Sociology > Sociology of Health and Illness
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Research on law and emotion has flourished in the last quarter of a century, underpinned by a range of theoretical and philosophical approaches. The field, while deeply interdisciplinary, originally developed around several disciplinary silos through the research of legal practitioners, jurisprudence theorists, social scientists and humanities scholars. Despite the field’s growth, methodological approaches have largely remained disparate. Researchers, all working from within their own disciplinary training, rarely make explicit the definition of ‘emotion’ and ‘law’ with which they are working, nor how the methods they choose to deploy sit in relation to those definitions. This article takes stock of methodologies, methods and data that seek to account for emotion in legal contexts. It aims to identify how law and emotion researchers are doing what they are doing, and to what ends, and seeks to distinguish ‘emotions’ in law and emotions research. It considers various theories of emotion underpinning law and emotion scholarship, canvassing how and to what extent scholars, when researching law and legal actors, are articulating the object of study, ‘emotions’; and takes into account different ways that researchers identify, theorise and deploy the concept of law. The article discusses empirical mixed methods, analysis of material artefacts, creative arts practices, and the place of researcher emotion. An explicit discussion of the different theoretical and philosophical approaches to emotion and to law that underscore current research, will help facilitate a productive cross-pollination of methods, including recognising the utility of different methods for particular research questions.
This article presents findings on the impact of maternal imprisonment on wider relationships within the family. Previous research has detailed the significant impact that maternal imprisonment may have on mothers and their children. Relational theory suggests that connections and relationships may be more important for women and that this has an impact on desistance and recovery. This article applies relational theory to the wider impacts of maternal imprisonment, presenting new findings on the intergenerational family impacts. This includes impacts on the mother-child relationship and older children (aged 13+), and mothers’ relationships with kinship carers, particularly grandmothers. The evidence presented shows how relationships within the family are often irreparably harmed by imprisonment and what can be termed ‘relational trauma’. Findings suggest that the significant impact that maternal imprisonment has on the wider family should be considered when sentencing mothers to custodial sentences.
We are currently witnessing a paradox in climate governance (CG): despite growing awareness of the socio-biophysical impacts of current lifestyles, there remains a persistent commitment to high-consumption habits with large carbon footprints. Around this paradox, a debate on responsibility for change has developed. Which actor can and should do what to solve the problem? Simultaneously, however, scholars depict trends towards ‘organised irresponsibility’ (Beck, 1988) and individual responsibilisation bound to be ineffective in the context of existing structural challenges. The most likely result of such dynamics is a responsibility ping-pong with actors assigning responsibility to each other, which, in turn, invites the question of how it might be overcome. What other forms of talking about and organising responsibility might exist that could provide an actual basis for transformation change? Disentangling discourses around responsibility in CG, thus, is crucial for enabling a shift in consumption patterns and lifestyles that are compatible with the 1.5° Paris climate target. The present article pursues this objective. Building on a multi-method research approach, including stakeholder laboratories, expert interviews, and Delphi workshops across several European countries, it explores to whom and how European stakeholders in CG, specifically governments, businesses and citizens, assign responsibility, what risks and opportunities are involved, and what indications of a potential for game change exist. The findings uncover a complex web of pre-empted responsibility, which frequently leads to pessimism or ineffective strategies. However, the research also identifies some opportunities for organising a shared, justice-oriented and comprehensive notion of responsibility (Young, 2006).
To understand the prison environment, we must acknowledge the integral role that correctional officers (COs) play in everyday functioning and structuring the living of prisoners. There are many tasks involved in CO work, some are traditional to CO work and others are less often considered. Specifically, a more thorough understanding of the tasks connected to care is needed. In the current article, we explore some of the human aspects of CO work, such as how officers view and incorporate humanity, listening, dignity, empathy and fairness into their work. Elucidating emergent themes from semi-structured interviews with 25 Canadian COs, we found officers continue to see custody and supervision as fundamental to their role, however, they also view various ‘care’ aspects as essential to their work. Officers discussed rapport building, interacting with prisoners, and centring interactions around humanity and, at times, kindness. Findings provide insight into the various approaches to correctional work and illuminate the role of care in the CO profession – if one is to achieve the rehabilitative function of their occupational responsibilities.
This study used panel data to examine the longitudinal effect of maternal and paternal depressiveness on children’s emotional difficulties in two-parent families in Germany. The main purpose was to examine whether the strength of this association differs depending on whether parents or children themselves assessed children’s emotional difficulties. Based on data from 1,586 children from the German Family Panel (pairfam), our findings show much stronger associations between parental depressiveness and children’s emotional difficulties when using parent-reported measures than when using child-reported measures, which indicates a negative mood bias in parent reports. The findings emphasise the importance of taking children’s self-reports into account when studying child wellbeing.
The following trend projection is based on the state of scientific knowledge of summer 2024, and the policy assumptions are optimistic for 2030. Still the outlook is dystopic – readers are invited to identify intervention and bifurcation points for the better, but in line with the state of science.
Environmental problems abound and it can be difficult for individuals to know how to act for the best. Moreover, knowing how we should feel about these problems and our potential actions has become increasingly unclear and confusing. Navigating these complexities involves reflecting on one’s own and other people’s emotions. This article explores how individuals put their emotional reflexivity to use in relation to two specific environmental emotions: eco-guilt and eco-shame. We conducted 20 in-depth interviews with Danish citizens about their experiences and emotions connected to being consumers in these times of substantial environmental challenges. A chief part of this emotional reflexivity involved judgements about whether it was good or bad to experience eco-guilt and eco-shame. These judgements were often made with reference to how useful the emotions were in motivating pro-environmental behaviour and whether or not the emotions were authentic. Some respondents expressed a strong sense that they ‘ought to’ experience eco-guilt and eco-shame, while others showed resistance to experiencing these emotions and the perceived social pressure to be more sustainable. Exploring emotional reflexivity around eco-guilt and eco-shame provides insights into the social and moral forces that pull people in different – and at times conflicting – directions regarding their feelings about environmental issues. We discuss our results in light of an emotional regime imposing on individuals the sense that they ought to experience emotions of care for the environment.
Internationally, there has been increased attention by research, policy and practice to the experiences of the family members of prisoners. Scotland continues to experience a disproportionately high rate of imprisonment, and this often translates to those punished serving repeated sentences, sometimes over the course of their lives, so-called ‘persistent punishment’. Yet, so far under-explored is how this plays out in the lives of the family members ‘on the outside’. This article draws from ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews. It seeks to foreground the experience of persistent punishment for affected families. In so doing, the article explores how family members respond and adapt to frequent, and often sustained, interactions with the prison. It explores how families maintain relationships, and how they (re) fit prison into their lives, albeit not without challenge or strain. The article calls for greater recognition to be paid into how imprisonment fits into the broader context of families’ lives.
This article explores the increasing interest in the role of emotions in the late modern working world. We examine how emotional regimes are characterised and which unintended consequences accompany the set of normative emotions. We illustrate this with the example of the German gaming industry, which is seen as being at the vanguard of the late modern world of work. Our aim is to show that this is a multifaceted but (organisation-)specific emotional regime. We use selected qualitative data material from the DFG project ‘The regime of emotions as a strategy? An analysis of economic subfields – emotions, emotional capital and gender in the late modern working world’ (duration 2020–2024). With reference to Patulny and Olson (2019), we examine the emotions that define this specific emotional regime, which prove to be (1) complex and ambivalent, (2) individualised, (3) commodified and (4) digitally mediated. Another relevant element of the emotional regime is (5) reflexive emotional management. We illustrate that late modern emotional regimes create paradoxes such as the passion for game development and the unquestioned acceptance of overtime, which can lead to exhaustion. We also reveal prevailing gender inequalities, which are often not immediately obvious in the seemingly egalitarian gaming industry.
