Description: Tracing emotions across work, leisure, social media, and politics, Practical Feelings counters old myths and shows how emotions are practical resources for tackling individual and collective challenges.
We do not usually think of our emotions as practical -- often they are nuisances to overcome, momentary mysteries to solve, or fleeting sensations to savor before getting back to the business of living. But emotions interlace the practical elements of daily life. In Practical Feelings, Marci D. Cottingham develops a theory of emotion as practical resources. By integrating the sociology of emotion with practice theory, Cottingham covers diverse areas of social life to show the range of an emotion practice approach and trace how emotions are put to use in divergent domains. Spanning work, leisure, digital interactions, and the political sphere, Cottingham portrays nurses, sports fans, social media users, and political actors in more complex, holistic ways. Practical Feelings provides the conceptual tools needed to examine emotions as effort, energy, and embodied resources that calibrate us to the social world.Review Quotes: "She has offered us a portrait of emotions and ourselves for our time, a time when our distinctive "emotional culture" makes many demands on us as beings with feelings. Today's world asks that we use emotions-our own and others emotions-with knowledge, skill, and competence." -- E. Doyle McCarthy, Symbolic Interactions
"Cottingham introduces emotional practices, as links beyond the immediately felt situation, time-lines that can be accumulating problems or energy-stores we can draw upon. Cheering at football games transforms into emotional capital among families and strangers. Viral on-line humor gives distance from public panic, even as it undermines authority. Nurses' moment-by-moment emotional shifts and organizational strains show up in their own bodily ailments. Cottingham moves the theory of interactional chains into the time-dimension that is the axis of our lives." -Randall Collins, author of Interaction Ritual Chains"This is a truly unique book in its integration of theoretical traditions (Hochschild, Collins, and Bourdieu) and its combination of empirical findings across the social domains of work, leisure, digital spaces, and politics. Cottingham convincingly shows the importance of emotions in various practices. A must read!" -Jan Willem Duyvendak, Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology, University of Amsterdam"Cottingham enhances the sociology of emotions by arguing that emotions are practical resources. She creates a mature dialogue with perspectives on emotion work and emotional energy. These ideas are brought to life through vivid and varied examples of how people use emotions as resources to meet the challenges of living." -Mary Holmes, University of Edinburgh