“Making My Prayer with Joy”

Drawing on recent literature in the history of emotions, this article describes Paul’s epistolary prayers as emotional practices that aim to harmonize and amplify the emotions of Paul and his addressees, particularly shared joy and longing. In Philippians and 1 Thessalonians, philophronetic topoi and the emotional norms they encode provide the basic cultural logic undergirding these prayers’ affective work. Compensating more or less successfully for the somatic signals otherwise constitutive of collective emotions, Paul’s explicit evocation of presumptively shared emotion nourishes the fantasy of presence and thus the rewards of common feeling, which include emotional sustenance for Paul himself and, if his letter is successful, a renewed feeling of solidarity among his addressees that reinforces their shared loyalty to Paul and his Lord.

Drizzling sympathy: Ideal victims and flows of sympathy in Swedish courts

By connecting sociological perspectives on sympathy with the concept of ‘ideal victims’, this article examines how sympathy forms and informs legal thought and practices in relation to victim status in Swedish courts. In its broadest sense, sympathy can be understood as an understanding and care for someone else’s suffering and in many contexts victimization and sympathy are densely entangled. However, since ideals of objectivity and neutrality prevail in court, emotional norms are narrow and sympathy is met with suspicion. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Swedish courts, I argue that while sympathetic feelings are mostly backgrounded, they are still a central part of court proceedings and deliberations. The main findings suggest that prosecutors and victims’ counsel use ‘sympathy cues’ to evoke the judges’ concern for the complainants and to facilitate their empathic imagination of the complainant’s situation. In relation to this finding, judges engage in emotion work in order to not be affected by these sympathy cues. The study also shows that in encounters with ‘ideal victims’ who perform a playful resistance to their victimization, legal actors show sympathy more freely and accept moments of temporary relief from the normal interaction order in court.

Emotional Imperatives of Late Modern Society and their Possible Social Consequences

The purpose of this article is to examine the main “imperatives” of contemporary emotional culture, which may provide special research optics for a deeper understanding of late modern society. The author begins with a definition of emotional culture — based on the body of works in sociology of emotions — and identifies dominant emotional norms and their corresponding perceptions, which bear the nature of imperatives in people’s everyday experience and serve as an extension of social values. These emotional imperatives include rational control over emotions, a compulsive desire to be and look happy, avoiding negative feelings, individual guilt from any sort of failure in social life, grievance that takes the form of righteous indignation, and others. These “imperatives” are in some respect contradictory, reflecting different aspects of life, but generally subject to the logic of late modern society, and can have important implicit social consequences such as broken social ties, “chronic” feelings of depression and frustration, fatigue, bad moods, increased anxiety and fears and many other implicit consequences, such as the emergence of new forms of solidarity. As a result of global events and the resulting social crises, these imperatives may change, thereby allowing us to trace how people’s lived experiences are changing. The list of emotional imperatives is not by any means full, and the same goes for their description, but through the outlined emotional imperatives the author attempts to describe theoretically contemporary cultural configurations of lived experience through leading emotional norms.

The bad environmentalism of ‘nature is healing’ memes

What can memes teach us about shifting popular-cultural understandings of nature? While a certain form of environmentalism with proclivities for dour, self-righteous, sentimental, or apocalyptic tones is often taken to be hegemonic, Nicole Seymour argues that a more irreverent ‘low environmental culture’ should not be occluded. Humor and irony can serve as emotional registers for environmental media that provide openings for the emergence of playful environmentalisms perhaps more amenable to a diverse audience. Such ‘bad environmentalism’ mobilizes humor by transgressing the emotional norms of piety within environmentalism. This article deepens the concept of bad environmentalism through an examination of the emergence of ‘nature is healing’ memes during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Implicitly critical of nefarious arguments that the death-dealing pandemic would provide a ‘pause for nature’ and thus that ‘humans were the real virus’, the formal and easily reproduced ‘nature is healing’ genre subverts conventional understandings of ‘the natural’ as well as the naturalization of social order and political economy. In particular, I extend Seymour’s argument – and pop cultural studies of the environment – by parsing five modes through which the ‘nature is healing’ genre plays ironically on differing understandings of the natural. These are the out-of-place in nature; nature out-of-place; drawing attention to a naturalized social order; naturalizing social transformation; and absurdity in the natural world. Close attention to different modes of humor provides insight into the ambivalence of affect within ecological and political movements; ‘bad affect’ can, after all, produce careful and critical aesthetics. Such research demonstrates the utility of a widened and potentially counterhegemonic repertoire of affective responses to environmental and political crisis.

Taking leadership fashions seriously as a vehicle for leadership learning

Popularized and commercialized leadership ideas are often criticized as mere fashions that dumb down leadership discourse, research, and learning. By contrast, we take leadership fashions seriously as an important vehicle for individual and collective leadership learning. We extend the neo-institutional theory of management fashions to define leadership fashions as a process that constantly reconfigures the rational norms and expectations attached to leadership, and that elevates certain approaches as the best way to fulfill those norms and expectations. Combining Weber’s broad understanding of rationality with our own concept of affective rationality, we account for the many different instrumental, practical, moral, and sometimes deeply personal and emotional norms and expectations that drive the leadership fashion setting process. This approach contributes a theoretical foundation for understanding the sociological significance of leadership fashions, for exploring the leadership industries that produce and promote them, and for researching further the ways that leadership fashions and the leadership industries influence leadership research, learning, and practice.

Introduction

An ‘emotional ethic’ is a system of feelings and embodied actions informed by a set of moral principles. This chapter introduces this concept and explains why caritas, a form of grace that ensured that neighbourly love was moral and ethical, operated as an emotional ethic in early modern Europe. This Introduction to the monograph introduces the concept of caritas and how it underpinned several significant ideas of the period, and explores why we might think of it as an embodied ethic. It details the methodological underpinnings of an emotional ethic, noting its foundation in performance theory and association with other emotional norms, such as ‘emotional communities’ and ‘emotional regimes’. The remainder of the chapter introduces the case study of the lower-order Scottish community in the eighteenth century, the source material through which they are accessed (mainly legal records), and the broader historical context for the book.

Lediggangens spøgelse

The article traces the emotional history of unemployment through various analyses of British and American fiction: Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole (1933), John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Allan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and James Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late (1994). The article develops a concept of a specific literary form (the unemployment novel) and a parallel set of emotional norms (the genre of unemployment), which it defines as the constellation of feelings connected to unemployment.

Styles of Sincerity

Chapter 4 deals with whether emotions are real in the sense of “genuine,” drawing on historical and ethnographic material to discuss social processes of assessing sincerity. The way enthusiasm is performed plays a role in whether it is perceived as sincere (and thus believable), which in turns depends on emotional norms, very often unarticulated and therefore more of an aesthetic judgment. It explores the overlap between enthusiasm and sentimentalism as concepts and asks what kind of work these concepts do in discrediting actors and their convictions. Charismatics are accused of sentimentalism, enjoying the feeling of the feeling too much, whereas mainline Lutherans are viewed as “going through the motions” without any real feeling behind them. This chapter argues that these groups have different styles of sincerity, and that the conflict over whether the emotions of the “other” group are genuine allows us to see more clearly how sincerity must be analyzed as a performance, not as a state of mind. These performances are informed by both the Enlightened and Romantic ideologies in complex ways that are somewhat unexpected and inform sincere speech in contexts beyond the religious, such as TED talks and other inspirational rhetoric.

Consuming Fictions Part III

Further challenges to the idea that sui generis imaginings account for our affective responses to fiction are developed. The chapter then undertakes an extended analysis of the “paradox of fiction”—viz., the claim that it is irrational or inappropriate to respond emotionally to mere fictions—and proposes a novel solution. A number of theorists have held that special features of imagination play a role in resolving the paradox. It is argued that these proposals fail on their own terms and that the paradox can nevertheless be resolved in a way consistent with our emotional reactions to fiction being grounded in beliefs and desires. Coming to terms with the paradox requires both understanding why the “rug-pull” structure of the examples typically used to motivate it are disanalogous to our experience of fictions, and appreciating the specific emotional norms relevant to fiction-appreciation.

Feeling Revolution

Stalin-era cinema was a technology of emotional and affective education. The filmmakers of the period were called on to help forge the emotions and affects that befitted the New Soviet Person—ranging from happiness and victorious laughter to hatred for enemies. Feeling Revolution: Cinema, Genre, and the Politics of Affect under Stalin shows how the Soviet film industry’s efforts to find an emotionally resonant language that could speak to a mass audience came to centre on the development of a distinctively ‘Soviet’ genre system. Its case studies of specific film genres, including the production film, comedy, thriller, and melodrama, explore how the ‘genre rules’ established by Western and pre-revolutionary Russian cinema were rewritten in the context of new emotional settings. ‘Sovietizing’ audience emotions did not prove to be an easy task. The tensions, frustrations, and missteps of this process are outlined in this book with reference to a wide variety of primary sources, including the artistic council discussions of the Mosfil′m and Lenfil′m studios and the Ministry of Cinematography. Bringing the limitations of the Stalinist ideological project to light, Feeling Revolution reveals cinema’s capacity to contest the very emotional norms that it was entrusted with crafting.