'The health event': Everyday, affective politics of participation

This paper is about a single event: a conference (A.K.A. 'the health event') held in the English East Midlands in July 2005, at which findings from a policy-led research project regarding young people's health needs were fed back to research participants. The paper foregrounds some of the everyday work, happenings, emotions, conversations and materialities which were fundamentally constitutive of 'the health event' and, thus fundamentally constituted the moments of affirmative, politically-charged participation which could and did happen therein. Thus the paper bears witness to the sorts of practices, minutiae and highs and lows which are surely fundamentally constitutive of participation, policy and politics per se, but which (despite the growing visibility of nonrepresentational theories) are typically absent from salient accounts of participation, Children's Geographies and Post-medical Geographies.