i. Setting the scene: introducing field and fury
It’s lunchtime at the office, and I’m gathered with a few colleagues around one table in the canteen, eating together and chatting casually. As so many times before, somehow the conversation evolves from being about the recent Employee Engagement Survey to talking about how awful #Meetoo is. Kenny, one of the technical consultants, brings up something he’d heard on the radio that morning. It is something about catcalling, where he launches into a rant: “It’s gone too far now. It’s a man’s nature to find women appealing, so why are we not allowed to act on that instinct anymore!? It’s only natural to us!” He is standing in front of the table and is clearly showing signs of frustration and anger, waving his hands and shaking his head.
His outburst seems quite sudden, and it feels somewhat like it is coming out of nowhere, causing the atmosphere to shift.
Klara, also a technical consultant, sitting right across from him, looking straight up at him, tries to cut in by saying: “Do you want to know a secret?”
But Kenny is all caught up in his own intense emotion. He does not seem to register, just keeps ranting. Klara then leans towards the table, turns her head towards me as I sit beside her, and with a sly smirk, she continues: “..us women, we have those urges too….”
Our eyes meet as she says it. It feels piercing, fierce, and intriguing; this sense of Klara subtly resisting Kenny’s claims. An urgent curiosity and excitement soars within me, but then, immediately, disappointment follows. Though Klara spoke clearly and with intention, it just felt like a whisper… Her words unregistered, her gesture overlooked. There is no reaction, other than the subtle fire lit within me. It feels powerful, and powerless, all at once.
Fury holds information and energy worth paying attention to.
This fieldnote describes a moment I experienced while doing fieldwork in a Danish technical installation firm. I was employed there as an industrial PhD student, doing engaged ethnographic research on organizational diversity, equity, and inclusion (see Holck, 2018) in the construction industry. Saturating the moment that this fieldnote depicts, as well as the process of analyzing it, was a forceful sensation of a pull. It was a pull that felt heavy on my chest: I felt captured and pressured by it. A pull toward something hot, burning, blinding, but also full of energy; like fire. In a momentary angry outburst, fury emerged and began pulling the strings in the ethnographic moment shared by Kenny, Klara, myself and our colleagues, rippling through the atmosphere and later transpiring into the analytical process.
Fury holds information and energy worth paying attention to. We know this from feminist scholars, who have encouraged reclaiming anger as a source of knowledge and listening with care to its claims (Lorde, 2012; Ahmed, 2012; Guschke, 2023b). The affective intensities of fury do, however, hold both destructive and productive power (Ashcraft, 2022; Just, 2025; Munar, 2018). The challenge lies in acknowledging what the light of fury might illuminate – that if we manage to take a critical look beyond being blindly overwhelmed by infuriation, we might be able to see otherwise hidden parts of the data. Albeit strong and consuming, the grip of infuriation does not have to leave us trapped in overwhelm (Munar, 2018). Indeed, to be thrown by rage can be an opening; “To throw things up is to be opened up” (Ahmed, 2017:132). Inspired by this, I ask: How can we approach fury productively and openly, as both a relational and analytical possibility? In this essay, I explore those possibilities by working with poetic resonance as an amplifier of sensory literacy, allowing fury to unfold in its full, analytical, relational, and metaphorical force. I do so by experimenting with an analytical protocol that extends, suspends, and deepens affective ripples in ethnographic data, uncovering subtleties, connections, and otherwise overlooked dynamics within organizational life (Scheel & Nouwens, 2026). Indeed, by looking beyond the blinding, burning heat of fury, we might sense connections where we first saw only clashes.
ii. Poetic intensities of position and place
My ethnographic case is situated within diversity research, which at its core is concerned with who institutions are for and who they exclude (Ahmed, 2017). Such research engages questions of equity and inclusion in organizations, which carries significant personal and political weight, since making difference and power visible inevitably involves being affected and affecting others within institutional spaces (Ahmed, 2014; Holck, 2018). In addition, my positioning in the field was shaped by being a woman in the historically male-dominated construction industry (Hanna et al., 2020). Attending to how I was affected in this institutional space, as an outsider and while doing such research, holds analytical potential, since embodied reactions can render power relations visible and generate critical moments for analysis (Ashcraft & Muhr, 2018; Guschke, 2023b). I therefore turned to poetic resonance for its capacity to hold and express the affective intensities through which institutionalized norms make themselves felt, allowing for an analysis attentive to both the disruptive and connective forces of fury (Marsh & Śliwa, 2022; Guschke, 2023a).
Surging through the ethnographic moment was fury, forcefully affecting bodies, atmosphere, and dynamics.
Surging through the ethnographic moment was fury, forcefully affecting bodies, atmosphere, and dynamics. It was later reinvigorated within me as I worked analytically with poetic resonance. In this process, poetic resonance provided a way to slow down analytical engagement, and within that extension, the power, influence, and role of affectivity and emotionality in my research could be more vividly drawn out. I used an analytical protocol designed to support poetic experimentation, aiming to shift ethnographic attention from why to how and towards sensing instead of explaining (Scheel & Nouwens, 2026). This allowed me to trace sensory vibrations in the data through poetic extension; lingering; dwelling; immersing; to seek out deeper depths. By uncovering this layer of affective intensities, the protocol offered a way to reflect on how my own positionality shaped and complicated the research process – from moments in the field to the writing of the analysis.
iii. Tracing affect: paying analytical attention to the poetics of fury
The ethnographic moment described on the first pages of this essay kept resurfacing in my thoughts, reappearing in patterns of similar dynamics across subsequent encounters. Something in that moment had stuck with me: an affective pull that continued to reverberate in my body and demanded further attention, pushing me to return to the moment in an immersed inquiry about what happened and how?
Affect theorist Wetherell (2012) describes affective states, such as infuriation, as processes of activation; of getting caught in pulses of energetic relations shaped by a shared context. Fury emerges in this way: it awakens the senses in an intense, embodied manner, instantly drawing focus. Whether rising within a body or in a space, fury commands attention – felt in the heat, seen in the shift, as it takes charge of the moment. The charge of infuriation simultaneously invokes both productive and destructive potential (Munar, 2018). In reflecting on ways of turning productively towards the fury vibrating in my data, without becoming entirely caught up in it, Ashcraft’s proposed mode of employing critical feeling in alliance with critical thinking came to mind. Ashcraft (2022: 215) suggests that “Critical feeling works to cultivate the sensory literacy we lack,” encouraging attention to what might be happening on the affective level, rather than focusing solely on the level of content. Critical feeling thus invites us to attend to what unfolds beneath and beyond what is heard or seen – thereby not asking what this is about, but rather, how this came about. Curious about where a combined approach of poetic resonance and critical feeling could take me, I returned to the fieldnote to revisit the ethnographic moment and trace, as suggested by the protocol, affective triggers that evoked embodied, emotive responses, vibrating from the words of the fieldnote.
iii.i. Into the fire: getting caught up
Overwhelmed by fury and amid the burning heat of fire, it is easy to get lost, feel stuck in a grip, or be at a loss for hope. The sense of suffocation, feeling deprived of air in the face of fury, like being under attack, under siege. Blinded, burned, overwhelmed, paralyzed.
This was how Kenny’s words threw me in a crushing grip, as he furiously claimed; It is a man’s nature and angrily asked why are we not allowed. Both claims were equally as piercing when I heard them spoken in the moment, as when I read them again from the fieldnote and analyzed them. An infuriating stinging sensation. My chest started to burn; I sensed a tickle that subtly stressed and made me anxious.
In the ethnographic moment, Kenny’s infuriation grabbed hold of the room and charged the atmosphere. The sense that his fury was contagious rose along with the temperature in my body. Kennys own intense emotion; roaring, burning, charging. Not only in that moment, not only emitting from Kenny’s body, but also, during analysis, I realized how I had been grabbed by my own intense emotion. Stuck, struck – like burned by a flame, hit by lightning. Kennys’ own intense emotion had reached out to grab me, not only in the moment itself, but again during analysis, where it intensely triggered my infuriation too.
Captives of fury, our attention was centered on Kenny and his pressing claims. Our eyes fixed on him, hearts beating silently, separately. Kenny, as well, was caught in his own infuriation, and when he did not register Klaras’s response, she instead looked at me; turned towards me. Was there nowhere else to turn? The only two women present, the only ones not embodying a man’s nature. Was she looking for an escape route? Was she seeking out possibilities for connection, of being seen and heard amid the roaring turbulence of Kenny’s frustration? A gentle, subtle attempt at giving a different view goes unregistered. Just like a whisper that no one heard. A missed opportunity, a voice unnoticed, a view overlooked, a connection lost, a bridge burned.
iii.ii. Amid intensity: poetics of blind infuriation
Fury lights fires
Fury pulls
Fury pushes
Fury affects the room, the bodies, the space, the conversation
Fury disrupts
Fury pushes apart
Fury like fire, like a red flag, like a burning desire to do and to undo
Fury attacks
Fury is attack
Fury: raging, ranting, rampant rage
Fury: a force to be reckoned with
Fury for good and for worse
I wrote this poem after my first immersion in the fieldnote. It clearly conveys a burning message of fury, being a force that bodies and atmospheres get caught up in. An infuriation that blinds and divides. It is not until the end of the poem that the productive potential of fury subtly emerges. And similarly, it was not until I had extended the moment through poetic resonance that I saw beyond the roaring fire of infuriation, where a shared connection transpired beyond the divide. Weaving us together was our shared sense of anger; loss; fear; it was our shared relationality touching upon us, making us furiously fearful of not belonging.
iii.iii. Moving beyond: seeing in renewed light
What became forcefully present, subtly in the moment, painfully during the analysis, were the institutional relations between those of us sharing the space. Kennys claims of not being allowed outlined an institution configured to cater to a man’s nature, pressuring the presence of anything other than that out of the way. A heavy pull, that affected my breath, made my chest burn. A feeling of entrapment, of being pushed out, of not being meant to be there. Am I not allowed to be here?
We become angry when we experience loss, especially when that loss feels unjust or when something we believed was rightfully ours is taken or denied.
Blinded by fury and then fear, I was unable to see how our relationality had become visible. What these affective ruptures in fact revealed was how the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion were being drawn within our shared organizational space. Our shared fury touched precisely on this: we become angry when we experience loss, especially when that loss feels unjust or when something we believed was rightfully ours is taken or denied. I believe this was what the fury surging in Kenny’s body and erupting out in his claims of a man’s nature and ‘not being allowed’ was about: he seemed to be at a loss.
Seeing beyond, I realized how fury had emerged from being overlooked, dismissed, or rendered invisible. We all shared a sense of dismissal; a charge affecting the atmosphere and all the bodies who shared it. We were all struggling in our own ways; in different ways; it was our differences that got in the way. Following affect took me beyond blinding infuriation, where I could see how the shared sense of fury connected us, even amid the differences and clashes that initially seemed to separate us. It was as if we had all been thrown: disrupted; erupting; and then, somewhat like a deep breath that lands calmly, wholly in the body, we had all arrived at the same, shared place. It was through fury that we were allowed to feel the same; feel similarly; feel how we were similar. This shared feeling belonged to us all; we all belonged within that feeling – Kenny, Klara, and me.
I returned to Klaras words, now burning with a new flame, shedding new light: ‘Do you want to know a secret?’ Indeed, her secret also meant letting Kenny know that they, and we, shared more than he was seeing: ‘..us women, we have those urges too.’ He did not hear, we did not see; our shared sense of anger and relational struggles remained a secret in the moment, but was brought to light through looking beyond the roaring flames of fury. In its burning light, I discovered connection where there had been clash.
iv. Poetics and power of fury: a concluding reflection
Poetic resonance engaged a sensory extension, echoing Ashcraft’s (2022: 215) idea of critical feeling, opening the data to a deeper, relational understanding as well as allowing the productive energy of fury to expand. Approaching fury as a shared force circulating between bodies uncovered how we are connected rather than merely divided by it. Fury, in this sense, is not an emotion derived solely from an inner state; rather, it is part of how bodies connect and disconnect with one another (Hunter & Kivinen, 2022). Asking how fury emerges, moves, and affects within the ethnographic moment thus revealed how the institutional lines between who is in and who is out are drawn (Ahmed, 2014). While my own fury was invoked through institutionalized dynamics that divide into binaries, returning to critical feeling and attending with sensory literacy allowed me to see how we all embodied an infuriation affected by a sense of dismissal, exclusion, or being out of place, not belonging to the space – albeit in different ways (Ahmed, 2012; Ashcraft, 2022). Through poetic resonance, analysis can thus extend rather than conclude, portraying participants as feeling, thinking, struggling people, and foregrounding multiplicity rather than resolute binaries. It might be that it is through this shared, resonating fury that we find connections across apparent differences, even amid polarized moments or institutionally rigid structures, that could otherwise get caught in binaries; included or excluded; for or against; friends or foes. Through sensory literacy, enabled by poetic resonance, I believe that space for complexity, contradiction, and paradoxical tensions is enabled: an opening of a space where the connective force of shared affect can be felt, recognized, and reflected upon.
Featured image: Red hot clouds at sunrise. Photo by Mist Hrannarsdóttir.
References
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Abstract: In this essay, I trace the force of fury that emerged within a single ethnographic moment and later saturated the analysis. Attuning to how fury charged the shared atmosphere in the empirical scene, as well as how it circulated between and within the bodies present – including my own – and resurfaced during analysis, I have sought to understand how fury affects the moment, the shared organizational space, and beyond. Using an analytical protocol of poetic resonance and metaphors of fire, I extend subtle elements of a fieldnote to explore the depths of their affective and relational meaning. In seeking resonance rather than resolution, my wish is to critically attend to feeling and to move beyond the blinding and overwhelming affects of forceful infuriation. By attending to the poetics of fury: the bodies it moved; the atmospheres it shifted; and the institutions it invoked, this essay demonstrates the potential of poetic resonance to deepen conversations about power, inclusion, and affect in organization studies, while cultivating a sensory literacy where affective intensities and emotions are critically addressed and acknowledged with care.
