ABSTRACT
This chapter examines disruptive encounters in urban spaces through affective lenses, arguing that fleeting moments of these unexpected interactions carry significant political potential. Drawing on 150 interviews from Helsinki and Malmö, the analysis focuses on how individuals narrate and make sense of sudden, unsettling encounters with strangers in public settings such as transport, streets, and parks. Building on theorizations by Sara Ahmed and Margaret Wetherell, the chapter conceptualizes emotions as culturally scripted yet situationally enacted, showing how affective practices mediate relations between bodies, histories, and urban environments. The findings reveal three modes of engaging with disruption that illuminate how power, inequality, and difference are reproduced, resisted, and reconfigured in everyday urban life. While incidents often expose persistent gendered, racialized, and socioeconomic inequalities, they also demonstrate possibilities for care, solidarity, and subtle forms of resistance. The chapter ultimately argues that these affective dynamics complicate narratives of urban polarization, highlighting how the political emerges in everyday moments of friction, ambiguity, and coexistence. Through attention to affect, the chapter advances understanding of how urban encounters shape and reshape the possibilities of living together in diverse cities.
