Symbolic Violence and Emotional Care: Origins and Ways out In Individual and Collective Action

In times of growing polarization, where dichotomies brutally simplify complexity, verbal and symbolic violence is gaining ground and becoming a way to gain visibility and stand out in the debate. Although this trend is widely recognized, discussed and condemned, more rarely, the underlying causes and countermeasures are highlighted. This prompts a reflection on the contrast between violence and emotional care, to analyze how verbal and symbolic violence is not merely the result of a sexist culture, a reactionary politics, a Hobbesian vision of international relations, an extractivist approach to economy and natural resources, but the growing failure to provide an emotional care within individual and collective everyday life. In the wake of the significant tradition of scholarship on the ambiguities of emotional labour (Hochschild), emotional capitalism (Illouz), as well as Elias’ perspective on the relationship between violence control and emotional upheavals, this panel encourages theoretical and empirical reflection on the increasingly direct relationship between the spread of verbal and symbolic violence in interpersonal and media-based forms of communication (particularly on platforms, increasingly interested in the management of emotions) and the difficulty of creating time and space for emotional care in everyday life. The panel is particularly interested in receiving theoretical reflections historicizing this debate, as well as examples and perspectives from diverse social contexts, whether these are based on evidence of the problem or on the search for possible solutions.