Does It Feel the Same? Danish and Finnish Social Science and Humanities Doctoral Students’ Academic Emotions

Even if pursuing a doctorate is both emotionally challenging and rewarding, empirical research focusing on doctoral students’ academic emotions is limited. Therefore, in this study we have contributed to bridging the gap in the research on the doctoral experience by mapping the emotional landscape of doctoral experience. In addition, we have shed light on potential invariants and socio-cultural characteristics of the emotional landscape by doing a cross-country comparison between Danish and Finnish doctoral students. A total of 272 doctoral students (Danish: 145, Finnish: 127) from the field of humanities and social sciences responded to the Cross-cultural Doctoral Experience Survey. The data were both qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed, using a mixed methods approach. The results showed that the doctoral students experienced a wide range of both positive and negative emotions embedded in various activities of the doctoral experience, including supervision, scholarly community, doctoral research, development as a scholar and structures and resources. The results revealed some associations between the emotions that were experienced as well as differences between the countries.

De Quincey's Slowness

Much has been said about De Quincey's fascination with the speed and mobility of contemporary life. This essay argues that we need also to recognize an acute sense of slowness that develops alongside De Quincey's fascination with speed. Activities like walking and reading and the figure of the crocodile offer examples of slowness that complicate De Quincey's fixation with speed. Ultimately, this essay suggests that the fraught relationship between speed and slowness that colours De Quincey's experiences of media and mobility clarifies the emotional landscape of the ‘Confessions’, marked as it is by drawn-out affective experiences, including boredom, longing, and nostalgia.

The Emotional Landscape of Abelard ’s Planctus David super Saul et Ionatha

In Abelard’s Letter 16 addressed to ‘Héloise, sister to be revered in Christ and loved’, he refers to a set of six planctus or laments written in the voices of a number of Old Testament characters The last of these, Planctus 6, in which David laments for Saul and Jonathan, is probably the most famous and is the only one for which a reliable, original music setting survives. The laments are all in the first person and provide a deeply personal reflection on the tragic events which inspired them; they are virtuosic in language and almost shockingly intense in emotional range. This study examines Planctus 6 considering the link between Abelard’s language and the expression of specific emotions and, wherever possible, examines how music serves to intensify that expression.

The nature of paid work in the retirement years

Ever more people are in paid work following the age of state pension availability, and yet the experience of working in this phase of the late career has been little studied. We interviewed a purposive sample of 25 Swedish people in their mid- to late sixties and early seventies, many of whom were or had recently been working while claiming an old-age pension. The data were analysed with constant comparative analysis in which we described and refined categories through the writing of analytic memos and diagramming. We observed that paid work took place within a particular material, normative and emotional landscape: a stable and secure pension income decommodifying these workers from the labour market, a social norm of a retired lifestyle and a looming sense of contraction of the future. This landscape made paid work in these years distinctive: characterised by immediate intrinsic rewards and processes of containing and reaffirming commitments to jobs. The oldest workers were able to craft assertively the temporal flexibility of their jobs in order to protect the autonomy and freedom that retirement represented and retain favoured job characteristics. Employed on short-term (hourly) contracts or self-employed, participants continually reassessed their decision to work. Participation in paid work in the retirement years is a distinctive second stage in the late career which blends the second and third ages.

How emotions shape feminist coalitions

This article develops a framework for conceptualizing the emotional dimensions of coalitions, with particular focus on how power operates through emotion in different varieties of feminist coalitions. The article proposes three interrelated areas in which emotion shapes feminist coalitions: (1) Feelings towards coalition partners: feelings of mistrust, anger, fear, or their reverse grow from histories of interaction and unequal power. These make up the emotional landscape of intersectional coalitions, which operate through a tension between negative emotions and attempts at empathy or mutual acceptance; (2) Shared feelings: feminist coalitions build on shared fear of threat or anger at a common enemy; and (3) emergent emotions in collective action. Coalition partners possess distinct emotion cultures. Joint collective action can cement bonds when all participants’ emotion cultures are reflected, or weaken coalitions when the reverse is true. In all three of these areas, organizers engage in emotional labour in order to create or maintain coalitions. These three dynamics are illustrated with examples from intersectional feminist coalitions, the Women’s Marches, and interactions between feminists and conservatives opposed to pornography.

PERFORATIONS

Perforations is a personal, experimental film that explores the residue and layers of memory through the emotional landscape of the artist’s entrance into middle age. The project navigates the ephemeral nature of memory, loss, absence, frailty, complexity and — ultimately — renewal in life through the interconnections and legacies of three generations. The thesis examines the way in which specific absences in history (women, class and collective memory) and the recounting of family history (through home movies, reconstruction of personal memory and the cycles of life, death and the landscape) contribute to the underlying basis of the film.

PERFORATIONS

Perforations is a personal, experimental film that explores the residue and layers of memory through the emotional landscape of the artist’s entrance into middle age. The project navigates the ephemeral nature of memory, loss, absence, frailty, complexity and — ultimately — renewal in life through the interconnections and legacies of three generations. The thesis examines the way in which specific absences in history (women, class and collective memory) and the recounting of family history (through home movies, reconstruction of personal memory and the cycles of life, death and the landscape) contribute to the underlying basis of the film.