Browse
This article presents insights gained from conversations with Arlie Hochschild, which challenged my initial assumptions and encouraged a nuanced integration of sociological and psychological perspectives in exploring children’s wellbeing through their experiences and management of emotional demands within institutional settings. Drawing on parallels between adults who are adept at managing emotions in societal contexts, such as flight attendants, and the challenges faced by children, Hochschild illuminated the distinctive nature of children’s emotional experiences. These insights enriched the theoretical foundation of my research, offering new perspectives on children’s emotion work within institutional settings. By investigating the emotional demands children face during their transition from kindergarten to school and after-school care, the article sheds light on the influence of schools’ approaches to children’s wellbeing and emotional experiences. The findings underscore the importance of considering children’s genuine emotional experiences in wellbeing initiatives, particularly in navigating expectations to be happy.
Resilience is a term often applied to students of refugee backgrounds having survived traumatic experiences of war, displacement and resettlement; but how is it acquired? To many, it is a function of some inner strength, a perspective that tends to ignore the considerable labour involved in acquiring the skills and capacities to be resilient. This article examines these differing understandings and their implications in working with students of refugee backgrounds in schools in New South Wales, Australia. In particular, it considers the different approaches they elicit and the affective dimensions of these, proffering a view that resilience is reliant on the accumulation of certain affects that sediment into dispositions ensuring a sound foundation for learning.
Scientific evidence highlights the pivotal role for structural change in pursuit of the sustainability transformation. A particular challenge for research on structural aspects of sustainable consumption and lifestyles, however, is the assessment of their impact. Especially quantifying the impact of structural change remains a serious problem. While some forms of structural change can be quantified, like the rate of building renovations, changes in the energy mix at the production level, or trends in access to health care or education, the impact of other changes such as societal narratives about wellbeing, political campaigns on energy technologies or policies, or the abandonment of the growth paradigm defy easy quantification. This article aims to shed light on potential avenues for quantitatively assessing the impact of structural change drawing on insights gained by a group of international and interdisciplinary research consortia funded by the European Union in the area of sustainable consumption, citizenship, and lifestyles research. It delineates strengths and weaknesses of different approaches, foci and blindspots of associated data types. Thereby, it highlights fundamental decisions that need to be made in research designs, but also important aspects to consider in the interpretation of results. Finally, the article highlights the particular challenges related to assessing the impact of deep political and ideational structures.
The article demonstrates how graphic narratives become a medium for managing inherited emotions in Vietnamese American second-generation works, GB Tran’s Vietnamerica and Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do. Highlighting the intergenerational transmission of emotions in Vietnamese American families through parental stories about the Vietnam War, the article argues that the authors’ attempts to represent these family stories transform graphic literature into a medium for postmemorial emotion work. While drawing theoretical insights from the sociology of emotions, the study employs textual analysis to thematically close read Vietnamerica and The Best We Could Do to understand the graphic strategies that aid emotion work. The graphic recreation of stories, which are narrativised versions of their inherited trauma memories, can offer potential trauma resolution and autobiographical clarity while fostering communal bonding. The analysis finds that in the works, emotion work is facilitated by various literary strategies, such as affective genealogies, affective geographies, affective pasts, and postmemorial re-embodiment. In a broader sense, the study concludes that graphic narrative strategies can aid in postmemorial emotion work for second-generation refugees grappling with inherited trauma, incoherent autobiographical knowledge, and detachment from the community or family.
Plastic consumption is posing a critical challenge to global sustainability. Yet our understanding of the social and everyday dynamics of how and why people use plastics remains limited. Particularly, significant gaps in understanding exist concerning how plastics are embedded in households’ daily routines and practices and how this varies across different daily life settings. This article aims to bridge this gap by offering an in-depth exploration of the social and material dimensions of plastic consumption in varied Dutch households. Employing a theoretically and methodologically innovative approach, the article advances understanding of the connectivity of daily practices influencing household plastic use. Combining a social practice theoretical framework with a future-oriented, multi-modal imaginary methodology, we explore practice dynamics across diverse households of distinct life stages and compositions. Our analysis uncovers the complex interplay between daily practice arrangements and their systemic integration, revealing how daily life’s material, spatial and temporal dimensions are shaped and enabled by plastics. The study highlights the nuanced ways in which social variations in the organisation and institutional structures of daily life and engagement with socio-technical systems lock people into plastic consumption or enable transformative possibilities for sustainable change. By shedding light on the often overlooked social and everyday dynamics of plastic consumption, the article deepens theoretical understanding of practice connectivity while also opening new avenues for envisioning and facilitating transformation towards circular plastic consumption.
For the descendants of al-Nakba survivors, who have been separated and exiled from their familial homeland in Palestine, memories of life before exile are no longer part of an act of recall, but one inherited and imagined. As seen in the narratives that follow, the memories they inherit from family members are often inflected by nostalgia and a longing for return, which in turn shape their imagined relationship with Palestine and their Palestinian identities. To narrate this ambivalence, young artists practise the traditional craft of Palestinian embroidery, or tatreez. As a result, what originated as a form of communication, passed matrilineally, has evolved to incorporate a new spectrum of voices.
This article examines discourses of Palestinian postmemory in the embroidered motifs of diasporic artists. This research examines how family dynamics and exposure to tatreez are shaped by gender and each family’s postmemory, drawing on online biographies, written autobiographies and social media posts by the artists, it explores what aspects of their families’ histories are remembered by young Palestinians and how these memories are reinterpreted and expressed through contemporary embroidered art. These individuals create art that combines nostalgia, longing, obligation, confusion, pride and commemoration that characterises al-Nakba memory and modern Palestinian identity. Each artist represents the perspectives of the descendants of survivors; they claim their stake in history and do so in ways that push the craft, as well as the identities it represents, in an evolutionary direction.
This article examines contemporary practices of urban food cultivation in Seoul as acts of ‘doing’ emotionally loaded cultural heritage making through familial practices. Widespread urban practices of food growing are examined in relation to the affective and connective charges that are illuminated in relation to family and heritage. Invocations of emotions are not mere individual/personal phenomena but can be interpreted by the social field, social interactions and family traditions of food growing. The article explores the meanings of food growing in the urban landscape and argues that contemporary urban food cultivation practices are part of a Korean sensibility towards not only food itself but also food cultivation through urban farming. The article argues that edible plant growing as a food practice is a form of ‘doing family’: a familial activity that links generations, evokes nostalgia and involves attempts to transmit values in the context of ‘compressed modernity’.
Neither the Rawlsian distributive model of justice nor Fraser’s (2008) three-dimensional model, based on principles of redistribution, recognition and representation, are sufficient to explain inequality in education. Both perspectives misrecognise how affective care relations operate as a discrete and relatively autonomous set of social practices, and how epistemic injustices impact participatory parity. The goal of this article is to show how metricisation exacerbates both affective and epistemic injustices, which, in turn, compound the classism and ableism of education.
Being hierarchically classified in school means being future-framed by a series of life-defining metrics specifying your capabilities. For many, the result is a definition that sets them apart as lacking appropriate educational currency (cleverness) defined in terms of abstract verbal and logical-mathematical reasoning. This exposes them to public shaming and humiliation, which, while exacerbated by tracking, works independently alongside it. The cleverness devaluation provides a moral and political justification for hierarchical ordering, an ordering that is incontestable as children lack epistemic credibility.
Drawing on published research examining the impact of rating and grading children in school, and on a reanalysis of data from a major study of inequality in education undertaken by the authors, the article examines affective and epistemic injustices and the role of metrics in these processes. A key message of the article is that the use of tests and metrics purporting to determine and order children’s educational ‘ability’ or ‘intelligence’ leads to the hierarchical ordering that is deeply unjust in affective terms, and compounded by testimonial and hermeneutic injustices in school.
Inherited family objects are often precious or cherished, a source of warm emotions connecting us to ancestors across time. But sometimes the family keepsakes we possess, tangible or intangible, can generate more troubling emotions. They may transmit to us things that we were not meant to have or do not want. They might link us to pasts with which we would prefer not to be entangled or feel compelled to set right. In this article, I draw from a sociological study of settler descendants in Australia who are reckoning with the lives of their colonist ancestors via family history research. I focus on several case studies to explore people’s relations to family inheritances that evoke troubling emotions and demonstrate departures from the lives of ancestors as well as connections. This analysis offers us ways to conceptualise the challenging and compelling roles that family inheritances can play in the lives of descendants reckoning with the material legacies of their colonist ancestors, and in the context of wider moves towards inter/national reckoning and reparative justice for colonised peoples and their descendants.
In this article, we delve into an examination of how the ethos of vulnerability is manifested within cultural practices related to young people in Finland, thereby shaping and determining the conditions of what is possible for the kinds of subjects that young people can become. We employed the term ‘affective subjectivation’ to elucidate the processes through which young people from diverse life situations are inclined to turn themselves into vulnerabilised subjects within the ethos of vulnerability, thereby amplifying the prevalence of highly individualised and psycho-emotional interventions and elements. Our affective-discursive analysis centres on two distinct categories of cultural practice: youth support systems and an extensive questionnaire survey about young men’s mental health. We scrutinise how the ethos of vulnerability operates within these contexts, influencing and shaping the conditions of possibility for young people. Moreover, we extend our analysis to examine how therapeutic power contributes to the affective landscapes of masculinity, and the ambivalences of young Finnish men’s gendered and therapeutic, vulnerabilised subjectivities.
