Over the last few years sociolinguists have becoming increasingly more interested in the ways in which emotions are brought into being with the help of a variety of meaning-making resources. In particular, scholars of linguistic landscapes have illustrated the locally significant role by emotions in particular spaces such as online chats, tattoo parlors and heritage sites (King 2011, Peck and Stroud 2015, Wee 2016). Unlike the existing literature, however, we are less concerned with the production and regimentation of specific feelings within bounded spaces than with what the circulation of different emotions aims to achieve across a variety of sites, both online and in the built environment. More specifically, by bringing together research presenting several cultural settings–Bosnia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Hong Kong, and the Philippines–the colloquium showcases the very different ways in which types of affect (desire, anger, pain, disgust, shame, sorrow, etc) are produced within culturally relevant constraints and then move across a variety of boundaries and spaces, thus creating a multiplicity of affective attachments in relation to university branding, mobility/migration, political protests, same-sex encounters, as well as nationhood. Although the contributors to the colloquium draw upon different concepts in studying affect, they all operationalise Margaret Wetherell’s suggestion to focus on “affective practices” as “situated event[s], in a consequential set of sequences in social, cultural and institutional life, and make connections between the emotional performances and other ordering and organizing constituents” (Wetherell 2015:159). In doing so, the colloquium seeks to show how detailed linguistic/discursive analysis adds important perspectives to the so-called affective turn in the social sciences and humanities by offering a more nuanced understanding of how affect takes shape semiotically.
References
King, B. W. (2011) Language, sexuality and place: The view from cyberspace. Gender & Language, 5: 1–30.
Peck, A. and Stroud, C. (2015) Skinscapes. Linguistic Landscape, 1: 133–151.
Wee, L. (2016) Situating affect in linguistic landscapes. Linguistic Landscape, 2: 105–126.
Wetherell, M. (2015) Trends in the turn to affect: A social psychological critique. Body & Society, 21: 139–166.
