The madness that is the world: young activists' emotional reasoning and their participation in a local Occupy movement

The focus of this paper is young people's participation in the Occupy protest movement that emerged in the early autumn of 2011. Its concern is with the emotional dimensions of this and in particular the significance of emotions to the reasoning of young people who came to commit significant ti...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Sociological review (Keele) 2015-12, Vol.63 (S2), p.167-182
Main Author: Mizen, Phil
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Activism
Activists
Cognitive psychology
Decision making
Decisions
Demonstrations & protests
emotion
Emotions
Energy
England
Occupy
Participation
Political protest
Protest Movements
Qualitative analysis
Qualitative Methods
Qualitative research
reason
Reasonable force
reasoning
Social movements
United Kingdom
Wales
young people
Youth
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Summary:The focus of this paper is young people's participation in the Occupy protest movement that emerged in the early autumn of 2011. Its concern is with the emotional dimensions of this and in particular the significance of emotions to the reasoning of young people who came to commit significant time and energy to the movement. Its starting point is the critique of emotions as narrowly subjective, whereby the passions that events like Occupy arouse are treated as beyond the scope of human reason. The rightful rejection of this reductionist argument has given rise to an interest in understandings of the emotional content of social and political protest as normatively constituted, but this paper seeks a different perspective by arguing that the emotions of Occupy activists can be regarded as a reasonable force. It does so by discussing findings from long-term qualitative research with a Local Occupy movement somewhere in England and Wales. Using the arguments of social realists, the paper explores this data to examine why things matter sufficiently for young people to care about them and how the emotional force that this involves constitutes an indispensable source of reason in young activists' decisions to become involved in Local Occupy.
ISSN:0038-0261
1467-954X
DOI:10.1111/1467-954X.12267