A Weird Experience

About an hour ago, I did some vanity googling and found that a blog post I'd written had been quoted in this article from the journal Emotion, Space and Society. It's only a few lines.

You might say that's not very surprising. And it wouldn't be...except for the fact that, out of the vast sea of academic titles, pretty much the only one I've read for pleasure in the last few years is this very journal!

And recently, too. Within the last year, I'm pretty sure, I spent several evenings trawling through its archives.

It gave me less pleasure than I hoped. As I've mentioned on innumerable occasions, the concept of atmosphere fascinates me. Not the gases in the air, but the thing you encounter when you walk into a party, a sports stadium, or a funeral home. Amazingly little has been written about this from an academic perspective, or even a journalistic perspective.

Sadly, the contributors to Emotion, Space and Society insist on dragging their left-wing politics into the subject, in a very obtrusive way. (Articles in the May 2026 issue include 

"Affective climate injustice and infrastructural Apathy: Rethinking public pedagogies for climate engagement" and "Migrants as homo affectus: How emotion shapes return migration among Iranians". This is typical.)

Nonetheless, there were a few interesting articles, where no particular hobby-horse was involved.

I've even contemplated submitting an article to this journal! Having an article published in an academic journal is an intermittent fantasy of mine. However, it would be a lot of work.

But isn't this whole experience strange? The internet tells me that there's about forty thousand academic journals published in English. Yes, the fact that I'm interested in the subject matter lowers the odds, but still...

This is my second blog post in a row about Ballymun. I grew up in Ballymun and lived there for most of my life. It was the only high-rise estate in Ireland (it's no longer high-rise). This means it was utterly distinctive. When Ballymun came on television, you recognized it instantly. It was also fairly notorious, so it was distinctive for that reason too.

"Distinctive". The funny thing is, my whole life seems to have been about this word. I'm obsessed with distinctiveness and the perceived loss of distinctiveness in modern life, as longtime readers of this blog will know. A craving for special times and special places has been my lifelong preoccupation.

Does this preoccupation come from the distinctiveness of my own life? My name is distinctive (almost unique). I came from a distinctive suburb. I went to an Irish-language school, which was already quite distinctive in itself, but was even more distinctive for being in a working class area. And I grew up in what I can only describe as the working class intelligentsia.

Of course, everybody's life and upbringing is distinctive in some way. Still, this theory occurs to me when I wonder why I'm so fixated on distinctiveness. (Not that I'm alone in this. I think more and more people are worrying about it as our world becomes more globalized and standardized.)