This project aims to create dialogue between scholars working in discrete fields of politics and everyday emotions, and to consolidate a critical mass at DU working in the field of ‘feeling political’ (intimacies, politics and everyday life) and build research capacity.
Professor Julie-Marie Strange, Department of History, julie-marie.strange@durham.ac.uk
Dr Laura C Forster, Department of History, Laura.forster@durham.ac.uk
This project builds upon an interdisciplinary reading group, bringing typically discrete fields of scholarship (politics and emotions), disciplines (arts and social sciences) & methodologies (quantitative and qualitative; textual, material and visual) into dialogue. Through a series of events, it seeks to formalise this network, consolidate critical mass, and identify/develop key interdisciplinary research and methodological questions.
This network will reach out to other scholars and practitioners across the UK working on similar themes. A launch workshop will be held to badge the network, followed up by an online seminar series. The workshop, ‘Feeling Political: intimacy and everyday life in the making of political identities’, will bring together scholars, activists, and practitioners to interrogate the ways in which political and activist communities are forged in everyday life, and the encounters and atmospheres that facilitate both the spread and the development of ideas about political alternatives, broadly understood, in the modern period. We want to bring a range of perspectives together to think about the relationship between emotion, intimacy, and politics. In essence the workshop will explore how people ‘feel’ their way to political conviction?
The subject and methods of the workshop build on the PIs current research projects on intimacies and politics in nineteenth and twentieth century Britain. The workshop will explore the ways in which ideas about emotion, intimacy and politics are embedded in our colleagues’ interests too. The history of emotions is a burgeoning field and the aim is to to bring some of its key themes and methods into conversation with meta-narratives about political developments and the making of political communities. The workshop will do this, both by thinking about the history of these developments, and by asking questions arising from the social sciences, notably sociology and anthropology, in order to think about political communities, emotion and everyday life in contemporary Britain. A number of political activists will be invited, as well as community organisers, heritage practitioners, as well as scholars working in UK centres for the study of emotion, and for everyday life.
The workshop will be followed with short online events exploring emerging themes and questions in more depth.
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