Practical Feelings Emotions as Resources in a Dynamic Social World

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.

Marci D. Cottingham is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam, Senior Researcher at the Amsterdam Research Centre for Gender and Sexuality, and a former fellow at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Institute for Advanced Study, Delmenhorst, Germany.