"Ecologies of Affect" offers a synthetic introduction to the felt dynamics of cities and the character of places. The contributors capture the significance of affects including desire, nostalgia, memory, and hope in forming the identity and tone of places. The critical intervention this collection of essays makes is an active, consistent engagement with the virtualities that produce and refract our idealized attachments to place. Contributors show how place images, and attempts to build communities, are, rather than abstractions, fundamentally tied to and revolve around such intangibles. We understand nostalgia, desire, and hope as virtual; that is, even though they are not material, they are nevertheless real and must be accounted for. In this book, the authors take up affect, emotion, and emplacement and consider them in relation to one another and how they work to produce and are produced by certain temporal and spatial dimensions.

The aim of the book is to inspire readers to consider space and place beyond their material properties and attend to the imaginary places and ideals that underpin and produce material places and social spaces. This collection will be useful to practitioners and students seeking to understand the power of affect and the importance of virtualities within contemporary societies, where intangible goods have taken on an increasing value.

Life in Canada is marked, celebrated, enjoyed, and dreaded in ways that respond specifically to the seasons. Sociological thinking allows people to ask questions about things that may otherwise be taken for granted. Thinking about the seasons sociologically opens up a unique perspective for studying and understanding social life. Each chapter in this collection approaches the seasons and the passage of time as a way to explore issues of sociological interest. The authors use seasonality as a device that can bridge, in fascinating ways, small-scale interpersonal interactions and large formal institutional structures. These contemporary, Canadian case studies are wide-ranging and include analyses of pumpkin spice lattes, policing in schools, law and colonialism, summer cottages, seasonal affective disorder, New Year’s resolutions, Vaisakhi celebrations, and more. Seasonal Sociology offers provocative new ways of thinking about the nature of our collective lives.