Berserk!: Anger and the Charismatic Populism of Donald Trump

This paper explores the role anger plays in charismatic movements. Although scholars have long recognized the importance of emotions to the etiology of charisma, they tend to focus on mutual affection among leaders and followers, paying less attention to how anger—and particularly its subspecies, ressentiment—patterns charismatic power. Drawing on literature from political science, populism research, and the cultural sociology of charisma, we argue that ressentiment, which is associated with self-disvalue and an invidious need to blame outsiders, is key to theorizing the emotional energy that charisma delivers to revolutionary upheaval. The Weberian source for the intervention is his lesser known concept of ‘berserk-charisma’. Reorienting the focus of charisma research to account for its aggressive, ‘outward’ dimension has the benefit of drawing us closer to the vision Weber had for its social-historical relevance. We demonstrate our insights using the case of charismatic/populist support for Trump.

Managing the Emotional Intensities of Gifted Students with Mindfulness Practices

The emotional intensities of gifted students affect not only their learning, but also the way they live and see the world. This article examines the Theory of Positive Disintegration of Dabrowski to explore the inner world of the gifted. The five levels of development and five overexcitabilities of Dabrowski represent an abundance of physical, sensual, creative, intellectual, and emotional energy that cause inner turmoil but can result in creative endeavors. The benefits of mindfulness practices to meeting the emotional needs of gifted students are presented with examples of deep listening, gratitude, and storytelling as mindfulness practices. A culminating activity of storytelling illustrates the integration of deep listening and gratitude and its effect on the sense of identity of gifted students.

Connective Memories

This chapter illustrates how families constructed recollections of spiritual intimacy that had the potential to shape new experiences of intimacy upon their return home. Drawing from Randall Collins’s work on the character and function of the emotional energy at work in ritual life, it discusses the emotional weight of ritual memories, symbolic recollections of Camino spiritual intimacy that had the potential to change family relationships and identity. It describes three types of connective memories family members talked about as significant: quiet memories (stories and sensory memories that are generally more private and shared only with intimate others), digital memories (photographs and other media forms of constructed memory), and material memories (printed photographs, symbolic objects such as jewelry, a pilgrim’s stamped credentials, and Camino tattoos). The chapter also discusses distancing memories, negative ritual emotional memories with the potential to sever feelings of family/group identity and solidarity with others and nature.

Heart, Mind and Body: #NoMorePage3 and the Replenishment of Emotional Energy

Emotional energy is key to disruptive institutional work, but we still know little about what it is, and importantly, how it is refuelled. This empirical paper presents an in-depth case study of ‘No More Page 3’ (#NMP3), an Internet-based feminist organization which fought for the removal of sexualized images of women from a UK newspaper. Facing online misogyny, actors engage in ‘emotional energy replenishment’ to sustain this disruptive institutional work amid emotional highs and lows. We introduce ‘affective embodiment’ – the corporeal and emotional experiences of the institution – as providing emotional energy in relation to disruptive institutional work. Affective embodiment is surfaced through alignment or misalignment with others’ embodied experiences, and this mediates how actors replenish emotional energy. Alignment with others’ embodied experiences, often connected to online abuse, means emotional energy is replenished through ‘affective solidarity’ (movement towards the collective). Misalignment, surfaced through tensions within the movement, means actors seek replenishment through ‘sensory retreat’ (movement away from the collective). This study contributes to theorization on institutional work and emotional energy by recentring the importance of the body alongside emotions, as well as offering important lessons for online organizing.

Mood Classification of Balinese Songs with the K-Means Clustering Method Based on the Audio-Content Feature

Bali is a province that has a diversity of arts and can not shunt from songs that come from Bali. Music in Balinese songs has a unique character, both in the variations of the tone that builds up a song and the lyrics contained in a Balinese song. Research on the classification of mood with energy and valence features of a song is often done, especially on western songs. Every music that is thought out has emotional energy that radiates and powerfully connects with human psychology. This research wants to explore whether the features used to classify western songs can also classify Balinese songs, which are rich in the sound of musical instruments according to the tastes of the Balinese themselves. Classification of songs is essential, considering that music is related to specific emotions and moods in humans. In this study, the mood classification of Balinese songs is performed using the Spotify API feature, namely energy and valence. Classification using K-means clustering based on energy and valence features is compared with the song mood data from ten respondents and produces the highest accuracy of 32%.

Sociology of a disciplinary bifurcation: Bruno Latour and his move from philosophy/theology to sociology in the early 1970s

This article analyzes Bruno Latour’s transition from theology to sociology between the late 1960s and the mid-1970s. The study cross-analyzes the philosophical field of the 1970s with the progress of interaction rituals specific to disciplinary integration. By examining his Master’s degree in philosophy and a lecture carried out during his thesis, plus the report of his stay in Ivory Coast, it is possible to identify several stages of a disciplinary bifurcation. First anchored to the metaphysical sector of the philosophical field, Latour – like his masters André Malet, Jean Brun and Claude Bruaire – tried to dissolve the boundary between philosophy and theology. Nourished with Rudolf Bultmann’s hermeneutics – which generates a particularly powerful emotional energy –, the young philosopher drew from the new theological resources provided by Vatican II Council the instruments for a conversion to sociology. Before that, following in the Council’s focus on prayer as the very core of the practice of believers, he had tried to turn prayer into an adequate mode of litany for analyzing texts. He then drew on the post-colonial opening of Vatican II to engage in the field of sociology, the Council having exhausted classical metaphysical questions. His discovery of the effects of colonial domination also played a fundamental role in mobilizing once again some emotional energy. Latour’s disciplinary reclassification just before beginning his laboratory ethnography in California is based on a reassessment of the epistemological possibilities born from the theological innovations of Vatican II.