Power Politics And The Emotions

How can we rethink ideas of policy failure to consider its paradoxes and contradictions as a starting point for more hopeful democratic encounters? Offering a provocative and innovative theorisation of governance as relational politics, the central argument of Power, Politics and the Emotions is that there are sets of affective dynamics which complicate the already materially and symbolically contested terrain of policy-making. This relational politics is Shona Hunter’s starting point for a more hopeful, but realistic understanding of the limits and possibilities enacted through contemporary governing processes. Through this idea Hunter prioritises the everyday lived enactments of policy as a means to understand the state as a more differentiated and changeable entity than is often allowed for in current critiques of neoliberalism. But Hunter reminds us that focusing on lived realities demands a melancholic confrontation with pain, and the risks of social and physical death and violence lived through the contemporary neoliberal state. This is a state characterised by the ascendency of neoliberal whiteness; a state where no one is innocent and we are all responsible for the multiple intersecting exclusionary practices creating its unequal social orderings. The only way to struggle through the central paradox of governance to produce something different is to accept this troubling interdependence between resistance and reproduction and between hope and loss. Analysing the everyday processes of this relational politics through original empirical studies in health, social care and education the book develops an innovative interdisciplinary theoretical synthesis which engages with and extends work in political science, cultural theory, critical race and feminist analysis, critical psychoanalysis and post-material sociology.

This book argues that the link between emotions and discourse provides a new and promising framework to theorize and empirically analyse power relationships in world politics. Examining the ways in which discourse evokes, reveals, and engages emotions, the expert contributors argue that emotions are not irrational forces but have a pattern to them that underpins social relations. However, these are also power relations and their articulation as socially constructed ways of feeling and expressing emotions represent a key force in either sustaining or challenging the social order. This volume goes beyond the "emotions matter" approach to offer specific ways to integrate the consideration of emotion into existing research. It offers a novel integration of emotion, discourse, and power and shows how emotion discourses establish, assert, challenge, or reinforce power and status difference. It will be particularly useful to university researchers, doctoral candidates, and advanced students engaged in scholarship on emotions and discourse analysis in International Relations.

This collection is concerned with two fundamental concepts of social science– power and emotion. Power permeates all human relationships and is constitutive of social, economic, and political life. It stands at the centre of social and political theorizing, and its study has enriched scholarship within a wide range of disciplines, including sociology, political science, philosophy, and anthropology. The conceptual cluster of emotion, by contrast, had a more troubled time within these same disciplines. However, since the 1970’s and the advent of the ‘emotional turn’, there has been a widespread re-evaluation of emotion in and for our shared social existence and, today, emotions research is at forefront of contemporary social science. Yet, although both concepts are now widely seen as fundamental, research on these two phenomena has tended to run in parallel. This collection, featuring leading international scholars, seeks to unite and deploy both concepts, emotion and power, in a variety of ways, and on a diverse array of topics such as: education, organizations, social movements, politics, ‘old’ and ‘new’ media, rhetoric and in comparative intellectual history. The results are at the bleeding edge of scholarship on these concepts, and will make important reading for practitioners and students working in the sociology of emotions, social and political power, political sociology, organization studies, and for sociological and political theory more generally. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Political Power.

This timely book critically addresses the intersection between power, politics and emotions. Challenging traditional dichotomies which counterpose rationalist to non-rationalist epistemologies, it offers a sustained argument for a more complete and integrated rationalism and helps us understand emotions in contemporary social and political life.

Politics and the Emotions is a unique collection of essays that reflects the affective turn in the analysis of today's political world. Contributed by both prominent and younger scholars from Europe, US, and Australia, the book aims to advance the debate on the relation between politics and the emotions. To do so, essays are organized around five key thematic areas: emotion, antagonism and deliberation, the politics of fear, the affective dimension of political mobilization, the politics of reparation, and politics and the triumph of the therapeutic. In addition, each chapter includes a case study to demonstrate the application of concepts to practical issues, from the war on terror in the UK and the AIDS activist organization ACT UP in the US to women's liberation movement in New Zealand and Dutch policy experiments. Politics and the Emotions provides an accessible introduction to a rapidly developing field that will appeal to students in political theory, public and social policy, as well as the theory and practice of democracy.

First published in 1999. Megan Boler combines cultural history with ethical and multicultural analyses to explore how emotions have been disciplined, suppressed, or ignored at all levels of education and in educational theory. FEELING POWER charts the philosophies and practices developed over the last century to control social conflicts arising from gen­der, class, and race. The book traces the development of progressive pedagogies from civil rights and feminist movements to Boler's own recent studies of emo­tional intelligence and emotional literacy. Drawing on the formulation of emotion as knowledge within feminist, psychobiological, and post structuralist theo­ries, Boler develops a unique theory of emotion missing from contemporary educa­tional discourses.

This collection is concerned with two fundamental concepts of social science- power and emotion. Power permeates all human relationships and is constitutive of social, economic, and political life. It stands at the centre of social and political theorizing, and its study has enriched scholarship within a wide range of disciplines, including sociology, political science, philosophy, and anthropology. The conceptual cluster of emotion, by contrast, had a more troubled time within these same disciplines. However, since the 1970's and the advent of the 'emotional turn', there has been a widespread re-evaluation of emotion in and for our shared social existence and, today, emotions research is at forefront of contemporary social science. Yet, although both concepts are now widely seen as fundamental, research on these two phenomena has tended to run in parallel. This collection, featuring leading international scholars, seeks to unite and deploy both concepts, emotion and power, in a variety of ways, and on a diverse array of topics such as: education, organizations, social movements, politics, 'old' and 'new' media, rhetoric and in comparative intellectual history. The results are at the bleeding edge of scholarship on these concepts, and will make important reading for practitioners and students working in the sociology of emotions, social and political power, political sociology, organization studies, and for sociological and political theory more generally. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Political Power.

Mainstream liberal narratives have often depicted politics as a matter of power and competing interests, disregarding emotions or conceiving them as threats to a rational and well-ordered society. In the last decades, however, this viewpoint has been increasingly challenged by a number of scholars researching on the complex and multidimensional role of emotions in politics. This edited collection aims at providing a concise but comprehensive introduction to this area of research. The essays contained in this volume focus on a single case, the Obama phenomenon, illustrating empirically how the variable ‘emotions’ can enrich political analysis. Taken together, the essays reflect the plurality of approaches available to the study of politics and emotions and thus contribute to the cutting-edge debates on this fascinating topic.