01 The method
Emotion and affect, treated as relations
Research on environmental problems carries a persistent split. Affect and emotion are studied with rich, interpretive, qualitative methods; socialecological systems are modelled with structured, often quantitative, network tools. The two rarely meet — so the grief, pride, blame and hope that shape how people actually act tend to fall out of the formal analysis.
The mapparatus, developed by Violeta Cabello and colleagues, is built to bridge that split. Its first move is, with Jan Slaby and colleagues, to treat affects and emotions not as private states locked inside individuals, but as relations — more-than-human connections through which people, practices, laws, living and non-living things and places shape one another. A patterned formation of such relations is what the authors call a socialecological affective arrangement (SEAA).
The method gives that idea a concrete, replicable pipeline. Relational interviews are coded so that each affective moment becomes a link between two things; the links assemble into a network you can analyse with standard tools — centrality, clustering, force-directed layout — while every link stays traceable to the words someone spoke and to the relational qualities of the interview process. Qualitative depth and quantitative structure, held in one frame.
The pay-off is the ability to see the affective texture of a contested issue: which concerns bind a community, where framings pull apart, who bridges the divide. First developed on the Mar Menor lagoon in Spain, the method is general by design — it travels to any setting where a community feels its environment changing.
02 Explore the arrangement
The Mar Menor, as a sea of many seas
Built from eight interviews about one lagoon and its slow ecological crisis. Rather than show all 306 relations at once, start with one person — then watch separate worlds become a single connected sea.
Legend
Node size = number of relations. Valence is shown by colour and by the +/− marks, never colour alone.
03 The method in practice
From a spoken sentence to a line in the graph
The network above is not drawn by hand. Every node and line is built from interview transcripts through one repeatable coding step. Here is that step, on a single sentence.
“all my childhood is this”Farmer P, on the Mar Menor
A reader hears a lifelong bond to the lagoon. The coder asks: what two things does this relate, and what is the affect between them?
One affective moment → one classified link. The same five axes are coded for every moment, in every interview.
A stone entity, an eutrophic-green narrator, a sage line for a strengthening emotion — one edge in the sea.
× 306 relations across 8 interviews → the network in section 02.
Wastewater → Eutrophication · Cause · alteraffective, how interviewees explain what is happening to the lagoon. Affective bonds and causal framings end up in the same network, which is what lets the method compare how people feel the crisis with how they explain it.
childhood), never as the original spoken sentence. Reproducing full transcript quotes for all 306 relations could make individual interviewees identifiable within a small community, so the map surfaces the classification, not the words themselves — only the two illustrative quotes on this page are shown verbatim, as in the published study.
This is the structure behind the picture: every relation in the map is one row here, sortable, each still traceable to an interview. The map is one reading of this table — the rigour is one click away.
04 Why it matters
An instrument for feeling-and-knowing
Most environmental analysis still treats knowledge as a stack of facts and feeling as noise around it. The mapparatus refuses that split — and in doing so makes a double contribution: it carries affective-arrangements thinking into socialecological territory, and it gives sustainability science a concrete way to bring emotion back into its models.
A bridge between two worlds
Affect is usually studied qualitatively and interpretively; socialecological systems are often modelled quantitatively — and the two traditions rarely share a method. The mapparatus is built on that seam: relational coding keeps the depth of qualitative work, while network analysis adds structure, comparison and centrality, with every edge still traceable to the words that produced it. It is one practical answer to the “knowledge–action gap,” aligning formal analysis with the affective ways people actually know their world.
A lens you can also act with
A SEAA map is a research instrument, but also a device for intervention. In knowledge co-production and Transformation-Lab settings, the maps can be shown back to the people who made them — helping a divided community see where concerns overlap and where framings genuinely differ, moving blame toward shared understanding. Run over time, the method can trace how relations and learning shift. Its authors frame it as support for an agonistic governance that works within differences rather than trying to erase them.
More-than-human by design
The mapparatus takes seriously that affects are not the private property of humans. A lagoon granted legal personhood is animated by people's affection for it; human anger takes force from the vivid green of an algal bloom — neither side is primary. Nitrogen, laws, fishes and childhood memories enter the network as full participants: processes that affect and are affected alongside people. It makes distributed agency visible, and resists placing the human subject at the centre of the story.
Built to travel
The Mar Menor is the worked example, not the limit. Because the method abstracts interviews into a general relational structure, it can move to any territory where a community feels its environment changing — a fishery, a forest, a drying river. It composes naturally with systems-mapping approaches such as Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping, situating their problem statements in the affective worlds that drive them — and it still has room to grow: weighting the valence of relations, mapping whole affective atmospheres, or opening toward more decentralised, multi-species accounts.
05 Applications & references
A growing body of work
Works that develop and apply the mapparatus and the SEAA framework.
Foundations — the method's spine
map + apparatus — an arrangement made to see relations
The name is an argument. The mapparatus extends Jan Slaby's affective arrangements into socialecological territory, and takes its sense of an apparatus — a device that arranges what it studies — from Karen Barad.
Violeta Cabello
Originator · lead author
A sustainability scientist at the Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3). Trained in environmental science, ecology and hydrology before a PhD in human geography and a degree in group facilitation, her work joins knowledge co-production, water governance and environmental conflict through relational and process approaches — asking why people who share a place narrate such different worlds. The mapparatus and the SEAA framework grow out of that question and her long engagement with the Mar Menor.
For more details on her work please visit violetacabello.net.
Conceptual lineage — secondary sources
Jan Slaby
Affective arrangements
Slaby, Mühlhoff & Wüschner (2019). Affective Arrangements. Emotion Review, 11(1).
Karen Barad
Apparatus · agential realism
Barad (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway. Duke University Press.
06 Work with us
The method grows through collaboration
The mapparatus was made to be shared, adapted and pushed further. There are several ways to join in — whether you want to think with the framework, take it into a new place, or analyse material you already have. All are welcome.
Theoretical development
Help refine the framework — the ontology of affects and valence, the affect/emotion distinction, or how SEAAs connect to other relational and systems approaches. Think with us, and co-author conceptual work.
Field work
Bring a case: a territory and a community living through environmental change. We can help design the relational interviews and run the fieldwork together, somewhere new.
Data analysis
Already have interviews or qualitative material? We can help code it relationally, build and analyse the network, and co-publish what it reveals.
Tell us about your work and which kind of collaboration fits.