History of Emotions (HEC-RS-HISONS-23)

HEC-RS-HISONS-23

Description

The history of emotions explores the sometimes shaky, but never dull terrain lying beyond the trodden paths of social constructionism. While feelings are shaped by social knowledge productions and power relations, they also involve bodies, materialities, and affects which inhabit the edges of symbolic order and cultural intelligibility. The seminar discusses ways in which one can approach these phenomena in an insightful fashion, thereby extending the purview of history and other disciplines. Our conversations engage with sociological, anthropological, psychological, neuroscientific, affect theoretical as well as praxeological perspectives. In addition to such theoretical deliberations, we review various empirical studies on economic, political and other dynamics in modern and early modern history and ask how a methodologically sound integration of emotional patterns and practices can further our understanding of individual and collective trajectories in the past or the present.