NUI Galway

Graduate Student, School of Political Science and Sociology

PhD Candidate

Thesis Title: Habitus shift in liquid modern Ireland

About

Funding body: Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences. 

Until quite recently, human emotions remained under-theorised within sociology.  With the emergence of the sociology of emotions since the 1970’s this has gradually changed.  However, even within this literature there exits a micro bias, with the relationships between emotions and more macro issues like social change, social structures and culture remaining, with a few notable exceptions, under-explored.  Yet emotions, their arousal and regulation, are fundamental to the constitution and functioning of society; to the formation of social bonds and the maintenance of social order.  This project aims to explore the relationship between social change and emotional habitus in late modernity and Ireland in particular.  Due to the speed and scale of change that has occurred here, Ireland is an ideal site for such research, yet such an analysis has not been attempted here to date.  One of the key objectives of this project is to suggest that many of the problematic social and sociological issues that have emerged in light of this social change may be rooted in an altered affective constitution-a link not yet explored.  In doing so, it draws on insights from social theory, particularly the work of Norbert Elias, the sociology of emotions, and also from social psychology and social neuroscience. 

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