An Infrastructural politics of emotion: Anticipating discomfort, managing expectations and developing routines in Australian community centres

At a time when loneliness and social isolation are increasingly being identified as a social challenge that has far reaching consequences, solutions tend to focus disproportionately on upskilling, directing or supporting individuals who experience this burden. By conceptualising the infrastructural politics of emotions that make social infrastructure accessible and inviting to some people and not others, this paper challenges these tendencies. The paper develops a framework for analysing an infrastructural politics of emotion and illustrates this approach using interviews with 46 people from three community centres which explored their initial and ongoing involvement with a centre. Through this approach the paper puts forward three contributions. First, we discuss how emotions, ranging from anticipatory feelings like anxiety to the comfort of familiarity, mediate people’s openness and engagement with social infrastructure. Second, we discuss how emotions contribute to the development of norms and expectations which govern social interactions and how people understand these. Finally, we discuss how routines, which are developed and understood over time, steer how people use infrastructure, and can provide the emotional scaffolding of familiarity and comfort which support social connection. This paper’s framing of an infrastructural politics of emotion advances geographical thinking by placing people, their practices and their feelings at the centre of what constitutes social infrastructure. Framing social infrastructure in this way points to new avenues for responding to issues like loneliness, which, while experienced individually, require collective and structural responses.