‘It is always putting things into words, but now it was about feeling, truly feeling’: <i>Affect Houses</i> as a novel method to attend to of affect

In this methodological paper, we introduce Affect Houses as a novel method to attend to affective experiences in research. We understand affect as an energy, a sensation that is felt through our bodies before it becomes cognitively known to us. This means that it is particularly challenging to identify affect in the research process. Hence, following a burgeoning body of methodological accounts, we foreground creative methods as a way out of this methodological impasse. We organized six workshops in which a total of 25 perinatally bereaved mothers – mothers who have lost their babies during pregnancy or in the first five weeks after giving birth – created affect houses. These are small cardboard boxes filled with all sorts of matter that resonated with the complex feelings as experienced through their bodies upon their return to work. Our innovative Affect Houses method advances the upcoming literature on creative methods and affect in three ways. First, it reveals the vibrant agency of more-than-human matter – the colours, texture, density and sound of materials such as paint, rope, cotton wool, tooth pics and cardboard – resonating with the sensorial, spatial and temporal intensities as felt through these mothers’ bodies. Second, affect houses foreground the non-linear, complex and flowing intra-action between those intensities. And finally, our account shows the political potential of our method, as it fosters solidarity and de-individualizes affective feelings of loneliness produced through the taboo around perinatal loss.