Affective agencies of discomfort

Abstract

Abstract How we might cultivate ethical and emancipatory modes of existence in hard places, places dominated by unequal and uneven social relations and far from any pristine environments to (re)connect with? This paper shows how learning with urban commoning projects in Paris and London has led to developing a more-than-human theorisation of discomfort. Although feelings of discomfort or unease are often acknowledged as central to collective projects, or in relation to the existential troubles of climate change, such perspectives are seldom examined together. Learning with commoning projects and bringing my ethnographic experiences in conversation with work on queer discomfort, critical social justice pedagogies and more-than-human geographies offers ways of thinking and doing with discomfort as collective practices. I suggest that (some) practices that welcome a careful attention to discomfort can cultivate relational worlds in the cracks of concrete environments. These are collective affective practices that involve ‘staying with discomfort’, a postponing of the tendency to swiftly reach towards a hopeful future in order to recover human and ecological ethical relations that have been obscured, dismissed or ridiculed, or indeed may not be possible.