In times of crisis, emotions seem more urgent than ever. The corona pandemic of 2020, the second true global crisis of the twenty-first century after the financial crash of 2008, has brought feelings to the fore: fear of contagion and for one’s own life, but also fear for others, even those we do not know personally. Other emotions that often emerge when social, political, or natural upheavals strike include solidarity and empathy, exhaustion and grief, hope and optimism. In contemporary discourse, feelings are both maligned for imbuing debates with ‘unnecessary’ emotion and appreciated for offering a more individual perspectives. Emotions validate events and experience. Feeling News has been created to engage with emotions as a day-to-day occurrence and their role in current events and incidents. Complementing our academic research portal “Insights into Research”, it provides brief, prompt, and essayistic analyses and viewpoints about the verbal and visual negotiations of emotions as they appear in everyday media coverage and beyond. Building on our Center’s core supposition that emotions have a history and that they make history, contributions may be historical or contemporary, but all flesh out the topicality of emotions for our present times and their historical aetiology. The blog is run by the Center for the History of Emotions, but publication is open to all members of the public and contributions that adhere to the netiquette and formulate a concrete argument will be considered for publication. If you are interested in replying to any entry or in proposing a piece of writing, please get in touch with the editors Kerstin Maria Pahl and Anja Laukötter.
Online, one can find plenty of advice on how to feel athletic, and even more reasons why such emotions are desirable: They promise success, beauty and health. They help one become “the best version of oneself.”
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The emotional impact of the coronavirus pandemic is unquestionable. Along with the feeling of uncertainty produced by the relative novelty of living through a pandemic, there are the feelings inspired by measures that have been set up around the world to deal with it. Regulations promoting relative: isolation, as well as the restriction of public freedoms, have produced anxieties, frustrations, vulnerability, fears, sadness and a series of emotional constellations that are simultaneously difficult to manage.
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In Japan, if an employee is found to be COVID-positive, their identifiable personal information could be announced company-wide. In some cases, the infected are asked to submit a formal letter of apology to their superior, which comes attached with a detailed account about how he or she was infected; a full acknowledgement about the negative implications for the company, including possible damage to its reputation; and a promise that they would not create troubles for the company again.
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Metaphern spielen eine wesentliche Rolle dafür, wie Krankheitsgefahr und Schutzmaßnahmen erfahren und emotional belegt werden. Viele der Metaphern, die noch heute in der Konfrontation mit Krankheitserregern, Ansteckung und Immunisierung benutzt werden, gehen auf das späte 19. Jahrhundert zurück.
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It is a truism that during the 2020 US presidential election, emotions were running high. On Election Tuesday, politicians, journalists, the electorate, and a large amount of non-Americans were on pins and needles about the outcome. For some time, it was a nail-biter.
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In May this year, Kent, a company manufacturing water purifiers ran a coronavirus themed advertising campaign in India. “Are you allowing your maid to knead atta dough by hand? Her hands may be infected,” said the advertisement. Following outrage on social media over its classist and casteist rhetoric, the advertisement has since been taken down. Nevertheless, it is telling of the ways in which the working body is routinely cast as a bearer of pollution—and especially so, during times of disease.
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The privileging of the digital has obviously had a great impact upon our lived experiences as work, socialising, even exercise have moved online. However, the eruption of the Black Lives Matter protests in America, and their spread to Paris, London, Buenos Aires, among many other global cities, demonstrated how the spatial and temporal absence, has turned into collective action.
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You may have felt it while waiting your turn in the cafeteria and your colleague is too far away to chat. It may be what your teenage son is afraid to feel if he respects your request to wear a mask when he meets his pals after the lockdown. It is what you and your best friends may have felt when you finally met and didn’t know whether to hug, kiss or bump elbows.
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22nd March 2020 saw the execution of a 12-hour national shutdown in India to express gratitude to the “frontline warriors” fighting against Corona Virus in the country. The catch being, our pradhansewak (chief-servant, our Prime Minister prefers to be addressed thus) urged the people to come out to their ‘balconies and terraces’ at 5.00 p.m. and bang pots and pans for five minutes.
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If there is one thing that a large majority of articles published, in print and even more in the social media agree on, it is the global character of the Corona crisis. The pandemic has spread to all the countries of the world and it forms part of a global experience – as a grim reality or at least as a threat – for every single individual. This imaginary of a shared plight gave rise to many instances of unexpected solidarity.
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Seit Beginn der Corona-Krise erlebt Die Pest von Albert Camus (1947) eine erstaunliche Renaissance in der Lesergunst – und das nicht nur in Frankreich, sondern auch im Ausland: In Italien, Japan und China schnellten die Verkaufszahlen in die Höhe, ebenso in Deutschland oder in Großbritannien. In Österreich lasen mehr als 100 Prominente in einer 10-stündigen Marathonsendung das Buch im Radio vor.
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Within only a few months, the coronavirus has claimed 340,000 lives, with over five million infections reported around the globe. Lockdown, shutdown, and isolation have been the dominant responses by governments and people. In a recent 2020 study by Ying Li, Shenghua Luan and Ralph Hertwig, people in China and the US were asked to write down five words to describe their feelings from the previous week. Overall, both Chinese and Americans experienced negative emotions more than usual at the time the pandemic peaked in their respective countries. Surprisingly, the usual suspects, fear and anxiety, were closely matched and even exceeded by the feeling of boredom.
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When physical distancing to stop the spread of Covid-19 is the dictum of the hour, how can one have sex? Anticipating such insecurities, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) published Sex and Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), a ‘safe sex’ guide in times of Corona. A media sensation upon release, the two-paged digital leaflet is a hybrid of classic sexual health advice and Covid-19 prevention measures. It comprises information on Covid-19’s transmission paths; partnered, solitary and digital sex; STIs and sex toy hygiene. Via knowledge transfer, it attempts to navigate two affective states through the pandemic: anxiety and (sexual) pleasure.
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There’s a new game in town and it already has a name. Social distancing shaming. Newspapers have reported on it, bloggers have commented on it, Twitterers have tweeted about it. It’s old wine in new bottles, really. People publicly castigate others who, in their estimation, are not following the rules and, in doing so, they aim to compel them to conform. The criticized person is supposed to feel ashamed of themselves and change their behavior.
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Erica Baffelli and Frederik Schröer May 12, 2020
These days our access to space (be it workplaces, parks, shops, let alone travel) is strictly regulated and restricted. Our experience of time, also, seems to have changed in a radical way, a way that most of us have never felt before. Many of us feel acutely disconnected from our communities, while at the same time new forms of solidarity and belonging are emerging. Although the impact and consequences of the pandemic are not the same for all of us, there is no denying that we are all affec
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Love is probably the first emotion that comes to mind when one thinks of weddings. The color white is the modern visual coding that will probably accompany this thought. But there are also Black Weddings: a Jewish religious ritual in which a wedding is held between two orphans (or other unfortunate individuals) in a cemetery, under a black canopy instead of the white one normally used. Both the black canopy and the fact the weddings are held in a cemetery symbolize the threat of death posed by the plague. Black Weddings are also called Plague Weddings and one even took place in Israel this year. [more]
The pedestrian felt uncomfortable: "it was a most surprising thing, to see those Streets, which were usually so thronged, now grown desolate". However, since the disease had not yet spread to all parts of the city, people were "allarm’d, and unallarm’d again, till it began to be familiar to them" and, eventually, they "began to take Courage and to be, as I may say, a little hardened."
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Das bislang einzige Geisterspiel in der Geschichte der 1. Fußballbundesliga, bei dem am 11. März 2020 Borussia Mönchengladbach den 1. FC Köln empfing, erregte ungewohnte Gefühle: Borussia Mönchengladbachs Patrick Herrmann sprach von einem "sehr seltsame[n] Feeling" und für den Schiedsrichter Deniz Aytekin war das Spiel "beängstigend", ohne Leidenschaft, etwas würde massiv fehlen (Berliner Morgenpost 19.04.2020, SZ 12.03.2020) Was fehlte waren die Fans, die Emotionen, vor allem die Begeisterung.
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Die Liebe in den Zeiten der Cholera lautet ein Romantitel des kolumbianischen Literaturnobelpreisträgers Gabriel García Márquez. Florentino, der junge Protagonist, sieht in Fermina die Liebe seines Lebens. Sie geht aufgrund sozialer Konventionen eine andere Ehe ein. Mehr als 50 Jahre lang vertraut Florentino darauf, dass seine Liebe nach dem Tod seines Rivalen eine Chance bekommt. Eingebettet in den Kontext Kolumbiens im ausgehenden 19. Jahrhundert und die Zeit der Cholera-Epidemie, eröffnet die Geschichte einen Blick auf die Frage nach „wahrer Liebe“ und ihrem Verhältnis zu zeitlicher und räumlicher Distanz.
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Die Berichterstattung über den Corona-Virus überschlägt sich seit einigen Wochen. Die neue Pandemie bestimmt nicht nur die Nachrichten, sondern bringt auch zahlreiche Sonderberichterstattungen hervor. In diesen kommen regelmäßig Politiker zu Wort, die vor einer Panikhaltung warnen.
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