Imagining Closure as a Proprioceptive Problem

Abstract This essay aims to advance theorisations of ‘closure’ as an emotion concept, and to offer new understandings of the relationship between emotion and imagination, including how such a dynamic might be studied. In justice contexts, ‘closure’ operates clumsily as both a legal outcome and an emotional expectation, an imagined affective state. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with people who work in, and who are caught up in, the justice system, the essay deploys approaches from phenomenological anthropology and creative writing to show how people’s imagining of ‘closure’ is often experienced proprioceptively, not narratively. It also shows the entanglement of form and method: how the essay form can be deployed in research as a critical imaginative tool.