Unfeeling

The theme of ‘unfeeling’ promised an urgent exploration of what it is to be human after the enforced separation, dislocation, and artificially recreated forms of social interaction that were prevalent during the pandemic and continue to be so. It is almost that we have discovered how to be posthuman. Unfeeling, we suggest, dislocates the internal subjective experience and the external expression thereof in a culturally legible manner. This perhaps underlines the contingent and culturally motivated way in which we experience, read, and express ‘feelings’ intersubjectively. ‘Feeling otherwise’ is an important and empowering marker of difference and agency which threads through our articles, creative writing, and reviews (Yao 12). This standpoint can operate to interrogate and interpret (white) cultural and political hegemony with its insistence on the social legibility and necessity for ‘appropriate’ emotions and responses. In this issue, our writers explore how unfeeling can engender a defence mechanism; it offers to promote healing by setting aside hurt feelings and refusing to continue to incorporate or experience them; it creates a refusal to be complicit with this socio normative control

Geography · Digital Education and Society · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism