From Rupture to Repair: Alienation, Violence, and Social Emotions

This joint session examines the relationship between alienation and violence through contemporary sociological theories that conceptualize violence as a complex, gendered, and multi-layered social system. Moving beyond approaches that isolate either subjective or structural factors, it draws on recent work to understand violence as embedded in intersecting regimes of inequality, including gender, as well as in institutional formations and global processes. Violence is thus not treated as episodic or exceptional, but as patterned, relational, and reproduced across multiple domains of social life, from interpersonal interactions to transnational conflicts. Particular attention is paid to gender-based violence as a key site where structural inequalities, power relations, and processes of alienation converge. Explore how gender regimes shape both the forms and the distribution of violence, as well as the conditions under which it is normalized, rendered invisible, or contested. Parallelly, it incorporates insights from the sociology of emotions to examine how social emotions—such as shame, anger, fear, and humiliation—interact with these gendered structures, contributing to the activation, escalation, or interruption of violent dynamics. By bringing together analyses of structural, interpersonal, and gender-based violence, the session highlights the mechanisms that connect alienation to various forms of harm. Considering how alternative emotional and social practices—such as empathy, solidarity, and care—challenge entrenched inequalities and contribute to the transformation of violent regimes. In doing so, the session aims to advance a comprehensive sociological account of violence that integrates gender, structural analysis, and relational dynamics, while foregrounding the possibilities for social repair and change.