Against Affect and for Emotion

Zum Vortrag:

Departing from the present-day free-floating assertions about affect I will offer their critical apprais-al. I will question it as a sociological tool of analysis. This will be accomplished by discussing „affect as it“, “individual affective wiring”, and “affect is relational” to show that these ideas either already have been covered and researched by the sociologists of emotion and/or can be studied only indirect-ly via indicators which are at present missing or poorly specified. In the second part of my presenta-tion I will turn to a more general question of what it is we want to know when we study affect or emotion. The current Sociology of Emotions suffers from an overabundance of case studies, relying on a rather arbitrary theory-mix. To counteract this tendency it makes sense to think back to various sociological grand theories. I will offer examples illustrating what research agenda each implies.

Zur Vortragenden:

Helena Flam gained her Fil.Kand. in Lund, Sweden in 1976 and her Ph.D. at Columbia University in NYC in 1982. As a Post-doc she was affiliated with the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne and the University of Konstanz. As a professor of sociology she taught at the University of Leipzig, between 1993 and 2017. As prof em she is still its affiliate. Professor Flam pioneered Continental research in the Sociology of Emo-tions. Recently, she called for connecting research on social movements, professions and civil socie-ties. She is the editor of the Research Handbook on the Sociology of Emotions: Institutions and Emo-tional Rule Regimes which appeared with Edgar Elgar in the Spring of 2024.