Emotions and the Global Politics of Childhood

Introduction

“…Responding to the adult-focused underpinnings of histories of emotions, Karen Vallgårda, Kristine Alexander and Stephanie Olsen propose the concept of 'emotional formation'. 196 This is both a pattern of emotional structures and a reiterated process cultivating codes of feeling through informal education and repeated daily experiences and practices. This approach stresses the contingency of feelings but does not explicitly acknowledge the role of siblings and lateral bonds in helping children and young people to mediate emotional norms as they are applied in differing situations.…”

The History of Experience: Afterword

“…Historians of childhood and youth have been frustrated with the limited tools available to uncover historical actors' lived realities. 8 How do we as historians access individual and collective humanity-the experiences, motivations, thoughts and feelings-of children and youth, who often leave few traces in the historical record? Those they do leave are often mediated adult recollections.…”

Ugly Intimacies and State Power: Separation Processes in Late Nineteenth‐Century Denmark

“…In order to approach this particular 'hand of the state' as it worked 'on the ground', I employ the concept of 'emotional formation' that Kristine Alexander, Stephanie Olsen and I introduced in 2015. 22 An emotional formation does not solely or even necessarily have to do with the state, but the concept is a useful tool to analyse how emotions are shaped, not just through official discourses and public policies, but also through a range of everyday interactions between the state and its subjects.…”

“…As such, an emotional formation is never fixed or firm, but rather, a work in progress. 23 What precisely identifies emotional behaviour is hard to pin down, not least because the definition is historically variable. Indeed, as Thomas Dixon has demonstrated, the very category of emotion is a relatively novel construct.…”