Sensibilities, Pandemic and Social Policies

Social policies affect individuals, not only through the transfer of goods and services, but also they shape behavior by influencing how certain situations are defined and conceptualized as problematic or as desirable. From this point of view, social policies assume and demand certain behaviors from part of individuals. In this way, they materialize norms, customs, traditions, and institutionalized beliefs that encourage certain emotional responses while restricting others. The current Social Question invites us to new reflections, questions, and revisions, where social emotions constitute a central axis to analyzing the social structure. A particular feature of the 21st century is the increase of social programs, the number of intervened subjects, and the percentage that it represents in the Gross Domestic Product of the nations. Since the advent of Covid-19, state interventions have increased and evidenced the relevance of analyzing the emotions that are configured in the intervened subjects in such a sudden context. These "new" state responses invite us to reflect on the link between social policies and emotions in the global order and enable reflections about pre-pandemic interventions, observing their distance, proximity, continuities, and possible ruptures. We call for the presentation of works that problematize the relationships between social policies and emotions from theoretical, epistemological, and methodological perspectives, and that refers to various spatial and temporal contexts.