LIST OF PANELS

Public policy scholars from across the epistemological spectrum are beginning to take stock of the role of emotion as an integral part of interaction and cognitive perception of the world around us. While mainstream approaches to public policy see in emotions elements shaping collective action and impacting policy processes, interpretive and post-structural approaches view emotions as meaningful practices or discourses, shaping our understanding of policies and related processes and constituting policy problems and subjectivities.  This panel (and sections) aims to explore the diverse approaches to studying emotions and emotional discourse in public policy and to encourage constructive dialogue between and across perspectives.

In current public debates around policy measures, policy instruments, or policy controversies, it appears that some emotions are presented and accepted as legitimate for some people or events. Still, when they appear in other contexts, they are seen as disqualifying. Especially in political negotiations, emotions are displaced and seen as irrelevant or unacceptable to a policy solution and instrument because it is too chaotic, naive, subjective, and not grounded in a systematic inquiry. This dynamic of the legitimacy of emotions, while it may seem legitimate in times of pandemic management, points to the need to pay attention to the specific context in which emotions are used or presented.

In a nutshell, emotions are important for policies since they constitute the context and content of issues to be regulated and how this content is communicated. The specific boundaries of emotionality can challenge the policy situation because they point to what is acceptable and seen as legitimate in a given situation: positive and negative emotions are discursive labels and the way these labels are embedded in the larger context impacts who has a say in politics, what kind of knowledge is accepted, and where this knowledge needs to be situated with policy actors.

We invite papers that deal with the role of emotions and policy, and politics. In particular, we welcome papers covering various themes, including gender and health, disability and emotion, racial politics, environment, and energy issues, among others. We welcome innovations in theory and methods, qualitative and quantitative approaches, interpretive and positivist orientations, and so forth. 

Participants should expect to engage in constructive dialogue; we hope to receive scholars from a variety of backgrounds. We, therefore, welcome individuals both new and experienced in the study of emotions, including graduate students, post-doctoral scholars, and new and experienced instructors and professors. Papers may come from any part of the world in the form of case studies or comparative analyses and utilize a variety of methodological and theoretical orientations. What is required is an open mind and a willingness to engage each other and these themes.