ABSTRACT

Everyday life is something we normally take for granted and only seldom, unprovoked, start to question. Emotions are an integral part of our everyday encounters, experiences, engagements, relations and interactions with other people. Emotions are sources of human motivation as well as responses to different social and personal experiences and interactional stimuli. Even though emotions are seemingly everywhere, historically they have not occupied the position of a central concern within disciplines such as sociology. Sociology and related disciplines have sought to conceptualise, frame and configure their understandings of emotions in many different way. From the ranks of phenomenology, existentialism, psychoanalysis, feminist research and interactionist sociology, the interest in emotions slowly but securely began to sprout and spread and throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Methodologically, the new gospel in sociology and related disciplines spells out the importance of emotional introspection and affective reflexivity on behalf of the researcher. The chapter also presents an overview of this book.