This essay explores what I describe as “bad feelings” in the field and the research process. Combining autoethnography with feminist and queer methods, I counter the stigma around trauma and feelings of shame and fear in research. I ask what happens when the researcher experiences bad feelings that recall past lived trauma, and that challenge their sense of safety and security. In addition, I consider what it means for researchers to feel bad about their research. I argue that feeling one’s research, and thinking through and with bad feelings, opens up the possibility to “accidentally fall” into productive, and perhaps, alternative issues of study.

Oscillating between naturalistic observations and conceptual forays, this essay simultaneously performs and introduces the notion of “composing climate change” at the heart of this special issue. Spanning personal narrative, poetry, dialogue, theoretical meditation, thick description, photographic essay, and other modes of scholarly writing, the contributors to this issue experiment with genre, style, and form as they seek to describe, evoke, grasp, disclose, and otherwise imagine what it means and—crucially—what it feels like to be an earthling in a time of tremendous ecological change and profound planetary transformation.

Drawing from in situ fieldwork in Longyearbyen, Svalbard, the northernmost settlement on Earth, these notes bring out the affective, ambient, and atmospheric power of extended darkness during the polar night, when the sun does not appear above the horizon for several months at a time. Each entry is composed of 113 words to reflect the number of days without light in Longyearbyen during the winter of my visit. Through a mixture of ethnographic observations, researched academic scholarship, and some endeavors of poetic worldmaking, these notes attempt to evoke the ineffable force of global warming by performing the sort of acutely observed and felt attentiveness to planetary being that is needed for our time.

While hurricanes are weather events that may become human/ecological tragedies, they might help create stylized moments too. Hurricanes can be distinctive from each other in message and in the tools they use as their material aspects (wind speed or storm surge) interact with cities, social structures, and popular media messages. One way to explore hurricane styles is through forms of affective mapping. This exploration analyzes features of several hurricanes that made landfall in 21st-century North America in combination with considerations of affect around hurricanes. The combination of material and affective elements of hurricanes might allow rhetorical style to serve as a way of rethinking hurricanes and their connections, from the individual level to global climate change.

By highlighting a collaborative praxis between performative interviewing and affect theories, this essay theorizes interpretive discernment as an orientational and conceptual foundation that paves the way for performative interviewing. Interpretive discernment—the process of sensing and interpreting affective registers—encompasses both a methodological orientation and an analytical heuristic. We argue that interpretive discernment builds an interpretive architecture that expands our vocabulary, heightens our ability to listen for the affective in interviews, homes in on methodological nuances that enrich critical qualitative approaches to interviewing, and provides a structure to performative interviewing analysis.

This brief essay introduces a series of performative writing experiments including prose, poetry, and performance that explore ordinary objects from the window opened by theory, including new materialist, posthuman, and affect-oriented approaches.

This essay brings together Amazon, consumer reviews, a science project, and ordinary objects in order to examine how affect works between and within them, both sticking them together and tearing them apart. This is a sticky tale with a speedy delivery.

Written in the spirit of Maggie Nelson's “autotheory,” this essay takes up José Esteban Muñoz's notion of “ephemera as evidence” to explore how the body-as-object (i.e., the body-as-book) might reformulate understandings of materiality as an ephemerality of “traces, glimmers, residues, and specks of things.” Bodies-as-books are distinctly material, though not always solid, and can be written and read as artifact-ephemera that end but do not disappear.

Water provokes my ecological curiosity, and ushers my understanding and use of water as a papermaker beyond what springs easily from the studio's many coiled hoses. Maybe it is where I live, or the vitality of water I encounter as a papermaker, but somewhere along the way I began to wonder about the matter of rain in my life. My contribution to robust and tender conversations regarding the power, importance, and mattering of the stuff of our lives explores water becoming rain, becoming paper, becoming writing.

This essay creatively evidences the materiality of a story and its ability to migrate and evolve. It does so by critiquing the non-human limitations of binary onto-epistemologies, especially visual/discursive ones. Here stories and words have lives, bodies, and agency and as such they matter, but that matter is not material. The mattering of stories is not contingent upon human telling or hearing. Stories linger where humans disappear. An ecomaterialist reading suggests we might productively decouple storytelling (stories about us) from storied matter (stories with autonomy).

This essay explores questions of what it means to participate in publicness—to be both discursively and physically in public spaces and to perform (functionally) and perform (productively) our identities as citizens of local, national, and global communities. Using a multiple/collaborative autoethnographic approach, the authors further theorize on the relationality, emotionality, and affect of both public response and collaborative methodology.

I can't tell my history without taking you to the Ohio town where I grew up. It's a military town, and this essay revolves around a particular military custom known as a tattoo. Here, the location (a military base) and activity (a celebration of military strength) combine in an American performance of freedom that is implicitly backed by threats of violence. In this way, a small-town celebration on the 4th of July suggests that to live in post-9/11 America is to inhabit a place of tumult, fear, and boredom.

This performative essay explores the connections between beloved popular culture figures and individual experiences of growth and change through my simultaneous experience of the death of singer Michael Jackson and the final weeks I lived at home with my parents.

Bodies travel. Bodies travel geographies. Bodies perform geographies. Geopolitical migrations are the subject of much writing, performing, and debate in contemporary scholarship. In this piece, I trace the migration of an affect that sits in the liminal space between the body and the stories it tells. The smile. I ask: How does a smile migrate? What does habitat and geography have to do with this mundane expression brought onto the body as an “ordinary affect?” How does the gendered female body learn to (un)smile across complex histories, colonial legacies, and fractured geographies?

A poetic emergence of the particular—a particular place, day, time, moment, event—and its (extra)ordinary affect.

Kathleen Stewart describes Ordinary Affects as an experiment set in “a present that began some time ago.” In this essay, I consider voice similarly, as not bound by a temporal linearity, but as voice of duration, absent of origin and as an articulation of a present that began some time ago, always becoming. I conclude with an experimentation of voice in the form of what I name lines of articulation .

This essay describes instances in the rhythmic play with affect in the reading of and performances with Kathleen Stewart's Ordinary Affects . It offers an engagement with the work that both troubles and is troubled. It celebrates this engagement and delights in the opportunity to read, read around, and read again and again words that flee from identification and representation and come to life in moments of tears, smiles, and writings living in the temptation and allure of the unknown. This was written with a visit to Edinburgh in mind and Robert Frank's The Americans , alongside Stewart's Ordinary Affects in my shoulder bag.

This essay is an experiment in what happens when you read Kathleen's Stewart's ideas about affect and agency together with Sara Ahmed's consideration of queer orientations and the willful subject as they are played out in stories of adoption, motherhood, choices, and desire.

“ Something ,” writes Kathleen Stewart, “throws itself together in a moment as an event and a sensation; something both animated and inhabitable.” Ordinary Affects is socioculturally vibrational, imagining the personally political even further. The following essay offers a collection of affectively heuristic “moments.”

This essay is inspired by Kathleen Stewart's call to pay attention to the affective, material, and relational qualities of everyday life, and by the posthuman imperative that we recognize how we are imbricated with all creatures, objects, and forces in our worlds. It assembles little scenes of weather in everyday life, aiming for an atmospheric attunement to the elemental and domestic, and exploring these through some of the work of critical geographers on affect and atmosphere. As I meander through moments and events of weather in the everyday, I keep close to home, literally, in these scenes of ordinary life.