''The contributors to this excellent collection of essays maintain that affect is directly tied to both the body and to ecologies and that ‘infused with power, grounded in place and located in bodies, affect is viscerally political.’ Affect can be (and is) used in multiple ways to define, shape, and sell particular places, values, and ideals. The authors provide insights into these processes and critique the lack of attention to affect in current social analyses of particular places.... The case studies on offer in this collection utilize a range of methodologies to describe the intangible and to demonstrate why the subjective is precisely the point of view that reveals the most about our understanding of place. Through engagements with music, literature, and public art as well as community spaces, tourist destinations, and personal objects, the contributors to this volume uncover the ways in which places make us who we are, along with how we transform them through our values, imagination, and action.... The strength of Ecologies of Affect: Placing Nostalgia, Desire, and Hope lies in the many very different ways in which the contributors approach affect, place, and ecology. Beginning with natural objects as divergent as giant puppets, a mug, children's picture books, and a young girl's journal, or wildly different places like the bike trail, Las Vegas, and Fort McMurray, the insights offered by the authors about the way that affect shapes both space and place as well as our understanding of our relation(s) to particular places, are varied and often profound. For anyone interested in place, this book is a unique contribution to the existing literature, which suggests that affect should be a critical direction in this ongoing conversation.''

''By using affect and ecology to enhance discussions concerning the ontology of space, the volume offers a well-balanced consideration of both material and discursive phenomena.... A clear strength of the project is the array of intriguing contexts with which to consider materialities and spatialities of affect and the careful consideration given to each case study. Through these wide-ranging and original analyses, the contributors fulfill their aim of blurring the line between the temporal, spatial, virtual, and material.... This book importantly draws the relationship between affect and matter into geographical discussions while signalling that more attention needs to be given to thinking through this complex relationship.''

''A stellar collection of essays; sharply focused, cohesive and very smart... The theory is never simply floating off the page and into the ether but is always grounded in some particular phenomenon or experience and, as examples of passionately engaged scholarship, the essays offer a coherent critical apparatus that simultaneously enacts how to go about using concepts like 'affect' or 'the virtual' in a very concrete fashion. That is, the chapters don't just do the talk (they never bog down in pure philosophy-speak), they walk the walk.''