Emotions, Community, and Citizenship is a pioneering work that brings together scholars from an array of disciplines in order to challenge and unite the disciplinary divides in the study of emotions.

This edited collection focuses on the relationship between social care, communities and citizenship. While there is extensive research within each of these fields, until now there is a dearth of dialogue between them: this book provides a link in a way that is relevant to both policy and practice.

In this critically acclaimed work, for which she was awarded the Prix de L'Assemblee Nationale in 1994, sociologist Dominique Schnapper offers a learned and concise antidote to contemporary assaults on the nation. Schnapper's arguments on behalf of the modern nation represent at once a learned history of the national ideal, a powerful rejoinder to its contemporary critics, and a masterful essay in the sociological tradition of Ernest Renan, Alexis de Tocqueville, Emile Durkheim, and Raymond Aron. If Schnapper asserts, the fate of liberal democracy is coterminous with that of the national ideal, then the nation's fate—and the answer to this question—must be of pressing interest to us all. Reflecting deeply on both the nation's past and future, Schnapper places her hopes in what she terms "the community of citizens." No mere exercise in sociological abstraction, Schnapper's case for the nation also entails a practical political objective. In a time of radical difference, the national ideal may be the last, great social unifier. This book deserves a place alongside the works of Elie Kedourie, Ernest Gellner, Anthony Smith, and other classics in the study of nationalism and nationality. This work will be of interest to sociologists, historians, and political scientists alike.

An Analysis Of How emotion functions cooperatively with reason & contributes to a healthy democratic politics.

Interest in citizenship has never been higher. But what does it mean to be a citizen in a modern, complex community? Richard Bellamy approaches the subject of citizenship from a political perspective and, in clear and accessible language, addresses the complexities behind this highly topical issue.

What do we know of the emotional life of the Middle Ages? Though a long-neglected subject, a multitude of sources – spiritual and secular literature, iconography, chronicles, as well as theological and medical works – provide clues to the central role emotions played in medieval society. In this work, historians Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy delve into a rich variety of texts and images to reveal the many and nuanced experiences of emotion during the Middle Ages – from the demonstrative shame of a saint to a nobleman's fear of embarrassment, from the enthusiasm of a crusading band to the fear of a town threatened by the approach of war or plague. Boquet and Nagy show how these outbursts of joy and pain, while universal expressions, must be understood within the specific context of medieval society. During the Middle Ages, a Christian model of affectivity was formed in the ‘laboratory’ of the monasteries, one which gradually seeped into wider society, interacting with the sensibilities of courtly culture and other forms of expression. Bouqet and Nagy bring a thousand years of history to life, demonstrating how the study of emotions in medieval society can also allow us to understand better our own social outlooks and customs.

Previously published as a special issue of Social Semiotics, this book grapples with such questions as: What does it mean to be a citizen in contemporary societies? What role do mass media play in the making of citizenship? Drawing on ground-breaking work from scholars around the world known for their contributions to the study of media and politics, this volume covers a range of practices of mediated citizenship, with chapters studying the mourning after the deaths of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands and notions of authenticity in letters written to British Conservative politician Boris Johnson. The authors explore discourses of nationalism in the English and Scottish Press, and examine struggles over definitions of the public in Australian public service broadcasting and the US Medicare debate. Emerging possibilities for mediated citizenship are assessed in three studies of online activism and participation in the US and China. The book builds on conventional understandings of citizenship and the public sphere, calling attention to the need for understanding affective attachments to politics. Finally, it demonstrates that we cannot fully understand citizenship without looking at the concrete workings of power in and through mediated discourse.