Practical Feelings

Book excerpt: "Practical Feelings develops a novel theory of emotion, combining the sociology of emotion with social practice theory. Chapter 1 theorizes an emotion practice approach by combining symbolic interactionist and poststructural approaches to emotion using their shared lineage of pragmatism. Within this approach, concepts like emotional capital, habitus, and social location together help us examine emotion as effort, energy, and embodied resource. Chapters 2 through 5 apply an emotion practice approach to the domains of work, leisure, social media, and politics. The empirical chapters move from the intimate sphere of nursing to the sphere of public health threats while refining an emotion practice approach. Audio diaries from nurses capture how they use and conserve emotional resources within hierarchies of social class and race. In examining sports fans, we see how they use and invest in the emotional power of sports symbols, but a hierarchy of racial inequality underlies this economy of emotion that connects communities and corporations. Social media users connect with others during health threats by relying on past engrained digital habits of frivolity and humour. Turning to the political sphere, rhetoric from leaders reinforced a view of emotions as irrational, converting dominant emotional capital into political capital during public health threats (Ebola and COVID-19). The final chapter highlights the relevance of homophily for connecting emotions with social inequality and theorizes mechanisms for social change"--