Kassandra Rothenstadt
transgressing the gridlocks of pure reason. Nussbaum( 2001) also contends that emotions are best understood as thoughts or cognitions and are in fact a form of judgement informing intentional perceptions and beliefs( 2001, p. 30).
3. Political activism and emotions
By connecting the subjective and the rational in our system of ethical reasoning, emotion is, thus, a necessary precondition for a conscious existence because emotion can confer agency by continuously questioning, evaluating, critically assessing and checking against its inbuilt exigencies the legitimacy of a priori constructions or newly offered propositions. Consequently, emotions are a fundamental element in political activism where knowledge alone, according to Mestrovic( 1996), is not enough to result in action. Action based on information assumes a connection between the emotions and the intellect. There is a vast body of research that demonstrates the active presence and role of emotions not only in politics of dissent, but in all political processes( Marcus 2000). Lasswell( 1948) has argued long ago that politics is the expression of personal emotions.
Especially over the last decade or so, social scientists have increasingly recognised the importance of emotions to the functioning of social movement activism. Since then, there has been an ever‐increasing scholarly research that aims to bring emotions into social movement studies( Flam and King 2005; Goodwin et al. 2001). Juris( 2008) points to the fact that emotion is not an incidental aspect of activism, but that it is strategically deployed and cultivated by organisers to incite sufficient commitment amongst activist collectives so as to maintain their on‐going participation. This can be fostered through the formation of affective attachments to the cause as well as among activists, and to produce particular emotional moods during protests and other activists’ work. Pulido( 2003) similarly considers“ emotions, psychological development, souls and passions” as comprising the‘ interior’ dimension of social movements( p. 47). Kim( 2002) warns that any account of social movement activism that ignores the emotional dynamics“ risks a fundamental misunderstanding of the dynamics of collective action”( p. 159). As Eyerman( 2005) states, social movements are often involved in“ transforming as well as articulating values, and in the process, creating new and alternative structures of feeling”( p. 42).
Recent research has focused on the moral conduit to collective action. Group‐based feelings of anger about collective injustices are an important motivational force in collective protest participation to defend collective moral principles( Leach et al. 2006). This assumption is based on the idea that anger is characterized by an agitated phenomenological experience which should galvanise or incite group members’ motivation to fight back when injustice is perceived( see Leach et al. 2006, p. 1234). Moral principles inform the extent to which social and political situations are perceived as unjust, functioning as reference points that reveal discrepancies between actual and ideal situations( Stitka, et al. 2005). From this perspective, the Occupy movement can be described as a thoroughly emotional movement because it erupted spontaneously, impelled by profound indignation and moral outrage directed at the social and economic inequality, the growing disparity of wealth, the injustices of finance capitalism and the seemingly complete bankruptcy of such concept as democracy.
4. Online media and emotional political activism
As today’ s social life is increasingly mediatised( virtualised), the political and the public sphere are also virtual; and the virtual, by consequence, is political and public. Thus, a study of contemporary social life is always a study of( virtual) media. Internet and new media have ushered in revolutionary changes to the processes of communication and interaction in the digital age, becoming not only an instrument in organising traditional activism, but a new context that is changing the very character and possibilities of political activism( Knudsen & Stage 2011). Online media enable, it has been widely claimed, the construction of autonomous communication spaces, free from the control of institutional power( Castells 2012), in this way empowering and rendering more effective social and political activism. In an increasingly mediatized world, online communication media increasingly play a role as catalysts and tools of change( Castells 2012; Shirky 2011; Tufekci 2011). The democratising potential of the internet has been widely researched( for ex. Agre 2002; Dahlberg 2001; Jenkins & Thornburn 2003).
Studies have also established that the Internet confers agency and prompts individuals to appropriate the medium and take action( Feenberg 2009; Bakardjieva 2009); it facilitates the emergence of‘ counter publics’( Dahlberg 2001); it enables‘ subactivism’ or politics that unfolds at the level of subjective experience and
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