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This special issue aims to deepen emerging theoretical engagements with discomfort, in relation to recent debates on affect and emotion, and grounded in ethnographic research. It is based on a joint project of bringing together scholars from different backgrounds to examine the methodological and conceptual affordances of discomfort. This project started in the 2019 AIBR (Iberoamerican Anthropology Association) annual conference, where the editors of this special issue made a call for contributions that examined discomfort from original and committed approaches. The quality and the breadth of perspectives moved the editors to collaborate on this publication proposal. The focus on discomfort is a way for the authors of the special issue to bring together approaches from across disciplines, to challenge fixed frames, and inhabit disciplinary borderlands. This common thread also allows the authors to bring together research from contexts and disciplines that might not otherwise be brought into conversation.
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Discomforting ethnographic knowledges

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In this article, I will discuss the relationships between discomfort, biography, emotions, location, and relocation in ethnographic research—specifically in military research in Colombia. In this article I argue that there is an intertwining between biography, discomfort, emotions, construction of research questions, and writing.
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Biographical (Re)Locations

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Learning to explore the embodied affect of discomfort allows us to identify the violence that is usually concealed in structures of power, and to identify our complicity and responsibility in sustaining that violence. From the starting point of my refusal to stay with discomfort in the process of writing an academic article, I put into question how easily we can drag ourselves into the same power structures that we criticise. Exploring my own discomfort leads me to delve into the violence of dichotomies that permeate my research context, the Basque Country, and myself as a researcher. The experiences of those who lived through the Basque armed conflict illuminate the possibilities of the disruption of binaries that embracing the vulnerability inherent to discomfort can entail. The teetering movement of tambaleo emerges, adding a new dimension to the interpretation of discomfort. Tambaleo represents the internal move of the body shaken by discomfort. Tambaleo is a proposal for knowledge generation in academic settings and in periods of crisis such as post-ceasefire processes, where certainties get blurred, and the unstable ground of shattered identities makes of wobbling steps potential spins for social transformation.
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‘I feel I cannot write anymore’

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In this paper I look at activist affects, discomforts, and complaints through the prism of engaged collaborative ethnography and autoethnography as a feminist scholar activist and disabled rape survivor. Drawing upon experiences of feminist solidarity and resistance in the ethnographic field in the UK, Spain, the Basque Country, Greece, Latin American diasporic communities, and transnational activist clusters, I follow affective articulations of activist complaints against intersecting violences, vulnerabilities, and their institutional denial. Attuning to lived experiences of multiple marginalisations in volatile contexts, personal and collective testimonies expose the ways in which such complaints are undermined; from court rooms and doctors’ surgeries to physical and digital spaces, structural violence and its ideological amplification of existing harmful discourses operate against them. These activist affects are articulated in contexts of disbelief, challenged for their validity and devalued in importance. Further complicated by hostile environments and attacks on so-called ‘gender ideology’ by both extreme-right and ‘progressive’ intellectual circles, the expression of marginalised lived experiences of discomfort, anger, pain, disappointment, and mistrust are depoliticised and discredited in their urgent quest for accountability. This paper calls for meaningful listenings and engagement with these unsettling affects as valid embodied knowledge of the operation of violences rendering lives unliveable.
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Encountering Discomfort and Negotiating Vulnerability as a Feminist Activist Researcher

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In certain cultural contexts, many minority groups have historically found a space for resistant survival against the acculturation pressure from mainstream societies in the ossification and reaffirmation of gender roles and compulsory heterosexuality. In this context, out-of-the-norm masculinities can be complex and a source of suffering. The ‘emotional discomfort’ accompanies many researchers throughout their fieldwork. This work aims to set a dialogue between my ethnographic experience and the different approaches to the role of emotions from anthropology and situated feminist knowledges. In this article I take my emotional discomfort as a non-heterosexual ethnographer, experienced in fieldwork with Spanish Gypsy men where ‘authentic’ ethnic and gender identities were inextricably linked, as a space for analysis. This position of relative subalternity may be experienced as an impediment or incorporated as a privileged space of research. Here I defend that the discomfort can be incorporated at the ethnographic level, both in terms of content and methodology. Therefore my proposal involves a systematic analysis of how this experience is produced in the different stages of the field work and can be methodologically incorporated in a fruitful way.
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Discomforting Methodologies

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This article explores discomfort as it relates to art. It proceeds from the author’s own framework of the ‘cracked art world’, bringing that model into conversation with the anthropology of affect. It identifies and explores three different ways in which affects of discomfort arise in art world encounters: discomfort from art, discomfort about art, and discomfort with (other) people. In exploring discomfort with (other) people, it focuses in particular on intercultural arts events, suggesting that these spaces produce affective ambivalence.
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Situating Discomfort in the Cracked Art World

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How we might cultivate ethical and emancipatory modes of existence in hard places, places dominated by unequal and uneven social relations and far from any pristine environments to (re)connect with? This paper shows how learning with urban commoning projects in Paris and London has led to developing a more-than-human theorisation of discomfort. Although feelings of discomfort or unease are often acknowledged as central to collective projects, or in relation to the existential troubles of climate change, such perspectives are seldom examined together. Learning with commoning projects and bringing my ethnographic experiences in conversation with work on queer discomfort, critical social justice pedagogies and more-than-human geographies offers ways of thinking and doing with discomfort as collective practices. I suggest that (some) practices that welcome a careful attention to discomfort can cultivate relational worlds in the cracks of concrete environments. These are collective affective practices that involve ‘staying with discomfort’, a postponing of the tendency to swiftly reach towards a hopeful future in order to recover human and ecological ethical relations that have been obscured, dismissed or ridiculed, or indeed may not be possible.
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Affective agencies of discomfort

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Discomfort can make one doubt one’s taken-for-grant accounts of reality. Thus, for settler colonial scholars—such as myself—undertaking collaborative research projects with First Nations communities, discomfort is a necessary companion. In this article, I tune into my own discomfort to explore its generative potential to disrupt my knowledge practices. To do so, I improvise with Lisa Stevenson’s ‘fieldwork in uncertainty’ (2014). Fieldwork in discomfort is paying attention to when my ‘facts’ falter and I butt up against my epistemological limits. I reflect upon moments of discomfort during a collaborative project with the Wolgalu and Wiradjuri First Nations community in Brungle-Tumut (New South Wales, Australia). The project aims to revitalise the community’s connection to a species of ecological importance: the corroboree frog—a critically endangered and culturally important species, whom the Wolgalu nation call Gyack (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_borderlands-2022-017_ref_037">Williams, 2019</xref>). A collaborative project involving people from different epistemic traditions demands of participants an attentiveness to what is not shared. Afterall, to take care of Gyack requires taking care of, and with, divergent knowledge practices. Discomfort is a method of coming to know what I cannot know.
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Fieldwork in Discomfort

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 21 (2022): Issue 2 (December 2022)

Volume 21 (2022): Issue 1 (January 2022)

Volume 20 (2021): Issue 2 (October 2021)

Volume 20 (2021): Issue 1 (January 2021)

Volume 19 (2020): Issue 2 (October 2020)

Volume 19 (2020): Issue 1 (January 2020)

Volume 18 (2019): Issue 2 (January 2019)

Volume 18 (2019): Issue 1 (January 2019)

Borderlands Journal

Borderlands is a transdisciplinary journal of the humanities and social sciences that was founded in Australia in 2001. Since then, it has fostered radical thinking across the borders between disciplines, nations, sexualities, economies, identities, peoples and species, and fostered interplay between rigorous scholarship in philosophy, law, cultural studies, politics, sociology, geography, international relations and the environment. Borderlands' profile in areas such as refugees, indigenous politics, post-and de-colonial theory, biopolitics, post-Marxism, queer theory, race and gender, is especially strong, but the journal remains open to a range of concerns and disciplines.  As the complex discourse and reality of the Anthropocene evolves, Borderlands is opening its pages to work in the environmental humanities, posthumanism, STS, and environmental politics, theory and law. It aims to foster new conjunctions of justice, power, theory and bodies; to connect theory, event and structure in compelling and thoughtful ways.  You can read the Borderlands' manifesto to get a sense of the vision with which we began.  Writing for Borderlands  Borderlands has a global reputation for first-class theorising and innovative conjunctions of theory, event and situated analysis. Borderlands' editorial board includes some of the world's most important social theorists including Sara Ahmed, Jane Bennett, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Claire Colebrook, Michael Hardt, Donna Haraway, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Adi Ophir, RBJ Walker and McKenzie Wark. Our rigorous standards and double-blind peer-review process ensures that only the highest-quality work is published. Your work will be published with an open access license - for free - ensuring global and equitable access to your work from readers around the world. And, by publishing with Borderlands, you help support a radical publishing space untainted by big corporate profitmaking and neoliberal elitism.  Past issues of Borderlands  Borderlands issues from 2002-2019 were published under the ISSN 1447-0810 and can be viewed in the National Library of Australia’s Trove archive.  Open Access Policy  This journal provides immediate open access to its content under the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. Under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license authors retain the copyright and full publishing rights without restrictions and all users are free to share the work (copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format), if the contribution is properly attributed and used for non-commercial purposes. The material published in the journal may not be altered or built upon.  All authors who wish to publish in Borderlands must agree to the licensing terms stated above.  ABOUT SOCIETY  The University of New South Wales (UNSW) Environment and Governance Research Group brings together leading international researchers in environmental politics, law and policy, biodiversity, climate security, food systems, and environmental ethics. Our work has a common focus on improving law, public policy and international cooperation in protecting ecosystems and managing the impact of human-induced environmental change. With planet Earth having entered the Anthropocene - the epoch of dramatic human impacts on the Earth’s ecology and systems - our work crosses disciplines and charts paths for improved governance that can support ecological sustainability, and key human interests in health, justice and security, into the long-term future.  Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.  Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process.