Affective Attunement: Mapping the Invisible

Abstract

This chapter describes methods for researchers to attune to the affective dimensions of their social and environmental conditions. These are placed within the context of feminist and decolonial ideas of ‘situated knowledge’ as opposed to universal knowledge: the view ‘from ground level, in the thick of things’, as Dwight Conquergood puts it. Sociology and ethnography have also developed methods for critical self-positioning, but the author argues that performance-based practices add to these by introducing embodied and experiential techniques to make apprehensible—that is, literally perceptible—the forces acting upon and through the observing subject. In this chapter, the focus is on the use of creative constructs to displace the intentional and authorial subject in place of an experiencing subject, open to chance influences and attenuated to that is which is preconscious or presubjective. Ant Hampton’s Borderline Invisible (2023) is discussed as an example of ‘performative mapping’ that brings to the surface the buried but very much live currents of migration, genocide, and ethnic displacement in the European context. This method is then extended to learning and teaching situations where practicing researchers can develop their affective sensitivities.