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Losing our cool?
Abstract
Despite constituting a significant area of everyday experience, emotions have rarely been the focus of detailed investigation within cultural studies. This paper makes a case for viewing emotions as social/cultural/political, as well as individual, phenomena and reviews the contributions of cultural theorists to analyses of emotions. To this end, it critically examines Raymond Williams' concept 'structure of feeling', which reintroduces the subjective into the social, and Larry Grossberg's concept 'economy of affect', which seeks to explain how, through affective investments, ideologies are internalized and naturalized. Whilst both theorists provide important conceptual tools, each conceptualization has specific limitations and neither theorist offers detailed analyses of the interrelations, in practice, between individual and social aspects of emotion. The authors seek to build on and extend the insights of Williams and Grossberg and locate emotions in and across specific historical, cultural and political contexts within relations of hegemony and resistance. The authors begin to theorize how emotions are constituted and operate interactively at the level of both individual personal experience and wider social formations/power relations. This paper establishes the groundwork for working towards a genealogy of specific structures of feeling and specific emotional subjects. It is argued that theorizing relations between emotion and power is crucial to this project. The paper discusses ways of theorizing 'emotion and power', and outlines the authors' approach, which, it is suggested, could be further explored in relation to concrete examples.
... Only Emotions had been considered to be infantile and uncivilized, hence need to be controlled so as society to work properly and rationally [1]. However, social sciences and humanities have recently showed a great interest in the study of emotions as sociocultural products and a more in depth analysis can actually reveal emotions as products of power relations. ...
... Therefore, we will discuss this theoretical standpoint based on Raymond Williams' concept 'structure of feeling' and Lawrence Grossberg's concept 'economy of affect'. A critical investigation of the aforementioned theoretical encounter is provided by Pribram and Harding [1], which will be supplemented by updated literature on sociology of emotion and will form the basis for the understanding of emotional and cultural intelligence discussed in detail further in the paper. ...
... Secondly, he uses 'structure of feeling' as a class-linked concept, analyzing what he believes are the principle structures of feeling for each class in a particular time and space. Thirdly, he links structure of feeling with 'experience' because experience represents an authentic expression of feeling and experience for Williams is real and immediate and thus credible [1]. ...
... Emotions had been considered to be infantile and uncivilized, hence need to be controlled so as society to work properly and rationally (Planalp, 1999in Pribram & Harding, 2004. In a sense emotions were believed to be destructive and non productive for social order. ...
... For Williams "the structure of feeling is the culture of a period: it is the particular living result of all the elements in the general organization" (Williams in Harding & Pribram, 2009, p. 36). As Pribram and Harding (2004) put it, structure of feeling "is an attempt to formulate the place of emotions in culture". In order for Williams to provide an operative account of the concept "structure of feeling" he studied in detail English literature during the 17th and 18th century and he reached a set of conclusions with regards to the role of emotion as "structure of feeling" which are useful and significant. ...
... Having these dimensions in mind Pribram and Harding (2004) moved a step forward and chose to emphasize, and Ι definitely agree on this, the productive process that jumps out from the analysis of structure of feeling in every social order. More specifically, following Pribram and Harding "in the notion of structure of feeling, the emotions are culturally constituted and culturally shared [...] with structures of feeling, the emotions become a widely held cultural experience, not solely an individual (biological or behaviorist) one" (2004, p. 8). ...
The paper aims to examine different visual manifestations of the European discourse on solidarity during the immigration crisis (2015-2017). International Organizations such as UN (United Nations), IOM (International
Organization for Migration), and EASO (European Asylum Support Office) following a set of European policies reflect solidarity in practice among the European Union (EU) states. Policy makers, apart from implementing and
drafting different sets of policies in moments of emergency due to the immense migrant flow, have also accompanied these practices with visual representations in the form of posters and photos. These visual representations feature the organizations themselves and the discourse on solidarity towards the migrants. Hence, examining this material we
can have a clear picture of the identity of the organizations but also, and most importantly, how they visualize their understanding of solidarity discourse. The paper is unfolded in the following way. Firstly, the theoretical framework of solidarity and the European Union’s perspective of solidarity are discussed in detail. Then, the focus is moved towards a theoretical discussion of emotion, the role of affect, and the role these Organizations play in the creation of European policies on migration. Thirdly, the analysis of the material, photos, posters, and a leaflet will be discussed in conjunction to the aforementioned theoretical framework of solidarity and affect.
... En este ámbito, autores se preocupan por el vínculo emociones-investigación, con la necesidad de separar o controlar las primeras, en aras de la objetividad (Savage, 2004). En contraste, otros ubicados en el post-estructuralismo, abogan por su articulación e inclusión al señalar beneficios para el proceso investigativo con relación al diálogo, la memoria y la narración que se posibilitan cuando se siente con el sujeto investigado (Harding y Pribram, 2004). En el fondo subyacen consideraciones, por un lado, sobre la práctica investigativa educativa que involucra relaciones interpersonales de cercanía y diferencia, por lo cual no se pueden excluir las emociones (Zembylas, 2007;Harding y Pribram, 2004) y, por otro, que los temas humanistas involucran cargas emocionales que impactan los actores investigativos (Rager, 2005). ...
... En contraste, otros ubicados en el post-estructuralismo, abogan por su articulación e inclusión al señalar beneficios para el proceso investigativo con relación al diálogo, la memoria y la narración que se posibilitan cuando se siente con el sujeto investigado (Harding y Pribram, 2004). En el fondo subyacen consideraciones, por un lado, sobre la práctica investigativa educativa que involucra relaciones interpersonales de cercanía y diferencia, por lo cual no se pueden excluir las emociones (Zembylas, 2007;Harding y Pribram, 2004) y, por otro, que los temas humanistas involucran cargas emocionales que impactan los actores investigativos (Rager, 2005). ...
Objetivo general: Revisar las contribuciones del enfoque narrativo para las prácticas de investigación-formación de emociones de actores educativos. Metodología: Revisión narrativa revisión narrativa de carácter selectivo, con el fin de comparar, contrastar y relacionar aspectos claves del tópico investigativo, delimitada por aspectos temporales (2000-2019), tipológicos (investigaciones con diseños cuali y cuantitativos) y de publicaciones (artículos y tesis en sistemas y bases: Dialnet, Ebsco, Proquest, Science Direct, Scopus). Resultados: El enfoque narrativo contribuye con la estructuración de las emociones para abarcar dimensiones y aspectos que intervienen en su desarrollo, con la formación de los actores investigativos en términos de comprensión y refiguración de sus episodios emocionales, con la reconfiguración, tanto del objeto como de los modos de analizar y socializar los resultados de las experiencias emocionales. Conclusiones: El desarrollo de habilidades socioemocionales es una necesidad para los ámbitos laboral y educativo y un desafío para las prácticas de educación emocional. Investigaciones prácticas evidencian aportes significativos del enfoque narrativo para abordar las emociones, frente a enfoques estereotipados y paralelos a la investigación tradicional que se reducen a datos y números que no permiten la comprensión de estas experiencias vividas
... 4 A majority of articles were written by authors within a single country, with the USA (116), the UK (40), Australia (32) and Germany (8) leading the tally. Only 10 articles (see Bellocchi et al., 2014;Harding and Pribram, 2004;Moon et al., 2009;Roach Anleu et al., 2015) were the result of cross-country collaboration (Australia-USA, 4; Australia-Sweden, 1; UK-USA, 1; USA-Canada-Germany, 3; USA-South Korea, 1). Dots in Figure 3 represent authors' locations; lines represent collaborations. ...
... Yet SoE grew as a fractured subdiscipline during this time. While Turner (2010) divides emotions theories along micro and macro scopes, others highlight distinctions between interactionist theories, which value emotions as consciously acknowledged and culturally relative (Harding and Pribram, 2004), and theories that depict emotions as both conscious and unconscious universal phenomena with structural properties (von Scheve and von Luede, 2005;Wang and Roberts, 2006). When dramaturgical approaches like Hochschild's (1983a) are categorised as a branch of interactionism, the former clearly enjoys a position of dominance within SoE, with a majority of articles employing interactionist social theories. ...
Based in a novel ‘meta-reflexive’ review of sociology of emotions (SoE) articles, we suggest that there are two primary SoE theoretical traditions that function within geographic silos: the USA is distinctly social psychological, while in the UK and Australia, SoE is more aligned with the humanities. In both traditions, parallel calls are emerging for interdisciplinarity and further engagement with physiological and pre-personal elements of emotion. Based in Archer’s and Bourdieu’s concepts of reflexivity, we assert the merits of reflexively examining SoE, and then identify key changes in SoE that have emerged across time and geography. Using Kuhn’s work on paradigm shifts, we conclude that SoE is entering a stage of growth and change, and raise important questions about the subdiscipline’s future direction.
... I felt both happiness and sorrow during the course of my field work. It was not possible to detach myself entirely from what happened in the field (see Harding &Pribram 2004 andZembylas 2007 for a discussion about being empathetic to the field). Stina Bergman Blix calls this being an emotional participant (2010: 61). ...
... I felt both happiness and sorrow during the course of my field work. It was not possible to detach myself entirely from what happened in the field (see Harding &Pribram 2004 andZembylas 2007 for a discussion about being empathetic to the field). Stina Bergman Blix calls this being an emotional participant (2010: 61). ...
... For the purpose of this paper, and drawing on the more recent mobilisation of the concept by affect and other cultural theorists(Anderson 2016;Coleman 2018;Filmer 2003;Harding and Pribram 2004;Seitz 2022;Smith 2005), I posit structures of feeling as an affective quality that shapes the ways in which groups of people understand their relationships with others and the world, whether in taken-for-granted, intangible ways or more explicitly. With others (Anderson 2014; Anderson 2016), I think of structures of feeling in more plural terms than Williams did when he broadly posited them as the culture of an epoch, generation or class; or organised them in terms of their residual (e.g. ...
Reporting the findings of a Critical Interpretative Synthesis of the qualitative academic scholarship on private landlords’ and tenants’ experiences in the Majority World, this briefing paper asks: What “structures of feeling” charge the affective economies of rental housing? The paper first introduces Raymond Williams’ concept of structures of feeling. It then brings together three lines of thoughts to deduce three structures of feeling that are likely to shape landlords’ and tenants’ (affective) practices: greed and exploitation, ethics of care, and cruel optimism. Findings are briefly presented in the form of a table, based on which six critical observations on how structures of feeling work are presented. A brief conclusion invites housing scholars to engage the concept in housing research. The methodology is presented in the related Briefing Paper One (https://zenodo.org/records/7566096).
... For example, Plato portrayed emotions, such as anger, as irrational urges that need direction from reason (cited in Alison, 2009).2 The differences between the concepts of affect and emotion have been discussed by many(Cavalcante, 2018;Deleuze & Guattari, 1987;Harding & Pribram, 2004;Hemmings, 2005;Lupton, 1998;Nelson, 2016;Papacharissi, 2015;Stets & Turner, 2014; Tygstrup & Sharma, 2015). Normally, affect is considered as a dimension of bodily experiences that emerges automatically and quickly -often before the mind can consciously catch them. ...
This thesis examines the mediated emotional experiences of rural elderly grandparents born before the 1960s. Against the backdrop of state-led neoliberal modernisation since the 1980s, it asks how the rural elderly experience their family life emotionally, whether and how the media culture has structured such experiences, and what is the significance of such emotions for the elderly, their families and, more widely, for China’s uneven modernity. To answer these questions, I conducted a 10-month ethnography in two rural villages in Enshi, China between 2019 and 2020, including live-in studies with selected families. This study found that the rural elderly’s willing sacrifice and sense of inferiority in the family are connected to the feeling of (eating) bitterness. Such a bitter structure of feeling has historical significance for this generation and has been reinterpreted through the media content they engage with, allowing them to live life meaningfully in deprived conditions. Moreover, under persistent patriarchal and increasingly neoliberal structures that systemically disadvantage rural households, the media that perpetuates new norms, scripts, and expectations has been actively appropriated by different genders and generations within the family. Such mediated processes play a crucial role in structuring the family dynamics within the three-generational household. These processes tend to engender highly classed and gendered intimacy, distance, and tension between the elderly and the younger generations, often leaving the elderly with grievances, guilt, isolation, disappointment, and a faint sense of hope. By examining the politics and formation of the elderly’s structure of feelings in relation to media, I argue that China’s modernization is largely enabled by and at the expense of rural elderly’s ‘cruel optimism’. In this regard, this study contests and contributes to the largely depoliticalised realm of Chinese family sociology by reintroducing power. It also contributes to media scholarship from the vantage point of the less (but increasingly) media-saturated region of the Global South. By the same token, it advances current theorisations of modernity, particularly individualisation. Through attention to a marginalised and understudied group – the rural elderly in China – this study advances the idea of an ‘imagination of modernity from below’.
... Since the Enlightenment in the 17th century, Western societies have viewed emotions as antithetical to reason and rationality (Harding and Pribram, 2004;Bandelj, 2009) and have largely ignored the role of emotions in social life. The opposition between rationality and emotion has been particularly present in prevailing views and definitions of journalism. ...
This article addresses a lacuna in the literature on the ‘emotional turn’ in journalism by examining how emotions shape journalists’ career trajectories. In-depth interviews conducted at two points in time reveal that love leads journalists to accept precarious work. Over the years, cynicism developed. Cynicism shaped careers in two ways: some moved into public relations and expressed emotions of relief. Others left media organisations to work as freelance journalists, expressing emotions of wanderlust and love. We address the ambivalence of love as an emotion. It leads journalists to accept precarious work that prevents investigative journalism. However, love of journalism has led others to pursue careers outside of media organisations that offer more freedom of expression, which is crucial for democracy.
... For a study of memorial spatiality, it is necessary to reintegrate the subjective position into the theorisations of the social. 67 In Whitehead's philosophy, society is a universal notion of a community of distinct and actual entities that has a certain order. 68 Despite the individual diversity of its members, the community forms a nexus of communal characteristics. ...
This paper develops the new concept of the geography of placemories as a critical approach for deciphering spatialised memories in cultural geography. In referring to Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of organism and cultural materialism in line with Raymond Williams, the paper reflects on processual conceptions of feeling, society, memory and place. First, reviewing existing research on memory and place elucidates that cultural geography takes spatialised memories as fixed objects. Its analysis leads to statements about society. Second, to avoid this fallacy, the paper shifts the analytical basis for the cultural geographical conception of memorial sites from place to feelings and experiences by developing a new view on spatialised memory. The resulting processual problematisation of the ontology of memories, as well as its relevance for the present and spatialisations, is called the placemoric approach. The analysis of contested remembering processes with regard to the prerogative of interpretation of half-timbered houses in descriptions of Nuremberg's old town in North Bavaria, Germany demonstrates the capabilities of the placemoric approach. In doing so, the paper shows how spatialised memories are the socially constructed result of permanently changing feelings.
... For a study of memorial spatiality, it is necessary to reintegrate the subjective position into the theorisations of the social. 67 In Whitehead's philosophy, society is a universal notion of a community of distinct and actual entities that has a certain order. 68 Despite the individual diversity of its members, the community forms a nexus of communal characteristics. ...
This paper develops the new concept of the geography of placemories as a critical approach for deciphering spatialised memories in cultural geography. In referring to Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism and cultural materialism in line with Raymond Williams, the paper reflects on processual conceptions of feeling, society, memory and place. First, reviewing existing research on memory and place elucidates that cultural geography takes spatialised memories as fixed objects. Its analysis leads to statements about society. Second, to avoid this fallacy, the paper shifts the analytical basis for the cultural geographical conception of memorial sites from place to feelings and experiences by developing a new view on spatialised memory. The resulting processual problematisation of the ontology of memories, as well as its relevance for the present and spatialisations, is called the placemoric approach. The analysis of contested remembering processes with regard to the prerogative of interpretation of half-timbered houses in descriptions of Nuremberg’s old town in North Bavaria, Germany demonstrates the capabilities of the placemoric approach. In doing so, the paper shows how spatialised memories are the socially constructed result of permanently changing feelings.
... There is a relationship between teacher motivation and teacher identity in that teacher identity impacts what teachers may be motivated to do or not do. Moreover, teacher emotion is a sort of psychic energy that teachers invest in their practices to shape their professional identities (Harding & Pribram, 2004). By understanding the classroom's emotional messages, teachers can choose different practices based on their professional identities to respond to those messages appropriately. ...
Addressing social and psychological elements of teachers' professional identities is crucially important to develop teachers' knowledge and practice concerning social and psychological issues in their classes. Thus, this study was an attempt to investigate how Iranian EFL teacher educators addressed social and psychological elements in teacher education programs to develop teachers' professional identities. To that end, a series of phenomenological interviews were conducted with four EFL teacher educators to delve into their past, current, and future practices. Moreover, the syllabi covered by the EFL teacher educators were analyzed as a verification of the data obtained through phenomenological interviews. Explicitation of data was done through using Moustakas's (1994) systematic approach to analyze the interviews. The thematic analysis of phenomenological interviews indicated that EFL teacher educators addressed the social elements in teacher education programs by introducing sociolinguistics, collaborative activities, social negotiation, social awareness-raising, and social and cultural engagement. Moreover, the findings indicated that teacher educators addressed EFL teachers' psychological elements through action research, critical thinking, autonomy-enhancing aids, and helping teachers understand emotional work values. It can be concluded that Iranian EFL teacher educators address social and psychological elements of EFL teachers' professional identities through various approaches which have been discussed in the current study. Using approaches that can affect psychological and social elements of professional identity simultaneously is the implication of the current study that should be followed by the EFL teacher educators.
... Leaders are expected to be relatively immune to situational pressures and able to conform to emotional display rules. Some pioneers in the field of emotions and leadership (Beatty 2000;Blackmore 1996;Boler 1997;Harding and Pribram 2004;Hargreaves 2000Hargreaves , 2001 are beginning to see emotions as situated in social and organisation processes and dimensions, and experienced in nondualistic terms that do not separate emotion and reason, or private and public (Zorn and Boler 2007). Rather than viewing emotions as 'individual, private and autonomous psychological traits and states' that hold leaders blameworthy for their emotional episodes; emotional responses are considered to be publicly and collaboratively formed through the leader's interaction with the organisational culture and institutional structure, expectations, power dynamics and response of other people (Zorn and Boler 2007, 137). ...
This paper aims to contribute to the literature on dean's leadership and explores the impact of corporate managerial practices and neoliberal ideology on the mindset and actions of 15 deans and heads of school in eight universities in Australia. We offer perspectives of leaders as emotional individuals who on a daily basis attempt to live up to and manage the contractions of their belief and role expectations. These leaders share their everyday experiences, struggles and vulnerabilities in restructuring their organisational unit to address the strategic goals of the university. We draw upon research on the emotional labour of leadership in higher education, the ethics of disrupting culture, and critical hope to provide insight into how these leaders move their faculty or school toward an imagined future and the impact on this work on their wellbeing.
... Hence, it can be stated that EFL teachers who are motivated by their profession will probably engage more in professional activities which will lead to their professional identity development. Moreover, emotion is considered psychic energy that teachers, including EFL teachers, invest in their classrooms' practices and performances which are important for them (Harding & Pribram, 2004). The connection between EFL teachers' professional identity development and their emotion is positive (Day, 2018) in that EFL teachers attempt to address the emotional issues of their classrooms through using professional practices, including teaching methods. ...
Potentially Exploitable Pedagogical Activities (PEPAs) help teachers problematize teaching and learning puzzles. The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of PEPAs in EFL teachers' professional identity development. A PEPA program was run in which two EFL teachers participated. The program took around a year to familiarize the teachers with the theoretical and practical aspects of PEPAs. The teachers tried to do PEPAs to understand puzzles in their classes. During the program, interactionally oriented narratives written by the two EFL teachers were collected. The narratives were analyzed based on the Teachers' Professional Identity Scale developed by Karaolis and Philippou (2019), including five indicators: self-efficacy, professional commitment, task orientation, work motivation, and future perspective. The findings showed the development in the five indicators after the two EFL teachers participated in the PEPA program, indicating that PEPAs had a positive and constructive role in developing EFL teachers' professional identity. It can be concluded that PEPAs help the teachers develop their syllabuses based on practice-as-research. Through using PEPAs, EFL teachers are involved in a never-ending research process to understand and solve their teaching puzzles.
... Although, as Beatty pointed out (Beatty, 2000), leaders' emotions were an un-charted area of research as recently as 15 years ago; since then, there has been an upsurge of research in this area. Some of this has focussed broadly upon a culturally oriented broad exploration of 'structures of feeling' in theorizing relations between power and emotions (Harding & Pribram, 2004); other research has raised issues of leaders' emotions as expressed in contexts of neoliberal external reforms (Ackerman and Maslin-Ostrowski, 2004). Blackmore (2011), for example, deconstructs the discourses of emotional labour and emotional intelligence in research on educational leadership by analysing how emotions have been translated and adapted across different epistemic fields, highlighting the interplay between gender, emotionality, identity, power and leadership. ...
This paper provides a basis for a tentative framework for guiding future research into principals’ identity construction and development. It is situated in the context of persisting emphases placed by government policies on the need for technocratic competencies in principals as a means of demonstrating success defined largely as compliance with demands for the improvement in student test scores. Often this emphasis is at the expense of forwarding a broader view of the need, alongside these, for clear educational values, beliefs and practices that are associated with these. The framework is informed by the theoretical work of Wenger and Bourdieu as well as recent empirical research on the part played by professional identity and emotions in school leadership. In the paper, we highlight different lines of inquiry and the issues they raise for researchers. We argue that the constructions of school leadership identities are located in time, space and place, and emotions reflect complex leadership identities situated within social hierarchies which are part of wider structures and social relations of power and control.
... Second, teaching historical narratives in schools will profitably be seen as enacted, emotional practices rather than simply as socially expressed (Zembylas, 2007(Zembylas, , 2008. In other words, this study suggests that it will be important to understand how both emotions and historical narratives are constituted and operate interactively at the level of both the individual and the social-political structures (Harding & Pribram, 2004) within school and the wider society. ...
Background/Context
Emotions often accompany discussions of ethnic matters, yet there have been few sustained investigations in education of how, and with what implications, emotional responses are (de)legitimized in the classroom, especially when conflicting historical narratives are involved. Emotions have remained in the margins of educational research about the ways in which historical narratives are dealt with in schools, or at best, they are regarded as epiphenomena rather than constitutive components in teaching practice.
Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study
The main objective of this article is to help us better understand how both emotions and historical narratives are constituted and operate interactively at the level of both the individual and the social-political structures within school and the wider society. The particular event on which we focus the present analysis—a classroom activity on the death of Yasser Arafat—was chosen because it is representative of multiple other events in which similar phenomena were identified. Its analysis offers insights into how those involved in education (even in the context of integrated schools) draw selectively from formal and informal sources to support their emotional identification and sense of belonging within their particular political, national, and religious communities.
Research Design
The events presented are based on rich data gathered from a long-standing ethnographic research effort in the context of the Palestinian-Jewish integrated bilingual schools in Israel.
Conclusions/Recommendations
We highlight two main implications of the analysis developed in this article. The first concerns the importance of teachers critically analyzing the emotional discourses/practices through which historical narratives are authorized by, implied by, and embodied in schools; this position also entails the recognition that such discourses/practices have consequences for the ways in which affective spaces and communities are constituted within the classroom and beyond. The second is that the findings of this study concerning the teaching of controversial issues in the classroom suggest an imperative need among teachers working with multiethnic children to increase their competence in dealing with conflicting historical narratives at both the cognitive and emotional levels. This competence can be partly developed through preservice and in-service teacher education that pays attention to the emotional complexities of teaching conflicting historical narratives.
The Great Recession of 2007-09, including its instigating Global Financial Crisis, inspired a collection of novels that utilize the crisis events and recession conditions in their plots and narrative. This article examines popular emotions and feelings circulating within Great Recession fiction. While anxiety and anger are arguably the emotions of the capitalist continuum, the post-crisis recession manifested a unique atmosphere due to the particularities of its historical moment: neoliberal austerity against a specific myriad of intersecting insecurities in a digital era in which anxiety-inducing spectacles go “viral” on social media and where post-9/11 police states have resulted in declining civil liberties including with regard to protest. Drawing on Raymond Williams’ conceptualization of structure of feeling, this paper argues that anger and indignation; fear and anxiety; melancholia, defeatism and hopelessness are popular emotions and feelings within Great Recession fiction. Great Recession novels articulate the emotional effects of neoliberalism yet, as a collection, contain a stunning lack of radical imagination. This paper argues, ultimately, that the structure of feeling detectable in Great Recession fiction gives affective expression to what Mark Fisher calls reflexive impotence — the disaffected state of knowing things are bad but not being able to do anything about it.
This chapter explicates the significance of communication to the promotion and practices of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It highlights how communication could contribute, and is indispensable, to the grand project of (re)setting global agendas for the sustainable goals.Firstly, the dialogue of international and global communications has laid down highly relevant and important conceptual frameworks to apprehend the informational flow of contemporary world. Specifically, this strand of communication literature contemplates the role of states, inter-state relationship, non-state actors such as transborder conglomerates and social media giants, and the networks of news agencies and journalists in the shaping of world opinion. These studies inform us some crucial factors to attain SDGs as prominent global agendas.Secondly, scholarly works on intercultural communication foster our sensitivity when adapting the visions of sustainable goals to various locales. Academic dialogues alike offer lessons on both the prospect and limits of multiculturalism and cultural hybridization when promoting social innovation and policy initiatives in various temporal and spatial contexts.Lastly, in view of the contested discourses arising from varying and conflicting goals, motives, and vested interests in the execution of SDGs, the intellectual insights of the articulation between public opinion, policy agenda, mobilization of resources, social movement, and governance inform us both visionary and pragmatic strategies in such complicated circumstances. Here, the perspective of communication is an integral part of the efforts to help accomplish the SDGs alongside other disciplines.In sum, communication is a much-needed jigsaw puzzle to complete the global momentum to (re)set SDGs as our universal goals. It plugs the strategic gap of shaping the world as well as local opinion, scrutinizes the cultural issues of introducing SDGs to different societies, and ushers in constructive and constitutive dialogues among various disciplines, contributing to social development for all.KeywordsSDGsCommunicationGlobal and international communicationIntercultural communicationPublic opinionSocial movementGovernance
Since they first aired in the 1990s, Twin Peaks and The X-Files have been enduring hallmarks of cult television. This reputation only increased with the news that the shows were to be revived and, perhaps unsurprisingly, media discourse surrounding the revivals harkened back to the shows’ peaks. Yet this discourse also drew heavily on concepts of generational fandom and nostalgia. This article is interested in how and why fans of The X-Files and Twin Peaks use nostalgia to discuss their relationship with the shows and their own fandom. Drawing on qualitative research conducted with fans, this article identifies three forms of nostalgia specifically related to reboots, remakes or revivals: spatiotemporal nostalgia, textual nostalgia and communal nostalgia.
Over the past decade, scholars from a variety of epistemological and theoretical backgrounds have begun to engage more deeply with history as a form of difficult knowledge. It is difficult to comprehend and can be traumatic for different groups for different reasons. History as a school subject has largely been used as a tool of hegemony by presenting nationalistic dominant narratives that can marginalise and oppress students from minoritized populations. This academic work has been primarily theoretical, but small case studies of empirical analysis of how teachers and students engage with history as difficult knowledge have emerged to inform practice. This article draws from this body of work – grounded in theories of memory and identity, critical socio-cultural approaches, and psychoanalytic and trauma-informed analysis – to explore key considerations for informing teaching and learning difficult histories. These include the relationship between teacher moral commitments and engagement with or resistance to difficult histories; the role of emotion and unsettling nature of difficult knowledge, and making assumptions about what representations of historic social trauma are or are not traumatising for young people. These considerations have implications for teaching and teacher education.
This article examines China’s emotional governance by analysing the emotional politics behind the wide circulation of the Fang Fang diaries during the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak. By highlighting the flexible and creative reorientation of online emotions in the Chinese state’s governance approach, the article investigates how the diaries’ reverberation of negative feelings – such as grief and indignation – engendered contentious affective publics and amounted to a moment of dissent. The article also explores how the state used multi-layered strategies to demobilise and reorient public sentiment and opinion into regime-supportive nationalism. In doing so, the article offers a more nuanced understanding of state–society relations, online expression and authoritarian resilience in China than interpretations that emphasise suppression and censorship.
In recent years a variety of trends have increased uncertainty over the future of the Higher Education (HE) sector. While these create challenges for all staff, they potentially impact most on non-academic staff, due to long standing misunderstanding and undervaluing of their roles and despite them representing almost half of all jobs within the sector. In this context, leaders’ abilities to manage emotions in the workplace appear to be at a premium. However emotionality remains under-explored both generally within HE and in non-academic contexts particularly. This article summarizes findings from research into the impact perceptions of managers’ abilities to display Emotional Intelligence (EI) has on the wellbeing, attitudes and performance of staff within the context of a professional services team in one English university. It found perceptions of managers’ EI could be a powerful influence on team members’ mental health, including stress and anxiety. Furthermore, when managers were viewed as being Emotionally Intelligent, staff reported this significantly impacted their motivation and could lead to tangible improvements in core areas of job performance, including commitment, flexibility and discretionary effort. It recommends Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) consider placing greater emphasis on developing understanding of EI throughout their workforce while also building capacity in its practice amongst current and prospective managers.
The proliferation of Web 2.0 platforms that aim to facilitate social action, often connected to international development or environmental sustainability, has contributed to the ongoing popularisation of development. In this article, I argue that it has resulted in the digitally-enabled constitution of everyday humanitarians, who are everyday people supportive of poverty alleviation. Kiva.org, a US-based online microlending platform that invites everyday humanitarians to make US$25 loans to Kiva entrepreneurs around the world, is a prime site to study these processes. I show how Kiva cultivates supporters through the mediated production of affective investments, which are financial, social and emotional commitments to distant others. This happens through the design of an affective architecture which in turn generates financial and spatial mediations. While these result in microloans and attendant sentiments of affinity, they also lead to financial clicktivism and connections that obscures the asymmetries and riskscapes resulting from Kiva’s microlending work.
In this chapter, we focus on the intertwining of the local and the digital in environmental communication. We interrogate the local in terms of place, and take a retrospective look at our discipline to review if, and how, the geographical scale and social interactivity enhanced by digital media have transformed how we, as researchers and practitioners, communicate the environment. This exercise begins with the birth of modern environmental consciousness during the 1960s and concludes at the current juncture. We adopt a wave metaphor to tease out major shifts over this period, exploring the dialectics between geographical scale and social interconnectivity. To understand these changes, we begin to unpack key concepts of ‘the local’ and ‘the digital’ in conjunction with ‘the global’ and ‘place’. Our observations, while not exhaustive, acknowledge the growth of digital media use and its impacts on environmental communication practice and scholarship. Here, we identify both stability and change, tempering our enthusiasm for the digital with the caveat that inequalities in power, wealth and position persist. We are thus reluctant to announce a ‘digital turn’ in the field, identifying instead the need for more critical approaches capable of engaging with the wider consequences of this changing media landscape. In this volume, during a third wave of environmental communication, where local places meet digital networks, we present 11 investigations conducted around the globe that explore these intersections.
In this paper, we make a case for bringing energy geography into closer dialogue with emotional geography, and argue that doing so has the potential to greatly improve our understanding of energy systems and their intersection with everyday life, bringing essential but often overlooked aspects into view. We draw on research carried out as part of an arts and humanities-based project in South Wales (UK), a region once dominated by coal extraction. We present and discuss material from sixteen oral histories recorded with long-standing members of the village of Ynysybwl. Reading their accounts through the lens of emotional-affective constructs reveals not only participants’ emotions about aspects of energy production and consumption, but also the atmospheres and affects arising within and out of the energy system. This brings to light the affectual agency of the energy system as an infrastructure assemblage and its role in everyday production of space. Related to this, it surfaces essential aspects of experiences of energy system change. We argue that recognising and exploring affect and emotion is crucial for energy geography as it continues to explore the functionings of energy systems, and energy transitions.
Although the psychologist's own emotional management is an integral part of psychological therapy, it is often assumed rather than discussed; the “feeling rules” for the profession are unarticulated. This research explores psychologists' accounts of emoting within the therapeutic relationship to explore the profession's norms and expectations for emotional expression and to look critically at their function. We use the affective practice theory of emotion to consider how emotions come to be patterned within the frames set by the occupational identity of the psychologist. Through analysing transcripts from interviews with practicing psychologists, we produce accounts of three interpretative repertoires and associated subject positions. We consider how psychologists have come to construct their emotions in dilemmatic ways and how this construction of emotions is part of what demarcates them as a social group.
This article provides an interpretation the film Wolf Warrior II in the geohistorical context of the Chinese Dream, which is advocated by China’s President Xi Jinping, and considers the psychological domains that produce a new national subject. Focusing on the emotional energy of pride articulated in the film, this article shows that it constitutes the most essential emotional element in the formation of contemporary Chinese nationalism. We argue that the film interpellates the desiring subject for participation in a nationalist position that is locked in binary opposition with the West. We elucidate the emotional politics of pride by comparing the films produced in the eras of Mao and Deng, and we conclude that the emerging national subjectivity is a psychic transformation and reinvention of previous nationalist fantasies in the new context.
This article attempts to understand the subject formation of Chinese peasant workers by exploring the emotional dynamics of their struggle for social security, in particular, the new political possibilities created by emotional forces, and the complex ways they experience and articulate the distinctive kind of emotional politics that binds peasant workers with the state in their co-production of emotionally charged power relations, identities, and subjectivities. It formulates an analytical framework that explores the emotional politics of fear that plays out in the context of economic restructuring. In contemporary China, the conflict triggered by social insurance contributions has become a component of the ensuing social crisis, where many protest events are triggered by widespread outrage at the violation of legal rights to social insurance and other welfare security. This research focuses on the struggle of a group of peasant workers at a UNIQLO supplier in Shenzhen, exploring how their fears for the future are constituted, and how their emotional feelings of insecurity motivate collective action and reconfigure their emotional identity and subjectivity in the face of extreme risk. Informed by a relational understanding of emotions, this paper investigates the complex ways in which the proliferation of fear, as a result of an anticipated pain in the future, articulates the process of subject-making in the face of increasing instability and precarity. The study attempts to demonstrate the centrality of fear for China’s sociopolitical order and the radical action of labor resistance. © 2019
Political emotion has become one of the most significant components of the ensuing crisis in Hong Kong since it was taken over by China in 1997. By focusing on the highly controversial film Ten Years which was awarded the best film at the 35th Hong Kong Film Awards but heavily criticized for its poor artistic value and intense political implications, this article explores a range of affective cultural practices of fear generated by the film and their social effects on Hong Kong’s post-Umbrella movement era. Informed by the perspective of critical cultural studies, the article examines how this political film offers a site of political intervention through which to perform the politics of fear. The article further illustrates how such emotional politics engages with subject formation in the changing political context, and how it produces a site of political intervention against China. Moreover, the article also elaborates what possible dilemma may be evoked by such politics of fear in relation to Hong Kong’s nativism.
The recent explosion of post-apocalyptic visions of zombie outbreaks, plague, and bio-engineered super viruses reveals the preoccupation that exists about the potential for future disaster and its link to our conceptions of health, the body, and the public good. Born from this same historical conjuncture, The New York State Public Health Manual: A Guide for Attorneys, Judges, and Public Health Professionals,
published in 2011, outlines the powers of the state of New York during a time of catastrophe; i.e. plague, outbreak, natural disaster. This particular legal guide demonstrates a current manifestation of biopower and the affective potential States hope to capture and control that emanate from the collision and interaction of bodies. States harness affect through various ways, and in this particular study, through a text that mobilizes fear and the ever-present potential of a threat, ultimately justifying draconian social measures in the name of “public safety”. Written texts provide a rich context in which to critique and better situate State policies within larger frameworks of discipline and control. States and bodies are inextricably connected to each other, and analyzing public policies help better contextualize these links specifically.
Schools in many countries have been subject to a continuing series of externally-initiated reforms over the last two decades. These reforms are widely reported to have resulted in increased bureaucracy, scope and intensity of work, external surveillance, and changes in the nature of teachers’ professional orientation to work, which consequently challenged existing professional identities to comply with ‘performativity’ agendas. Given the challenges and pressure to respond to these increasingly functionalist expectations and demands, in this chapter, I examine associations between teachers’ agency, emotional wellbeing, working contexts, and resilience, as key components of their sense of professional identity, professionalism, and perceived effectiveness.
Based on Raymond Williams’s concept of ‘structures of feeling’, this chapter argues that football writing channels subjective emotion into social feeling. Football fandom is a sensual experience, and it is again and again narrated as nostalgic recollections of said experiences. As the spaces of these experiences have become increasingly regulated, football fans’ discontent is often articulated via smells, tastes or sounds of the football ground. New Football Writing therefore frequently signifies differences between pre- and post-Taylor football by emphasising olfactory or auditory impressions. The first half of this chapter critically discusses Williams’s concept and its merits for analysing football fiction, while the second half applies this concept to the study of how our five senses interact with the football ground.
This article discusses the emotions and cultural politics within domestic work contexts involving employers and migrant domestic workers in Macau. Since Macau was transferred back to China from Portugal in 1999, the Macau SAR government has pursued a neoliberal economic policy that emphasizes economic growth. With a revitalized economy boosted by casino revenues, thousands of migrant workers have moved to Macau to take advantage of new employment opportunities. Based on first-hand interviews with migrant domestic workers and employers in Macau, this paper examines how emotions are motivated and articulated within the affective interactions between employers and Migrant Domestic Workers (MDWs). This includes how employers’ emotions of fear and disgust towards MDWs contribute to the creation of an MDW population as a feared and inferior “other,” and how such affective operations reinforces the existing hegemonic dominance of naming and legitimizing the exploitation of MDWs. Meanwhile, in the production of domesticity in the home, this paper explores how emotions such as emotional numbness and disgust experienced by the MDWs make affective negotiations and contestation possible, and generate disobedience and resistance to the disciplines and controls imposed upon them. This article also investigates how such emotions, acting as a kind of intervention, operate within the production of specific subjectivities and identities that MDWs want to claim for themselves.
In this article, I argue that we are witnessing a new phase or ‘theory turn’ in the field of educational leadership. These more critical perspectives in the field of educational leadership have typically been marginalised by the larger body of orthodox approaches due to a perceived lack of focus on best practice and ‘what works’ discourses, and especially in recent years with the rise of the school effectiveness and improvement movement. However, critical perspectives in educational leadership constitute an essential and vibrant part of educational leadership scholarship and discourse. Drawing on Michel Foucault's notion of discourse, through this article, I examine how critical perspectives have been constituted historically, with some of the main themes of research. This foregrounding also highlights a number of limitations with more orthodox and hegemonic leadership discourses. I identify a number of key writers in the field and situate them in the current theory turn, that is, an emphasis of theoretically informed research that have been prolific over the last 5–10 years.
In this chapter, the authors investigate the social skills that school principals ought to exhibit in order to be more effective in the complex environment that characterizes modern schools. Thus, the main aim of this chapter is to provide an in-depth exploration of those social skills that are needed in order for school principals to become more flexible to external and internal requirements and to balance the need for change with stability. Therefore, an attempt is made to investigate the linkages between school leadership, emotional intelligence, political skill, and teachers' job satisfaction, as well as to examine the correlation of emotional and political skills of principals with the job satisfaction of their teachers.
In this chapter, the authors investigate the social skills that school principals ought to exhibit in order to be more effective in the complex environment that characterizes modern schools. Thus, the main aim of this chapter is to provide an in-depth exploration of those social skills that are needed in order for school principals to become more flexible to external and internal requirements and to balance the need for change with stability. Therefore, an attempt is made to investigate the linkages between school leadership, emotional intelligence, political skill, and teachers' job satisfaction, as well as to examine the correlation of emotional and political skills of principals with the job satisfaction of their teachers.
Surveying recent developments in management and work culture, computing and social media, and science and psychology, this article speculates on the concept of emotional extraction. Emotional extraction is defined in two ways. One iteration involves the transfer of emotional resources from one individual or group to another, such as that which occurs in the work of caring for others, but which also increasingly occurs in the work of producing new technology, such as emotionally aware computers. A second instance of emotional extraction entails the use of emotion knowledge – or theories about emotions, such as emotional intelligence – to generate conclusions or predictions about human behaviour. Emotional extraction in service work, management, marketing, social media, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience are discussed. ‘Mining the mind’ focuses in particular on emotional extraction that enhances both productivity and predictability, in turn tracing how emotionally extractive sites are implicated within the production and hierarchical valuation of difference – especially racial and gendered, but also neural difference – in everyday life. The article aims to offer scholars in cultural studies, as well as critical race theory, feminist theory, and critical disability studies, ways to think about this newly intensifying resource extraction and the intersections of culture, capital, and human experience that such extraction indexes and makes possible.
This book attempts to explore the “private sphere
” of minority cultures through exploring their affective energies and expressions, in conjunction to analyzing the broad ideological conditions of inter-ethnic relations in various Asian cities. It originates from a research grant received from the Hong Kong
government. Taking the important cue of the “affective turn
” in cultural theory over the past twenty years or so, the various contributors of this book raise broadly an overarching question: what are the representations of affective/emotional energies and intensities surrounding the ethnic figures/strangers in cultural production, urban spaces, and social discourses? In Asia, there is little attention paid to the minorities’ own sense of subjecthood
, such as their construction and articulation of self-understanding formed through lived experiences, sensibilities, emotions, sentiments, empathy
, and even tempers and moods. Social misunderstanding, not to mention stereotyping, mystification, and discrimination, often stems from a neglect of the surprising and enlivening texture of minorities’ emotional world
.
Many of those working within or along with the so-called affective turn in the humanities do so following the Deleuzian (cf. 1997) understanding of affect as a force or kind of intensity to be thought separate from processes of signification or discursive construction, indeed, as something that fundamentally disturbs or challenges the stability of such structures of meaning. As such, Brian Massumi and Steven Shaviro both emphasize the distinction between affect and emotion, by insisting that, whereas emotions are meaningful and differentiated signifiers of affect, thus domesticated and segregated by the symbolic system (Massumi, 2002, p. 28), affect itself is ‘primary, non-conscious, asubjective or presub-jective, asignifying, unqualified and intensive’ (Shaviro, 2009, p. 3). A focus on the affective dimension of politics can therefore be part of the attempt to understand the nonsensical, bodily irrational, or in a sense ‘un-serious’ dimension of contemporary politics. This is a dimension which often escapes theories and methodologies focused on examining processes of ‘making sense’.
In this chapter, the authors investigate the social skills that school principals ought to exhibit in order to be more effective in the complex environment that characterizes modern schools. Thus, the main aim of this chapter is to provide an in-depth exploration of those social skills that are needed in order for school principals to become more flexible to external and internal requirements and to balance the need for change with stability. Therefore, an attempt is made to investigate the linkages between school leadership, emotional intelligence, political skill, and teachers' job satisfaction, as well as to examine the correlation of emotional and political skills of principals with the job satisfaction of their teachers.
This remarkable collection challenges traditional ways of thinking about the relationship between gender and genre, understanding their meeting as a mutually transformative encounter. Responding to postmodernist conceptions of genre and postfeminist theories of gender and sexuality, these essays move beyond the limits of representation. Testing new thinking about genre, gender, and sexuality against closely analyzed films, they explore generic convention as putting into play what our culture makes of us, while finding in genre's repetitions infinite possibilities of cross-generic, cross-gender, cross-sex permutation. At the same time the aesthetic and emotional dimensions of gender and sexuality emerge as elements fueling the dramatic worlds of film genres, producing in the encounter new gendered perceptions, affects, and effects. Recognizing the intensifying transnational context of film production and responding to postcolonial perspectives, this volume includes essays that explore the transformational transactions between gender and genre in the meeting between world-circulating Hollywood generic practices and American independent, European, Indian, and Hong Kong cinemas. Such revised concepts of genre and gender question taken-for-granted relationships between authorship and genre, between center and periphery, and between feminism and generic filmmaking. They consequently rethink the gendering of genres, filmmakers, and their audiences. Contributors are Ira Bhaskar, Steven Cohan, Luke Collins, Pam Cook, Lucy Fischer, Jane Gaines, Christine Gledhill, Derek Kane-Meddock, E. Ann Kaplan, Samiha Matin, Katie Model, E. Deidre Pribram, Vicente Rodriguez Ortega, Adam Segal, Chris Straayer, Yvonne Tasker, Deborah Thomas, and Xiangyang Chen. © 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. All rights reserved.
In troubled societies narratives about the past tend to be partial and explain a conflict from narrow perspectives that justify the national self and condemn, exclude and devalue the 'enemy' and their narrative. Through a detailed analysis, Teaching Contested Narratives reveals the works of identity, historical narratives and memory as these are enacted in classroom dialogues, canonical texts and school ceremonies. Presenting ethnographic data from local contexts in Cyprus and Israel, and demonstrating the relevance to educational settings in countries which suffer from conflicts all over the world, the authors explore the challenges of teaching narratives about the past in such societies, discuss how historical trauma and suffering are dealt with in the context of teaching, and highlight the potential of pedagogical interventions for reconciliation. The book shows how the notions of identity, memory and reconciliation can perpetuate or challenge attachments to essentialized ideas about peace and conflict.
Since the mid-1990s, affect has become central to the social sciences and humanities. Debates abound over how to conceptualise affect, and how to understand the interrelationships between affective life and a range of contemporary political transformations. In Encountering Affect, Ben Anderson explores why understanding affect matters and offers one account of affective life that hones in on the different ways in which affects are ordered. Intervening in debates around non-representational theories, he argues that affective life is always-already ‘mediated’-the never finished product of apparatuses, encounters and conditions. Through a wide range of examples including dread-debility-dependency in torture, ordinary hopes, and precariousness, Anderson shows the significance of affect for understanding life today.
All young people have the capacity to learn and to enjoy learning; they do not 'fail school', rather, schools fail them. The teachers, workers and students who have shared their stories provide significant insights into how we might change this situation, and the book will be invaluable reading for postgraduates and researchers in the fields of education, the sociology of education, school reform and social work.
In Indonesia, light skin color has been desirable throughout recorded history. Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race explores Indonesia's changing beauty ideals and traces them to a number of influences: first to ninth-century India and some of the oldest surviving Indonesian literary works; then, a thousand years later, to the impact of Dutch colonialism and the wartime occupation of Japan; and finally, in the post-colonial period, to the popularity of American culture. The book shows how the transnational circulation of people, images, and ideas have shaped and shifted discourses and hierarchies of race, gender, skin color, and beauty in Indonesia. The author employs "affect" theories and feminist cultural studies as a lens through which to analyze a vast range of materials, including the Old Javanese epic poem Ramayana, archival materials, magazine advertisements, commercial products, and numerous interviews with Indonesian women. The book offers a rich repertoire of analytical and theoretical tools that allow readers to rethink issues of race and gender in a global context and understand how feelings and emotions-Western constructs as well as Indian, Javanese, and Indonesian notions such as rasa and malu-contribute to and are constitutive of transnational and gendered processes of racialization. Saraswati argues that it is how emotions come to be attached to certain objects and how they circulate that shape the "emotionscape" of white beauty in Indonesia. Her ground-breaking work is a nuanced theoretical exploration of the ways in which representations of beauty and the emotions they embody travel geographically and help shape attitudes and beliefs toward race and gender in a transnational world.
A feminist is a woman who does not allow anyone to think in her place.’ Michele Le Doeuff Spanning nearly two decades (1980-1996), the six sections of this reader investigate the debates which have most characterized feminist theory to date. Including articles such as ‘Pornography and Fantasy’, ‘The Body and Cinema’, ‘Nature as Female’, and ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs’, the extracts in Feminisms explore thoughts on sexuality as a domain of exploration, the visual representation of women, what being a feminist means, and why feminists are increasingly involved in political struggles to negotiate the context and meaning of technological development. With writing by bell hooks, Alice Jardine, and Andrea Dworkin, this multi-cultural Oxford Reader reflects the dynamic nature of feminist debates and the genuine diversity within current feminist theory.
Faced with the seemingly enormous difficulty of representing 'others', many theorists working in Cultural Studies have been turning to themselves as a way of speaking about the personal. In Sexing the Self Elspeth Probyn tackles this question of the sex of the self, an issue of vital importance to feminists and yet neglected by feminist theory until now, to suggest that there are ways of using our gendered selves in order to speak and theorize non-essential but embodied selves. Arguing for 'feminisms with attitude', Sexing the Self ranges across a wide range of theoretical strands, drawing upon a body of literature from early Cultural Studies to Anglo-American feminist literary criticism, from 'identity debates' to Foucault's 'care of the self'.
The central argument of this book is that emotion is meaningful and meaning is emotional. The modern world is forcing us to understand emotion in order to cope with new problems such as road rage and epidemic levels of depression, as well as age-old problems such as homicide, genocide and racial tension. This book draws on scholarly research to address, explain and legitimize the role that emotion plays in everyday interaction and in many of the pressing social, moral, and cultural issues that we face today. © Maison des Sciences de l'Homme and Cambridge University Press 1999.
Within cultural studies, there has been little detailed investigation of emotions as part of everyday personal, cultural and political life. In this article, we argue the need for a cultural studies approach to emotions that focuses in detail on: how emotions are constituted, experienced and managed; what is culturally permissible for specific categories of subjects to express as part of their constitution within contemporary power relations; and the techniques and contexts in and through which the emotional subject is produced. We develop an analytical framework based on a critical review of, first, Michel Foucault's analyses of modern power, discourse and the formation of subjectivity (focusing on `technologies of power' and `technologies of self'), second, Alison Jaggar's conceptualization of `emotional hegemony' and, third, Raymond Williams's conceptualization of `structure of feeling'. We apply this framework to specific examples to demonstrate how emotions might participate in the reproduction of culture, subjectivity and power relations. Here, we discuss the unexpected and extensive public outpourings of grief following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and media and government responses to these. We also look at the ways in which diaries/day planners may be used to provide a structure not only for appointments, but also for feelings — registering and managing individual emotional states — and self-construction. In each of these examples, we consider how `the emotions', as a category of experience, might be implicated in negotiations of the (hierarchically arranged) public/private divide.
This paper argues that, by construing emotion as epistemologically subversive, the Western tradition has tended to obscure the vital role of emotion in the construction of knowledge. The paper begins with an account of emotion that stresses its active, voluntary, and socially constructed aspects, and indicates how emotion is involved in evaluation and observation. It then moves on to show how the myth of dispassionate investigation has functioned historically to undermine the epistemic authority of women as well as other social groups associated culturally with emotion. Finally, the paper sketches some ways in which the emotions of underclass groups, especially women, may contribute to the development of a critical social theory.
Bringing It All Back Home: Essays on Cultural StudiesThe power of feeling. locating emotions in culture
- L Grossberg
- Nc Durham
- J Harding
- D Pribram
Grossberg, L. (1997) Bringing It All Back Home: Essays on Cultural Studies. Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Harding, J. and Pribram, D. (2002) 'The power of feeling. locating emotions in culture', European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 407Á/426.
Communicating Emotion. Social, Moral and Cultural Processes Sexing the Self: Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities, and Cultural TheoryIn whose voice? The drama of Raymond Williams
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- Exploration
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Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review
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Williams, R. (1979) Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review, NLB, London. O N E M O T I O N S 8 8 3 Downloaded by [University of Kent] at 10:30 05 November 2014