Comfort is typically perceived as a consistent effect of various transportation systems. However, in recent years, geographers have sought to challenge traditional ways of thinking about comfort in the context of mobility practices. First, by challenging any strict dualistic distinction between ‘comfort’ and ‘discomfort’. Comfort, as Philip and Atchison (2022) note, is materialised, actioned, and verbalised, and the times, spaces, and places that discomfort becomes comfort’. One person’s place of comfort can be another’s place of discomfort for different reasons. Second, (dis)comfort has been theorised not merely as a psychological property of an individuated subject, but rather as an affective intensity emerging from transpersonal encounters between bodies, materialities, and spaces (Bissell, 2020). In this paper, I bring this retheorisation of comfort to bear on some recent qualitative research I have conducted in Dhaka, Bangladesh, which is looking at women’s experiences of harassment and the emotional and affective geographies of fear. I argue that the affective and emotional dynamics of comfort open new possibilities for understanding people’s perceptions of comfort and fear, and how they are shaped by the affective spaces and materialities that comprise everyday urban mobilities.
Keywords: affect, emotion, comfort, discomfort, fear, mobility & emotional geography