Una aproximación a las emociones en los equipos deportivos (An approach to emotions in sports teams)

Este trabajo se adentra en la convivencia de equipos deportivos pertenecientes a disciplinas que implican contacto con el equipo rival en su práctica, a partir del análisis empírico procedente de 30 entrevistas en profundidad con entrenadores/as y deportistas de equipos de la Comunidad de Madrid de las disciplinas de fútbol, baloncesto y rugby. En un acercamiento feminista desde la sociología del deporte, se señalan las formas de organización de los equipos deportivos, visibilizando las estrictas jerarquías y sistemas de disciplinamiento normalizados, incidiendo en ciertas prácticas exacerbadas que pueden llegar a justificarse en el contexto. A partir de aquí, se realiza un análisis a través de las especiales sensibilidades del deporte, incidiendo en el estudio de las emociones y las dinámicas afectivas en estos equipos deportivos, reflexionando acerca de su misión como sustento de sistemas que perpetúan fragilidades que darán pie a ciertas vulnerabilidades en el espacio, especialmente hacia las mujeres. Abstract. This work analyze the coexistence of sports teams of disciplines that involve contact with the rival team in their practice, based on the empirical analysis from 30 interviews with coaches and athletes of teams from the Community of Madrid of the soccer, basketball and rugby disciplines. In a feminist approach from the sociology of sport, the forms of organization of sports teams are pointed out, making visible the strict hierarchies and normalized disciplinary systems, influencing certain exacerbated practices that can be justified in the context. From here, an analysis is carried out through the special sensitivities of sport that affects the study of emotions and affective dynamics in these sports teams, reflecting on their mission as support for systems that perpetuate fragility that will give rise to certain vulnerabilities in space, especially against women.

A Cognitive Perspective on Autofictional Writing, Texts, and Reading

This chapter argues for the necessity of a cognitive and holistic approach to autofiction—an approach that considers textual signposts in combination with the cognitive-affective dynamics of a text’s production and reception. On the basis of empirical data in the form of writers’ self-reports and psychological studies into the differences between fictional and factual reading modes, the chapter argues for and offers definitions of autofictional writing and autofictional reading modes. Their potential affordances and effects both for authors and readers are illustrated in relation to three works, which exhibit different degrees of fictionality: Philip Roth’s The Facts (1988), Olivia Laing’s Crudo (2018), and Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014).

Within and Against Racial Segregation

The pandemic brought migrant farm workers into the limelight once again, as has happened repeatedly in the last three decades, in Italy as in many other parts of the world. Here I examine how intersecting and sometimes conflicting discourses and interventions, that have this biopolitically conceived population as their object, decide upon these subjects’ worthiness of attention, care, and sympathy through criminalizing, victimizing, and humanitarian registers. I reflect on some of the affective dynamics that sustain both the governmental operations through which these populations were (sought to be) managed and reactions against them from a situated perspective, as an accomplice to many of the forms of struggle in which migrant farm workers have engaged in the last decade in Italy. The stage for many such occurrences is what I have elsewhere defined as the “encampment archipelago” that many such workers, and particularly those who migrate from across West Africa, inhabit—labor or asylum-seeker camps, but also slums or isolated, derelict buildings, and various hybrid, in-between spaces among which people circulate.

A Mutualism, Affiliation and Status Seeking (MASS) Framework of Fundamental Affective Dynamics and their Survival Benefits

Primates have developed a unique set of complex drives for successful group living, yet theorists rarely contemplate their taxonomy and how such drives relate to affective dynamics fundamental for group success. Affective dynamics and drive fulfillment exert mutual influence on one another, ultimately collectively promoting or undermining survival. We first identify six core benefits of group living common among both humans and other animals, and from this foundation we propose three broad social drives that have evolved to preserve or enhance group living benefits: (i) Mutualism comprises cooperation, reciprocity, trust, and fairness; (ii) Affiliation comprises assimilation and belonging, whereby one aims to fit into the group through adherence to group norms and ideologies; (iii) Status-Seeking is represented by a drive to build one’s value in the group and acquire differential access to mates and other resources. We identify affective dynamics that facilitate each social drive: (i) Reactive flexibility involves qualitative shifts in affect in response to shifting goals, which facilitates mutualism; (ii) Affective synchrony is the reproduction of another individual’s emotions in oneself and facilitates social affiliation; (iii) Regulatory flexibility facilitates status-seeking through a broad repertoire of regulatory approaches during strategic behavioral pursuits. Finally, we posit that fulfilling Mutualism, Affiliation, and Status-Seeking (MASS) drives enhances the benefits of social living and supports development of fundamental affective dynamics.

Postimperial Melancholia and Brexit

The lead-up to and the aftermath of the 2016 referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership in the European Union have been characterized by particular psychic reactions and affective states: shock, perplexity, anxiety, guilt, paranoia, anger, depression, delusion, and manic elation. The debate over Brexit has played out largely in an affective register. Scholars and journalists in search of explanations have reached for psychological concepts such as amnesia and have cited feelings, specifically nostalgia and anger, as major factors. Paul Gilroy’s Postcolonial Melancholia provides a more useful analytical framework for constructing histories of Brexit beyond the usual narratives of reversal, unexpected rupture, or liberation, and for unearthing the psychic attachments and affective dynamics underlying such narratives. Gilroy’s conception of postimperial melancholia allows us to see the links between Brexit, anti-immigrant racism, and the obsession with national identity, and the unacknowledged and ongoing legacies of empire and decolonization in contemporary Britain.

A mother’s hope in the midst of existential immobility from state and stigma

The article is situated ethnographically in households on the main social housing estate in Harpurhey, North Manchester, England. It explores the affective dynamics of motherhood and imaginations of the future with a backdrop of prolonged government disinvestment. We follow the experiences of a mother and her son as they deal with moments of uncertainty and attempt to imagine and prepare for his future free from dependence on state welfare. Considering that parenting marks time in the most intimate of ways and it confronts parents with the passing of time in terms of biological “growth” that sequences time for us, this article addresses how and at what points dependence on the state, over time, reconfigures the affective dynamics of motherhood and imaginations of familial dependencies into the future.

Affective Dynamics of Excitable Speech in Milo Rau’s Breiviks Erklärung and Mitleid

Robert Walter-Jochum reflects on the successes and failures of Milo Rau’s stage explorations of hate speech, investigating what Judith Butler terms “restaging and resignifying.” Walter-Jochum references two of Rau’s performances: Breivik’s Statement and Compassion: The History of the Machine Gun. Both pieces highlight the hypocrisy and similarities of rhetoric from right-wing terrorists and liberals with seemingly good intentions. Breivik’s Statement restages hate speech with an actor of color inverting the meaning of the speech, while Compassion restages a woman of color refugee reflecting on her childhood, while a white woman contemplates her time volunteering in the Congo. Walter-Jochum dissects each monologue, analyzing deeper meaning in Rau’s projects.

Taking Situatedness Seriously. Embedding Affective Intentionality in Forms of Living

Situated approaches to affectivity overcome an outdated individualistic perspective on emotions by emphasizing the role embodiment and environment play in affective dynamics. Yet, accounts which provide the conceptual toolbox for analyses in the philosophy of emotions do not go far enough. Their focus falls (a) on the present situation, abstracting from the broader historico-cultural context, and (b) on adopting a largely functionalist approach by conceiving of emotions and the environment as resources to be regulated or scaffolds to be used. In this paper, I argue that we need to take situatedness seriously: We need (a) to acknowledge that emotions are not situated in undetermined “contexts” but in concrete socio-culturally specific practices referring to forms of living; and (b) to agree that not only are context and emotions used for the sake of something else but also that the meaning-disclosive dimension of affective intentionality is structured by situatedness as well. To do so, I offer a multidimensional approach to situatedness that integrates the biographical and cultural dimensions of contextualization within the analysis of situated affective dynamics. This approach suggests that humans affectively disclose meaning (together) which is at once product and producer of specific forms of living – and these are always already subjects of (politically relevant) critique.