who inhabit it, patients and companions alike. Relationships are reordered, rights and responsibilities specified, debts and liabilities tallied, new routines and habits established. A kind of estrangement and dis-ease unsettles boundaries of self and other.

What does it mean to be in this kingdom? This paper explores this question from the perspective of an ethics of care. Drawing on emotion diaries, memoirs, participant observation and other primary sources, it describes a topography of the emotions. The contours of this map outline the newly unfamiliar and sometimes hazardous terrain of home, work and the clinic and the associated spaces of consumption (of food, pharmaceuticals and care services, including health insurance). My interest is in the adaptive function of the emotions and the forms of communication that make sense of the meanings of serious illness.

36. 'This school was the hardest I've ever worked in': school principals, emotional labour and haecceity

Dr Margaret Freund, School of Education, Mawson Lakes Campus, University of South Australia

This paper reports on a study that positions schools as complex, ever-changing social organisms, and sees their leaders as influenced by reciprocal self and societal relationships, actions and interplays (Day 2004). The work of school principals operates within the emotional space of the school and is examined as a form of emotional labour, where the management of emotions is intrinsically linked to a particular form of paid work (Barbalet 1998; Hochschild 1983). The neo-liberal climate of recent times and the impact of discourses of managerialism have had considerable impact on the nature of the work of school principals. Principals have even greater responsibilities as distinct from the earlier position where policy was directed through often large bureaucracies. These and other differences have meant a change to school culture, so that positions have had to be renegotiated and there is now a need for principals to demonstrate a stylisation of the successful self (du Gay 1994, 1996), for they are now more than ever identified by parents and the public as embodiments of school culture and success. Linked to emotional labour is the notion of haecceity (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) or 'thisness', for rather than leadership skills being generic and transferable from school to school, school leadership is manoeuvred and understood through beliefs about the particular nature of this school, this community, these students, parents and teachers and particular social and economic situations that make each school unique. Haecceity has a particular quality for it is 'this' rather than 'what', part of a web of environmental, personal and school relationships that combine to influence organisational outcomes. Haecceity is an assemblage, in that the individual school principal no longer remains separate from objects of time and space but enters into composition with them. The paper is based on a qualitative study where school principals from independent, public and Catholic schools in South Australia and New South Wales were interviewed. In all interviews principals commented on the changing nature of their work and the increasing demands upon them. Most significantly they stressed the qualities and elements of the various schools they had worked in and the particular features that fashioned their work. Rather than the static figurehead our interviews reveal school leaders striving to claim emotional space and understanding for themselves in the myriad of interactions that comprise the everyday world of school.

37. Enthusiasm, magazines and an event-based conception of the scene

Dr Glen Fuller

Since the 1950s enthusiasm has served as a resource for the magazine industry that services the various scenes of modified-car culture. As a durable cultural formation modified-car culture represents a useful example of the relation between an enthusiasm and the affective economies of the cultural industries that service such enthusiasms. Enthusiasm is felt as a subjectively experienced constellation of impersonal affects that circulate within the specific events that characterise the enthusiasm. In modified-car culture these events mostly exist as socio-technical 'challenges' inculcated by automotive technologies. The magazine industry insinuates itself in the event of enthusiasm by becoming a technology of visibility for the scene. As a technology of visibility the magazine transforms the scene in three main ways: 1) valorising certain elements of the scene over others and (re)producing cultural hierarchies of value; 2) engaging with the 'black box' of automotive technologies and structurating 'challenges' – through 'how-to' articles – in an affective economy of experience; and 3) commodifying the first two functions by relying on advertorial intervention inline with commercial imperatives. By using an archive of 30 years of enthusiast magazines this paper will outline an 'event-based' conception of the scene that is defined by the challenges of enthusiasm.

38. Body, subjectivity, action and emotional labour: investigating the emotion experience(s) of the music performer during performance

Andrew Geeves and Dr Doris McIlwain, Macquarie University

This paper explores the phenomenology of emotion experience during music performance from the music performer's perspective. Although past research has examined the emotional impact of music on the musical listener, from its effects at the levels of physiology, neurology, cognition and self-report (Bever 1988; Harrer and Harrer 1977; Krumhansl 1997; Peretz 2001) to its interaction with the listener's musical expectations (Davies 1978; Huron 2006; Minksy 1982), the perspective of the music performer in regards to music and emotion has been largely ignored. This paper will investigate the emotion experience(s) of the music performer during performance. What varieties of emotion does a music performer experience whilst on stage? How are conflicting emotions managed? How important is emotionally engaging and communicating with the audience and what strategies may be put in place to do this effectively? Does the performer engage in emotional labour, 'the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display' (Hochschild 1983: 7). If so, what potential costs might this incur and at what levels? A theoretical backdrop will be established by examining the small amount of past research that has specifically examined the perspective of the music performer rather than the listener (Berger 1999; Dunsby 2002; Gabrielsson and Juslin 1996; Goebl, Pampalk and Widmer 2004; Persson 2001; Sloboda 2005; Woody 2002), Dejours' (2006) understanding of work and its inevitable ties to the body, subjectivity and action and Hochschild's (1983) notion of emotional labour. After establishing background theory, preliminary data from interviews with professional musicians will be shared and their emotion experience during performance investigated.

39. 'The ground on which we live': emotional geographies of postcolonial belonging

Frances Haydie Gooder, University of Melbourne

There has been much recent work on intimacy and emotions in public life and the affective politics of postcolonial belonging. In Australia, one of the aims of the state policy of reconciliation (1991–2001) was to restructure the legacy of colonial relations, including its emotional legacy. As Sara Ahmed has argued, to 'recognize the injustices of colonisation as a history of the present is to rewrite history, and to reshape the ground on which we live' (2004: 200). Examining non-Aboriginal involvement in the reconciliation movement in Victoria in the late 1990s and early 2000s reveals that the politics of locality have produced very different reconciliation landscapes, which in turn have raised different opportunities and dilemmas for Aboriginal–non-Aboriginal dialogue. Despite the era of reconciliation officially ending in 2001, and the much-anticipated official apology to Indigenous Australia now given, the complexities that face non-Aboriginal people who commit to an uncomfortable and contested vision like reconciliation still continue. In this paper, I want to explore how these postcolonial emotional geographies manifest, examining the ways in which the absence of a local Aboriginal community in a Melbourne suburb has meant a certain positioning for non-Aboriginal people involved in local reconciliation activities and subsequently has lead to a re-imagining of an Aboriginal past and present in order to re-Aboriginalise place. For many non-Aboriginal people involved in the reconciliation movement, acknowledging Aboriginal dispossession has meant a rethinking of the places and the spaces they occupy – an ambiguous new inhabitance of belonging and non-belonging.

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40. Creating place, re-constructing lives: a holistic approach to reconstruction scenarios

Tiffany Greene, PhD Candidate, Australian Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Queensland

Conflict and natural disasters have devastating impacts on civilians. Addressing the psycho-social state of individuals affected by conflict and disaster is considered pivotal in establishing long term sustainable peace and development. Within the academic and professional community, nature and the environment have predominantly been researched both as a source of conflict and natural destruction. Little previous emphasis has been placed on the use of nature as a tool of healing, peace-building, reconstruction and development at the grass-roots individual and communal level.

Nature-centred Approaches to Peace-building (NAP™) is a holistic approach that provides a practical means of concurrently addressing immediate psychosocial needs within post-conflict, peace-building and reconstruction settings, whilst simultaneously addressing long-term development, reconstruction, environmental and peace-building goals. NAP is a singular grassroots approach that can: contribute to individual psychological and social wellbeing; aid physical wellbeing and nutrition; support community building; provide horticultural knowledge and vocational skill acquisition; address immediate and long-term development goals; promote nature conservation and increase environmental awareness.

Children who experience crisis often suffer immense loss of family, social support networks and belongings. Many are also uprooted and relocated. Consequently, there may be a loss of identity and the need to re-establish a sense of self, community and place. NAP programs are as holistic as they are interdisciplinary. They use nature as the medium through which individual and communal wellbeing can occur. The program activities, which range from art to team building, are linked by a project: the construction of a NAP place. A NAP place is a natural space created by program participants for the benefit of the wider community. This approach has multi-tiered benefits for participants, the community and the environment.

41. Elation and anxiety: the spectacle of the future in Shanghai's Expo 2010

Dr Mark Harrison, University of Tasmania

Less that two years after the Beijing Olympics, Shanghai will host Expo 2010. From its Its slogan Better City Better Life, the rhetoric of Expo 2010 is suffused with global techno-utopianism, appealing to 'sustainable and harmonious urban living' and 'human-centred development, scientific and technological innovation, cultural diversity and win-win cooperation for a better future'. It 'compos[es] a melody with the key notes of highlighting innovation and interaction in the new century'. Expo 2010 is being delivered through a series of unrestrained architectural and urban infrastructure projects that offer a transmutation of what Barbrook and Cameron have called the 'Californian ideology', in which a capitalist social revolutionary ideal of the global convergence of the media, computing, telecommunications and urban space has been fed through a party-state national developmental ideology. It has produced a vision of urban life that starts with a global language of revolutionary corporate techno-power with its contemporary environmental aspirations and is rendering it as as a form of urban architectural excess beyond the instrumental limits of capitalism that implicitly appeals to the radical anastomosis of the party-state and global capital that is China today.

In dialogue with Marinelli's work on Tianjin, this paper maps the emotional geographies of Expo 2010 as a vision of China's future, contrasting it to nostalgic visions of China's past in Tianjin's designated historical cultural areas. In notions such as excess, the sublime and spectacle, Expo 2010 is understood as a site that elates a Chinese public in its demonstration of China's national power even as in its very excess it might be endeavouring to efface the ontological anxieties about the China it represents.

On this basis, like Marinelli, the paper explores what could be called a crisis of representation for China. Both the valorised past in colonial Tianjin and the future in Shanghai's Expo 2010 are spaces that self-consciously deploy historical and contemporary global languages of architecture whose mimetic forms of representation evoke the ambiguities and anxieties of China's experience of modernity.

42. The race for space: youth subcultures and space

Clementine Hill, University of South Australia

Subcultures are an important part of any society. The ways in which they are formed are reflective of the current economic and social conditions of any given space. Emos, goths and punks are three subcultures that were formed as a reaction to the restrictive social norms of western society. Each have stemmed, in part, from underground Britain and have diffused around the world. With particular focus on the emo subculture, this paper will discuss issues of space and emotional freedom as well as representations of youth subcultures within the media as a form of emotional expression. It may be argued that as these subcultures diffuse into society the core meanings involved in being a participant dissipate leading to a consumer niche rather than a subculture. As a subculture hits the mainstream the meanings and spaces occupied change, altering the meanings of each subculture. Going from underground Britain to the streets of Adelaide has altered the meaning of emo and has changed the construction of the subculture. Self-surveillance is a powerful tool especially for youth. Where the participants of these subcultures gather a higher security presence is notable. This may lead to alterations in the normal behaviour of these youths, whether good or bad and again change the subcultural foundations. For emos their initial reasons for forming, as a resistance to social norms and as an expression of their 'inner selves', have become distorted with the introduction of their fashions and styles into the mainstream market into such stores as Kmart and Target. As emos became visible the space they occupied changed, which changed how they were labelled (from deviant to fashionable). Space for subcultures is very important, as it determines whether they remain underground or are exposed and become mainstream.

43. Hanging by a thread: the fine lines of emotional safety

Julia Horncastle, Lecturer, Gender and Cultural Studies, Murdoch University

Goethe once said that 'the tiniest hair can cast the longest shadow'. Using this delicate aphorism, my paper examines the notion of emotional 'safety nets' – not wide, firm, web-like structures that we may imagine as being reliable, but thin, hair-like threads upon which non-normative familial and love relationships may walk, totter, fall or hang. The paper highlights, through a phenomenological viewpoint, the queer emotional 'landscape' that may choose or insist upon such precarious safety. 'Queer being' in times of emotional (safety-net) need can occur when relationships struggle with (indeed may fracture under) resistance to the pressures – tastes – of normativity, which support the easy and often glib consumption and assumption of monogamous, familial, relational normativity. By exposing the unreliability of emotional safety, I use a backdrop – the 'existentialist love/sex project' that de Beauvoir and Sartre were so (in)famous for – and propose that we cast more light into the spaces where contemporary and brave queer being weaves autonomy, love and oddity together. By complexifying the notion of 'emotional safety-net' I examine an unconventional charting of emotional geography. The metaphor of the 'long shadow' from a single thread (a casting, thrown effect) forms the basis for considering the oddity of emotional safety.

44. Keeping effective and affective dimensions of transport on the rails: passenger experiences of crowding in carriages and on platforms in the Australian rail industry

Lily Hirsch, Dr Kirrilly Thompson and Dr Mathew Thomas, University of South Australia

This paper considers the issue of crowding in Australian rail transport from the perspective of travellers as well as service providers. It draws from ethnographic observations of Australian carriages and platforms and focus groups with travellers. The paper considers the ways in which passengers experience crowding and the relationship between customer service and increased capacity. It focuses on the ways in which passengers emotionally engage in and construct spaces of recurrent cycles of movement, stillness, departure and return.

45. Hanging by a thread: the fine lines of emotional safety

Dr Julia Horncastle, Lecturer, Gender and Cultural Studies, Murdoch University

Goethe once said that 'the tiniest hair can cast the longest shadow'. Using this delicate aphorism, my paper examines the notion of emotional 'safety nets' – not wide, firm, web-like structures that we may imagine as being reliable, but thin, hair-like threads upon which non-normative familial and love relationships may walk, totter, fall or hang. The paper highlights, through a phenomenological viewpoint, the queer emotional 'landscape' that may choose or insist upon such precarious safety. 'Queer being' in times of emotional (safety-net) need can occur when relationships struggle with (indeed may fracture under) resistance to the pressures – tastes – of normativity, which support the easy and often glib consumption and assumption of monogamous, familial, relational normativity. By exposing the unreliability of emotional safety, I utilise a backdrop – the 'existentialist love/sex project' that de Beauvoir and Sartre were so (in)famous for – and propose that we cast more light into the spaces where contemporary and brave queer being, weaves autonomy, love and oddity together. By complexifying the notion of 'emotional safety net' I examine an unconventional charting of emotional geography. The metaphor of the 'long shadow' from a single thread (a casting, thrown effect) forms the basis for considering the oddity of emotional safety.

46. Singapore's rebirth: re-enchanting the bland in a culture of consumption

Dr Chris Hudson, School of Media and Communication, RMIT University

Since independence in 1965 Singapore has been a developmentalist state driven by pragmatism and instrumental rationality. According to CJ Wee, the spatial characteristics that accompanied Singapore's agenda of radical modernisation amount to a bland, homogenised, even authoritarian, urbanism. Singapore has had a long-standing reputation for being a boring, soulless nation of overly disciplined workaholics. Singapore's form of illiberal political system, some would argue, has also produced a docile, depoliticised population living in an air-conditioned comfort zone.

Singapore long ago evolved from a postcolonial labour intensive industrial economy to what is now widely acknowledged as a culture of consumption. In recent decades the city-state has attempted to transform its identity and its global brand image by styling itself as a 'Global City for the Arts' and a 'Renaissance City', in which the arts, the economy and ultimately the culture of Singapore itself has been reborn. The government's Renaissance city report (2000) declares: 'Renaissance Singapore will be creative, vibrant and imbued with a keen sense of aesthetics.' This transformation of the nation and the aestheticisation of its urban environment, has also apparently necessitated the production of a new kind of citizen. The report goes on to say: 'The Renaissance Singaporean has an adventurous spirit, an inquiring and creative mind and a strong passion for life.'

In the nation's transition from boring to vibrant, and the transformation of its people from pragmatic to passionate, the urban environment has also been transformed to create new spaces of affect where passion can be incited. These are typically located in the ubiquitous Singapore shopping malls – the landscapes of consumption where taste can be manufactured and manipulated. This paper will consider the new aesthetics of Singapore and the re-enchantment of the urban landscape as part of Singapore's agenda to transform itself into an exciting, creative hub of global cosmopolitanism where global consumption patterns and tastes can be satisfied.

47. One last breath: death and dying in life and living

Dr Katrina Jaworski, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of South Australia

In contemporary western culture death has assumed the appearance of being separate from life, despite the persistent presence of death and dying made available through various media outlets. Curtained off by the privileged privacy of hospitals and funeral parlours, death is something that happens 'out there' to someone else. Death is an experience one must face eventually, but not just yet. Guided by the selected works of Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben and Emmanuel Levinas, I argue that death and dying are performatively constituted through the inscriptive surfaces of living, dying and dead bodies, caught in a life–death nexus, situated in a relational and contextual zone. I begin by reflecting on the experience of witnessing my mentor's death. I then question to what extent the zoning of death and life is maintained by what remains largely unspoken and invisible of the dying and dead body, alongside that which is rendered spoken and visible. I close by considering briefly the implications of the presence of death and dying in life and living for those who remain behind to grieve for, and remember, the dead.

48. Bikes, body and emotions: motorcycling a social emotional career

Dr Gabriel Jderu, Faculty of Sociology and Social Work, University of Bucharest, Romania

My goal within this research is to approach motorcycling as a social phenomenon, seen from social career concept perspective. Therefore, I have ascribed the meaning that Erving Goffman ascribed to social career (1961/2003: 117) that is 'social range of a person's lifetime', 'changes that happened in time, essential and common for the members of a certain social category, even thus those changes happen independently in each one's life'. I added to Goffman's model the theory of David Matza (1969) about the 'deviant career', arguing that this theory has a explanatory value that exceeds the social deviance area. Afterwards, I distinguish the role of emotions for the changes one person's self goes over during his social motorcyclist career. To do that I will use Mimi Sheller's view (2004) about 'automotive emotions', which are specific emotions determined by body self-mobility. Finally, I shall put forward the concept of social emotional career. All over the construction of the motorcyclist social career, the fellow learns how to manage his and others' emotions related to such a social practice. Thus, the bikers do 'emotional work' (Hochschild 1979, 1983) related to motorcycling as social practice. Consequently, I call social emotional career the patterns of managing the emotions socio-historically built alongside a social career related to a practice. In order to argue, describe and analyse the importance of emotions for social career of motorcyclist I shall use as a support the content of the main motorcycling forums in Romania: www.motociclism.ro and www.pro-bike.ro, data coming from observations, discussions with bikers, as well as info from the three magazines edited in Romania.

49. A day at a modest Bangkok cosmetic surgery clinic

Dr Meredith Jones, Senior Lecturer, Graduate Courses in Interactive Multimedia, University of Technology, Sydney

On a recent research trip to Thailand, looking into cosmetic surgery tourism, I was unexpectedly invited to spend a day in a small clinic in the heart of Bangkok. Run by a single surgeon, the clinic offered sex change operations and all manner of cosmetic surgery operations at about a tenth of what they cost in developed countries. During the day I witnessed – at close hand – a male-to-female sex change operation, a brachioplasty, a silicon breast implantation and a liposuction procedure. There were no hygiene standards to speak of (the surgeon never washed his hands); at one point a testicle plopped onto the floor near my sandal; none of the patients had general anaesthesia and two of them were clearly in pain; the operating tables were rusty. And yet the surgeon was much-loved by his patients and staff; he generously bought me lunch; he was proud of his work. And he had a philosophy: a firm belief that 'no frills' gender reassignment and cosmetic surgeries should be available to all who want them. This paper consists of writing based on this day. My own sensorial reactions – during the day and for months afterwards – are described in order to think about how the researcher's affective being can become integral to her project. Further, I explain how traditional modes of academic expression have proved inadequate for examining a set of experiences that beg for a more intimate and emotional narrative.

50. 'But my heart it's all Indian': gender and the affective fictions of globalisation

Assoc Prof Tanya Ann Kennedy, Women's and Gender Studies and Composition, University of Maine-Farmington

In Mercy in her eyes: the films of Mira Nair, John Kenneth Muir discusses Nair's film Mississippi masala and the Hollywood politics that help define the film's final focus on the star-crossed love story of the Indian Mina and the African-American Demetrius. According to the screenwriter and actors involved in the production, 'There were two clear stories in that film: the love story, and the story about their family and their diaspora, and having to leave Uganda ... the political side of the story, the family plot' (p 79). Although the story had first focused on the Indian diaspora and racism, through the processes of Hollywood mainstreaming the love story became the central plot. The film's ending seems to place emphasis on the distance between these two stories by creating a geographical distance between their respective protagonists: Mina and Demetrius are viewed twirling through the cotton fields of rural Mississippi, while Mina's father has returned home to Uganda to reassert his claim to the property which had been taken from him. This seems designed to reassure viewers that the injuries of colonialism and globalisation can be safely isolated in the past and in another continent – and America is truly the New World.

This distinction between love and politics, between love and the economic/cultural conditions of globalisation that produce the contemporary diaspora relies on a binary constructed to appeal to the imagined desires of an American audience. But in this paper I argue that many contemporary women writers/filmmakers of the South Asian diaspora articulate the connections between the imaginary plottings of economic globalisation – focused on a world of ethnic-national masculinities constructed in opposition to globalisation and transnational business masculinities incorporated into its hierarchies of race, gender, and nationality–and the intimate ideals of love both homosocial and heterosexual.

These representations of globalisation re-examine the gendered geographies that make it possible for Mina to find a 'happy ending' by being incorporated into the multicultural couple. It is not only the injuries of colonialism and globalisation that Mina's romance makes disappear into another continent, but also the fathers and brothers who lay claim to these injuries, the struggles of Third World men to reclaim the lost investments both economic and romantic of imaginary homelands. Women filmmakers/writers of the diaspora represent the ambivalences that attend these idealisations for female subjects formed at the intersection of gender inequality, abject masculinity and the processes of globalisation, including western feminisms.

In challenging the boundary between love and politics, these fictions transform not only the conventions of Hollywood romance, but also the conventions that imagine those romances as metonymic vehicles for representing the national ideal, what Sara Ahmed, in The cultural politics of emotion, calls 'multicultural love' (p 133). In this construction of the nation, it is '"love," rather than history, culture or ethnicity that binds the multicultural nation together' (p 135). Thus, an interracial couple such as Mina and Demetrius allows an American audience to imagine national identity through its incorporation of difference, but such a romance may also represent the failure of the reproductive family to act as a vehicle for national identity inasmuch as both characters reject the idealised versions of home – Indian, Ugandan, African-American and Southern – represented by the families of the film. This decentring of the family as an affective and biological vehicle for national identity can be seen as well in Monica Ali's Brick lane and Kiran Desai's Inheritance of loss. In each of these works, I examine how romantic plots are used to comment on the gendered trajectories of globalisation and to reposition their female protagonists in relation to the happy endings that romantic love seems to offer.

51. Glomping and the multicultural sublime

Dr Paul Kingsbury, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, Simon Fraser University

Aesthetics, so often eclipsed by the political, is one of the most undervalued categories in contemporary research on multicultural spaces. Our engagements with aesthetic concepts and experiences frequently involve impatient, arguably reductive appeals to their more serious socioeconomic and political dimensions. In this paper, I inquire into how certain multicultural spaces are registered as wondrous and/or unnerving in the first place. To do this, I examine the 'monstrous' taking place in Vancouver, British Columbia in terms of over-sized 'monster houses'; dressing up or 'cosplaying' and intense hugging or 'glomping' at the Anime Evolution convention; the 'metamorphosis and the whimsical dark' of the Parade of Lost Souls; and the dragon dances in Chinatown's Lunar New Year parade. While many researchers affirm an ethics of difference that respects the otherness of other persons and cultures, few interpretative practices do not respect the otherness of aesthetics. Drawing on Joan Copjec's (1999) Lacanian understanding of sublimation – a process that purifies spaces of fear and pity which result from capitalism's and the superego's cruel injunctions to 'Enjoy!' – this paper illustrates how sublimation creates a space that 'renders visible not the ideal but the real, and gives us a purchase on life–sensual life'. With all the wondrous ecstasies and horrific pains that beauty charges, begets and accumulates strangely absent from many accounts of multicultural spaces, a new approach to the relations between aesthetics, culture, and emotions must commence.

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52. An-other space: spatial concepts in Dirt music and Indigenous art

Britta Kuhlenbeck, University of Hamburg

I am using Edward Soja's trialectic model of spatiality, in which he sets up an interrelation between Firstspace (empirically measurable spatial forms), Secondspace (conceptual, symbolic and cognitive concepts of space) and Thirdspace (lived space), as an analytical tool to look at conceptualisations of space in literature and Indigenous art. Soja suggests that Thirdspace is 'a radically different way of looking at, interpreting, and acting to change the embracing spatiality of human life'. Within the trialectics of spatiality, Thirdspace 'deconstructs' prevailing concepts of space – both on a theoretical level and in practical terms. Guided by Soja's ideas about Thirdspace as a 'third possibility that works to break down the categorically closed logic of the "either-or" in favour of a different, more flexible and expansive logic of the "both-and-also"', I will look at ways in which an affective engagement with nature is explored in Tim Winton's novel Dirt music as a representation of spatiality. I will explore how Winton challenges the subject–object, real–imagined, nature–culture dichotomies in his understanding of space and suggests an understanding of space that is based on intimacy, affect and experience. I will further look into a selection of issues revolving around the production and reception of Indigenous art and its function within Thirdspace. A spatial trialectics embraces a consideration of the ways in which space is both represented and lived in by emphasising spatial awareness. As Soja explains, 'To be human, then does not simply involve quantifiable spatial details such as distances and areas but also their transformation through intentionality, emotion, involvement, attachment.' It can be argued that Indigenous art is conducive to an understanding of Other spatial concepts based on such essentials.

53. Awash in ideality: this is satisfactory

Dennis Leavens, Associate Dean of Humanities, United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain, United Arab Emirates

AR Ammons' 1993 book-length poem Garbage presents an encyclopedic collection of topics, ideas, relations, idioms, processes and reflections. Garbage is, as the citation for the 1993 National Book Award observes, 'an epic of ideas: all life – not that of human beings alone, but every species – is shown to be part of an ultimate reality'. One central image is the mountain of garbage the speaker notices on Interstate 95 in Florida. This mountain generates a series of meditations on the cyclic nature of being, the continuous recycling of nature, a space where nothing goes to waste, nothing is garbage. As he says in another poem, if seen appropriately all space is emotionally full, 'when you consider' that the flies do not wince from the generosity of 'the dumped guts of a natural slaughter' but relish 'its storms of generosity' (from 'The city limits').

This perspective is complicated by Ammons' acknowledgment of the insubstantiality of reality at subatomic scales: reality is 'realityless', and this, the poet affirms is 'satisfactory'. Idea, relation, substitution, metamorphosis, transformation become categories of reality, spaces, akin to the material world, filled with emotional value and force. There is no separation between event and emotion, event and idea. Because 'things are awash in ideality', 'isness itself is the name of a segment / of flow'. And since Ammons feels ideas as 'forms of beauty' (from Tape for the turn of the year), emotional space is normal, natural, inevitable. My essay explores the poem's assertions about human ways of being in the necessary emotional and ideological union that is space.

54. The ecstasies of exchange: reconfiguring hearing disabled masculinities in rave space

Dr Cassandra Loeser, University of South Australia

Specific sites of social dancing provide a network of fluidly imagined spaces of masculine representation and experience for young men with hearing disabilities. Drawing on data collected from an interview with one young man with a hearing disability called 'Danny', this paper will argue that dance at 'rave' clubs incites and facilitates a diversity of communications and gendered practices that the forum of verbal language as communicative mechanism does not permit. Opportunities to valorise a masculine positioning in the everyday communicative exchange are problematised through ongoing difficulties adhering to the imperatives that designate 'meaningful' communicative practice based on hearing and speech. The possibilities for interconnection with the characteristic of 'control' that Danny attaches to masculinity emanate from the integrated union of affectivity, motility and perception actualised in the pulsating music and collective movement of other embodied, conversing actors in rave club space. In relation to this, the paper emphasises a theoretical imperative to render representations of hearing disability and masculinity in communicative settings as moments always constituted by and constitutive of diverse positions. Still further, his story works to highlight the need for new studies that focus on the possibilities for becoming something other that the ecstasies of interconnection and exchange in dance can bring – particularly for the diversity of hearing disabled bodies whose 'voices' still remain largely unrecognised and unacknowledged in much scholarly research.

55. Emotion, space, animality

Assoc Prof Stephen Loo, School of Architecture and Design, and Dr Undine Sellbach, School of Philosophy, University of Tasmania

'The wolf shall live with the sheep, / and the leopard lie down with the kid; / the calf and the young lion shall grow up together, / and a little child shall lead them.' Isaiah 11:16
In his book The open, Giorgio Agamben places this passage alongside a thirteenth-century miniature depicting the messianic banquet where the members of humanity who remain are illustrated with animal heads. Together text and image suggest that on the last days of the world human and animal natures will be transformed, both in the sense that humans will be reconciled with their animal natures, and in the sense that new relations will open up between animals.

This paper explores the spatial and affective dimension of these two scenes. What kind of architectural and geographical spaces place animal species side by side? What kind of room might be built to house a messianic feast? How do life and death feel in these spaces? What is the relation between animal, man and child? At the very end of the world, a strange childhood emerges between man and beast, but why is this opening blind to gender?

56. Seasonality, affect and creativity: lessons from a creative tropical city

Dr Susan Luckman, UniSA

This paper draws upon findings from a three-year creative industries study to examine the enabling role played by the natural environment in terms of local creativity. It will especially focus upon the perceived 'license' for introspection provided by the wet season. In so doing, it challenges creative cities orthodoxy, as represented by high profile figures such as Richard Florida, which tends to focus on large, densely-populated post-industrial urban centres of the global (temperate) North.

To do this, it draws on a discussion of Darwin, an urban yet isolated tropical savannah location in the north of Australia that the local government wants to promote as a 'creative city'. Darwin is unique among Australian capitals, not just on account of its significant distance from other major urban centres and tropical location. What clearly emerges in discussion with Darwin's creative practitioners is that the natural environment is seen as fundamental to local creativity. Darwin's unique climate, proximity to the sea and South-East Asia, seasonal rhythms, the relative dearth of indoor spaces and the emphasis on outdoor festivals, not to mention markets and performances during the dry season, all mean that nature figures strongly as an inspiration for creativity.

Darwin reminds us that there is a lot more to creativity than critical mass, global companies and a constant rubbing together with other creative industry practitioners (whether or not you want to). It reminds us that creativity has long also been deeply connected to space for reflection and nature as a source of inspiration. This points to a more complex relationship between culture and nature than has been acknowledged in much policy and industry discourse regarding the knowledge economy, yet this has been rarely addressed beyond a focus on street scaping and parklands in much of the thinking on creative cities.

57. Constituting citizenship through the emotions: Singaporean transmigrants in London

Dr Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho, University of British Columbia

Drawing on a qualitative study of Singaporean transmigrants in London, this paper examines the way that citizenship is constituted and contested through the emotions. I draw attention to, first, the emotional representations associated with citizenship, particularly the politics of belonging in relation to citizenship-making projects and with regards to the emotional valences of racialised belonging. Second, I explore the emotional subjectivities underpinning social behaviour and constituting the social relations of citizenship. I focus on the ordinarily experienced emotions in everyday settings that play an important role in shaping citizenship, but which have hitherto been neglected in the citizenship literature. An emotionally inflected analysis of citizenship, or what I term as 'emotional citizenship', helps illuminate social relations and structures producing the politics of citizenship.

58. The emotional capital of Tianjin's cultural heritage

Dr Maurizio Marinelli, University of Bristol

In 2005 the Tianjin Municipal Government launched a 15-year cultural heritage preservation plan (2005–2020). According to this plan, Tianjin has fourteen protected historical cultural areas (lishi wenhuaqu), six state-level key protected sites (guanjian baohuqu), eighty-eight municipal-level 'cultural relics protected units' (wenwu baohu danwei), and more than 850 'historically flavoured buildings' (lishi fengmao jianzhu). At the conclusion of its 21st meeting, on 20 July 2005, the XIV Standing Committee of Tianjin's People's Congress adopted and promulgated the 'Regulations to protect Tianjin's historically flavoured architecture' (lishi fengmao jianzhu). The criteria to define these buildings are contained in the third article of the regulations: 'the age of the building is more than 50 years; [the building has] historical, cultural, scientific, artistic and humanistic value, reflecting the characteristics of a certain period and the local characteristics in its construction'. It is significant that all these buildings belong to Tianjin's hyper-colonial period, when the city became the site of up to nine foreign-controlled concessions (1860–1945), and therefore have foreign-local characteristics. During that time, Tianjin became the testing ground of a multi-layered pedagogical project, and the blueprint of Tianjin as a 'modern city' emerged from western minds. The form, the function and the meaning of the cityscape reflected colonial modes of thought and conceptualisation of power. On the one hand, the foreign powers co-existing in Tianjin reproduced via the built form, mimetic representations of the motherland. On the other, cultural reproduction not only reflected the intention to affirm national identity, but also proposed, exposed and imposed, in the microcosm of Tianjin, global discourses of power, which contained a specific emotional capital. This paper focuses on Tianjin's emotional landscape with particular attention to some of the buildings classified as 'lishi fengmao jianzhu'. The paper will shed light on their significance as 'spaces of taste' during the colonial era, in addition to their relevance today; at a historical juncture when Tianjin's identity politics are marketing the colonial past as the beginning of the city's globalisation.

59. Empathy and the clinic: toward an understanding of emotional geographies in general practice

George RE Marshall, practising GP in Western Australia

Empathy is important in the practice of medicine and particularly general practice. As a concept empathy is difficult to define; as a skill it is seldom taught with intention. Some problems with the concept are: who creates empathy and how is it created, what is the effect of an empathic consultation on patient and physician, how can empathy be learned or acquired? The modern conception of empathy may be seen as an addendum to the primacy of what Foucault called le regard. In other words, empathy may be a bandaid concept that covers the absence of a theoretical basis for caring in modernist health care ideology. The physical, social, political and economic geographies of the clinic may not always coexist with the emotional geographies required for healing. I will draw on interdisciplinary research into mechanisms of emotion and intersubjectivity to examine critically the concept of empathy in general practice. In doing so I hope to create knowledge that will lead to better encounters between health seekers and health providers.

60. The affective landscapes of antidepressant use

Kim McLeod, University of Melbourne

Antidepressant consumption escalated dramatically after 1990 and remains at mass level in many industrialised countries. This phenomenon has been examined by a range of theoretical paradigms. What is common to these paradigms is they bring a cognitive lens to understanding experience, and describe antidepressant use in relation to a sovereign and intentional self. There has been little discussion of the experience of antidepressant use in terms of the visceral, affective and pre-discursive processes of being in the world. This paper develops an affective account of antidepressant use, understanding antidepressant action as mediating consumers' capacities to affect and be affected in encounters with bodies, things and environments. I draw on qualitative interviews and auto-photography with antidepressant consumers to illustrate affective dimensions to the experience of taking an antidepressant. The photos taken by antidepressant consumers which connect their experiences to the landscapes they inhabit will be discussed in affective terms, in support of an account of antidepressant use that takes relationality, not individuality, as its departure point. By expanding understandings about what the experience of taking an antidepressant might constitute, this paper makes a contribution to the debates around what it means that antidepressant use is a feature of contemporary life in many industrialised countries.

61. Reconstructing 'desire' in everyday spaces and practices: the male sex workers in Puerto Vallarta (Western Mexico)

Dr Cristóbal Mendoza, Dpto de Sociología, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa

This paper explores how sex workers (man-to-man) construct their personal (desire) spaces in a gay-defined 'place' such as Puerto Vallarta (Western Mexico). Theoretically it stems from recent debates about 'place' and 'space' in human geography. The paper uses qualitative information from 11 in-depth interviews with male sex workers which were carried out in October 2006 and is organised in four parts: First, it explains how Puerto Vallarta has been constructed as a gay destination in the context of the very conservative Western Mexico. Secondly, the paper studies everyday spaces and practices of sex workers; particularly, how places and personal behaviours are organised through time during the day. Third the role of Vallarta as a 'freedom' place in which interviewees can be 'themselves'. Fourth the paper focuses on the 'body' either as a social construction and a commodity. Amongst the conclusions, it is remarkable that entry into prostitution is generally smooth, casual and unproblematic. In interviewees' discourses, it is appreciated that the liberal gay scene in Puerto Vallarta (at least in comparative terms with other parts in Mexico) puts some young people into the track of the sex industry. In other words, it is not a dark business to which they have been forced, but a 'natural' job in Vallarta. Moreover, personal and everyday spaces are organised through a very strict round-the-clock timetable that suits tourists' activities. Again, when listening to their everyday activities, the general feeling is not that these young men (average age 25) are into work, but enjoying relaxing sunny days in which sex is only a part of it (maybe as it is for gay tourists themselves). The reality is though far more complicated, as tourism in Vallarta has its downs and ups through the year which implicates that sex workers must look for alternatives in low season (eg working in other jobs or migrating to large cities). Finally being in the gay sex industry does not mean that these male workers recognize themselves as 'gay', which may imply identity problems to some of them that are sometimes translated in moral-biased discourses.

62. American masculinity in the context of grief

Jessica Merrick, University of South Florida

Portraits of grief profiles lives lost in the attacks on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2009. Content analysis of these portraits sheds light on cultural narratives of identity; in this case, what it means to be an American. In this presentation, I focus on representations of men to discuss how The New York Times constructs modern American masculinity in the context of grief.

63. Why urban Yao grandparents wield the rod : parenthood in absentia and capricious ancestors, Chiengkham Town, North Thailand

Douglas Miles, Centro Incontri Umani, Ascona, Cairns Institute, JCU

Yao uplanders once prospered by growing poppies in rockeries above the cloud that encircled the mountain of Phachangnoi (Little Elephant) whose peak has the profile of a Disney Dumpy when viewed against the setting sun from the nearest valley town of Chiengkham. But on 18 February 1968 a bombardment by the Royal Thai Airforce forced this ethnic minority to abandon their farmlands, their village and even the jungles where they hunted near the summit. They became refugees. Thai lawmakers have since declared Phachangnoi a wildlife sanctuary and botanical reserve, perpetuating the eviction by banning re-establishment of their residence in the park. This paper provides a background to adaptations that the fugitives have made in response to their situations as refugees in town. Remarkably, the urban Yao extended families today own 17 adjacent Siamese-style longhouses in the town's outer suburb of Pangka. These are structurally isomorphic with the rural kin units (peo) which I called dwelling groups in the 1960s and which occupied the 19 houses of the mountain settlement. Most basically, they have subjected these kin units to organisational re-arrangement which I call 'translocation'. This involves able-bodied personnel (male and female) in permanent employment abroad where they 'stay' rather than have 'homes' and from where they continue to maintain the headquarters of their peo in Chiengkham. These absent workers provide for all requirements of the building as the 'home' of its occupants who are typically one retired grandparental couple plus the children of two or more of the adult sons and/or daughters. The peo's translocation over several generations has also facilitated capital accumulation necessary for investment now in enterprises which now promise opportunities for jobs back home, especially in tourism. Best prospects include the commercialisation of (1) the traditional Yao wedding for marketing to long-married ethnically Chinese couples; and of (2) two varieties of camping: nocturnal spotlighting rather than the hunting of big game including gigantic cattle (bos gaurus) and paragliding off Phachangnoi using abandoned poppy rockeries as take-off sites.

What are the costs of absent parenthood? Drunkenness, glue sniffing, metamphetamine addiction etc is rife among urban Yao high school children, male or female, and is punishable by severe use of the rod in class and at home. But these youngsters never experience any authority from parents who are rare but welcome visitors to their childhood homes. On the other hand, a stereotype of the draconically stern grandparent prevails and challenges anthropological generalisations about compassionate relationships between alternate generations.

64. Emotive methodologies: reflections on the use of solicited diaries and self-directed photography in intimate geography research

Carey-Ann Morrison, Department of Geography, Tourism and Environmental Planning, University of Waikato, New Zealand

This paper explores the use of personal solicited diaries and self-directed photography as research tools for examining the intersection of gender, sexuality, emotions and place. The first part of the paper introduces personal solicited diaries and self-directed photography as research methodologies. I bring together the limited body of work by geographers who have used this form of qualitative research and discuss the advantages and constraints of this method. The second part of the paper draws on empirical material from 14 young women who live in Hamilton, Aoteraoa New Zealand. These participants provided critical feedback (in the form of an evaluation questionnaire) on the usefulness of diaries and photographs as research methods. Attention is focused on the ways in which emotions of research participants and the researcher are mutually constituted when conducting intimate geography research.

65. Sleep, emotions and the embodied person

Dr Yasmine Musharbash, Anthropology Department, University of Sydney

The aim of my paper is to ponder the role of emotions in the establishment and maintenance of social relationships, and in particular, on how emotions are expressed tacitly, through choices about where to position one's body in relation to others. Based on data from research at the remote Aboriginal community of Yuendumu, Northern Territory, I explore this by analysing the positioning of Warlpiri bodies at night and the nature of such a form of expression – that is, the tacit use of the body in communication: What gets communicated? How does it get communicated? And why does it get communicated in this way? In search for answers, I bring together data from Yuendumu, Marcel Mauss' (1979[1934]) techniques of the body, and insights from the anthropological literature on emotions.

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66. The path of most resistance: mapping the emotional landscapes of Resistance fighters in northeast Italy during World War 2

Dr Sarah De Nardi, Open University in London, Faculty of Arts

The project seeks to explore the individual, intimate geographies of the Italian Resistance during World War 2. For traditional Italian postwar history – in which the Resistance plays a heroic role in freeing the country from Nazism and Fascism – partisans were often described as retreating to wilderness landscapes to avoid Nazi and Fascist forces, and to rest, replenish and plan their next move. This paper reports on a series of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with surviving veterans that explored their sensual, emotional engagement with these landscapes. First, it will address the experiential, emotional engagement of the veterans with these landscapes. Second, it will explore the embodied encounter of partisans with their temporary refuges and positions – considering how their bodily comportment constituted these places and produced a landscape of refuges, hiding places and places for surveillance. In sum, how they produced a landscape of resistance through their embodied presence and their emotional engagement with these once familiar, now hostile landscapes. Moreover, I will briefly report the preliminary findings of fieldwork carried out with the veterans' families and young people involved in the study of Resistance heritage as part of the educational curricula, and as extra-curricular activities promoted by veterans' associations in northeast Italy.

67. Dialects of racism: how the interface of emotions, authority and geography impacts on the delivery of human services for Aboriginal peoples

Dr Heidi Nietz, James Cook University

All social relations involve emotional responses that are a product of historical, cultural and political practices. In turn, change in societies is ultimately driven by emotions. In rapidly changing policy landscapes, the desire for change can often outstrip the realities of existing ways of relating, leaving discussion about the terms of how we relate subsumed to performance measures. The current national agenda of 'Closing the Gap' in Indigenous health and wellbeing disparities is a case in point. Driven by a commitment to the greater social inclusion of Indigenous peoples of Australia, this paper argues that the current reform agenda is filtered through an emotional landscape of human services provision that is predicated upon ambivalence and fuelled by stereotypes that protect the boundaries of that un-interrogated landscape. Drawing on observations from the human services sector in the South Australian Riverland region, I will argue that such emotional landscapes prohibit the embedding of reform agendas in effective service delivery practices because they are shaped by dialects of racism that ineffectively engage Aboriginal peoples in the design and delivery of service provision.

68. Queer inhabitation in the spaces of neo-liberalism

Kyja Noack-Lundberg, Latrobe University

Drawing on phenomenological perspectives, this paper investigates queer, lesbian and trans-identifying women's embodied experiences of public space. It examines how these experiences are mediated through emotion and by the norms embedded in design and planning practices. Queer inhabitation of spaces is structured by, or in opposition to, neo-liberal spatial practices. Neo-liberal technologies of the self influence the way emotions circulate in society, including within groups that are resistant to the mainstream. Implicit hegemonies (of whiteness, middle classness, straightness) delimit the kinds of people who are welcome in and actions one can undertake in public spaces. Celebration of 'otherness' in neo-liberal spaces becomes suspect, and, paradoxically, is seen to detract from projects of inclusion and equality.

I focus specifically on the experiences of people who identify both as queer or trans and as a woman or female within urban and suburban public spaces in Melbourne. Whilst the specific group I focus on may seem confusing, the wording was intended to attract participants in these immediate social categorisations, and also some who fall in the interstices of these definitions. I draw on interview and focus group data to provide examples of participants' experiences of both adversity and triumphs in public spaces. Queer activisms and queer place-making practices are stimulated by and instigate emotions such as hope, anger, joy and disillusionment. The emphasis on women and trans people serves as a corrective to many studies of gay spaces, particularly gay urban villages, as these studies highlight gay male consumption and place-making trends. This research often doesn't examine the various ways in which queer and trans, female or women identifying people inhabit public spaces. These are ways that variously celebrate and support queerness, provide space for the development of activisms, and challenge, replicate or appropriate neo-liberal norms.

69. Post-secular urban culture and sacred space

Peter Nynäs, Professor of Comparative Religion, Head of Department, Åbo Akademi University, Finland

Modernity has affected the religious landscape in several ways. Churches and similar religious architecture have been marginalised and made more invisible in society. We also witness a relocation of facilities for worship, prayer and contemplation. They are, for instance, found in airports and shopping malls. Further, the character of new prayer rooms is also changing. They are often intended to be used by people of all faiths or by people of no faith at all. Finally, modernity does not simply lead to the downfall of religious beliefs and practices but also allows for a continuation of religion, and traditional rituals are being modified, reinterpreted and invented to fit with modernity. Resacralisation generates new semi-religious practices and symbolic spaces. Hence, the subject of religious studies needs to move beyond a focus on a traditional religious landscape.

This presentation is based on my fieldwork in a chapel, which is situated in a shopping mall in the Helsinki region in Finland. The mall and the chapel together provide an interesting object of study as they shed light on the complex transformations of the religious landscape. For instance, some scholars regard shopping malls as condensed spaces that embody the new post-secular urban myth, as cathedrals of commerce in a religion of the market. Such new spaces blur or even invert the traditional boundary between the sacred and profane and raise questions concerning the role of the chapel in the mall. My analysis is mainly based on the interpretative work evoked among people by the chapel and the surroundings. In particular I address the emotional character of these interpretations and their self–object trajectories. On the basis of these results I discuss how we could re-evaluate the assumed distinction between sacred and profane in the post-secular culture.

70. 'Gam yafa vegam offa! [In Hebrew] She is pretty and she bakes too': Jewish-Israeli migrant mothers' foodways in New Zealand – towards understanding senses and emotions

Hadas Ore, University of Auckland

Skrbiš (2008: 236, 242) lately argued that emotions need to be seen as constitutive part of the transnational family experience itself, on par with other social concepts such as gender and class, and not just as occasional analytical sources. Elaborating on the concept of embodiment via the lens of foodways in theorising migration, emotions, senses and belonging can offer just that. Recent anthropological research on migrants' foodways, emotions and senses contend that migrant groups create new sentiments of attachments, while also using nostalgic sentiments through foodways, recreating a sense of place, home, and community and generating trans/national subjectivity. Senses and emotions are depicted as cultural and situated embodied practices, which enable migrants to map anew 'integral embodied geographies' (Law 2005: 239). Yet little scholarly work is devoted to the actual transformation of emotion and senses in the midst of these processes of re-mapping and identification. I explore the quotidian home practices of Jewish-Israeli migrant mothers' foodways in the context of the nation-state of New Zealand. I focus on the experiences of Jewish-Israeli mothers with dependent children who immigrated to New Zealand in the past fifteen years as their first migration. Two years into my fieldwork, I argue that Jewish-Israeli migrant mothers in New Zealand use their foodways to negotiate belonging/attachments mostly vis-à-vis other Jewish-Israeli migrants, Jewish New Zealanders and pakeha New Zealanders. Through the lens of foodways their emotions and senses emerge as nationalised, ethnicised and gendered. As Jewish-Israeli migrant mothers mostly remain the Key Kitchen Persons (a term coined by Douglas 1984: 8) ie the persons who invest the most time and energy in procuring, preparing, serving and cleaning up food within the household unit, they employ embodied culinary Judaism ('secular Judaism') entangled with emotional labour of gift exchanges (Skrbiš 2008: 237) to constitute their attachments.

71. Giving birth to the socially just teacher: an emotional labour

Helen Ovsienko and Prof Marie Brennan, School of Education, Centre for Research in Education (CREd), University of South Australia

Mass schooling was established by the nineteenth-century colonial administrations of what became, at Federation, the separate states that joined to form a new Australian 'nation'. Teacher education was then organised by the states, ensuring that the figure of the teacher and its ongoing production would be highly politicised and contested. The figure of the teacher is thus intimately bound up with the production of empire/nation-state and the citizen-worker (Hunter 1994). Teacher education, and the production of the twenty-first-century teacher, remains politicised, at the core of the Australian values debate, and under constant governmental scrutiny (Brennan and Zipin 2008). The space of a teacher education classroom hosts significant work on emotions (Hochschild 1983) and regulation or management of emotions as part of the production of professional identity and the capacity to practice as a teacher (Britzman 2009). This paper provides a case study of a teacher education classroom where the substantive topic requires pre-service teachers to engage with the 'racial Other'. Teaching for 'social justice' requires engagement with the Other, knowledge and co-construction of identity, yet the teaching force remains largely insulated from such engagement, made up largely of Anglo-Australian females (Santoro and Allard 2005; Aveling 2006). The nature of the identity and emotional work involved will first be illustrated in interviews with students and critical discourse analysis of their written work. It will then be interrogated theoretically to explore the dimensions of the emotional labour involved, using Hochschild and more recent feminist (Butler 2005) and anti-racist (Hage 2003) scholarship. The growth of governmental intervention associated with international league tables for testing results has ensured that education and teachers' work continues to be central to the national self-image, yet the detailed identity work and professional formation associated with these moves are not well understood or examined.

72. Placing bets and paying one's dues: managers' attitudes to making music

Pearl Panickar, PhD candidate, University of South Australia

This paper examines the notion of creative work as emotional labour in the context of the popular music industry and the study of economics. I argue that, while popular music is viewed by economic agents as a product of industry, music artists and managers engage in the same space with different attitudes which reflect their emotional attachment to the space of production. It is this affective engagement in the production of popular music that is considered here as part of the emotional geography of cultural production.

Popular music artists often refer to their creative work as a 'labour of love'. The first part of this paper considers the views of music artists. This section also explores the orthodox treatment of creative work as emotional labour in economic theory with reference to Karl Marx, Adam Smith and others. The next part of the paper explores the views of managers to music artists and creative work in the popular music industry in order to present real-world views on emotional labour and to discuss these views in relation to extant economic theory. The final part of the paper explores alternative positions towards emotional labour in economics with reference to the work of feminist economists including Nancy Folbre, Susan Himmelweit and others. In particular, the notion of 'decommodified labour' and 'social reproduction' are discussed in relation to strategies for the management of emotional labour. The discussion presented is based on interviews conducted between 2004 and 2007 with music artists and managers from the popular music industry in Australia and New Zealand.

73. Taste, distaste, disgust and renewal

Dr Maree Pardy, University of Melbourne

A working-class, culturally diverse and (in the eyes of some) too slowly gentrifying inner suburb of Melbourne is in the grip of urgent plans to 'renew' its image. Hollowed out of its once vibrant heart by the consumer and tourist attractions of the neighbouring mega malls, shopping strips, trendy urban villages and a seaside suburb, its former working-class glory has been stripped away. Today, public drinkers, drug users and sellers, two-dollar shops, recent immigrants and the poor are the public face of the suburb. For those executing the renewal plan the cheap 'ethnic' eateries (Asian and African cafes and restaurants) that have proliferated over the last thirty years provide a unique opportunity to re-brand it a 'suburb of tastes'. No longer a grubby, industrial, unsafe haven for the latest migrant cohort, it will be a reconfigured or purified social space (Sibley 1988, 1995) – a desirable inner city residence for the edgy urban professional. Ethnographic research among residents, visitors, planners, council officers and small business people here suggests that the push to create and promote it anew as a 'suburb of tastes' is driven by a moral economy of distaste for the suburb's public spaces and disgust towards the people who inhabit them. Drawing on William Miller's The anatomy of disgust (1997) the paper enquires into the emotion of disgust and its spatialising work of erecting boundaries and averting chaos and indicates the ways in which this negative emotion both drives and limits the imagined futures of post-industrial urban life. The public spaces at the centre of the suburb have become spaces of friction as this disgust involuntarily rubs up against the emotional displays of optimism and nonchalance by those to whom disgust, in the form of 'magical ideas of contamination' (Nussbaum 2004), is attached.

74. 'It's like you're a part of the whole': transnational German subjectivities in the Australian desert

Jana-Axinja Paschen, MA, Australian Centre, University of Melbourne

This paper presents research from my PhD project on how German tourists I interviewed over a period of three years experienced self and place when travelling in the desert regions of Australia. Looking at two case studies of tourists' affective responses to this space, the paper addresses questions of how identity, subjectivity and belonging are embedded in transnational and cross-cultural contexts. Forming emotional attachments to place in Australia, these participants came to reconsider aspects of their German identities via relating to Indigenous knowledges. Their embodied experience of feeling small on a spatial and temporal scale triggered complex emotional and intellectual reflections on forms of belonging that transcended national and cultural boundaries.

Layers of cultural landscapes in Australia – shaped by the German or Australian imagination or as part of the profound Aboriginal concept of Country – interact and merge in the individual experience with the sensual, affective and embodied aspects of experience (Crouch and Desforges 2003; Duffy et al 2007; Thrift 2001). While there is a focus on recent non-representational theory and methods from geography and tourism studies, my interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective takes the enquiry beyond the seemingly antagonistic conceptual boundaries of the representational versus the non-representational (Crouch 2003; Crouch and Lübbren 2003; Merriman et al. 2008; Thrift 2008). My analysis instead traces the ways in which culturally based and pre- or non-cognitive tourist experiences are interlinked and work through each other.

75. Two geographies in Rabindranath Tagore's literary works

Prof Mohammad A Quayum, International Islamic University, Malaysia

This paper offers to examine the two geographies – topographical and emotional – in Asia's first Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore's literary works, and show how they collide, complement or converge to constitute the fabric of his work. It will interrogate the laureate's letters, novels, short stories, plays and nonfictional works to establish that although a Bengali/Indian poet/writer, who was inherently inspired by Bengal's/India's topography and local colour, his espousal of the Upanishadic ethos of Advita or non-duality also enabled him to foster an expansive and inclusive emotional geography that encompassed the whole world. Therefore, his writings are at one level provincial, centring on Indian landscape and Bengali, Hindu culture, but on another, imbued by a sense of visvovod, they aspire to embrace the whole of humanity and bring them into 'one nest'. This phenomenon of being local and yet global, of depicting a geographically and culturally localised terrain and yet seeking to transcend all geographical borders and create an emotional cartography that accommodates the whole human race, is best embodied in the title of one of his translated novels, The home and the world.

A part of the paper will be devoted to examining how this far-flung, dilatable and panoptic emotional geography of Tagore resulted in his acerbic attacks on nationalism, which was otherwise a popular philosophy in India at that time (especially under the aegis of Mahatma Gandhi) and other postcolonial societies for its potential to inscribe new dignity on the hitherto colonised peoples through the possibility of self-rule. While Gandhi saw nationalism as the only way out for Indians from the shackles inflicted on them by the British, Tagore dismissed nationalism as 'an epidemic of evil' that creates a 'circumscribing circle' (both territorially and emotionally) around the individual, causing not only innumerable moral and spiritual hazard, but also untellable social suffering through warfare and bloodshed.

76. Mapping the emotional and embodied terrain of queer classroom research: constituting student, teacher and researcher subjectivities in a high school health class

Dr Kathleen Quinlivan, Senior Lecturer, University of Canterbury

In this paper, I make a case for attending more fully to emotional and embodied ways of learning and knowing within the cultures of classrooms and in undertaking classroom research. Working within the context of a classroom research project partnership developed to engage with issues of gender and sexual difference in a Year 12 secondary school health option, I show how the predominantly unspoken cultural norms of the classroom, and in this case of classroom research, unconsciously tended to frame learning and knowing largely as cognitive processes. I draw on queer and psychoanalytic theory to show the ways in which student, teacher and researcher subjectivities were destabilised as we were faced with the emotional and embodied labour of engaging with subjugated knowledges such as bodily pleasure, desire and problematising sexual and gendered normalcy. I close by suggesting that attending more closely to the emotional and embodied labour of learning and knowing for students, teachers and researchers alike has important epistemological and methodological implications for teaching and learning and classroom research.

77. Refugee support organisations in Britain and their construction of asylum seeker vulnerability

Dr Sophia Rainbird, Research Assistant, Hawke Research Institute, UniSA

Service providers in Britain construct an emotional landscape about asylum seekers, differentiating them as problematic, isolated and largely vulnerable dependents. In doing so support organisations assume an exclusive position of expertise and knowledge of asylum seekers' predicaments. This exclusivity can be understood as the 'official explanation' (Spivak 1987). The official explanation is put forth by organisations in order to ensure that they maintain a degree of influence in government policy, as well as ensuring a competitive edge in the arena of service provision. Asylum seekers may be incorporated into the discourse of this production only to the extent that they might aid in its reproduction and consistency – that is, asylum seekers understand the politics of presenting to an organisation as vulnerable and isolated. This paper explores the paradox of an organised system of support that works to assist asylum seekers to be independent and yet in doing so constructs asylum seekers as dependent, excludes them from decision-making processes, assumes knowledge and perpetuates isolation so that the support organisations can to a large extent rationalise and ensure their own sustainability. Spivak's (1987) question 'can the subaltern speak?' is worth considering here because although it may seem that asylum seekers are rendered voiceless, in fact asylum seekers have a considerable amount to say. Moreover, their emotive speech acts are a strategy that asylum seekers employ to push the boundaries of their predicament and to negotiate a possible future.

78. Desiring The circuit

Dr Mary Lou Rasmussen, Monash University, and Dr Vicki Crowley, University of South Australia

This paper pursues issues of pedagogy, place and queer phenomenology in the context of what might be meant by the term 'after queer' or 'what falls outside queer' as we currently theorise, practice and locate queer. Inspired by Sara Ahmed's account of 'how bodies become oriented by how they take up time and space' (2006: 55) this paper investigates how bodies become oriented within and around the field of a television series that centres Indigenous terms and orientations and thereby, still further, problematises the directions and orientations of desire. The paper explores the narrative and queer and other couplings of an Australian tele-series, The circuit: a six-hour primetime drama series filmed in the remote Kimberley region of outback Australia revolving around Drew Ellis, an Indigenous lawyer working for the Aboriginal Legal Service attached to the Kimberley Circuit Court. The paper raises issues of audience, public pedagogy and we refer to guestbook discussion as we strive to foreground a methodology for working with sexuality and race that recognises and disturbs in order to read sexual and racial orientations as mixed and unfixed orientations.

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79. Spaces of belonging amongst tertiary-educated migrants

Rosie Roberts, University of South Australia

This presentation explores the ways tertiary-educated migrants into and out of Australia negotiate belonging and identity. Attention is given to the multiple stages of migration recognising that the visa status of migrants changes over time. This allows for an analysis not only of the labour components of skilled migration but also other pathways for migration such as family reunification and the relocation of refugees. I build a tapestry of migrant experiences from their own words to highlight the complex nature of skilled migrant trajectories and to reveal the diversity of affective landscapes that exist within and outside of official modes of skilled migration. Based on participants' narratives, I use an analytical framework that allows belonging to be viewed as an intimate construct, as well as a formal negotiation of institutional regulations. I show that, for many migrants, their relocation experiences are as much underpinned by serendipitous events and emotional attachments as they are by strategic and rational intentions.

Conceptually the research is located within explorations of voice, multiple speech practices and identity, drawing upon the theoretical ideas of Bakhtin (1981) to understand how narrative and performance are implicated in the identity work of tertiary-educated migrants. This dialogic approach is particularly important when trying to unpack the multiple identities and sites of affective attachment that migrants negotiate in their everyday lives. Emerging from such discussions is a recognition of the complexity of the categories of migrants and their stories. What this calls for is a way that takes into account different, embedded approaches to migrants' own mapping of life histories and life geographies.

80. Righteous indignation online: China's angry/shit youth

Kaz Ross, University of Tasmania

The force of China's online community can now be felt around the world, from ticketing chaos at the Melbourne International Film Festival to the hacking of pro-Tibetan independence computers. Within China, anyone who stirs the anger of Chinese netizens can be subjected to individualised mass cyber-attack which can have real effects. A woman who tortured kittens and posted the video online was named and shamed, losing her job. A girl who complained online about the lack of decent TV programs in the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake was forced into hiding and subjected to violent and sexist threats via video. China's 'fennu qingnian' or 'angry youth' are easily motivated into retaliation. When their collective heightened sense of national pride and national interest is offended, China's online vigilante community or 'human flesh search engine' swings into action.

Understanding this behaviour requires challenging the simple explanation of extreme nationalism, particularly as a state-induced mobilisation strategy. Using Appadurai's Fear of small numbers (2006), I argue that the online numerical majority become predatory with regards to the minority when the minority threatens to expose the incompleteness of the 'China as homogenous/unified' narrative. Appadurai calls this the anxiety of incompleteness. The key word to note is 'anxiety' as emotion is central to the actions of the 'fennu qingnian' or 'angry youth'. I argue that the word 'indignant' is more appropriate as it captures the sense of injustice and reparation which is common in 'fenqing' discourse. With a play on pronunciation characteristic of the Chinese language, 'fenqing' can also mean 'shit youth', thus drawing attention to the dual insider/outlaw status of the community. The community, however, gains a sense of legitimacy from two sources. It draws on China's history of youth defence of the motherland. It also does the work of the state in policing boundaries. I conclude that the 'fenqing' form a community of affect which is an outgrowth of gamer culture. This is more than extreme peer group pressure online. In a sense, this is 'World of Warcraft' made real.

81. Emotional, sensuous place making on traditional public spaces: Pokemon's portrait of public spaces qualities in metropolitan Santiago

Dr M Bertrand S, Facultad de Arquitectura y Urbanismo, Universidad de Chile

Mobility patterns of new groups forged by sensuous, affective embodiment codes intensify the production of transient emotional place making. This transitory emotional, sensuous evening and night place making graft in some specific spatial conditions of traditional central open public places, as parks and streets. This form of grafted place making is openly manifest in the case of Pokemon's mobility patterns search sensuous body-to-body relationships high tactile, olfactory stimulus. Their search begins with a travel from the places where they live to the great parks in the central, historic urban core. Pokemon's place making reveals sensorial deficits, sensuous poverty first in the public places where they graft and, in a more radical way, in the city. Their transient, sensuous spaces are, simultaneously, tangible and intangible. Worlds of affects discarded, ignored by the static, coded, object-centred representations of space. To make them visible asks for critic, creative tools of capture, analysis and project such as new photographic, filmic, narrative language resources. When revealed, sensorial and affect spatial worlds open to more complete understanding and to more rich principles of public spatial conditions.

82. Pedagogy, affect and responsibility at the periphery of schooling

Dr Sam Sellar, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of South Australia

Teachers' felt senses of their pedagogical relationships with students depend on the places in which they teach. This paper draws on research with teachers from secondary schools on the geographic and socioeconomic periphery of an Australian capital city, conducted as part of a large school–university collaborative project. Teachers were encouraged to research their pedagogies and the out-of-school lives of their students in order to design more connected teaching and learning. When researching with students, a number of teachers were unsettled by emotional reactions to what they heard. Many teachers also described strong senses of ethical responsibility to the young people in their classrooms, who frequently endure the injustices of education institutions that unevenly distribute social, cultural and economic goods. When discussing their pedagogies, teachers gave emphasis to the importance of relationships. However, they struggled to translate their strong intuitive senses of this importance into more elaborate descriptions. Teachers apprehended dimensions of their often ethical and emotive work that appeared to resist conceptualisation.

In this paper I extend from my experience working with these teachers to explore the relation between the affective and ethical dimensions of their pedagogies. Drawing on Bauman's (1995) discussion of emotion and responsibility for the other, and the concept of affect developed by Massumi (2002), I explore the ethical role that non-conscious but corporeally registered sensations may play during pedagogical encounters. I argue that these visceral and emotive sensations have the potential to interrupt or unsettle established understandings of the other, and to condition a sense of ethical responsibility. Such visceral ethical sensitivity may play an important role in places where the contradictions of institutional education find particularly acute expressions, and where teachers' pedagogies must frequently negotiate tensions that manifest along both class and cultural lines.

83. Emotion, sociality and documentary film

Dr Belinda Smaill, Film and Television Studies, Monash University

Of all film genres, documentary is unique in the way it consistently facilitates a fantasy of connectedness and sociality – a sense of being in the public sphere. Although assumptions concerning an affective public sphere and passionate politics are integral to the practice of documentary filmmaking, and political documentary in particular, scholarly attention to this function of the genre has been limited. This paper investigates how a theoretical approach to the work of emotion in the address of documentary might take shape. This is an investigation into how individuals are positioned by documentary representation as subjects that are entrenched in the emotions, whether it is pleasure, hope, pain, empathy or disgust. The individuals I am referring to are, in some instances, filmmakers, and in others, those featured in the film. By 'entrenched' I mean not simply that the poetics of the film such as music, rhetoric or narrative frame individuals in ways that elicit emotional responses from viewers, but that emotion confers cultural meanings onto others. This methodology will account for how emotionality marries with the social project of documentary in ways that make the non-fiction genre a compelling site for perceiving how fantasies of self and other circulate through specific textual practices in the public sphere. A key concern is how different manifestations of the self are located by emotions in ways that effect their position within formations or technologies of power, such as aesthetics of the text and the social conditions represented in the world of the film. This discussion will be illustrated with a number of examples drawn from contemporary documentary film.

84. The emotional geographies of the American religious right and their conservative protestant base

Catherine Smith, Monash University

Over the last several decades, the Religious Right in America has battled the public school system regarding curriculum and the role of religion in school; specifically, they are engaged in debates over the teaching of evolution, prayer in school and sex education. The Religious Right is well known for its power and influence in politics, as well as for its ability to frame debates on social issues. Their framing of such issues, particularly those involving public education, often involves the use of charged language. The rhetoric of the Religious Right is most emotionally evocative with respect to their protests against sex education in public schools – phrases such as 'the sodomy curriculum' and 'condom education' are used to play upon people's feelings of fear and shame concerning sex. While the Religious Right's charged language regarding sex education is well documented, the emotionality of their framing of the issues of school prayer and the teaching of evolution is less so. Further, the effect of this charged language on the Religious Right's base – American conservative Protestants – has also not been established. This paper explores the emotional language the Religious Right uses to frame various debates in public education, and looks at the responses of conservative Protestants to this rhetoric. Although it is widely accepted that the Religious Right uses charged language to encourage their base toward political activism, it is far less clear what sort of emotional responses are evoked by their rhetoric.

85. Transgressing expectations of the sexual citizen and reinventing affective associations: Sri Lankan migrant women in Lebanon

Monica Smith, Department of Geography, National University of Singapore

Drawing upon research in 2008–2009 in Beirut, Lebanon into the lives of Sri Lankan female migrant workers, this paper assesses the intimate and affective dimensions of transnational migration and adultery as a form of resistance to heteronormativity and the nuclear family. The paper focuses upon a specific cohort of Sri Lankan domestic migrant women who live outside of their employers' homes in one of the largest migrant neighbourhoods in Beirut. It assesses how migrant women, the majority married with children, transgress expectations of sexual citizenship through engaging in intimate relationships while abroad. Geographies of social constraint during migration, which make intimacy difficult to achieve and maintain, for example, physical separation, state laws and political practices, and economic restrictions mediate women's affective responses. Women experience socially constructed loneliness, sadness, anger and despair. Having an affair becomes a form of resistance and source of pleasure, happiness and hope. The understanding that bodily interactions and sites of encounter are given normative associations through repeated affective performances has opened up epistemological and ontological avenues that categorical accounts of human identity have passed over. Intimate relationships have much to tell us of the ways in which affective relations are played out, how they are kept in place through deeply routinised performances, yet also have the potential to (re)invent associations. It is through social geographies of encounters – of bodies and forces – that emotional are materialised, resulting in a hierarchal arrangement, 'in the relations between bodies which results in an increase or decrease in the potential to act' (Thrift 2003: 104).

86. Being there and loving it: tourism and affect at the Sydney Opera House

Dr Naomi Stead, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Queensland

In architectural discourse there is a lineage of discussions of affective, erotic relations between people and buildings. These include Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia poliphili, Alexander de Bastide's La petite maison, and more recently Anthony Vidler's revisiting of Bastide's work in his theorising of contemporary spatial affect. While such accounts have often been understood within the history of aesthetics and sense perception in architecture, this paper will attempt to bring such accounts to contemporary Sydney, and to bear on tourist culture and affect at the Sydney Opera House. What might it mean to 'love' this building? If the tokens of such love are souvenirs, postcards and photographs, then what is revealed in these objects themselves, and the performances that surround their purchase, inscription or capture? What might it mean to think the city of Sydney as a landscape of affect, with the tourist map as its visualisation and guide?

Architectural tourism, it could be argued, is central to an understanding of tourist practices more generally – tourism provokes a conscious audience for architecture, it reframes everyday buildings as sights. Individuals who might never give architecture a second thought in their usual environment are drawn to look at buildings in a strange city, to make destinations of them, to take guided tours. Architecture is also central to modes of tourist navigation – buildings become landmarks and points of orientation.

The affect of tourists is not all pleasure. Jody Berland writes that 'Tourism tantalizes us by proposing that everything visible is within our grasp, and yet works (as an industry) by evoking a degree of underlying longing, nostalgia, dissatisfaction.' Lucy Lippard notes that 'All tourists are afraid they are missing something. This anxiety is a basic condition of tourism', while Susan Stewart reminds us that souvenirs exist in the gap between experience and representation: that they are emblems of a lived encounter now lost forever. Tourists capture what they can, and carry away what spoils of memory and authentication can be borne, but what is left behind at this intersection of love and loss?

Using experimental writing techniques drawn from feminist place writing and architectural theory, this paper will be both a theoretical examination and a case study grounded in material culture. Springing from a base in architecture, it will traverse cultural studies, critical tourism studies, and aesthetics.

87. A meditation on virtuous spaces

Assoc Prof Elaine Stratford, School of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Tasmania

For some time, geographers have been concerned with moral questions, and recent work shows a renewed interest in spirituality, place and landscape. For example, Dewsbury and Cloke explore 'the notion of "spiritual landscapes" as co-constituting sets of relations between bodily existence, felt practice and faith in things that are immanent, but not yet manifest'. They suggest that the spiritual is constitutive of experiential knowledge; informs how we are attached – through affect – to the world; and creates room for 'thinking … in ways attuned to the potential of worlds that can be formed, and the alternative senses and understandings of togetherness that can be forged'.

The utopian impulse exemplified by this proposition is informed by an idea that the good life is virtuous. Virtue is generally understood to be expressive of one or more efficacious, good or beneficial qualities: for instance, kindness, patience, generosity, modesty, acceptance, truthfulness and wisdom. Yet many landscapes seem devoid of virtue or sense of the spiritual – and this malaise is perhaps both spatial and temporal. Think of Mr Curly's advice to Vasco Pyjama (via Michael Leunig). 'In response to your question "what is worth doing and what is worth having?" I would like to say simply this. It is worth doing nothing and having a rest … otherwise you will become restless! I believe the world is sick with exhaustion and dying of restlessness … Tiredness has become the most suppressed feeling in the world'

Diagnoses such as Mr Curly's warrant greater attention, and prompt the question where, then, might spiritual landscapes be found, created and celebrated? Focusing on three spaces with three very different emotional registers, the purpose of this paper is to engage with that question, and with the idea that virtuous spaces are a key requisite for a sense of restfulness and openness to the good life in the present moment.

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88. Intercorporeal and interpenetrative human–animal relations: technological mediation of the human–horse–bull network in the bullfight from horseback (rejoneo)

Dr Kirrilly Thompson, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of South Australia

This paper explores the human–animal relations of the Spanish bullfight from horseback. Using an actor-network-theory approach, I consider the ways in which the human–horse–bull relationship is technologically mediated. By considering the role of technology as interpenetrative and co-constitutive, I examine the three phases of the bullfight from horseback to demonstrate that the human–horse–bull relationship becomes progressively intimate and transgressed throughout the bullfight. These layers of interpenetration involve a generative and transformative boundary blurring across humans, animals and technologies. These are material, semiotic and emotional engagements framed within the space of the bullring as well as its related interactions. This paper is based on 15 months of anthropological fieldwork in Andalusia from 2000 to 2001 and contributes a post-structuralist and post-humanist approach to existing bullfighting literature.

89. Constructing the homo sapiens amans: love as the basis of social life in Humberto Maturana's biology of love

Dr Sergio Holas Véliz, University of Adelaide

Since the early 60s Humberto Maturana has been creating the explanatory foundations for the biologic nature of cognition and the social. He has enacted a view of living systems in which they emerge as embodied and in permanent process of 'autopoiesis' (self-creation). The basic insight is that humans live in a flux of emotions which, when distinguish by an observer, bring forth different relational conducts and domains of existence. Human beings dance their entrance into different domains according to their emotional flux and, as a consequence, emotions emerge as the foundation of social systems. In other words, in Maturana's reflexion emotions are distinguished when observing the relational conducts of human beings. According to this for social systems to emerge love is the key emotion which brings it forth into existence. As an outcome of this assertion Maturana points that not all human relations are social and that for human social systems to emerge love is central for the conservation of our identity and existence as humans. This paper explores Maturana's assertions as they are key explanations that allow the understanding of social systems that as social systems enact their living as homo sapiens amans.

90. Syringe sensation

Dr Nicole Vitellone, School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Liverpool

In his political economy analysis of the shooting gallery the social anthropologist Phillipe Bourgois interprets the comment 'I started shooting heroin at 14, now I'm 64' as an indication that '[Doc's] oppression is fully internalized and, almost like a neo-liberal ideologue, he takes full responsibility for his poverty, illiteracy and homelessness' (1998: 60). But does this interpretation of shooting up adequately get to grips with a lifetime's attachment to the syringe? Could there be another explanation for Doc's experience of the shooting gallery? What happens when addiction is addressed not in terms of suffering but the object of the syringe, its consumption and movement? Drawing on Law's observation that spaces are made with objects, and my research findings on the social life of the syringe, this paper examines the affective dimension of the shooting gallery, paying particular attention to the sensation of the syringe. My focus concerns the relationship between practices of disposing and discarding syringes and issues of space, affect and waste. Bringing together the work of Derrida, Bataille, Foucault, Lefebvre, Thrift and Thompson, I argue that the excess value of the syringe unsettles the boundaries between subject and object, private and public, space and place. This has implications for how we understand not just the affective dimensions of the shooting gallery but the politics of addiction, harm and waste.

91. Europeanisation of cultural tourism

Mario Vrbancic, University of Zadar, Croatia and Dr Senka Bozic-Vrbancic, University of Melbourne, Australia

European policy makers' emphasis on the need to promote multilingualism and pluralingualism is often seen as 'vital to harmonious engagement between peoples and languages'. Cultural tourism and cultural industry are seen as activities (and economies) that have the capacity to promote this engagement and intercultural communication. However, this promotion is not a 'neutral' activity. This paper examines the processes of Europeanisation of cultural tourism in Istria (Croatia) and new passionate attachments that these processes initiate.

92. The colonial gaze and its other: travel writing on India and England

Shvetal Vyas, Research Assistant, Hawke Research Institute, UniSA

'There is no foreign land; it is only the traveller that is foreign' (Robert Louis Stevenson)

In India inscribed Kate Teltscher invokes Francois Hartog, who wrote the history of Herodotus, to raise certain fundamental questions such as '"in the last analysis", what does a traveller talk about? About what is "the same" or about what is "the other"?' The traveller's procedure comes down to constructing an image of what is other that will be a 'telling' one for the audience from the world of the 'same' (Teltscher, p 24). In my paper, I would like to explore three different texts: Up the country (written 1837–1840, published 1866) by Emily Eden (1797–1869), which is a collection of letters addressed to her sister Mary Drummond, Letters from India (written 1889–1909, published 1911) by Lady Anne Wilson (born 1855) and England maan pravaas (Travels in England) by Karsandas Mulji, first published in 1866. The first two are narratives that seek to construct and negotiate India by two women who came to India at different points of time in its history. Emily Eden was the sister of George, the second Baron Auckland, and Governor-General of India (1836–1842). His bachelor status made it necessary for her to accompany him to India and host and attend functions of the state. Anne Wilson, in contrast, belonged to a different class as her husband James was a part of the covenanted civil service and had worked his way up the administration. This difference between the two women is not insignificant considering the strongly defined class hierarchy that operated within the cloistered English community in India. The last named is a Gujarati memoir that seeks to understand the coloniser by examining his land, by taking in not only the 'sights' of London but also its socio-political systems and conditions. In my paper, I shall attempt to explore the various implications and possibilities that these texts suggest on the female colonial gaze and the reversing of that gaze by a male colonised subject.

93. Writing landscape/landscape writing

Dr Linda Marie Walker, University of South Australia

I propose in this paper an approach to landscape/site specificity through a writing practice that is spatial, that is interdisciplinary, and that produces a texture in language/understanding through a differing of modes. This practice considers itself as a site, geographic, emotional, indeterminate, subjective and excessive. The 'site' makes manifest the writing-being (subject) and the relationships emerging through intellectual engagement and creative desire. The text becomes a 'site of writing'; it is process-based and simultaneously a critical endeavour. It can be termed an 'expanded writing practice', or a 'critical spatial practice'; Jane Rendell calls it 'site-writing'. Here, there is no distance, as writer, from the content of one's research; one is located inside the inquiry. It's a form of invention that understands the inquiry (the 'site') as infinite – the writing is constructed in relation to and in dialogue with its chosen interest. This is the production of writing with multiple voices/styles; it is a combinatory work, a generative 'machine' of poetic and theoretical intention. 'A "voice" in criticism can be objective and subjective, distant and intimate.' It is an active/open writing, more invitational and compositional than directive. Perhaps landscape is illusion, an image, a piece of earth imagined, upon which writing comes, hauntingly. A landscape is (in the context of site writing) a space/time venue, a platform/scaffold, where events are conjured as well as meetings, joys, losses, births, deaths. This is a type of psycho-analytic writing where the 'other' of the writing's 'topic' must be thought, including the other of the writer; an imaginative criticality where, as Rendell posits, the writer 'occupies both the position of the analyst and analysand, and works through critical analysis and interpretation, as well as associate states such as story-telling, remembering and imagining'. Other theorists to be worked with: Elizabeth Grosz, Helene Cixous, Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze.

94. Emo-culture in contemporary China and intra-east Asia cultural transnationalism

Fang Wang, MPhil candidate, Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney

Erotic/cute style, which serves as an emotional outlet, is the main territory with which I want to propel myself into an investigation of the imbrications between the cultural shifts and the more contemporary formation of young female subjectivities. What feelings, thoughts and moods manifested in their erotic/cute photos? How do their temperament, emotions and disposition having been shaped by China's new market economy carve out visible and invisible space of their own? How do they negotiate their everyday life and express their desires of by showing, performing, transforming their erotic/cute bodies in front of cameras?

On the one hand, by examining erotic/cute online style among young urban females in contemporary China, my paper, in the same way, could been seen as a case study to explore the plural, heterogeneous and decentred nature of globalisation, to probe what have been seriously and continuously under-explored, especially in the Chinese context, but is becoming more visible and conspicuous: the regional transnational cultural flows within east Asia. On the other hand, erotic/cute photos posted by young females on the internet will be my main research. By analysing those pictures, in my paper, instead of feeding such images into fabrication of youth problems, I am trying to deal with the emotions that surround their styles, which stems from something repressed but subsequently returns to the surface. Those emotional youth will tell you that they have the right to be taken seriously.

95. Dialogical remembering and the new tour of duty: tourist projections and experiences at 'American War' sites in Viet Nam

Brad West, Flinders University

I analyse tourism at 'American War' sites in Viet Nam to explore the development of dialogical forms of national remembering. From ethnographic research in Viet Nam at the Cu Chi Tunnels, De-militarized Zone and War Remnants Museum I outline three ways in which tourism intertwines western and Viet Nam memories of the conflict: the incorporation of western anti-authoritarian narratives in exhibits and dialogue about the war, reliance and use of western media content and genres by Viet Nam tourist authorities and entrepreneurs, and by corporeal experience of place and culture prompting individual revision of dominant national narratives. The findings are used to critique prevailing theories about cosmopolitanism and globalisation that neglect the adaptive and enduring cultural power of the national.

96. You mean the world to me? Love, space and scale in Russian doll geography

Eleanor Wilkinson, School of Geography, University of Leeds

In this paper I want to begin to explore what a queer geography of responsibility might entail. I build upon Massey's concept of 'Russian doll geography' in which care and responsibility are always associated with proximity. I focus specifically upon the unrelenting promotion of the monogamous couple as the ultimate source of care and love. I examine some of the dominant spatial metaphors used to discuss romantic relationships in order to draw out the complex ways in which normative intimacy is seen to work through and reproduce a number of different spatial scales. In particular I look at how neo-conservative rhetoric portrays romantic coupledom as inextricably connected to the good of the community, the nation and even the world.

Yet what if we believe that normative intimacy is actually detrimental to the common good? What if we do not want to preserve current society, the nation or the existing order of things? In this paper I draw upon interviews with people who feel that their rejection of monogamy is a political act: they argue that the privatised monogamous couple both diverts attention away from wider global struggles, and also helps uphold the existing neo-liberal order. A rejection of normative romance may therefore free us to rework intimacy, and challenge the idea that that those closest are the ones we care for, and who we feel most responsibility towards. In order to rethink intimacy must we also rethink our spatial imaginaries?

97. Shooting affect: emotion as documentary film form

Simon Wilmot, Deakin University

Participating as a filmmaker in an Australian Research Council Linkage project, 'Oral Tradition, Memory and Social Change: Indigenous Participation in the Curation and Use of Museum Collections', has created an opportunity to consider, in a practical way, questions about documentary as a way of knowing in scholarly practice. I am also compelled to deal with some of these questions because, as yet, the enquiry in this project has not yielded the kind of narrative premise with cause and effect that a documentary is typically made from.

Instead, what I have been filming has been determined by the relationships that have made my presence on the project possible; the relationships between researchers and Lamalama people, researchers and museum, the museum and Lamalama people and a Lamalama elder and myself. This project is revealing to me how the circumstances of documentary making, from the relationships to the kinds of encounters I am having with the camera in hand, make it possible to understand documentary in terms other than a critique of its representational veracity. Using examples from this project and drawing on theories of affect and relationality, this paper will suggest how documentary making can equally be understood as a discourse in emotion as being based on visible evidence. The discussion of the work of the film maker will also demonstrate how considering affect has provided a way forward in solving the narrative problems of this project and resolving the point-of-view problems of a white academic making a film about Indigenous knowledge.

98. The Olympic building in Beijing: the social and urban impact of the 'Bird's Nest'

Dr Charlie QL Xue, Prof Wei Jia and Brian Mitchenere, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong

China's national stadium, the Bird's Nest, designed jointly by Swiss architects Herzog and De Meuron and China Architectural Design and Research Group, hosted the opening and closing ceremonies as well as numerous sporting activities during the 2008 Olympic and Paralympics Games. The stadium has become a landmark in Beijing, the Chinese capital. Its association with the international events transcends conventional architectural significance and embodies many meanings.

This paper introduces the brief construction data of the Bird's Nest and discusses the phenomenon of iconic building popular in the recent years. Based on these, the paper analyses the building, its impact on the city and society and its urban image. The authors discuss the iconic building phenomenon and describe the prospects for this kind of building. Influenced by the Olympic Games, the Bird's Nest also motivates the economy and tourism. The building is nearing the measure of success attributed to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. The new building image is changing the traditional criteria of architectural evaluation and has triggered extensive discussions. In Beijing, the Bird's Nest, together with other iconic buildings has changed the city's face. As a building, its attractiveness and social impact are unprecedented. No doubt the Bird's Nest is an icon of contemporary China. In addition to the conventional criteria of evaluating architecture, we argue that one more principle may be added for this kind of building – the influence of building image on the economy and society.

99. Passionate politics and affective spaces of becoming in education

Prof Deborah Youdell, Institute of Education, London

In this paper I explore the practices of teachers and students inside an English end-of-the-line 'special' school for boys aged 5 to 16 who have been designated as having 'social, emotional and behavioural difficulties'. This is a politically significant space: competitive education markets push those students who are constituted beyond the bounds of the tolerable student-learner out of mainstream schooling into 'special' and 'alternative' education spaces. There are almost 100,000 students attending such provision in England at any given time. Given its place on the margins of education, this school is a useful site for considering the possibilities for passionate political pedagogies that move beyond normative notions of the school, the teacher and the student.

The paper engages ethnographic data generated in the school and makes use of the ideas of Michel Foucault (1998a, b, 1990) and Judith Butler (1997, 2004) in order to read processes of subjectivation, the demand for recognisability and the promise of resignification. And it draws on Deleuze and Guattari's (2008) understanding of smooth and striated space to read the classroom and other school spaces and makes use of their understanding of affective flows to interrogate the passionate politics that suffuse these spaces. The paper deploys these conceptual tools simultaneously in order to understand both the way that the school, teacher and student are constrained and corralled and how these might be spaces and subjects that are becoming-otherwise. I argue that the affectivities that flow through the spaces and bodies of this school might be understood as opening up the possibility for a passionate politics in which educators and students are 'becoming-revolutionary' (Deleuze and Parnet 1983: 114).
 

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