Emotional Communities, Collective Identities and Social Movements

This session explores how emotions and affects shape collective action in contexts marked by multiple crises, democratic uncertainty, cultural conflicts and growing social polarisation. Moving beyond approaches that treat emotions as secondary or individual experiences, the panel invites papers that examine affects as constitutive dimensions of subjectivities, collective identities and engagement. It examines how they contribute to processes of politicisation and subjectivation through which actors interpret grievances, develop shared meanings and engage in collective action. In this sense, the session approaches social movements as emotional communities through which feelings, moral values and collective identities are constructed and reproduced. We particularly welcome contributions from Global South contexts and from forms of activism rooted in cultural and political traditions that challenge dominant Northern understandings of emotions and collective action.

The panel considers both emotional orientations towards solidarity, care and social transformation and more reactive dynamics. Contributions may address anger, fear, resentment, nostalgia, pride, love, care and emotional labour, as well as memory, trauma and future imaginaries. We also encourage papers examining the spaces and practices through which emotional engagement contributes to the formation of political subjectivities and collective identities, including everyday life, digital activism, consumption, cultural practices and the emotional dimensions of research and fieldwork. It includes studies of progressive, conservative, environmental, feminist, nationalist and far-right mobilisations.

By bringing together the sociology of emotions, social movement studies and the sociology of collective action, the session seeks to open a comparative conversation on how emotions shape subjectivities, collective identities, solidarities and action.