Studying the Emotional Costs of Integration at Times of Change: The Case of EU Migrants in Brexit Britain

Events such as Brexit have drawn attention to the precarity of contemporary migrants’ settlement rights and reopened the debate on the nature of integration and assimilation processes. Drawing on participant observation and interviews with Italian and Bulgarian migrants in Brexit Britain, this article develops a novel approach for understanding migrants’ changing relationships with their countries of settlement and their current and future practices. This approach builds on the sociology of emotions, which it extends to migration and diversity with a transnational sensibility. The approach is then applied to explain the different displays of emotion undertaken by our participants and their consequences. Overall, the article develops a new way to examine the subjective experiences of integration at times of change that is capable of offering important insights into the emotional costs of the neo-assimilationist climate characterising several western societies.

Exhaustion, Adversity, and Repression: Emotional Attrition in High-Risk Activism

The article proposes the notion of emotional attrition to capture the process through which activists working in high-risk environments may develop a lasting state of emotional exhaustion caused by protracted exposure to adversarial conditions. Combining insights from clinical psychology and the sociology of emotions, it outlines a novel framework to understand the relationship between activism, emotions, and disengagement. We argue that activists can develop an emotional state characterized by dispiriting emotions and disengaging attitudes that affect their well-being and ability to sustain their activism. This argument is grounded on an in-depth analysis of more than 130 interviews with local human rights activists in Colombia, Kenya, and Indonesia. By examining their experiences and pressures in relation to the arena of repression, their immediate social circle, and the broader sociopolitical and cultural context, we shed light on the complex intersections between activists’ emotional challenges and the range of contextual and strategic factors shaping their work and lives.

Civic Engagement in Retirement and the Socioemotional Experience of Pandemic Time

This research integrates literature from the sociology of the life course, sociology of emotions and the sociology of time to examine how Socioeconomic Status (SES) influenced retiree civic engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic. I find that SES framed both the social experience of time and the prevalent emotions experienced by retirees while physically distancing during the early days of the pandemic. These individual-level experiences translated to markedly different blueprints for civic engagement. High-SES retirees were more likely to ‘go global’, organizing to advocate for their interests. Conversely, low-SES retirees were more likely to ‘turn in’, minimizing their civic engagement. My findings reveal how existing sociopolitical inequalities may become further entrenched in public health crises. Policies aimed at combating inequalities in later life also need to consider socioemotional and sociotemporal factors.

The Role of Emotions in Sustaining and Transmitting the Song and Dance Celebration. Summary of the Doctoral Thesis

The name of the Thesis ir “The Role of Emotions in Sustaining and Transmitting the Song and Dance Celebration”. The Song and Dance Celebration is one of the most emotionally fulfilling and positive experiences in the Latvian culture. Previous studies have indicated emotions as a key precondition to transmit and sustain the tradition (Laķe & Muktupāvela, 2018). Because emotions have not been systematically researched in the context of tradition, suitable theoretical and methodological descriptions are lacking. The research question of this thesis was to study emotions as a prerequisite for inheritance and preservation. The aim of the thesis is to reveal the role of emotions in the tradition of the Celebration and related routine activities by amateur art groups, as well as to describe the prerequisites for emotions to improve the preservation of the Celebration. The theoretical basis of this thesis is sociology of emotions and the phenomenon of tradition. The analytical concept of the Celebration is tradition. To describe tradition, an interdisciplinary approach was used. Sociological analysis enables sociocultural description of emotions and reveals the manner in which emotions are the driving force in social interactions. Interaction ritual theory (Collins, 2004) was used as the theoretical framework of this thesis. It enables description of macro processes by means of micro interactions. In this framework, the Celebration was analyzed as a chain of interaction rituals where participants are motivated by long-term emotions. Visual research methods were adapted to study emotions in the context of the Celebration: observation with photo documentation, and photo-elicitation. Additionally, in-depth interviews were used. The thesis is based on qualitative methodology. In this study, 14 observations of amateur art groups, 37 in-depth photo analyses with their members, and 15 in-depth interviews with their leaders were performed. This data enabled analysis of tradition as a chain of tradition rituals to find out what role emotions play in it. In conclusion, the Song and Dance Celebration is the emotional culmination for amateur art groups. The culmination can be reached through positive emotional charge in their routine practices in the interim between Celebrations, which in turn ensures long-term involvement in the Celebration. The thesis provides recommendations for tradition implementers to maintain positive emotions.

How sociology of emotions is possible, and how it helps to understand happiness and justice

The article is a reflection-review of the book by Scott R. Harris An Invitation to the Sociology of Emotions (translated from English by O.A. Simonova; Moscow: HSE; 2020). Certainly, such a type of scientific works does not need a review after publication, but this book requires special attention for sociology of emotions seems to be a marginal area of Russian sociology, at least in the institutional perspective. After a brief description of the origins and manifestations of the affective turn, the author considers its consequences for social sciences (recognition of the cultural nature of emotions, perception of emotional standards in the course of socialization, etc.), and reconstructs the sociological model for the study of emotions as developed by Harris: reliance on symbolic interactionism and the social exchange theory, analysis of the normative aspect of emotions (cultural expectations about how one should feel in different situations, social standards for assessing the acceptability of emotions, etc.) and of the procedural side of the emotional life (exchange of emotions, management of emotions, identification of emotions, and emotional labor).

Texas wildfire survivors’ narratives and the meaning of everyday objects

This study suggests the importance of focusing on lost objects after disasters and gauging the emotional registers and impacts of object loss to best understand and assist in wildfire victims' recovery process. Because objects and materiality are a focus of research in the sociology of culture and the sociology of emotions, I assess these sub-field of interest in object and emotion, along with surveying the various fields dealing with disasters and their aftermaths. Participants were from a small, semi-rural community in the central hill country of Texas. A participant-observer design allowed for working alongside fire survivors. Grounded theory and situational analysis frameworks were used to analyze 54 survivors' narratives related to the importance of everyday household objects in their recovery– things resurrected from the wildfire. The findings suggest that it would be wise to ponder material objects in situated context—in a new manner and with new respect.

How propagames work as a part of digital authoritarianism: an analysis of a popular Chinese propagame

“Propagames,” or games with propagandistic content, have been emerging in the past two decades. They operate as a part of digital authoritarianism, together with other forms of new soft propaganda, to legitimate populist authoritarian states around the world. The contemporary democratic struggle against global authoritarian resurgence will require knowledge on how propagames and other digital propaganda work. But knowledge on propagames is seriously lacking compared to the voluminous scholarship on politically progressive, educational, and serious games. This study fills this research gap by analyzing the most popular propagame in China, Kangzhan Online (War of Resistance against Japan Online), and gamers’ reception of it. We begin with theoretical explorations of how to define propagames, how to demarcate them from other games with political content, and what role they play in digital authoritarianism. We eclectically borrow from four frameworks to analyze Kangzhan Online: the dual-process perspective, imaginary world studies, the sociology of collective memory, and the sociology of emotions. Our data include participant observation in the game for 3 months, formal interviews of 30 gamers, informal interviews with dozens of gamers, and documentary data from the official forum and the Chinese game media. The data were collected in 2009, 2010, and 2019.

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.

From self-censorship to contention: Shame triggered participation in the 2013 Gezi Protests

Focusing on journalists’ professional behaviors during the 2013 Gezi Protests in Turkey, this article offers a theoretical framework for understanding the transformation of inertia into contentious action. Accordingly, the emotion of shame triggers contention when it is experienced with a contingent event that generates hope for change. In Turkey, journalists working in the mainstream media extensively practiced self-censorship before the 2013 Gezi Protests and felt ashamed of themselves. This feeling became a trigger for joining public protests, resigning and/or producing non-compliant news stories when Gezi offered them an opportunity for social change. This argument builds on the sociology of emotions and events, and is inductively derived from 20 in-depth interviews conducted with journalists. The article presents the social context in which shame arises and the place of this emotion in generating contention. Through this research, the Gezi Protests assert their continuing relevance for understanding the relationship between repression and contention, especially in countries hit by the current wave of authoritarianism.