Emotional citizenry: everyday geographies of befriending, belonging and intercultural encounter

This paper develops the concept of emotional citizenry, as a process grounded in the complexities of places, lives and feelings, exceeding any fixed status of citizenship to be achieved in the formal political sphere. Drawing on encounters between refugees, asylum seekers and more settled residents in a befriending scheme in Newcastle, England, it focusses on the emotional geographies of intercultural interactions produced through everyday spaces. Contact in the scheme involves difficult negotiations of difference, yet it is precisely the emotional that opens up the potential of/for making connections, and through which nuanced relationships develop, dualisms are destabilised, and meaningful encounters emerge in fragile yet hopeful ways. I argue that these emotional encounters evidence desires to (re)make society at the local level, beyond normalised productions and practices of citizenship as bounded in/outsiders, in which a politics of engagement is enacted. Analysis suggests that the felt, interpersonal dimensions of such praxis, the emotionality of these specific notions belonging and relationality, push at the concept of cosmopolitan citizenship to register something more. This paper contributes to debate on everyday practices of citizenship as already taking place, and poses questions to how individual relations may anticipate collective change in how we live together in an era of super‐diversity.