The Emotional Topography of Everyday State Borders: Mapping Borders Through Emotional Practices

Abstract This article examines how state borders become powerful through everyday emotional practices within urban spaces. Bringing the emotional turn and the practice turn in international relations (IR) into dialogue, it conceptualises emotions as embodied, relational, and performative social practices through which political order of state borders is reproduced, negotiated, and contested in everyday life. By combining a participatory research approach with art-based methods, the article advances a critical and co-creative methodological approach that provides analytical access to forms of ‘felt knowledge’ that often remain difficult to grasp through conventional research approaches. In doing so, the article offers empirical insights into how ordinary people experience and navigate the everyday effects of state borders and challenge them through emotional practices that create alternative spaces of belonging, presence, and participation. At the same time, it contributes to integrating subjects and forms of knowledge that often remain marginalised within dominant IR research into critical practices of knowledge production.