The aim of this article is to analyze friendship ties and the emotions connected to them in some particular phases of life: periods when subjects are faced with difficult challenges such as mourning, separation, job loss or illness. Under these circumstances, friendship ties and emotions take on exceptional intensity. To investigate these moments I will use the analytical concept of trial and I will outline its heuristic utility in the analysis of friendship ties. The article is based on a research project on the dynamics of friendship relationships among adults conducted in the urban area of the city of Milan. In order to shed light on the dynamics of friendship in difficult moments of life, the article is organized in three sections: in the first part, I will introduce some narratives collected during the research. In the second part, I will shed light on the way that trial phases of life are the periods in which the relation between friendship and emotions becomes more visible, in particular through the way that friendship bonds offer the possibility of narrating and sharing emotions themselves, thus introducing an element of reflexivity. In the third part, I will conclude by underlining the way that this kind of analysis of friendship ties can reveal some more structural dynamics of contemporary individualized society.
This article deals with the topic of emancipation in the social sciences and its transformation in recent decades. Despite its centrality for sociological analysis, emancipation is a topic characterized by ambivalent meanings -autonomy and authenticity, contingency and normativity, free will and negative freedom -and by 'Eurocentric' and 'postcolonial' interpretations. After a long period in which emancipation was considered the unified expression of the critical consciousness of European modernity, its internal ambivalences have provoked criticism (for instance from the cultural turn in social sciences), enhanced dichotomies in theoretical discussion and highlighted the intertwining between emancipation and historical processes such as individualization and capitalism. This article investigates the ambivalences of the concept of emancipation and frames its present plural meanings, testing its current range and heuristic value.
The aim of this article is to offer a cartography of the current debate on critical agency, starting from the inner ambivalences of the modern notion of critique as resistant negation and affirmative creation of new practices. First, the article discusses the double-faced nature of critique and its interpretations in the European tradition of critical thought. It then engages in reflection on some alternative pathways to conceptualizing critical agency developed by American pragmatism, as well as by anti-Eurocentric and anti-anthropocentric theoretical approaches. The aim of this investigation is to understand the premises for developing critical agency in contemporary historical conditions, and to shed light on the characteristics of critical agency at a time when critique can no longer be solely an unmasking tool, while we have not abandoned the aspiration to link the contingency of situated critical agencies with an image of the future.
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