Practical Feelings

She has offered us a portrait of emotions and ourselves for our time, a time when our distinctive emotional culture makes many demands on us as beings with feelings. Today's world asks that we use emotions-our own and others emotions-with knowledge, skill, and competence. * E. Doyle McCarthy, Symbolic Interactions * Cottingham introduces emotional practices, as links beyond the immediately felt situation, time-lines that can be accumulating problems or energy-stores we can draw upon. Cheering at football games transforms into emotional capital among families and strangers. Viral on-line humor gives distance from public panic, even as it undermines authority. Nurses' moment-by-moment emotional shifts and organizational strains show up in their own bodily ailments. Cottingham moves the theory of interactional chains into the time-dimension that is the axis of our lives. -Randall Collins, author of Interaction Ritual Chains This is a truly unique book in its integration of theoretical traditions (Hochschild, Collins, and Bourdieu) and its combination of empirical findings across the social domains of work, leisure, digital spaces, and politics. Cottingham convincingly shows the importance of emotions in various practices. A must read! -Jan Willem Duyvendak, Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology, University of Amsterdam Cottingham enhances the sociology of emotions by arguing that emotions are practical resources. She creates a mature dialogue with perspectives on emotion work and emotional energy. These ideas are brought to life through vivid and varied examples of how people use emotions as resources to meet the challenges of living. -Mary Holmes, University of Edinburgh