Emotions matter

de Alan Hunt, Kevin Walby, Dale Spencer

The sociology of emotions has recently undergone a renaissance, raising new questions for the social sciences: How should we define and study emotions? How are emotions related to perennial sociological debates about structure, power, and agency? Emotions Matter brings together leading international scholars to build on and extend sociological understandings of emotions. Moving beyond reductionist approaches that frame emotions as idiosyncratic states of mind, the scholars in this collection conceptualize emotions as the experience of social relations. Empirical and theoretical chapters demonstrate how emotions relate to sociological theories of interaction, the body, gender, and communication. Pushing the boundaries of sociology and stimulating debate for related fields, Emotions Matter offers diverse relational approaches that illustrate the crucial importance of emotions to the sociological imagination.