Review on "emotional turn" and emotional geographies in recent western geography

The discipline of geography often presents us with an emotionally barren terrain,leading to spaces ordered solely by rational principles and demarcated according to political,economic or technical logics. However, this situation is beginning to change, as the recent burgeoning publications and conference session dedicated to emotion, which resulted in emerging turn within geography. Four precursors contributed to turn are discussed in this context, including body and feminist works, humanistic geographies, nonrepresentational theories and psychotherapy. As a new branch of human geographies, emotional geographies was considered as an interdisciplinary platform for exploring the spatiality and sociality of emotion, feeling and affect. According to the books and journals related to emotional geographies, seven hot issues are major concerns of scholars at present: climate change and ecology; intimate space; geopolitics of emotion; educational geography of emotion;place and belonging; ethnic and racial geography of emotion; special group. In summary, we hope the work conducted in the present paper can shed new light on domestic research upon emotional geography that is rarely presented in domestic research.