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Abstract The work of beauty—in disciplining bodies, imagining nations, driving globalized commodity networks, and fostering booming tourist industries, for example, is a vibrant area of research across the Humanities and Social Sciences. However, an understanding of the complex ideologies, material objects, and practices of beauty remain undeveloped in our field. In this article we call on geographers to take beauty, and its spatialities, seriously. We center the powerful work of beauty in three connected arenas, each of long‐held interest to political geographers: nationalism, militarism, and development. For each we engage analyses of beauty from beyond our discipline. Drawing on our own research and that of a limited, but growing, body of geographers, we point to the instructive openings a feminist geographic approach to beauty, widely imagined but always grounded in power, offers.
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Affectual intensities: Writing with resonance as feminist methodology
This paper advances current debates about feminist methodologies in geography by attending to affectual intensities and their resonance. Affectual intensities emerge through encounters between different bodies and objects, and are deeply power‐laden, enabling, disabling, transforming, and restricting geographic research. We attend to three moments of resonance that surfaced in Elisabeth Militz's field research on nationalism in Azerbaijan. In each, we show how attending to affectual intensities reveals much about the work of power in nationalism and in the constitution of geographic knowledge about it. The paper calls for an affectual methodology, a process of critical writing, reflection, and rewriting about moments of resonance between different bodies and objects in the field, and as we analyse, present, and write up our data. This is a layered, dialogic, and collaborative writing strategy that, we argue, enables us to write through and with affect. In particular, our work contributes a nuanced and multi‐layered approach to uncover often‐neglected power structures of predominantly white and heteronormative geographic research practice.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1461686
- PAR ID:
- 10130009
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Area
- ISSN:
- 1514-0687
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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