Last night I attended the Book launch of ‘Public Emotions’, edited by Perri 6, Susannah Radstone, Corinne Squire and Amal Treacher. The book launch was hosted by Demos with the main event being a discussion between the editors and Michael Rustin, Professor of Sociology and Dean of Faculty of Social Science at the University of East London.
It was an interesting talk and valuable to hear so many different responces from people connected to public emotions in different ways, the book highlights emotions in connection to conflict, resolution, memory, power and authority.
There was talk of needing a new vocabulary in order to display emotions – perhaps a new way to show emotions. It would be a nice idea to document displays of emotion and find out how we are currently doing this.
We spoke about how we have institutions where emotion is likely to be very much at the heart of what they do, such as the NHS, and the opposite end of the spectrum where something is very scientific, and depends on amthematical data – unaffected by emotions.
I felt the discussion was great to be a part of, but there seems to be a lot of questions, possibilities and thoughts as opposed to actions in response to all of this information. When will all this discussion engage with the public and the people affected by this?
One man who works in a disability centre, commented that the main problem he encounters is the inability of some people to show emotion. I think its a really interesting idea to think about how we can help people to show emotion, who have difficulty doing so for whatever reason, and how could we then document that. Other things I was inspired by was the idea of if there was a place where it was appropriate to display emotions, where would it be and what would it look like? Something else that was not directly discussed was how we display emotions, and whether people are having emotions, but not generally displaying them visably – and the consequences of this.