This article uses the notion of intimate ethnography to further a discussion on social constructions of family ties, secrets and complex strategies of storytelling. Using the example of a book published about one’s own family history, the author presents several ethical dilemmas where engagement with intimate ethnographies is fraught with pitfalls and can tear apart people, families and individuals; however, it can also give a brief and illuminating holistic experience of mutual horizontal connectedness, human harmony, and communion across time and space. The article argues that the intimacy in this ethnography traces the residues of violence and oppression, but also moments of harmony and happiness to create a holistic, complete, anthropological picture of myself and the world that makes me – with its bright and dark sides.
Intergenerational emotions highlight the feelings that we have for our ancestors and descendants, drawing attention to a lineage of feeling and its temporalities. This article revisits the idea of intergenerational emotions as a conceptual tool and methodological approach that is used to explore how we grapple with feelings that persist across time, and which draws attention to the importance of temporalities in shaping social structures and emotional practices. It particularly positions the family as a key site where ideas of emotion and temporality are negotiated, and so to generating intergenerational emotions as a historical and cultural construct. To illustrate this discussion, it uses the example of family history making in an exhibition by the Windrush Generation Legacy Association.
Sexual harassment is an affective, embodied and relational issue with distinctly gendered consequences for those who experience it. Despite a vast literature illuminating the gendered dynamics of sexual harassment, detailed analyses of the affective dimensions of such dynamics are scarce. This article analyses young women’s and nonbinary people’s experiences of sexual harassment from the perspective of affective embodiment. The analysis draws on Sara Ahmed’s theorisation on embodied hurts, orientations and emotions to trace relational, embodied and affective processes of gendering linked with sexual harassment. The analysis identifies two harassment-related embodied processes: embodied regulation and embodied resistance. Whereas embodied regulation takes the form of feminisation – a process that renders bodies vulnerable – embodied resistance includes a variety of orientations labelled here as preparedness, defeminisation and embodied critique. Thus, the analysis suggests that bodies may respond to sexual harassment in varied ways, and even though harassment contributes to the constant shaping of bodies, it does not determine them.
This article analyses how universal parenting courses for first-time parents in Danish municipalities represent measures to cultivate parents’ skills in ‘how to parent’. The aim of such courses is to support all new parents in the transition to parenthood, to teach parents about early child development, and to guide parents in managing their emotions. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, we address how the courses end up addressing a particular form of parenting (risk attuned, educated, science based) as well as a particular kind of parental self (reflective, responsible, sensible). We discuss how a therapeutic grammar imposes a new conformity on parents, and how neuro-claims form the basis for recommendations about child development and parent-child interactions. We also critically assess how mothers, in particular, are encouraged to work on and manage their maternal selves.
We explore formation of expectations and links between expectations and action among Croatian micro-producers of organic fruits and vegetables. Twenty-nine interviews with entrepreneurs from all Croatian counties and the City of Zagreb were conducted. Thematic analysis reveals four recurring themes linking participants’ expectations and action: positive feedback, coordination devices, proximal vs. distal bias and retrospecting prospects. We relate these themes to the valence of expectations (positive, negative or neutral) and situate our findings within broader theoretical frameworks of Barbalet’s theory of confidence and Emirbayer and Mische’s theory of agency. Enjoying acceptance and recognition as members of community-supported agriculture groups, and having access to specific resources as members of associations of organic producers are identified as key drivers of optimism and confidence among the participants.
This article examines the intersecting roles of the face with reference to the popularisation of the smile in Republican China. Research on emotional labour presupposes the potency of the open, beautiful and polite smile without delving into its underlying emotional, aesthetic and sociocultural fabric. The article argues that the modern invincible smile not only conveys emotions, facial ideals and etiquette but, at a deeper level, reproduces expressive, aesthetic and cultural order. Through the qualitative analysis of Republican discourses about the smile and its visual representations in calendar posters, pictorials, portrait photographs and films, the article demonstrates how the broad, tooth-exposing smile was dynamically constructed as a charming, cheerful and civilised face. The popularity of the smiling face in this era reveals a dramatic transformation in China’s emotional regime and expressive convention, one that is interwoven with the rise of consumerism, the spread of hedonism and the wider social process of modernisation. By exploring this complex interplay, the article evinces the multiple social lines that construct and constitute the face.
Inheritance provokes mixed emotions and feelings for people who engage in this ‘family practice’ (Monk, 2014; 2016). Inheritance can be a way of ‘doing’ and ‘displaying ‘family’ but can also be a way of un/making families (Edwards and Canning, 2023). The aim of this article is to explore how care experienced people ‘feel their way through’ (Ahmed, 2014) inheritance. We do this by triangulating findings from informal empirical research we undertook on social media with an analysis of the broader literature on inheritance contained within blogs, autobiographies and museum exhibitions about care experience. We make two key arguments. The first is that inheritance can be attributed as a source of feeling for care experienced people. We consider how our question on social media immediately sparked negative ‘emotional expressions’ (Bericat 2016), related to feelings of exclusion, loss and anger of inheritance not being of relevance to them. The quote in our article title – ‘Is this a joke?’ – was an expression from a person who responded to our research. Second, we argue that while marginalised and absent within orthodox inheritance practices, care experienced people are ‘feeling subjects’ (Bericat, 2016), who derive new forms and ways of creating and (re)imagining inheritance from the emotions associated with being ‘othered’ by inheritance practices. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s (2014: 4) question: ‘What do emotions do?’, we show that care experienced people ‘feel their way through’ and ‘do’ different things with the emotions they attribute to inheritance to forge new inheritances.
This article discusses the emotional micro-politics of belonging and the ways this is negotiated and contested in the everyday space of the school by young people themselves. To do so, I draw on Clark’s micro-politics of emotions and Hochschild’s feeling rules to explore how power and status determine how everyday citizenship boundaries are drawn and felt. The empirical data come from 14 focus groups conducted in three secondary schools in Flanders, with 89 students aged between 13 and 19 years old. The results show that a sense of belonging was often constrained by a politics of exclusion influenced by societal norms and power dynamics, both inside and outside the school setting, which fostered feelings of fear, mistrust, resentment, and misrecognition among the youth. These experiences cultivated collective emotions and a dynamic sense of belonging, which involved forming social bonds with peers and teachers with whom they shared similarities, but also with people who were willing to embrace the differences.
Psychological expertise has developed in market economies along with the priority of individualised, self-responsible and productive citizenship, thus directing people’s evaluative glance inwards. Yet psychology, as a field of knowledge production, also interprets and classifies wider socioeconomic processes, including defining the emotional experience of different structural conditions. Extending the concept ‘the psychological imagination’ (Nehring and Frawley, 2020), which highlights how globalised psychological expertise induces perceptions of individualised self-accountability, I propose the ‘psychological imagination of the social’, illustrating how this expertise configures socioeconomic factors. I draw on texts and commentaries by mainland Chinese psychologists in the popular media, state-run press, self-help literature and academic writing, as well as interviews with practitioners in Jinan, delineating how psychologists address economic reforms, commodification, digitalisation and social competition. This imagination buttresses the positivist trajectory of market expansion as a ‘civilising’ and ‘emotionally emancipating’ process, while also stressing the emotional toll of contemporary urban lifestyles. Thus, this expertise advertises its unique contribution to elevating immaterial ingredients in the Chinese social experience through ongoing negotiation between market ideologies and the party-state’s agenda.
