Changing the Feeling Rules
How Emotions Reshape Social Relations, c. 1700 to today
Most, if not all, human societies, know ‘feeling rules:’ historically and culturally contingent norms and expectations that manage the expression of emotions, judge their appropriateness, and sanction divergences.
This project explores how existing social formations become unsettled because individuals or groups start contesting what is considered commendable emotional behaviour. Foregrounding moments of conflicts when social judgments clash and when values, through friction and rupture, become reoriented, the issue sheds new light on historical and social change by looking at shifts in emotions and sensibilities.
The contributions will most likely be published in a special issue in the first half of 2024.
A collaboratively developed multi-disciplinary work, this special issue brings together historians, sociologists, and ethnographers. Its case-studies cover Europe, US America, and Japan and range from the later eighteenth century to today. While drawing from a wide range of sources, including ego-documents, the press, ethnographic research, and sociological interviews, its unifying theme is the role of emotions in uncertain times.
With social rupture being a preoccupation of the twenty-first century world, this special issue offers a timely investigation into how people emotionally engage with each other in times of transformation.