Abstract

Fracking is an emotive issue. That is the starting point for this thesis which explores public engagement in the context of environmental controversy in Ireland. Love Leitrim, an anti-fracking community campaign, opposes fracking. They do so not just through scientific knowledge practices, but through a felt and meaningful performative imaginary. This thesis aims to explore the richness of this anti-fracking imaginary by paying attention to the affective practices involved. This is with a view to considering what value this understanding might have for public engagement. The empirical work involved unstructured interviews, participant observation, and image and video analysis. The findings explore what affective practices are evident in the anti-fracking imaginary, detailing love, hate, positivity, enchantment, anger, fear, and more. The analysis examines how emotions such as shock and fear unsettle the community, opening a fracking future that produces distinct orderings of time, space, and society. It looks at the settling of temporal, spatial and social order in an affectively-charged counter-imaginary whereby fracking is imagined as absent. It uncovers a politics of violation and consent, ownership, and healing that deal with traumatic memories of Troubles-era violence, hopeful sustainable futures, and the protection of community, place, and a way of life. The thesis ends by examining these issues in more detail, suggesting that affectively charged imaginaries provide unique opportunities for engagement. I argue that the creative capacity of affect could allow us to imagine together in playful, performative, and participatory ways which foster care, trust, sensitivity and empathy. I suggest that this kind of engagement constitutes a politics that is just and in which collective visions can be reimagined and resettled in ways that embrace and value difference.