Motivadores de compra

Affect and emotions of differing depth and duration were found to weave through and shape many of the multicultural and multi-ethnic encounters described in this thesis, with small acts of sharing, care and support, and their consequences, contributing to a sense of what Wright (2015) calls ‘new ways of being human’ emerging among participants. This research finds that emotive elements, many of them ‘small’ and 'quiet', weave through of-ten banal and superficial encounters, something ofof-ten highlighted by participants new to Glasgow:

“Cafes don’t offer me the chance to get to know people [but] you are with other people and that is a kind of socialisation as well. Especially people-watching! […]

and maybe you will smile at them and they will smile back. That is good enough for me already. That makes me feel less lonely.” (Young woman, East-Asian, born in Hong Kong, new migrant, student)

This participant suggests that small emotive gestures experienced at cafes such as smil-ing (6.2.1) can represent meansmil-ingful elements in everyday life, as they build up over the course of a day, and can help people to satisfy a yearning for emotional reactions from other human beings. The value of short-lived, banal or superficial moments of relation and encounter was underscored across this research (5.2), and showcases how small and quiet emotional gestures and social exchanges can produce a critical ‘flow-on effect’

(Wise 2005: 183) on wider notions of recognition, hospitality, and belonging in society. I suggest that this emphasises the embodied aspect of multicultural living and the

emotion-al in processes of belonging and homeliness (Askins 2015), emotions emotion-also being centremotion-al to relationships with the nation-state, broader political discourses and processes of other-ing, which the following chapter discusses in more depth.

Similarly, participants who attended groups meeting at community centres and public li-braries implied that embodied activities, and carving out shared identifications with others, enabled them to share the emotionality (having emotions/being emotional) of experiences:

“We can get to know each other [at the gardening group] [...] but, for me, the most important thing is that I can share ideas, I can share interests with other people.

[…]Yes, we are busy in the garden [but] we also talk about our countries and our families. […] It is good to know these things about other people […] it makes me feel closer to them.” [Smiles, other participants nod their heads in agreement]

(Focus group 3, P10; emphasis added)

Discussing the impact of specific placed encounters around ‘being a gardener’ at commu-nity centre A in Maryhill, this participant emphasised these as giving him the chance to satisfy a ‘longing’ for sharing ideas and interests with others, something that subsequently seems to foster feelings of closeness and connection to other group members. This speaks to intersectionality (5.3) and the relationality of emotions (cf. Haldrup et al 2006).

The notion of sharing experiences, ideas and interests with others, with the effect of feel-ing closer and connected to them, might suggest how manifestations of connection, be-longing an attachment are ‘expressions of conscious and unconscious feelings that arise in the real and imagined movements between “selves” and “others”’ (Davidson et al 2007:

7). This draws attention to how important it is to attend to feelings, e.g. fear, anger, love, compassion and hatred, when thinking through processes of (national) belongings. Chap-ter 7 further extends this discussion to the politics of emotion; here, this quote suggests understanding emotions as simultaneously interiorised subjective, embodied and mental states, and as socio-spatial mediations and articulations that shape processes of identifi-cation and relation-building (Davidson et al 2007). There is also an aspect of recognising encounters as temporal relations, representing an ‘assemblage of event, performance, and affect’ (Nayak 2010: 2388) which is always ‘mooded’ (after Merleau-Ponty 1962).

‘Feeling closer’ and connected to people and places, and emotions as positive force/aspect of multicultural encounters, leading to connection and tension (Chapter 5), was emphasised by participants frequently from non-white, non-Scottish backgrounds and those new to Glasgow:

“It’s good to be around others […] [because] even if you don’t get to know people, you recognize their faces, like ‘I have seen you before in the Zumba class’. […] It’s that group activity…it’s just that feeling of being part of something, of feeling con-nected…if you didn’t have that, you would just become lonely and disconnected.”

(Young woman, Middle-Eastern, born in Jordan, new migrant)

This participant foregrounds her ability to fight feelings of isolation and disconnectedness through being engaged with others in a Zumba class in Maryhill, actively working towards establishing feelings of belonging and connectedness; echoing Probyn’s (1996) concept of ‘belonging’ encapsulating not only a be-ing but a yearning or longing for attachments (3.4). In this quote, dancing seems to incorporate an emotional dimension that is mean-ingful, and stretches beyond the immediate space of the dance group, arguably enabling this participant to feel part of the group and local (multicultural) communities in Maryhill (also 5.4). Likewise, another participant remarked that “I don’t have a huge social back-ground or group of different people [in Glasgow] […] but [at the knitting group], if some-thing interesting happens in my life, then I will have people to share it with.” (Middle-aged woman, white, born in the USA, permanent resident, working). Here, geographies of

‘home’ and belonging in Partick emerge as embodied performative acts, intertwined with emotions, something critical in many migrants’ lives (Christou 2011), that make it possible to embody belonging and ‘immerse in the world’ (Lobo 2014b, 2013).

Participants across the research talked about escaping feelings of loneliness, isolation and depression by coming together in mixed spaces, valuing the possibilities to (re)establish relationships with others. Especially participants who were new to the city or had experienced the process of (re)settling in Glasgow talked about their experiences of leaving their social networks of family and friends behind and the struggles involved in starting a new life in Glasgow:

“[When I first came to Glasgow] being somewhere around other people […] was really important […] having that contact with other human beings, even if that was just talking to the person over the counter [at the library] to take out a book.” (Fo-cus group 2, P19)

The need and wish to experience emotions as positive force featured strongly in narra-tives of 'coping' with these decisive moments in participants’ lives, this participant, for ex-ample, suggesting how emotional encounters at the local library seem to have helped her to feel (re)connected with local communities and neighbourhood life in Partick, and possi-bly wider Glasgow. Similarly, another participant remarked that “when I felt like people started to welcome me, being friendly and talking to me, I felt so much better [and] I

start-ed to like being in Glasgow” (Young woman, Middle-Eastern, born in Egypt, new migrant, volunteer). These 'small acts of care' this participant experienced at the multicultural women’s group at community centre A in Maryhill thus highlight the embodied and emo-tional as interrelated, and central in practices of belonging and home-making in local places and neighbourhoods, and wider Glasgow.

Central here, I suggest, is that many of these often small emotional practices matter be-cause they ‘contribute to a convivial atmosphere in the shared space and […] lead to a sense of connection and understanding’ (Wiseman 2017a; also Darling 2010). Indeed, participants often linked the importance of sharing life experiences and making connec-tions (5.2) to counteracting feelings of stress, anxiety and uncertainty increasingly felt around issues of immigration, multiculturalism, and (national) identity in Scotland:

“It can be about life itself [that you connect]. I don’t have kids and there are women my age [at the knitting group] who have grandchildren! […] I still want to hear [and]

[…] share these experiences that I did not have in my life.” (Middle-aged woman, white, born in the USA, permanent resident, working)

The possibility to share personal experiences with others was experienced as (re)instilling feelings of, for example, self-worth and comfort as “when you connect with other people […] you feel cared for [and] feel less stress in that space [and] with the people around you” (Young woman, East-Asian, born in Hong Kong, new migrant, student). I hold that emotions are thus central features in understanding processes of belonging and intercul-tural relations, agreeing with Askins (2016: 525) who states that

“it is precisely in considering the emotions of intercultural encounter […] that atten-tion is drawn to how diverse residents can discover each other as multifaceted and interdependent; as individuals with simultaneously different and potentially shared positions, practices and desires.”

As such, I suggest that an openness to and through emotions in intersectional and em-bodied encounters, and the particular spaces where such encounters are made possible, can help to chip away at feelings of fear, uncertainty and anxiety increasingly constructed around ‘difference’ in society. By contextualizing these feelings and giving people the chance to get to know each other as individuals, the impact of emotions as negative force might be lessened as people develop more ‘unpanicked’ ways of living together in differ-ence. Materials played an important part in facilitating many of the above encounters and connections, to which this chapter now turns.