Affect, Emotions, Feelings, Senses, Sensibilities: Conceptual Consistencies and Inconsistencies (1)

Wednesday, 9 July 2025: 11:00-12:45
Location: FSE016 (Faculty of Education Sciences (FSE))
WG08 Society and Emotions (host committee)
TG07 Senses and Society

Language: English

The coexistence of different theoretical approaches to the social study of human subjectivity has led to the development of a plurality of categories referring to its object. In the case of sociology, certain schools of thinking have privileged the use of specific concepts to address the realm of the subjective and the social interactions related to it, such as ‘affects’, ‘emotions’, ‘sensibilities’, ‘senses’, and ‘feelings’, among others. While certain areas of scholarship use such terms interchangeably or with some elasticity, other theoretical and epistemological approaches impose rigidity, consistency, and exactitude in their use. But what really separates ‘affect’ from ‘emotion’ from ‘feelings’, say, or ‘senses’ from ‘ sensibilities’ anyway? How and why does this matter?

The present session aims to answer these questions by means of conceptually innovative contributions, with or without empirical content, that problematise the forms of conceptualising human subjectivity in sociology in these ways, and which are attentive to the philosophical, psychological, psychoanalytic, and other disciplinary genealogies through which the terms have gained currency in sociology and elsewhere. Accepted papers will prompt thorough, provocative, and fair-minded discussion regarding the consistencies and inconsistencies between these concepts, their related categories, and their disciplinary histories and origins.

In addition, we want contributors to reflect on what these consistencies and inconsistencies mean for different sociological approaches, research contexts, and empirical engagements.

This session constitutes a joint effort between the WG08 ‘Emotions and Society’ and the TG07 ‘Senses and Society’.

Session Organizers:
Mark PATERSON, University of Pittsburgh, USA and Nicolas ARENAS, London School of Economics, United Kingdom
Oral Presentations
How Does Normality Feel like? the Case for Unmarked Emotions
Lorenzo SABETTA, Sapienza-University of Rome, Italy
Affective Sublimations or How We Feel with Intelligent Technologies
Ania MALINOWSKA, University of Silesia, Poland
The Neue Phänomenologie and the Category of the Patheur, a Bridge between Atmospheres and Social Sensitivity.
Michele GRANZOTTO, University of Naples "Federico II", Italy
Affect, Rhetoric, and Identity
Ferruh YILMAZ, Tulane University, USA
Senses As Bodily Apparatuses of Generating and Perceiving Affects
Taoyi YANG, Germany
After Alerts
David CECCHETTO, Canada; Katherine BEHAR, Baruch College and CUNY Graduate Center, USA
Loneliness : Emotion or Feeling?
Romain DAVIERE, France
See more of: WG08 Society and Emotions
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