Scholarlink

<p>Emotions are increasingly recognized as central to understanding ethical issues in social contexts. While much of the existing scholarship takes a functional account of emotions, this conceptual paper aims to further advance our understanding of how emotions co-construct morally tense relations. We build on Sara Ahmed’s performative and critical theorization of emotions, focusing on what emotions <i>do</i> in terms of surfacing relations between selves, objects, and others, and in terms of attaching subjects to social structures. We apply this perspective to understanding morally tense relations in cross-sector partnerships, using an ethnographic study of a partnership involving a Dutch corporation, a Dutch consultancy, and a South African nonprofit as illustration. Centering the voice of the nonprofit’s head, we develop three vignettes, showing how three emotions—passion, shame, and threat, intensely expressed to us in an interview—shaped self-other relations within the partnership and reinforced the nonprofit’s marginalization. Building on this empirical illustration, we propose three theoretical implications of revisiting the role of emotions through Ahmed’s lens.</p>

错误：搜索内容不能为空，请输入英文关键词
错误：关键词超出字数限制，请精简
高级检索

Emotions and Morally Tense Relations: What We Can Learn from Ahmed’s Performative View on Emotions

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2025年9月17日

查看全文
  • ToTran Nguyen,
  • Maddy Janssens

摘要

Emotions are increasingly recognized as central to understanding ethical issues in social contexts. While much of the existing scholarship takes a functional account of emotions, this conceptual paper aims to further advance our understanding of how emotions co-construct morally tense relations. We build on Sara Ahmed’s performative and critical theorization of emotions, focusing on what emotions do in terms of surfacing relations between selves, objects, and others, and in terms of attaching subjects to social structures. We apply this perspective to understanding morally tense relations in cross-sector partnerships, using an ethnographic study of a partnership involving a Dutch corporation, a Dutch consultancy, and a South African nonprofit as illustration. Centering the voice of the nonprofit’s head, we develop three vignettes, showing how three emotions—passion, shame, and threat, intensely expressed to us in an interview—shaped self-other relations within the partnership and reinforced the nonprofit’s marginalization. Building on this empirical illustration, we propose three theoretical implications of revisiting the role of emotions through Ahmed’s lens.