Moving forward with empathy

This concluding chapter sets out a research agenda for emotional geographies in a period of global disruption – war, climate crisis, AI and political instability. We reaffirm that emotions are central to how we understand and act in the world, shaping both knowledge and power. We highlight care, positionality and collective practice as key themes permeating across the monograph. By employing the lexicographic play on words – afterwor(l)ds – we reflect on the emotional labour of academic work and the value of collaborative scholarship, especially in unsettled times, by returning to the use of vignettes. The chapter calls for research that is empathetic while remaining critical and attentive to context, difference and power. In moving forward with empathy, we advocate that emotional geography can play a pivotal role in navigating contemporary change, with an ethics of care that foregrounds emotion as part of how research is done, not just what it studies.