Il simbolico e la via del movimento delle donne

Symbolic politics has been one of the key phrases in Italian feminism since the 1970s. This text describes the historical origins and significance of this concept together with the difference in the use of the symbolic dimension in traditional male politics. The most important difference is that female politics are born from living and affective relations which cannot be permanently established and rotate around non-formalized procedural practices. The sense that emerges is felt during the actual process and the symbolic is therefore experienced and transformed from the inside with the authority that comes from these practices, which influence and modify each other due to their closeness. They spread by proximity.

Affective geographies: Family and friendship in the production of scientific knowledge

Through case studies of two early nineteenth-century French geologists, this article shows how relations of family and friendship were integral to determining where science took place. Digging up the traces of what I call the “affective geographies” of individual scientists that are entangled with their intellectual itineraries, I show how the practice of science is embedded in such affective relations and thus in everyday life.

Living with Food Allergies: The Recalibratory Body

As a growing global public health concern, an increasing proportion of the UK’s population must live with and manage the chronic disease of food allergies. Through a multi-method approach of autoethnography, cognitive mapping, and interviewing, this research investigates what matters to the bodily experience of people living with food allergies. I work with the concepts of embodiment and affect to delineate a theorisation of the allergic body as recalibratory and argue that the adrenaline auto-injector (AAI)—the lifesaving medication prescribed to individuals with severe food allergies—is integral to the allergic recalibratory body. I demonstrate the multiple, dynamic ways in which those living with food allergies “affectively relate” to the AAI and what contributes to this. An account of the body as recalibratory is advanced to account for the dynamicism of the body’s affective relations. The recalibratory body becomes a valuable tool for understanding the ways that macro-issues of AAI production shortages and the tragic occurrence of allergy fatalities as well as micro-level everyday experiences matter to those living with food allergies. The essay concludes by exploring how the concept of recalibration can expand beyond allergic bodies to understand what the body—any body—can be, do, and mean.

Embodied Movement as Method: Attuning to Affect as Feminist Experimentation

This article explores qualitative research methods that employ materiality and movement, images and body mapping to access research participant knowledges. We examine a methodologies workshop that we co-facilitated for academics and postgraduates. We position the workshop as a research assemblage, through which we facilitated four different methodological ‘moves’, to borrow from Barad's (2007) notion of ‘cuts’, to invite learning-knowing through the movement of affect. These embodied methodologies included: moving-writing sport, digital photovoice, movement improvisation, and body mapping somatic movement. Workshop participants were invited to experiment with each method as a means of engaging with tacit, or difficult to articulate knowledges. By exploring what these embodied ‘moves’ do to our ways of knowing, we traced the affective relations that entangle human and nonhuman worlds, self and others, researcher and researched through the workshop intra-actions. Our accounts of each method are diffracted through affective relations as we attune to bodies, vulnerabilities, openings, objects, texts, thoughts, surfaces, and senses, as means of (un)learning together. We articulate the kinds of productive (un)learning that moved us in different ways, and how embodied, feminist new materialist approaches might contribute to defamiliarised approaches to research.

Transient Feelings

In response to the shifts of communication following the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions, this research investigates the disorienting experience of navigating loneliness and intimacy in the digital space. Creative writing is a relatively unexplored but recently emerging field of academic inquiry (Skains 2018, 84). Poetry in particular involves research into the language and textures of the world—it is a critical way of thinking that incorporates not just the signified meaning of words, but also the phonaesthetics, placement, space, and textual structure. This practice-based creative work is presented in the form of a 9-part autoethnographic prose poem that echoes the fragmented and asynchronous nature of digital communication (Bonner 2016, 11). Through stream-of-consciousness vignettes that could be read in any order, I emulate the experience of scrolling through a feed. I explore ideas of limitlessness in the face of apocalyptic endings, where our desire for more is troubled by having too much. This experimental and experiential paper is ultimately an interrogation of the tension between affective relations and isolation, where mediated bodies are troubled by longing, loneliness, and looking.

The visual politics of public police Instagram use in Canada

Public police now use online and social media spaces as forums for communication. Drawing from discourse and semiotic analysis, and contributing to literature on police image management, we analyze police Instagram communications from five Canadian cities. Focusing on public police services’ Instagram posts, which are more indebted to visual communication than Twitter and Facebook, we examine the ways police communications frame community and diversity. Arguing that these communications resemble the fantastical authenticity found in other Instagram communications, we show how police mobilize images of community and diversity on Instagram to create positive affective relations with community. We argue that these communications amplify policing myths and operate to enhance police legitimacy. In the discussion, we assess what our findings mean for literatures on public police social media communications and policing myths.

Racial Unspeakability

Increasing diversity in international student mobility/migration has gained attention in recent years (Bilecen & Van Mol, 2017). Diversity in international higher education institutions has primarily been understood in terms of diversity of national origin, meaning the dynamics of racial and ethnic differences are not adequately addressed in the literature (Estera & Shahjahan, 2018). This study uses data collected during semi-structured interviews with international and domestic students, as well as administrators, to identify narrations of race, ethnicity, and nationality that delimit a modern/colonial global imaginary (Stein & Andreotti, 2017). It further demonstrates that internal heterogeneity of both sending and receiving countries leads to varied meaning-making schemes for engaging with embodied racial differences and their attendant affective relations (Ahmed, 2013; Wetherell, 2012). The project suggests the term racial unspeakability as a culturally contingent, affective force that governs narrations of race, ethnicity, and nationality.

Animal, Body, Data: Starling Murmurations and the Dynamic of Becoming In-formation

The aim of this article is to demonstrate that data modelling is becoming a crucial, if not dominant, vector for our understanding of animal populations and is consequential for how we study the affective relations between individual bodies and the communities to which they belong. It takes up the relationship between animal, body and data, following the datafication of starling murmurations, to explore the topological relationships between nature, culture and science. The case study thus embodies a data journey, invoking the tactics claimed by social or natural scientists, who generated recent discoveries in starling murmurations, including their topological expansions and contractions. The article concludes with thoughts and suggestions for further research on animal/data entanglement, and threads the concept of databodiment throughout, as a necessary dynamic for the formation and maintenance of communities.