AHR Conversation: The Historical Study of Emotions

Emotions, Marital Conflict and Affect in the Multicultural Social Welfare Encounter

“…Depicting emotions as signifiers of social interaction, impactful cultural forces, and historical change agents, they have examined the norms governing emotions and individual and collective responses to them, and tracked dominant, alternative and oppositional emotional communities or regimes. 11 Histories of affect have fruitfully explored intimacy as local, cross-cultural and transnational sites marked by tender and tense ties. 12 I have incorporated certain insights from this literature into a feminist framework attuned to both the material and discursive.…”

Introduction

“…Or is it contrived in order to fulfill social expectations? It might seem that our attention to the senses inevitably leads to children, whose experiences and expressions have often struck adult observers as less mediated, more natural, and more uninhibited by the norms of language (Eustace et al 2012). After all, one of our key challenges is getting direct information from children themselves rather than relying on adult perceptions, recommendations, and adult-created artifacts.…”

City Glow

“…Historians have of late paid growing attention to the way interior sentiments structure social relations and shape historical processes, showing how the way emotions are felt, the meanings they convey, and the different emotional dispositions considered appropriate or legitimate changes according to time and place. 12 Felt individually, emotions acquire broader cultural resonance as they are expressed to others, valorized or stigmatized by the power dynamics of broader social groups which are defined variously as emotional "regimes" or "communities." 13 My objective here is to read through expressions of a multiplicity of emotions (which are often studied in isolation 14 ) in order to understand the interior, ardent, and sometimes unpredictable responses to the intensity of urban life that often clashed with increasingly pervasive attempts to shape and regulate space, as well as behavior within it.…”