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Smith 2002). A shift to performative approaches to understanding the world is valuable in challenging forms of interpretation that depend on representations of meaning in texts. Performativity as a concept can be linked back to Judith Butler’s work on the performance of gender and sexual identities, and is ‘an attempt to find a more embodied way of rethinking the relationships between determining social structures and personal agency’ (Nash 2000:654). Such a shift meant that there was a need for methodological advancement and move beyond the narrow range of interviews and ethnographic work to include methods in the performative arts in theatre, bodily techniques like dance and music therapy, performative writing, which “recuperate the spatial practices and bodily performances that may be detected within them” (Scott 2004:28). In response to criticisms that performative approaches have occluded politics, Thrift (2003:2021) argued that they aim to “make things… much more political…to expand the existing pool of alternatives and corresponding forms of dissent.”. The links between performativity and the body as a site of action is what Thrift describes as non-representational theory (NRT), which is about ‘practices…that shape the conduct of human beings towards others and themselves in particular sites’ ( cited in Nash 2000:655). NRT thus expands understanding and knowing of space beyond sight by emphasizing embodied and other sensory pathways.

 

The focus upon experiences and thus the body as a site of experiences is important for understanding our emotions which serve as a “connective tissue that links experiential geographies of the human psyche and physique with(in) broader social geographies of place” (Davidson and Milligan 2004: 524). Emotional geographies thus recognize the interactional quality in human experiences between us and the environment, and is a response to the dominantly visual focus of work by taking into account the corporeal and sensual which involves touch, taste and hearing in addition to sight. Increasing literature on the field of emotions has led to a claim of an ‘emotional turn’ (Bondi 2005).

 

Expanding on the phenomenology and NRT, the psychoanalytical understanding of ‘affect’ is increasingly being discussed. Dewsbury (2009:21) defined it as being “encountered prior to any subjective framing and are rendered more in terms of felt intensity which produces a kind of understanding before it can be signified and articulated”. In highlighting the importance of understanding affect, Thrift (2004) argued that affect is increasingly being engineered and that there is a need to rethink what constitutes the political. For example, Carter and McCormack (2006) showed how there is a need for the expanded understanding of relations between cinematic films and geopolitical intervention, by looking at the magnification and anchoring of affect through cinematic techniques in the film ‘Black Hawk Down’. While emotions and affectual geographies share certain similarities, we should not conflate them for they are conceptually different (Pile 2010). The fundamental difference is that of ‘thought/cognitive’ vis-à-vis ‘affect/non-cognitive’ whereby the emotional geographies focus on the psycho本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。