In “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down,” José Esteban Muñoz writes about depression, or what he calls “the depressive position,” as an affect/ive position. His articulation of “brown feelings… chronicles a certain ethics of the self that is utilized and deployed by people of color and other minoritarian subjects who don't feel quite right within the protocols of normative affect and comportment.”¹ Muñoz's contribution to conversations about affect and affective “particularity and belonging” is to ask us to pay attention to feelings and positionings, rather than identity categories and developmental discourses of normativity. He writes:

Affect is not meant to be a simple placeholder for identity in my work. Indeed, it is supposed to be something altogether different; it is, instead, supposed to be descriptive of the receptors we use to hear each other and the frequencies on which certain subalterns speak and are heard or, more importantly, felt.²

The articles in this issue of Departures in Critical Qualitative Research (Departures) resonate with Muñoz's focus on feelings and positionings, articulating in “narratives of being and belonging” affective portraits of academic depression among queer faculty of color, the microaggressions, and the workings of difference set against an assumed (hetero)normativity in organizational relationships and collaborations within the academy, and appeals for biodiverse and non-normative understandings of individuals …