Spending a day with the Emotion Historians

This event https://emotionsblog.history.qmul.ac.uk/2015/09/tears-and-smiles-programme/ was an opportunity to exercise some transdisciplinary thinking. Could emotion historians contribute to the scholarship of online and distance education?  Specifically, the issue of disembodiment when interpersonal interaction takes place online.

Descriptors assigning purpose to an emotion (e.g. mocking, patronising) peppered the day and emotion as culturally situated performance for control, or to resist control, was a strong theme to emerge. Emotion as a rational act expressed for strategic purposes although, there was some debate on ‘the complex emotion repertoire’ of Margery Kempe (a medieval mystic). While those around Kempe  perceived her behaviour as irrational it could be explained as a manifestation of illness. Self-report by Kempe, that sensory stimuli could  trigger strong emotion, would fit with the experience of some with neural evidence of temporal lobe epilepsy. 

Emotion as experienced and in particular socio-emotional experience, those feelings and thoughts embedded in the dynamic of an interpersonal interaction, did not feature. Understanding social emotions is important for a socio-cultural pedagogy based on the idea that students will co-construct knowledge through discussion, through sharing ideas. The negotiation of ideas can generate strong emotions and when it takes place online it is through written communication and is mediated by a digital device i.e. the physical other is unseen. ‘The textual face of the medieval poet’ did provide an eloquent account of using literary device such as metaphor and the multimodal  (through styling for example, embolden) to express emotion and achieve emphasis through writing  (as is the case when people interact online).  But once again, this account was confined to the expression of emotion and one-way interaction i.e. poet to reader.

Art history provided considerable resource throughout the day, an observer interpretation of an expressed emotion that is then reinterpreted by the historian.    By contrast social emotions rely on language,  spoken or written, and their history would require a different resource. So, while I enjoyed an illuminating set of talks, thank you, I am still searching for the history of those emotions, experienced and expressed, that are embedded in the social.