The affective spaces of global civil society and why they matter

lable at ScienceDirect

Emotion, Space and Society xxx (2013) 1e7

Contents lists avai

Emotion, Space and Society

journal homepage: www.elsevier .com/locate/emospa

The affective spaces of global civil society and why they matter

Mark Griffiths*

King’s College London, Centre for Public Policy Research, Education, Stamford Street, London SE19NH, United Kingdom

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Received 6 March 2013Received in revised form7 August 2013Accepted 8 August 2013

Keywords:VolunteeringGlobal civil societyAffectSocially engaged researchAffective methodsPravah

* Tel.: þ44 7720888797.E-mail address: [email protected].

1 http://www.pravah.org/.

1755-4586/$ e see front matter � 2013 Elsevier Ltd.http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2013.08.003

Please cite this article in press as: Griffiths,(2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2

a b s t r a c t

Many early-career researchers aim at making research socially engaged. In the initial stages of myresearch on international volunteering for development I learnt very quickly that any push towards socialjustice has been blunted by the damaging mechanisms of neoliberal power. The temptation is thereforeto make research socially engaged by exposing such malign presences of power in volunteering orga-nisations. This paper grows out of this interest and builds an argument of how researchers can engagepower and write into being a better future. This brings into contrast the capitalocentric orientation offieldwork preparation against the micro-processes of meeting and being with other bodies cometogether to constitute work in the field. Through work with an NGO in New Delhi the case is put thatsuch meetings of bodies are affective and this is central to making research socially engaged. Affectivemoments give rise to love, solidarity and hope. Making research sensitive to such intersubjective mo-ments writes into being the possibilities of a better and more just future. The paper makes an attempt toput this approach to research into practice.

� 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

When you’re in a dark tunnel you don’t need folks to tell you, “It’sdark in here.” Analysis of the darkness is important and critique isnecessary, but in these kinds of times we need to be very clear aboutthe vision that lures us toward hope and the sources of that vision.We have to remind ourselves what we look like at our best andwhat has been bequeathed to us at our best e particularly now, aswe’re witnessing the waning of democratic sensibilities

Cornel West (2004, Tikkun Magazine)

You can make political films and you can film politically

Jean-Luc Godard

As part of my doctoral research I arranged to work with Pra-vah,1 an NGO in New Delhi that works with young people toencourage “active citizenship” through volunteering. My researchinterests lie in volunteering and global civil society and the waysthey take shape under neoliberalism. I also consider myself so-cially engaged and I am keen for my research to at least have thepotential to contribute to a better future, however that is imag-ined. Consequently much of my research is concerned with thenegative presences of neoliberal power in global civil society andthe work in India was to give me the opportunity to document

All rights reserved.

M., The affective spaces of g013.08.003

this. Through the process of doing the research, however, the ideaof being socially engaged evolved in a way that effected consid-eration of methodological issues. This led to an altered perspec-tive on the ways that research conceptualises power. Thisreconsideration was an unstructured process and here I hope topresent it in a more cohesive way and to make a case for includingaffective methodologies as an important tool of socially engagedresearch.

1. Global civil society and socially engaged research

Like many researchers I am politically engaged and becameinvolved in social science because of its capacity to unpick the in-justices embedded in the fabric of the world. Social science is, as Iunderstand and want to practice it, ‘always already concernedabout power and oppression’ (Cannella and Lincoln, 2011: 81) and Iwould identify with calls to make research more ‘problem-driven,action-oriented and applied’ (Jensen and Glasmeier, 2010: 83).There is therefore no pretension to detachment and the ‘theessential motivation is to change the world not just to analyse it’(Martin, 2001: 18). Themain site for this approach is capitalism andits ability to infiltrate various aspects of economic, political andcultural life. Over recent years academic commentaries haveincreasingly framed the discussion of such sites through neoliber-alism (Boas and Gans-Morse, 2009) where the process of “themarket” imposing on social life is understood as a constitutiveelement of a “neoliberal agenda” (Larner, 2000).

lobal civil society and why they matter, Emotion, Space and Society

Delta:1_given name

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.pravah.org/

www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/17554586

http://www.elsevier.com/locate/emospa

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2013.08.003



2 Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (2005).

M. Griffiths / Emotion, Space and Society xxx (2013) 1e72

Such an understanding of neoliberalism provides the criticalthrust of much work on volunteering and civil society and anincreasing amount of work is devoted to detecting neoliberalism’simposition of market forces on the “third sector”. One specific focusis on “global civil society”, the imagined community of non-stateactors that stretches across the globe on different scales fromUNESCO to grassroots organisations such as Pravah, and there is alarge amount of literature on global civil society’s continuing“neoliberalisation”. Mary Kaldor, for example, has argued that thejoining together of non-state actors functions as ‘a mechanism formarket reform and the introduction of parliamentary democracy’(Kaldor, 2003: 589) and thus enters a longer debate on how thethird sector has the potential to work incognito as a ‘shadow state’(Wolch, 1989). More empirical research has mapped the ways inwhich the geography of global civil society is heavily inflected bythe international distribution of power (Smith and Wiest, 2005);how state politico-legal frameworks function to ‘disable undesir-able programmes’ (Chandhoke, 2002); how grassroots dissentingvoices are stifled (Kothari, 2005) and co-opted (Baillie-Smith andJenkins, 2011; Kothari and Minogue, 2002); the way that NGO ac-tivity is predicated on western forms of knowledge (Shukla, 2009)and how progressive organisations are ‘reined in’ by less progres-sive funders (Dolhinow, 2005: 567).

Going into these literatures as an “early-career researcher”,eager to engage power and injustice, it is easy to draw out anarrative of “bad” neoliberalism undermining “good” global civilsociety. This undoubtedly comes in part from an (my) eagerness toaim directly at power but it also comes out of a prevailing power-centric academic performance of a cohesive “neoliberal agenda”(Larner, 2000). Consequently the discernable narrative of neo-liberalism’s negative presence in charities and NGOs made this anideal area for research that wants to push the world in a certaindirection. This understanding of neoliberalism as ‘a top-downimpositional discourse’ (Larner, 2003) shaped wholly the initialstages of my research and the imperative was clear: to seek and toexpose the presence of such processes in the organisations I was toresearch. Being involved in an NGO in New Delhi would give meaccess to this and would hopefully enable me e in some small waye to get at the unjust presence of neoliberalism in global civil so-ciety organisations.

In this paper I tell the story of a small part of my time withPravah and focus on the way that my initial understanding of aspace “saturated” with power contrasted with my experience onthe ground. The experience was rich in intersubjective connectionsbetween people. I use an account of this to illustrate how sensingaffective moments in the field opens up ways that research canengage with social justice. My main argument is that affectivemoments matter and documenting them presents a way to moveon from an understanding of neoliberalism as an imposition ofpower and explores how social life instead escapes power. Themove is thus simultaneously towards a more nuanced use ofneoliberalism in the research process and an emphasis on the as-pects of life that play out without deference to power. The aim is toput this into practice and build towards an “anti-capitalocentric”account of social life (Gibson-Graham, 2008) and consider whatthis might offer socially engaged research and the wider project ofpushing for a better future. I begin with the story of some work inthe field with Pravah.

2. The Jan Satyagraha: Gwalior, India, 2nd October 2012

It’s 7 am, I’ve just eaten pohe and drunk a cup of super sweetchai. The sun’s already burning my neck and I’m having problemswith my kamarband e the cord that holds the pajama of the kurta.My trousers are falling down and it’s embarrassing. I’ve been asked

Please cite this article in press as: Griffiths, M., The affective spaces of g(2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2013.08.003

to wear a kurta by the Pravah volunteer facilitator Nitin, who hasagreed to let me take part in a ‘Group Exposure’, a programme thattakes 20e30 metropolitan university students out of their comfortzone and puts them to work in rural communities. This GroupExposure is slightly different. The concept is the same except we’regoing to follow the first seven days of the 300 km-one-month JanSatyagraha e a march for justice for rural Indians. This is a sensitiveissue for many in India and provokes strong criticism of the gov-ernment and much soul-searching as it draws focus on interreli-gious and intercaste discrimination and violence (see Carr-Harrisand Parishad, 2005). So, it’s hot, sweaty, we’ve slept little andwe’re about to start the first 23 km leg of the march along with100,000 rural people who have committed to spending the next 30days marching on parliament in New Delhi. There’s a megaphoneblearing out feedback and an intensity to the chanting I wouldn’texpect so early in the morning.

The two evenings before the beginning of the march the othervolunteers and I had been sent around the camp to record someindividual stories of themarchers. As we spent time talking to themit became clear that this was a cause to which they were entirelycommitted. One family fromKerala (2000 km south of Gwalior) hadbeen denied work by landlords who are obliged under the Right toWork Act (2005) to provide work and pay fairly.2 They didn’t haveenough to eat and malnutrition was obvious but their cause wasbeing ignored by the authorities. Another family had had their landtaken away from them by corrupt forestry officials. Another’schildren were being denied schooling by higher caste Hindus intheir village. One man from Madhya Pradesh had lost his landthrough caste discrimination, his words were poignant: ‘in Delhi Ifind land reform or I die’. The testimonies were moving and char-acterised by the conviction that the state ignored, tolerated and e

most maddeningly e colluded in the injustices these people suffer.The vastmajority of themarchers had brought all they had and theyhad been planning for years; many had come out of desperation. Tomy mind this was significant, the protests and action I have beeninvolved in in Europe grow out of exasperation rather thandesperation: the difference between “we’ve had enough!” and “wecan’t go on!” is a shocking one that was brought home by theelderly, infirm and newly born all ready (or readied) towalk 300 kmover 30 days. All while sleeping, eating and bathing on the road toNew Delhi. Meeting, speaking and simply being with these peopleleft us at times speechless and the two days of collecting testi-monies, it is fair to say, had a profound effect on each of us.

Back to the morning of the march. The hot sun, the sober yetcharged atmosphere, the orchestrated chant, the regimented lines;we were ready to go and there was a tangible sense of hope. Wewere trying to fit in: kurtas, scarves, lungis, no deodorant, make upor jewellerye no smoking. Of course we (I especially) were obviousoutsiders but our efforts had meant that the people on the marchwere warm to us and, because of our reportage over previous days,we definitely felt an affinity with the people of the Jan Satyagraha.To add to this I was quite nervous, this experience was going tomake or break the research. “I need to take this in”, I thought, “tomake valid observations”. My mind moved onto how I was going tofit this into the reading I’d done, where was the presence of aneoliberalised global civil society here? What were the convolutedchannels of global civil society and Pravah’s place in it that hadplacedme in this field? Howwas the experience of these volunteersshaped in some way by market logic? How had Pravah had itsactivism blunted by funding requirements? Where, in short, wasneoliberalism on this hot, sweaty, noisy, exciting and affectivemorning on a field in central India? Questions abound, this is the


M. Griffiths / Emotion, Space and Society xxx (2013) 1e7 3

moment where my focus on neoliberalism and power seemedincongruous withmywork in the field; in thatmoment, in the doingand practices of volunteering, these meta-discourses seemedirrelevant. Not least because I wasn’t really sure what I was doing; Iwas observing but somehow fromwithin as I became caught up inthe moment. The Jan Satyagraha was for all of us an undeniablyemotional, visceral and affective experience and one central to thisparticular space of global civil society.

Back in New Delhi I interviewed some of the volunteers abouttheir experience of the march. Unsurprisingly perhaps there wasthis visceral aspect to the data:

whenwewere first like marching because very rarely do you getto like visually see yourself as part of something bigger, I’ve beenpart of marches before but nothing on that scale and so like theactual movement of my legs in synch with these tens of thou-sands of peoplewas very emotional but it was just an experiencethat you can’t describe really I don’t know. that was one of thehighest points where I felt most connected to everyone on themarch and just like the excitement level was really high eventhough we were starting and it was already hot. it was just arush.. (Allison, Pravah)

It strikes me that there is something to this account thatemerges from a shared affective moment. The connections thatAllison makes with the people of the Jan Satyagraha rise out ofthis moment suggesting that an important element of thisparticular space of global civil society is affective. It must there-fore be recognised that ‘one of the highest points’ of Allison’svolunteering rests on certain micro-processes that may notnecessarily defer to the (or any) processes of neoliberalisation inglobal civil society. That this is the case complicated my task ofcoming back to London to potentially drag all of this experienceback into some kind of grand symbolic order. Amidst this chargedatmosphere, affinities, hope and the sweat, tears and palpable willof people what would be the ethical choice I make by writing thisexperience into academic speak and extrapolating, say, neo-liberalism’s hold over this space? This troubled me. What followsis a discussion of this process and I use Allison’s story to advancethe case for working through issues to do with addressingneoliberalism and what affective moments offer socially engagedresearch.

3. Approaching injustice in research: “Everything’s Sh*t”

“Everything’s sh*t”. I am sure that on certain days as we goabout our research, read the newspapers and follow politics we allapproach exasperation. Exasperation at abuse of power, taxavoidance, corruption and the unrelenting forces of capitalismthat blight our cities, working lives, families and even encroach onour innermost thoughts. On these days our vitriol is aimed atcapitalism’s causal relationship with social ills and life’s subjec-tion to the cold processes of the market. All is subsumed bygovernance, neoliberalism, the market and various other malev-olent agents of injustice. Subjectivity, even, succumbs as ‘capitalends up penetrating and colonising those very Pre-Capitalist en-claves (Nature and the Unconscious)’ (Jameson, 1991: 221) torender subjects ‘emptied of ethical substance and psychicalinteriority, the ephemeral function of this or that act of con-sumption’ (Eagleton, 1996: 45). Of course such dystopian ab-stractions exaggerate but they nonetheless chime with many ofthe concerns of socially engaged research e the demise of mo-rality, deference to the market, citizen-consumerism e that arerepeatedly revisited in studies of ‘neoliberal this and that’(Gibson-Graham, 2008). Take this example from a paper on crit-ical pedagogy:


Neoliberalism has become one of the most pervasive anddangerous ideologies of the twenty-first century. Its pervasive-ness is evident not only by its unparallelled influence on theglobal economy but also in its power to redefine the very natureof politics and sociality. Free market fundamentalism ratherthan democratic idealism is now the driving force of economicsand politics in most of the world. Its logic, moreover, hasinsinuated itself into every social relationship, such that thespecificity of relations between parents and children, doctorsand patients, teachers and students has been reduced to that ofsupplier and customer. (Giroux and Giroux, 2006: 22)

As a summary of neoliberalism there is not much room left foralternatives. The pervasiveness of “neoliberal ideology” is conveyedby its presence on the vastly different scales of policy and economyright down to the minutiae of interpersonal relationships. James-on’s and Eagleton’s exaggerations are evident and social life wouldseem to follow ‘free market fundamentalism’. From this perspec-tive, everything is indeed shit.

Somewhere within socially engaged research there exists this“doom narrative”, a mode of approaching social phenomenaagainst the ‘all encompassing monster’ of capitalismwhere life canonly be subordinate to ‘ever-present and irresistible ‘market forces’’(Massey, 1997: 156). This was my original approach to my work onvolunteering. The compulsion was to expose power and whatevermy data from the field, the frame would be neoliberalism with theimplied position I would find a causal relationship and evidence ofneoliberalism undermining global civil society’s drive for a betterworld. My experience on the Jan Satyagraha, however, presentsdata that can move research beyond such dystopian accounts ofpower and open up the possibility that neoliberalism may not rulethe world after all.

4. Beyond dystopian accounts of neoliberalism

To move beyond monolithic accounts of capitalism and neolib-eralism does not come out of some vague or ‘overly experimental’research approach. In fact, the imperative to marginalise perfor-mances of an ‘all-encompassing’ neoliberalism comes out of a rangeof well-discussed concerns. Here I draw on established literaturesto demonstrate that when research evokes an omnipotent neolib-eralism it is flawed in three ways, i) conceptually; ii) epistemo-logically and iii) ethically.

i) Dystopian visions of an overbearing neoliberalism failconceptually because neoliberalism is not a unitary mode ofgovernance nor does it shape all our interactions in social life.Rather, ‘neoliberalisms are always (in some way or another)hybrid or composite structures’ (Peck and Tickell, 2002: 384),and in this way always a compromise that depends on ‘thelegacies of inherited institutional frameworks, policy regimes,and political struggles’ (Brenner and Theodore, 2002: 351).When neoliberal practices of governance are perceived, then,we should always note the ‘interaction with other culturalformations or discourses’ (Kingfisher, 2002: 165). As a resultany notion that life follows neoliberalism, however it isimagined, is particularly problematic. To theorise a causalrelationship is to make an important assumption that humanexperience, in some way, derives from political economy andthat it in some way it pulls the strings. This is a shortcoming,as Clive Barnett points out

the recurrent feature of the political-economy invocation ofhegemony is that it lacks any clear sense of how consent isactually secured, or any convincing account of how hegemonicprojects are anchored at the level of everyday life, other than



implying that this works by “getting at” people in some way orother. (2005: 5)

So where there are some lines to be drawn between policy andsocial life it is erroneous to presuppose that ‘social relations’ are ‘aresidual effect of hegemonic projects and/or governmental pro-grammes of rule’ (Barnett, 2005: 7e8). To conceptualise “the So-cial” in this way, even only implicitly, negates the variability ofsocial relations and only puts the world at the service of currentlyfashionable research foci, of which neoliberalism is most certainlyone (Boas and Gans-Morse, 2009). This is all too comfortable andtheremust be a conceptualisation of social life that at least attemptsto be open to its unbound multiplicity.

ii) Deference to neoliberalism as an ideology or a “power-discourse” is flawed epistemologically because it assumes adiscursively constructed world where discourse is tied topower and then seeks to “get at” phenomena throughdiscursive methods. This is, to all intents, a self-fulfillingmethodological approach. So while the mode of enquirymight be commensurable with the phenomena underobservation e as literatures on methodology (and doctoralupgrade panels) insist on e research findings will alwaysalready be incommensurable with the potential of social ac-tion because our discursive make up will not allow for actioncontra or outside power. It serves to remember that theory, asSpivak reminds us, ‘cannot help but ideologically constitutethe world on which it reports’ (Spivak, 1999: 244) andtherefore works to construct the world in its own image.There is a distinct conceit e and a certain ‘dogmatism’e toaccounts of power-discourse that undoubtedly impose limitson human agency (Jazeel and McFarlane, 2010).

iii) Ethically it is necessary to rehearse debates on the relation-ship the researcher has with the field. On the Jan Satyagrahathis came to the fore when I was talking to people in themoment while initially attempting to ‘code’ my observationsaccording to the theoretical preparation I had undertaken.Following advice to “analyse as you participate” results in anincredibly inauthentic experience and undermines anyconnection one might experience with people in the field.The line between people and subjects that research pushestowards is always difficult to draw but it does seem that, forinstance, “talking harvest, thinking governmentality” (as Ifound myself doing in India) is a particularly deceitful way ofconducting exchanges with people. This was pronounced inthe context of the March, emphasising that the up-scaling weare inclined and required to do cuts away all of the humanaspects that are constitutive of such exchanges, sorrow,empathy and hope, for example. It is an obvious ethicalindiscretion to consider people solely through the structuralimplications of neoliberalism.

Ordering and putting together these cases makes a convincingcase for careful consideration of the way research imagines neo-liberalism’s relation to social life. It is clear that to deny social lifeexistential terms outside political economy disintegrates socialrelations and constructs an all-powerful image of neoliberalismthat pervades culture, family, love and each and every thoughtand unthought act that constitutes life. This is counterproductive tothe concerns of socially engaged research as the dismissal ofagency precludes any possibility of alternatives to the impositionsof neoliberalism. Out of this comes the rather pressing matter ofresearch taking on a performative role and reinforcing thevery power it seeks to redress. Locating power in all aspects of lifelends a helping hand to power’s shift from omnipresence to


omnipotence. The two should not be conflated, that they often aremeans a significant amount of research on power must face thereality of being complicit in the very oppression it seeks to expose.This leads the discussion to a central concern of this paper, howresearch engages (and contests) injustice without performing e

and reinforcing e the power of power.

4.1. Repositioning neoliberalism

A significant amount of research explores the power ofdiscourse while failing to reflect on its own capacity to ‘make socialrealities and social worlds’ (Law and Urry, 2004: 391). In researchon neoliberal power, Wendy Larner points out, the risk is ‘con-structing neoliberalism as a monolithic apparatus’ leading to ana-lyses that ‘inadvertently reconstruct its hegemony’ (2000: 15). Itfollows that once we recognise even a minor role in producingrealities we must then consider ‘which realities?’ (Law and Urry,2004: 404). Addressing neoliberalism, then, we should bewareperformances ‘tinged with scepticism’ (Gibson-Graham, 2008: 618)or ‘an inevitability about which nothing can be done’ (Bondi andLaurie, 2005: 5). So even on the worst days when Jameson’s post-modern capitalist dystopia seems upon us we cannot allow it todrive research because the end can only be the inescapable posi-tions of victim and victor. This would make academic labour,through the iterative processes of publishing and teaching,complicit in the “victories” of power. As if the power of neoliber-alism needs reiterating. Socially engaged research should thereforeseek in some way to deny an all-encompassing version of neolib-eralism and insist on a thicker understanding of social relations.

A useful point of departure is Gibson-Graham’s practice of‘reading for difference rather than dominance’ whereby re-searchers ‘recognise their constitutive role in the worlds that exist’andwork to bring into being ‘alternatives to hegemonic experience’(2008: 623). From this point the objective is to evidence the waysthat social life resists, contests and subverts power so that we canwork towards a version of a world insubordinate to neoliberal po-wer. To this end ground has beenmade inwork that tracks thewaysthat people are able to “work the spaces of neoliberalism” (Bondiand Laurie, 2005) and resist the impositions of neoliberal subjectformation (Bondi, 2005). The neoliberal landscape here is notpopulated by passive subjects but ones that reframe and evenembrace neoliberalism to “work” through its discourses for theirown ends. Such academic work is therefore sensitive to differenceand in so being remains open to the possibility of life escapingnetworks of power. The reality that begins to emerge at this point isone where power’s hegemony is not absolute and change can comeabout through sometimes disparate and localised examples ofresistance and subversion. Allison’s short account offers the op-portunity to complement and, hopefully, further this line ofresearch.

To work ‘difference over dominance’ into Allison’s account in-volves realising what tools we have and how they see the world. Ifthe objective is a reality where power does not preclude the pos-sibility of more justice, then what we already have is a welldeveloped set of qualitative methods that are predisposed to pro-duce alternative knowledges. To think theworld qualitatively positsthat it does not exist ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered but thatthe world is created through discourse and, crucially, people (andnot only power) can be agents of that discourse (Crang, 2003).Therefore, even before we explicitly engage issues of justice thevery idea of using qualitative methods forces us to acknowledgethat ‘neutrality is not possible’ and ‘taking a stance is unavoidable’(Fontana and Frey, 2005: 696); we are always already embroiled inissues of power and choice has to be made. The choice ranges fromreading coercion, where power is dominant, to reading subversion,



where power is contested. The decision is made partly by the na-ture of ethnographic methods and the telling stance they take onthe world. They

recognise the relevance and importance of ’lay’ or ’folk’ per-spectives on the practicalities of everyday life. We choose thesemethods, then, as a way of challenging the way the world isstructured, the way that knowledges are made, from the topdown. We are therefore adopting a strategy that recognises thediversity of human experience, that addresses the complexity ofhow lives are lived, and that confronts the fact that people’scharacteristics and experiences do not group into neat mappa-ble parcels or tidy policy-relevant units [.] we are adopting astrategy that aims to place non-dominant, neglected, knowl-edges at the heart of the research agenda. (Smith, 2001: 25)

In many ways this is obvious. Ethnography deals with peoplewho are present in richer ways than is represented in their wordsand the words that do come out of ethnography should not beautomatically placed in the wider meta-narratives much researchon power tends towards.

The choice wemake, then, matters. Look for dominance and it isthere, difference, likewise. It follows that rather than pretend a“view from nowhere” (Haraway, 1988), a commitment to a morejust future demands that we emphasise Allison’s obvious feeling ofsolidarity with the people of the Jan Satyagraha above consider-ations of the whys and wherefores of a “neoliberalised” global civilsociety that (may have) enabled her to be there in the first place. Soin the case of the Jan Satyagraha and Allison we can begin toexplicate the decisions necessary if the research is to push towardschange. The first option, and the one I am building a case against, isto carry through the weight of the dystopian vision of neoliber-alism. This would mean taking Allison’s testimony out of themoment and introducing all kinds of disparate discourses to bringthe data into line with the literatures I cite at the beginning of thispaper. We could consider the funding streams that Pravah is tied to,the corporate funding it receives from Tata, for instance. We couldnote the conditions such funding imposes on Pravah and how thatshapes volunteer involvement and how subsequent experiences ofactive citizenship are depoliticised, “neoliberalised” or whatever.We may also note that Allison is a US citizen and develop anargument that her privileged position is unavoidably neocolonial orthat she subjects her fellow marchers to some kind of gaze thatrenders any claim to know these people a faux-solidarity and nomore than a tool used to build cultural capital. Examples of suchwork exist. And it is not that they do not teach us something aboutthe world, rather it is wrong to presume that they give a compre-hensive account of the world. What is certain is that such a readingbetrays the data and takes too many interpretive leaps; if we reallyare ‘to place non-dominant, neglected knowledges at the heart ofthe research agenda’, then, we have to avoid imposing discursiveconstructions on the social life we witness. Power is already quiteadept at imposing on social life, academic labour need notcontribute.

5. The affective space of volunteering

As analysis begins to move away from meta-discourses we candraw on affective methods to add depth to the anti-capitalocentricpicture beginning to emerge. Volunteering is a labour distinct fromothers in that self-advancement and monetary motivations arebalanced e and often outweighed e by volunteers’ sense of socialparticipation (Sherraden, 2001: 2). Embedded within this space ofsocial participation, argue Smith et al., are ‘wider emotional rep-ertoires’where ‘belonging, pleasure, sorrow or angermay all be tiedup in the emotional experiences of volunteers’ and these predicate


‘their relations with others’ (2010: 261). Most importantly thismeans that ‘volunteering is not only embedded in the formalorganisational spaces of the voluntary sector, but is excessivebeyond this’ (Smith et al., 2010: 272). Certainly Allison’s and myexperience of volunteering on the Jan Satyagraha evidences this;Allison’s funding body and my research agenda very quickly fadedagainst the vivid emotional investment in the March. It should alsobe noted that the emotional and affective element is intensifiedwhen volunteering involves work on International Developmentissues such as the Jan Satyagraha. Such spaces of development arerichly affective, meaning that the practice of volunteering tiestogether the always present injustices with the bodily and inter-subjective connections inherent to development work (see Baillie-Smith and Jenkins, 2012; Hardy, 2012; Humble, 2012). Given thisaspect to volunteering, whichwas pronounced on the injustice-richcontext of the Jan Satyagraha, there follows an opportunity tomovefurther out of the frame of discourse, power and neoliberalism toemphasise non-representational phenomena and what they offerto the task of prefiguring alternatives to capitalism.

By non-representational I refer specifically to the broadeningbody of work that focuses on non-discursive phenomena such asaffect. Affect has been put to interesting use by researchers keen tocircumvent the post cultural turn focus on language and the im-plicit belief that analysis of constructed worlds offers a completeunderstanding (Dewsbury, 2003). Theworld is made up of differentaffects, ‘hatred, shame, envy, jealousy, fear, disgust, anger, embar-rassment, sorrow, grief, anguish, pride, love, happiness, joy, hope.’

(Thrift, 2004: 59), that pass between ‘dynamic’ bodies (Clough,2008) to give rise to the intersubjective connections that providethe ‘push’ of life (Thrift, 2004). Making research sensitive to affectethe methodological difficulties notwithstanding e can make forlively and productive accounts of how experience is made up of,and dependent on, the presence of other affective phenomena.Taking this to the analysis, it serves to remember that the ethno-graphic data runs thicker than Allison’s words, she is present inricher ways that evade the banalities of language. Analysis shouldfrom here attempt to imagine the ‘charged atmosphere, affinities,hope and the sweat, tears and palpablewill of people’ that I attemptto convey in my account. I was marching next to her, my experiencewas similar to hers because this was a richly affective momentcomprised of infinite intersubjectivities that are not describable butalways palpable. The clues to this come where Allison labels themoment ‘emotional’ and ‘exciting’ and also gives a strong sense oftranscendence to ‘something bigger’, a ‘rush’ that she concedes ‘youcan’t describe’. Such affect cannot be reduced to words, nor shouldit be surrendered to research frameworks informed solely by po-litical economy. What is at stake here is the fact that aspects of liferesist the grasp of discourse, power and neoliberalism and that itdoes this matters a great deal. To be discursively oppressed orconstructed, from this point, is no longer a possibility; the world, atleast in part, is not determined by, say, technologies of governancebut by the intersubjective and felt movements that emanate fromthe body. This is a significant move as any trace of the dystopianpower in research is displaced by strong narrative of hope.

6. Why affect matters to socially engaged research

The use of affective data ‘represents a genuine and importantshift away from thinking life solely in terms of power knowledge’ bylocating meanings through ‘that which speaks to the affirmation oflife itself, to our feeling, desires, and beliefs that give us investmentsin the world and which make us feel that we belong’ (Dewsbury,2003: 1928). There is little doubting Allison’s sense of belonging,but the question remains of how emotional and affective connec-tions might prefigure alternatives to capitalism. In fact putting



aside neoliberalism and documenting affect sits uneasily withthose who prefer their politics confrontational; such ‘touchy feely’methods (Crang, 2003) rub against the instincts of researcherspreoccupied by rigour and inclined to direct action. For such peopleaffective research will perhaps always lack political drive and neverhit hard at the grave injustices to which we are witness (seeLorimer, 2008). The “political punch” however is present; NigelThrift has argued that affective methods ‘want to make thingsmorepolitical, much more political’ by opening ‘alternatives and corre-sponding forms of dissent’ (Thrift, 2003: 2021). The task set is toembrace these connections that avoid the ‘blind political calculus’(Anderson and Harrison, 2010: 342) of ascribing people to a seriesof pre-defined e and potentially insipid, attritional or oppressed e

political positions. This brings us back to the importance of thesense of belonging inherent to an affective space:

that precise moment of connection that draws you into a senseof belonging e of beginning to ‘feel-in-place’ more than youwere a moment before. We are speaking here of the “propertythat founds all possible belonging”: that moment coming intobeing by virtue of a pure ‘being called’. This is the momentwhere world and individual, folded together, call each other intoexistence. (Dewsbury, 2003: 1910)

Allison’s sense of belonging calls into existence ‘affective bonds’that may give rise to new forms of “collective will” (Mouffe, 2005:51) and carve out space for ‘nascent’ connections so that they mayfind ‘room to move and grow’ (Gibson-Graham, 2008: 620).

Folding this back into the analysis of Allison’s volunteering wemust consider that her experience ‘emerges less from prior-intentioned actions than from embodied responses to externalstimuli’ (Conradson, 2003: 1984). Therefore her feeling ofbelonging goes beyond any kind of personal ethical drive, is notformed out of activist radicalism and it is not dictated by religiousempathy; instead this is solidarity borne out of the affected bodyand is consequently an intense and authentically felt connectionwith other people. Solidarity with the marchers began with thereportage the previous evenings and was compounded by themovement of bodies ‘in synch’ so that Allison’s connection becameinscribed on the body, a rich site of data (Longhurst et al., 2008).The body thus ‘emerges as a political presence; the politically pre-sent body demands its rights on behalf of social justice’ (Pelias,2007: 186). This is social life in its rawness, it cannot beappeased, cannot be spun, nor can it be faked. However much the“monolith” of capitalism reaches into volunteering and global civilsociety, its affective moments ensure that in important ways it isalways able to escape. This is not to posit that affective life lies al-ways automatically outside or opposite capitalism and power(Ettlinger, 2009; Vrasti, 2011)e indeed there is increasing evidencethat affect is ‘engineered’ by some techniques of governance (Thrift,2004) e but rather to explore the possibilities of how ‘affective lifemay be an ‘outside’’ (Anderson, 2012: 30). Doing research andanalysis this way does not close doors but rather opens ways toexploring alternatives where “difference” replaces dominance in aworld full of possibility (Gibson-Graham, 2008).

7. Affecting change

By way of conclusion I want to briefly expand the ways thatresearch done this way has potential to effect change. As the ac-count of Allison’s (and my) experience on the March evidences,the incorporation of affect into research levels out the field andenables us ‘to “join with” rather than “know and save”’ (Cannellaand Lincoln, 2011: 82). This takes the idea of struggle and fadesout the idea of oppression and instead fuses it with the politics ofhope, of collective action and of endless possibilities and


potentialities. It is futile to attempt to counter power on its ownterms, we cannot after all ‘control or redistribute it’ (Rose, 1997:254). We can, however, offer alternative worlds that pick apartand bypass power and ground them at the very rich site of thebody. Justice, solidarity and related concepts are thereforeaddressed on our terms rather than on abstract market logic.Justice, write Denzin and Giardina, ‘extends beyond fair selectionprocedure or the fair distribution of the benefits of research acrossa population’ rather it ‘involves principles of care, love, kindness,and commitment to shared responsibility, to honest, truth, bal-ance and harmony’ (2007, 24). The importance of this is difficultto overstate as predicating such concepts as justice and solidarityon these terms restores their intrinsically human aspects: ‘it isprecisely on this capacity for shared subjectivity and knowledgethat moral values are founded, that emancipatory knowledge isconstructed, and that human solidarity is established’ (Darder andMirón, 2006: 17).

Affect in this way opens the world to different political realities.‘Love’ is a particular affect that has captured the imagination ofvarious writers. The Marxist critics Antonio Negri and MichaelHardt, for example, call on the Multitude (proletariat) to engageaffective life and love in the name of justice:

Militancy today is a positive, constructive, and innovative ac-tivity. This is the form in which we and all those who revoltagainst the rule of capital recognise ourselves as militants today.Militants resist imperial command in a creative way. In otherwords, resistance is linked immediately with a constitutive in-vestment in the biopolitical realm and to the formation ofcooperative apparatuses of production and community. Here isthe strong novelty of militancy today: it repeats the virtues ofinsurrectional action of two hundred years of subversive expe-rience, but at the same time it is linked to a new world, a worldthat knows no outside. It knows only an inside, a vital andineluctable participation in the set of social structures, with nopossibility of transcending them. This inside is the productivecooperation of mass intellectuality and affective networks, theproductivity of postmodern biopolitics. This militancy makesresistance into counter power andmakes rebellion into a projectof love (2000: 413).

The call here is to embrace the new spaces provided by capi-talism and to use them productively to ‘form a social body that ismore powerful than any of our individual bodies alone’ (Hardt andNegri, 2009: 180). Darder and Mirón (2006) call this ‘revolutionarylove e a love linked to a struggle grounded in a shared kinship,political self-determination and economic justice’ (18e19). If Isquint I can see this forming in Gwalior. So while all around usmight seem shit we must insist that “things could be otherwise”and work hard to render this large as a vivid world of ‘politicalpossibility’. (Gibson-Graham, 2003: 53)

It is here that a new politics of hope is established. The dystopiaof aggressive capitalism, consumerism and neoliberalism replacinghuman qualities with market logic evaporates in the heat of themoment. What returns is solidarity and the prospect of justicethrough this authentic and intense connection between people; thequalities that make us human return. If we make this a grounds foraction there is so much more potential for resistance and change inthe world; love, and derivative affects such as solidarity, affirms aspace autonomous from the influence of capital and power and allthat is human is emphasised. This enables us to transcend the less-than-human plateau of capitalism and escape the impositions ofneoliberal mechanisms of oppression. Of course there is an elementof idealism to this but resistance is seldom not idealistic. Mostimportantly, the presence of hope is crucial if social action is to be apossibility. Our minor part inworld-making compels us to offer this



up in our research. Research done this way bears witness to a betterpresent and holds great potential to push for a better future.

Acknowledgements

My thanks go to Allison, Dipanjana, Neha and Nitin.

References

Anderson, Ben, Harrison, Paul, 2010. In: Anderson, Ben, Harrison, Paul (Eds.),Introduction. Taking-place: Non-representational Theories and Geography.Ashgate, London, pp. 1e34.

Anderson, Ben, 2012. Affect and biopower: Towards a politics of life. Transactions ofthe Institute of British Geographers 37 (1), 28e43.

Baillie-Smith, Matt, Jenkins, Katy, 2011. Disconnections and exclusions: professionali-zation, cosmopolitanismand (global?) civil society.GlobalNetworks11.2,160e179.

Baillie-Smith, Matt, Jenkins, Katy, 2012. Editorial: Emotional methodologies e theemotional spaces of international development. Emotion, Space and Society 5,75e77.

Barnett, Clive, 2005. The consolations of ‘neoliberalism’. Geoforum 36, 7e12.Boas, Taylor C., Gans-Morse, Jordan, 2009. Neoliberalism: From new liberal phi-

losophy to anti-liberal slogan. Studies in Comparative International Develop-ment 44, 137e161.

Bondi, Liz, 2005. Working the spaces of neoliberal Subjectivity: Psychotherapeutictechnologies, professionalisation and counselling. Antipode 37 (3), 497e514.

Bondi, Liz, Laurie, Nina, 2005. Introduction. Working the Spaces of Neoliberalism,pp. 1e8.

Brenner, Neil, Theodore, Nik, 2002. Cities and the geographies of “actually existingneoliberalism”. Antipode 34 (3), 349e379.

Cannella, Gaile., S., Lincoln, Yvonna S., 2011. Ethics, Research Regulations, and CriticalSocial Science. In: The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, pp. 81e90.

Carr-Harris, Jill, Parishad, Ekta, 2005. Struggle-dialogue: Tools for land movementsin India. International Institute for Environment and Development, 2e23.

Chandhoke, Neera, 2002. The limits of global civil society. Global Civil Society, 35e53.Clough, Patricia, 2008. The affective turn: Political economy, biomedia and bodies.

Theory, Culture, Society 25, 157e160.Conradson, David, 2003. Doing organisational space: Practices of voluntary welfare

in the city. Environment and Planning A 35 (11), 1975e1992.Crang, Mike, 2003. Qualitative methods: Touchy, feely, look-see? Progress in Human

Geography 27 (4), 494e504.Darder, Antonia, Mirón, Luis F., 2006. Critical pedagogy in a time of uncertainty: A

call to action. Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies 6 (5), 5e20.Denzin, Norman K., Giardina, Michael D., 2007. Introduction: Ethical Futures in

Qualitative Research: Decolonizing the Politics of Knowledge. Left Coast Press,Walnut Creek, pp. 9e44.

Dewsbury, John-David, 2003. Witnessing space: ‘Knowing without contemplation’.Environment and Planning A 35, 1907e1932.

Dolhinow, Rebecca, 2005. Caught in the middle: The state, NGOs, and the limits tograssroots organizing along the US-Mexico border. Antipode 37 (3), 558e580.

Eagleton, Terry, 1996. The Illusions of Postmodernism. Blackwell, Oxford.Ettlinger, Nancy, 2009. Whose capitalism? Mean discourse and/or actions of the

heart. Emotion Space and Society 2 (2), 92e97.Fontana, Andrea, Frey, James H., 2005. The Interview: fromNeutral Stance to Political

Involvement. In: The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, vol. 3, pp. 695e727.Giroux, Henry A., 2006. Challenging neoliberalism’s new world order: The promise

of critical pedagogy. Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies 6, 21e32.Gibson-Graham, J.K., 2003. An ethics of the local. Rethinking Marxism 15 (1), 49e74.Gibson-Graham, J.K., 2008. Diverse economies: Performative practices for ‘other

worlds’. Progress in Human Geography 32 (5), 613e632.Haraway, Donna, 1988. Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and

the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies 14 (3), 575e599.Hardt, Michael, Negri, Antonio, 2000. Empire. Harvard University Press, London.Hardt, Michael, Negri, Antonio, 2009. Commonwealth. Harvard University Press,

Cambridge, Mass.


Hardy, Kate, 2012. Dissonant emotions, divergent outcomes: Constructing space foremotional methodologies in development. Emotion, Space and Society 5, 113e121.

Humble, Darryl, 2012. “This isn’t getting easier”: Valuing emotion in developmentresearch. Emotion, Space and Society 5, 78e85.

Jameson, Fredric, 1991. Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.Verso, London.

Jazeel, Tariq, McFarlane, Colin, 2010. The limits of responsibility: A postcolonialpolitics of academic knowledge. Transactions of the Institute of British Geog-raphers 35 (1), 109e124.

Jensen, Kari B., Glasmeier, Amy, 2010. Policy, Research Design and the SociallySituated Researcher. In: The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Geography. Sage,London, pp. 82e93.

Kaldor, Mary, 2003. The idea of global civil society. International Affairs 79 (3), 583e593.

Kingfisher, Catherine Pélissier, 2002. Western Welfare in Decline: Globalization andWomen’s Poverty. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadephia.

Kothari, Uma, 2005. Authority and expertise: The professionalisation of interna-tional development and the ordering of dissent. Antipode 37 (3), 425e446.

Kothari, Uma, Minogue, Martin, 2002. Critical perspectives on development: Anintroduction. In: Kothari, Uma, Minogue, Martin (Eds.), Development Theoryand Practice: Critical Perspectives. Palgrave, Basingstoke, pp. 1e15.

Larner, Wendy, 2000. Neo-liberalism: Policy, ideology, governmentality. Studies inPolitical Economy 63, 5e25.

Larner, Wendy, 2003. Neoliberalism? Guest Editorial. Environment and Planning D:Society and Space 21, 509e512.

Law, John, Urry, John, 2004. Enacting the social. Economy and society 33 (3), 390e410.

Longhurst, Robyn, Ho, Elsie, Johnston, Lynda, 2008. Using ‘the body’ as an ‘instru-ment of research’: Kimch’i and pavlova. Area 40 (2), 208e217.

Lorimer, Hayden, 2008. Cultural geography: Non-representational conditions andconcerns. Progress in Human Geography 10, 1e9.

Martin, Ron, 2001. Geography and public policy: The case of the missing agenda.Progress in Human Geography 25 (2), 189e210.

Massey, Doreen, 1997. A feminist critique of political economy. City 2 (7), 156e162.Mouffe, Chantal, 2005. On the Political. Routledge.Peck, Jamie, Tickell, Adam, 2002. Neoliberalizing space. Antipode 34 (3), 380e404.Pelias, Ronald. J., 2005. Performative writing as scholarship: An apology, an argu-

ment, an anecdote. Cultural Studies e Critical Methodologies 5 (4), 415e424.Rose, Gillian, 1997. Situating knowledges: Positionality, reflexivities and other tac-

tics. Progress in Human Geography 21 (3), 305e320.Sherraden, Margaret S., 2001. Service and the Human Enterprise (Perspective).

Centre for Social Development Washington University, St. Louis.Shukla, Natasha, 2009. Power, discourse, and learning global citizenship: A case

study of international NGOs and a grassroots movement in the Narmada Valley,India. Education, Citizenship and Social Justice 4 (2), 133e147.

Smith, Fion M., Timbrell, Helen, Woolvin, Mike, Muirhead, Stuart, Fyfe, Nick, 2010.Enlivened geographies of volunteering: situated, embodied and emotionalpractices of voluntary action. Scottish Geographical Journal 126 (4), 258e274.

Smith, Jackie, Wiest, Dawn, 2005. The uneven geography of global civil society:National and global influences on transnational association. Social Forces 84 (2),621e652.

Smith, Susan, 2001. Doing Qualitative Research: from Interpretation to Action. In:Qualitative Methodologies for Geographers: Issues and Debates. Arnold,London.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward aHistory of the Vanishing Present. Harvard University Press, London.

Thrift, Nigel, 2003. Performance and.. Environment and Planning A 35 (11), 2019e2024.

Thrift, Nigel, 2004. Intensities of feeling: Towards a spatial politics of affect. Geo-grafiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 86 (1), 57e78.

Vrasti, Wanda, 2011. “Caring” capitalism and the duplicity of critique. Theory &Event 14.4, 1e14.

West, Cornel, 2004. Finding hope in dark times. Tikkun 19 (4), 18.Wolch, Jennifer, 1989. The Shadow State: Transformations in the Voluntary Sector.

The Power of Geography: How Territory Shapes Social Life. Unwin Hyman,Boston, pp. 197e221.


http://refhub.elsevier.com/S1755-4586(13)00081-9/sref2










































































































































































Documents

The affective spaces of global civil society and why they matter