Introductory description

"Emotions," Sara Ahmed (2014) writes, "have been a ‘sticking point’ for philosophers, cultural theorists, psychologists, sociologists, as well as scholars from a range of other disciplines. This is not surprising: what is relegated to the margins is often, as we know from deconstruction, right at the centre of thought itself.”

As Ahmed describes, people are emotional beings, but we often find it difficult to think and talk about feelings. On this module, we bring both the concept of emotion itself and ideas about specific emotions into the spotlight, as we explore how we can think about – and think with – feeling.

Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches, on this module we examine and analyse emotions as personal, collective, cultural, and social experiences. We explore what emotions mean to individuals, communities, and societies; how emotions feel, and how we feel about emotions; how emotions can be expressed and 'performed'; and how emotions circulate in cultural productions and social spaces.

Module web page

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

As this module uses problem-based and student-led learning, topics studied may change from year to year and based on students’ interests. The syllabus below is purely indicative, meaning actual content and topics may differ:

• Histories of Emotion - how have people thought and understood feelings?

• Connection and Community - how do emotions bring people together?

• Shame - how does shame, through its connections to privacy and discipline, shape our behaviours?

• Love - how has love been understood and expressed across different times and cultures?

• Grief - how do we understand grief as an individual and collective emotional experience?

• Anger - is anger always a negative, destructive emotion, or can it be used positively and creatively?

• Depression/Anxiety - do we need to move beyond ideas of mental health and think of emotions as a broader cultural experience?

• Happiness/Joy - what is the role of happiness in contemporary society?

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate awareness of the history of thought surrounding emotions and feelings
• Critically evaluate understandings of emotion
• Analyse cultural expressions of emotion
• Mobilise critical and theoretical perspectives to support their ideas and understandings of emotion
• Develop individualised interdisciplinary perspectives on emotion
• Undertake independent research

Indicative reading list

Adams, Matthew. 2020. Ecological Crisis, Sustainability, and the Psychosocial Subject: Beyond Behaviour Change. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Ahmed, Sara. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Ahmed, Sara. 2014. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 2nd Edition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Allen, Kelly-Ann. 2020. The Psychology of Belonging. New York and London: Routledge.

Berlant, Lauren, ed. 1998. Intimacy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Berlant, Lauren, ed. 2004. Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion. London and New York: Routledge.

Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Berlant, Lauren. 2012. Desire/Love. Santa Barbara: Punctum Books.

Bladlow, Kyle, and Jennifer Ladino, eds. 2018. Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment. Lincoln, NE, and London: University of Nebraska Press.

Bowlby, John. 1961. Processes of Mourning. The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 42, 317-340.

Butler, Judith. 2003. “Violence, Mourning, Politics.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 4, no 1: 9-37.

Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso.

Chemaly, Soraya. 2018. Rage Becomes Her. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Cherry, Myisha. 2021. The Case for Rage: Why Anger is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cvetkovich, Ann. 2012. Depression: A Public Feeling. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Daniel, Drew. 2013. The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology in the Renaissance. New York: Fordham University Press.

Deonna, Julien A., Raffaele Rodogno, and Fabrice Teroni. 2012. In Defense of Shame: The Faces of an Emotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dixon, Thomas. 2023. The History of Emotions: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Elias, Norbert. 2000. The Civilising Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Oxford: Blackwell.

Eng, David L., and David Kazanjian, eds. 2003. Loss: The Politics of Loss. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Featherstone, Mike, ed. 1998. Love and Eroticism. London and New Delhi: Sage Publications.

Flam, Helena, and Jochen Kleres, eds. 2015. Methods of Exploring Emotions. London and New York: Routledge.

Flannery, Mary C. 2021. Practising Shame: Female Honour in Later Medieval England. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Goodwin, Jeff, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta, eds. 2001. Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gray, Billy, Carmen Zamoran Llena, and Jonas Stier, eds. 2023. Crisis and the Culture of Fear and Anxiety in Contemporary Europe. London and New York: Routledge.

Hirsch, Marianne. 2008. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today 29, no. 1: 103-128.

Illouz, Eva. 2012. Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation. London: Polity.

Irigaray, Luce. 2002. The Way of Love. Translated by Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluhacek. London and New York: Continuum.

Jack, Dana C., and Alisha Ali, eds. 2010. Silencing the Self Across Cultures: Depression and Gender in the Social World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

James, Robin. 2015. Resilience and Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism. Winchester and Washington: Zero Books.

Kim, David Kyuman. 2007. Melancholy Freedom: Agency and the Spirit of Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Klass, Dennis, Phyllis R Silverman, and Steven Nickman, eds. 2014. Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief. New York: Routledge.

Kleinman, Arthur, and Byron Goode. 1985. Culture and Depression: Studies in the Anthropology and Cross-Cultural Psychiatry of Affective Disorder. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Korsmeyer, Carolyn. 2011. Savouring Disgust: The Fair and the Foul in Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lertzman, Renee. 2015. Environmental Melancholia: Psychoanalytic Dimensions of Engagement. London and New York: Routledge.

Lorde, Audrey. 1981. The Uses of Anger. Women's Studies Quarterly 9, no. 3: 7-10.

Lund, Mary Ann. 2021. A User’s Guide to Melancholy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Martin, Emily. 2009. Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

May, Simon. 2011. Love: A History. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Miller, Susan B. 2013. Disgust: The Gatekeeper Emotion. New York: Routledge.

Miller, Susan B. 2017. Emotions of Menace and Enchantment: Disgust, Horror, Awe, and Fascination. New York: Routledge.

Morgan, Michael L. 2011. On Shame. London and New York: Routledge.

Phillips, Matt. 2017. “Notes on Loving a Mourner (with Roland Barthes and Others.” Paragraph 40, no. 2: 211-227.

Plamper, Jan. 2015. The History of Emotions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Probyn, Elspeth. 2005. Blush: Faces of Shame. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Radden, Jennifer. 2002. The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rosenwein, Barbara H. 2020. Anger: The Conflicted History of an Emotion. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Rosenwein, Barbara H., and Riccardo Cristiani. 2018. What is the History of Emotions? Cambridge: Polity Press.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1999. A Dialogue on Love. Boston: Beacon Press.

Singh, Julietta. 2018. No Archive Will Restore You. Santa Barbara: Punctum Books.

Stearns, Peter N. 1994. American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth- Century Emotional Style. New York: New York University Press.

Swidler, Ann. 2001. Talk of Love: How Culture Matters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Thompson, Neil, and Gerry R. Cox, eds. 2017. Handbook of the sociology of death, grief, and bereavement: A guide to Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge.

Wilson, Elizabeth A. 2004. Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Wilson, Elizabeth A. 2011. AI: Affect and Artificial Intelligence. Washington: University of Washington Press.

Wilson, Elizabeth A. 2015. Gut Feminism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Research element

The seminars on this module are centred on student-led, problem-based learning, with students undertaking independent research across the module to support our collaborative explorations of emotions. The assessments on this module are also centred on independent research and provide space for students to explore topics related to emotion which also align with their own research interests.

Interdisciplinary

This module mobilises critical and theoretical perspectives drawn from multiple disciplinary areas, such as art, classics, culture studies, history, literature, philosophy, politics, psychology, sociology, and theology, as well as interdisciplinary perspectives. Throughout the module, we reflect on connections and contradictions between cross- and interdisciplinary thought, in order to understand the complexities of emotion as both an area of study and a lived, personal and social, experience.

International

The central focus of the module falls on Western/European/Global North understandings of emotion, as an immediate sociocultural context; to facilitate exploration of the sociocultural dimensions of emotion, however, throughout the module these perspectives are drawn into dialogue with ideas and lived experiences of emotion across a diversity of time periods and global cultures.

Subject specific skills

We will gain a critical understanding of:

• how emotions have been studied, and how to study emotions
• theorisations of emotions across times and cultures
• individual and collective expressions and experiences of emotion
• circulation of feelings in art, film, literature, media, and music
• how ideas about emotions shape and (de)construct identities

Transferable skills

• critical thinking
• problem solving
• close analysis
• reflection
• collaborative working
• independent working
• time management
• communication of ideas
• synthesis of ideas
• evaluation and reflection
• independent research
• constructing arguments