Relational happiness through recognition and redistribution: Emotion and inequality

Abstract

This article develops a model of relational happiness that challenges popular individualized definitions and emphasizes how it can enhance the sociological analysis of inequality. Many studies of happiness suggest that social inequalities are closely associated with distributions of happiness at the national level, but happiness research continues to favour individual-level analyses. Limited attention has been given to the intersubjective aspects of happiness and the correlations between it and higher social equality. Conversely, key theoretical debates about inequalities, such as Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser’s exchanges, have only indirectly touched on happiness. A relational approach to happiness is not new, but what this article offers is a new combination of a relational understanding of happiness as an intersubjectively, culturally experienced complex of emotions with discussions about recognition of marginalized groups and redistribution of material resources. This combined approach can further debates about understanding and remedying social inequalities. It argues that theories and measurements of happiness must consider how it can be achieved collectively through working at mutual respect as well as greater material equality.

Spatialising happiness economics: Global metrics, urban politics, and embodied technologies

“…Thus, an alternative spatiality based on the public rather than individual nature of happiness is advanced by the relational approach described above. The notion of "public happiness" (Arendt, cited in Segal, 2017, p. xiv) describes a commitment to addressing political issues of resource allocation, recognition, and redistribution as pre-cursors to public policy interventions in happiness (Holmes & McKenzie, 2019). This spatially situated and outward-looking account of subjectivity rejects the notion of self-reported happiness waiting to be declared by survey respondents.…”

Future Building and Emotional Reflexivity: Gendered or Queered Navigations of Agency in Non-Normative Relationships?

“…The relational navigation of the world may involve geographically or emotionally distant significant Others (Holmes, 2014). In this view, emotions are not interior to individuals, nor simply played out in a supposedly separate intimate sphere but are part of the wider social fabric and key to the patterns of social recognition or misrecognition that reproduce social inequalities such as those around gender (Holmes and McKenzie, 2018).…”

Emotions in Aotearoa New Zealand: Reflexive emotionalisation in a colonised context

“…Emotional reflexivity is worked at as people interact and consider and respond to what others feel. Feelings are also impacted by power relations, with groups struggling over what the ‘proper’ emotions are in particular contexts and whose feelings are respected (Holmes and McKenzie, 2019). To describe emotionalisation as reflexive is to acknowledge that within late modernity, there has been a degree of detraditionalisation making past, traditional or habitual practices difficult to rely on as a guide for living and feeling in a rapidly changing world.…”

“…However, this highlights the relational aspect of emotional subjectivities. Angry activism can only ameliorate inequalities if there is some recognition of those who are angry; their anger must be heard (Holmes, 2004; Holmes and McKenzie, 2019).…”