ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the role of affect in the analysis of governmental strategies and presents our research design for a critical inquiry into two airport behavioural profiling programs. Affect is the physiological source of emotion, behaviour, feeling, or mood but is “not ownable or recognizable” on its own (Massumi 2002: 88). It is a non-representational and emergent intensity that exists in and through the body that is prior to any sociolinguistic fixity such as consciousness, discourse, emotion, or feeling. Affect is therefore not a material thing, but the origin of the underlying bodily events from which everyday human behaviours emerge. Due to the nature of the airport as a space of indeterminacy (Salter 2008b) and a space for the management of affective relationships (Adey 2008), being attentive to the role of affect is central to understanding the airport’s security politics. Researching affect, in turn, requires methodological innovation.
