This paper orchestrates alterethnographical reflections in which we, women, polyphonically document, celebrate and vocalize the sound of change. This change is represented in Kamala Harris's appointment as the first woman, woman of color, and South Asian American as the US Vice President, breaking new boundaries of political leadership, and harvesting new gains for women in leadership and power more broadly. With feminist awareness and curiosity, we organize and mobilize individual texts into a multivocal paper as a way to write solidarity between women. Recognizing our intersectional differences, and power differentials inherent in our different positions in academic hierarchies, we unite to write about our collective concerns regarding gendered, racialised, classed social relations. Coming together across intersectional differences in a writing community has been a vehicle to speak, relate, share, and voice our feelings and thoughts to document this historic moment and build a momentum to fulfill our hopes for social change. As feminists, we accept our responsibility to make this history written, rather than manipulated or erased, by breaking the mold in the form of multi-layered embodied texts to expand writing and doing research differently through re/writing otherness.

This piece of writing is a joint initiative by the participants in the Gender, Work and Organization writing workshop organized in Helsinki, Finland, in June 2019. This is a particular form of writing differently. We engage in collective writing and embody what it means to write resistance to established academic practices and conventions together. This is a form of emancipatory initiative where we care for each other as writers and as human beings. There are many author voices and we aim to keep the text open and dialogical. As such, this piece of writing is about suppressed thoughts and feelings that our collective picket line allows us to express. In order to maintain the open-ended nature of the text, and perhaps also to retain some 'dirtiness' that is essential to writing,

This piece of writing is a joint initiative by the participants in the Gender, Work and Organization writing workshop organized in Helsinki, Finland, in June 2019. This is a particular form of writing differently. We engage in collective writing and embody what it means to write resistance to established academic practices and conventions together. This is a form of emancipatory initiative where we care for each other as writers and as human beings. There are many author voices and we aim to keep the text open and dialogical. As such, this piece of writing is about suppressed thoughts and feelings that our collective picket line allows us to express. In order to maintain the open-ended nature of the text, and perhaps also to retain some ‘dirtiness’ that is essential to writing, the article has not been language checked throughout by a native speaker of English.

This piece of writing is a joint initiative by the participants in the Gender, Work and Organization writing workshop organized in Helsinki, Finland, in June 2019. This is a particular form of writing differently. We engage in collective writing and embody what it means to write resistance to established academic practices and conventions together. This is a form of emancipatory initiative where we care for each other as writers and as human beings. There are many author voices and we aim to keep the text open and dialogical. As such, this piece of writing is about suppressed thoughts and feelings that our collective picket line allows us to express. In order to maintain the open-ended nature of the text, and perhaps also to retain some ‘dirtiness’ that is essential to writing, the article has not been language checked throughout by a native speaker of English.

Impatience rules the systems in which we operate. Since the inauguration of ephemera in 2001, we have witnessed increasing haste which continues until this day. There are endless possibilities for us to work smarter and harder, thereby delivering more in less time and writing to comply with sector and university publishing norms. In this situation, writing in academia becomes normalized to publishing in ‘top’ tiered journals, especially those that find themselves on some world ranking list. In contrast, we put patience at the heart of the academic profession. Proposing writing with patience, we envision writing without intent to complete a specific project, writing without clear boundaries, beginnings and endings. Such non-event writing holds potential for meeting the world as a verb, and for enduring a collective capacity to care. 

Affect in Organization and Management asks how affect theory understands everyday working lives through embodied, social and political practice. Discussing a range of dimensions and perspectives on affect, the book considers how subjects are formed through their connections with others, both human and non- or more-than-human.

The six women writers on affect presented in this series (Sara Ahmed, Kathleen Stewart, Donna Haraway, Jane Bennett, Karen Barad and Rosalyn Diprose) all speak to important themes in organization studies, including power, politics and ethics. Each chapter explores how these thinkers have already influenced organization scholars, as well as how their work can extend our understanding of pressing organizational issues around gender, race, the environment, leadership and ethics. Feminism is a core feature of this collection, highlighting feminist writing with affective, connected and intersubjective possibilities.

Each woman writer is introduced by experts on affect and organization studies. The chapters also suggest further reading and accessible resources. The book is suitable for students, academics and practitioners in business and management, organization studies and critical management studies who want to think differently about organizations.

We invite you to explore with us the enchanting affects that move us, through ordinary moments in writing for children. Enchantment shows how we are entangled with the world, that which surprises us and builds a sense of wonder. A wind in the trees, a gentle smile, a look of horror. The smell of fresh coffee and the final words of a manuscript. We explore enchantment as mundane but gendered experiences which entail a promise and a potentiality, one that is part of power relations, and where an ethical possibility to engage in the world differently emerges. This paper shows how enchantment is not a detachment from, but a connection to the world. Through interviews with children's writers, we ask how enchanting affect can help us to see work through a different ethical lens.

Scholars of organizations are increasingly interested in everyday experiences through the study of embodiment and the lived body (see e.g. Hancock and Tyler, 2009, Pullen and Rhodes, 2015; Fotaki and Daskalaki, 2021; Harding et al., 2021). Many have turned to the recent work on affect to understand the multiplicity of our identities at work, as employees, managers, co-workers and consumers, are entangled with the world around us. Organizations may shape or move us, impacting upon our bodies and our sense of self (Shilling, 2012). When you walk into a workplace, you can gain a sense of this space of work, the people who work there and the artefacts and objects of that organization (Dale and Burrell, 2008). Entering a room, there are expectations and histories; multiple different ways of sensing the atmosphere of the room, the intensities between bodies and non-human objects. Take for example an organization with a ‘fun’ culture: those objects we encounter may encourage us to ‘have fun’, to tell jokes, to feel and demonstrate emotions such as happiness (Hunter, 2022). There may be expectations to experience organizational life in prescribed ways, although of course, the expected and the actual experience of employees may widely differ. To study the world of organizations, therefore, is to appreciate the connectedness with the world and to recognise the entanglements of the human, non-human and more-than-human in organizational life. It is this focus on affect being located in situated relationships with others, both human, non-human, and more-than human that this book explores.

Our everyday experience of living in the here-and-now is performed through a complex network of relationships and meanings attached to people, things and ideas. Yet some organizational spaces we occupy matter more than others (cf. Halford & Leonard, 2006; Tyler & Cohen, 2010). A challenge is to study organizational spaces as they are being performed (Beyes & Steyaert, 2011), particularly with a focus on different changing modes of materiality as artefacts move and shape spaces and simultaneously change the artefacts and their materiality (Knox et al., 2008). In this chapter we draw upon two different but overlapping strands of research: the study of organizational spaces and materiality. Space and spatial practices have in different ways gained new interest within social sciences with the writings of, for example, Michel Serres, Edward Soja, Nigel Thrift, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Augé. The idea of space being a product of social relationships or networks reveals space as compelling and controlling, and providing social boundaries for subjectivity. But it also opens up space to be challenged: we can liberate ourselves from the cages and prisons in which we find ourselves. But space is also material with walls, tables, staircases and computer software providing important building blocks of spatial practices. In this chapter we particularly highlight the anthropological work of Daniel Miller and the ways in which matter becomes meaningful and changes in different contexts and places.

This is an essay in three parts on writing differently, on grief and on breathing. The first part I wrote in one go, embodied and raw. The second part was written over two months, reflecting on my earlier words. The third part argues for the importance of writing differently. I write for hope. Hope is to voice that which has remained silent. Hope is to recognise the full human experience both in our research, our teaching and in our universities. Hope is the creation of different encounters, of momentary affective spaces with the potentiality of alternative endings.

The spread of COVID-19 acutely challenges and affects not just economic markets, demographic statistics and healthcare systems, but indeed also the politics of organizing and becoming in a new everyday life of academia emerging in our homes. Through a collage of stories, snapshots, vignettes, photos and other reflections of everyday life, this collective contribution is catching a glimpse of corona-life and its micro-politics of multiple, often contradicting claims on practices as many of us live, work and care at home. It embodies concerns, dreams, anger, hope, numbness, passion and much more emerging amongst academics from across the world in response to the crisis. As such, this piece manifests a shared need to — together, apart — enact and explore constitutive relations of resistance, care and solidarity in these dis/organizing times of contested spaces, identities and agencies as we are living–working–caring at home during lockdowns.