Comments
Thank you for your interesting presentation! How do you see the relationship between emotional scripts and collective experiences – did one affect the other or did it run both ways?
Thank you! I think the latter is true and that emotional scripts and collective experiences shape and influence one another. Emotional scripts ensure a more or less ‘uniform’ norm regarding certain emotional responses, which in turn structures the (collective) experience of those emotions and the events causing them.
However, moments of crisis can – I think – also reverse this process. Since a crisis is an impactful and often very sudden collective expierence, it can cause equally sudden and more or less shared emotional responses that do not fit within the existing emotional scripts, thus enabling or even necessitating a transformation of the emotional norms on which these scripts are based.
Thank you for a really inspiring presentation! It reminded me of a book that might be useful to you, Rebecca Solnit’s “A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster” (2009). You might know it already, of course. For me, the interesting thing in the book was the observation of tension between spontaneous community building in the wake of a catastrophe and the ways public media tends to describe people facing disaster. This could be interesting for your perspective as well.
Thanks so much for the tip, I hadn’t come across it yet and it sounds very useful indeed!
Thank you very much for this interesting presentation. As you analyse the (partly contesting) roles of the affected population, the national government and the media, I was wondering how you would assess the visit of the Queen, and the role and mediatization of the royal family in general if we compare your case study to other disasters like the 1953 flood, as part of an emotional crisis discourse? Was the visit seen as an acknowledgment of the flood victims’ experiences where governmental action was lacking or too slow?
Thank you for the interesting question. I haven’t actually done comparative research, but I know that the way the Queen is portrayed is very similar to the preceding period (for example Fons Meijer talks about this in “Vorst in het vizier” in De Moderne Tijd 4:3-4 (2020) 294-320).
Regarding the flood of 1953, I can make some careful assumptions. The flood of 1926 was regional and the consequent call to action was collective, where the Queen is indeed portrayed as acknowledging the victims experiences. She visited the region multiple times in de first few weeks, which was of course seen as a show of sympathy and support.
The difference, I think, is in being more or less explicit in her actions and utterances. In 1926 there was no National Day of Mourning, like there was in 1953 and the Queen never gave a speech concerning this flood as she did the one in 1953. She visited and was portrayed, but did not show much agency in how she was portrayed. This made it possible for het actions to be seen as consoling her subjects, while at the same time ensuring that she did not give an (explicit?) opinion on government actions, or the lack thereof.
Like I said, only some prelimenary thoughts, but an interesting aspect to keep in mind for me!
Thanks so much for this poster. You explained at the start why you explore times of crisis in terms of the history of emotions, rather than times of stability. What is your speculation about particular shared emotions when the particular crisis ends? In other words, are these shared emotions heightened by the crisis, or do they simply appear in times of crisis and disappear afterward? And depending on your answer, what can this tell us about collective experiences?
Thank you for your question and the chance to elaborate on my hypothesis!
I think that both could be true at the same time, depending on the crisis and the emotion in question. I will try and elucidate my thought proces for both possibilities.
My main presumption is that times of crisis make the dynamics at play in existing relationships more visible. This assumes that those emotions and experiences are already there, but that they are heightened by the circumstances, or that the media pay more attention to – and thus ‘enlarge’ – those experiences. On the other hand, there might be emotions or experiences that are more acute or connected to a particular (moment within a) crisis, which can lead to the rise and fall of a certain experience that is contingent on the exact circumstances and/or emotions within that crisis.
An obvious example could be the experiences in the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic. I think that the situation created new shared emotions, because the circumstances were completely foreign to us. For example: the pride in and gratitude towards hospital personnel, leading to applause from people in lockdown, standing in gardens and on balconies here in the Netherlands, was (in this way at least) new. Although it was ofcourse not shared or supported by everybody, it nonetheless felt like a shared experience within Dutch society.
Almost two years later, these emotions have faded and the experience has transformed. Medical personnel has even on occasions been attacked because people do not want to adhere to government/hospital policies regarding isolation or wearing a face mask. Maybe in the above example the ‘new’ emotions served to temporarily heighten trust in government and/or the medical profession (or dampen distrust?). When the consequences of the pandemic dragged on and the government policies came under more frequent attack, the changing emotions lead to new and more polarised experiences. I think the cohesion of the shared experiences started to rupture and older mechanisms in turn became more visible.
In my case study, both versions seem to be visible as well. The relationship between the affected region and national government had never been the center of discussion, because it had not been relevant. The crisis made this relationship of crucial importance to the inhabitants and thus made the underlying mechanisms visible, with the aid of the media who actively promoted a shared experience within society at large – with the national government as a counterpoint. The emotion of compassion invoked in actors who had never stepped foot in the region, was ‘new’ (or newly directed) and was not lasting, or at least not as a shared experience.
Thank you for the poster. I like your idea of using newspapers a to grasp collective experience but the approach also raises questions. It is easy to think that newspaper articles state the experiences of individual authors, but how can you assess the ability of the media to structure the collective experience of the public? How large corpus of writings are needed for that? Or do you think that other sources (like ego-documents) are always needed to confirm the influence of the media?
Sami Suodenjoki
15.3.2022 12:19
Hello Sari, thanks for this question. Maybe my answers during yesterdays seminar helped illuminate this already, but I’ll try and answer nonetheless.
I do think that newspaper articles often state the experience of the individual author, but that it differs greatly how conscious of a process this is. The same goes for the agency. Journalists also show more than just their own experience, because they perceive and talk to others, but also because they are part of the society they write about. With one person or article, this would not say much (as Rob explained beautifully yesterday), but with a lot of people and sources, I think we can say something – if not everything – about the experiences that were and were not shared across (divisions within) society. For me newspapers are a lens on society, but that does not mean that I do not pay attention to how that lens can be wide or small, distorted, working as magnifying glass or maybe causing tunnel vision. By using a wide variety of sources, I think I can forestall the possible pitfalls of using these newspaper articles as a main source.
Regarding the shaping of society. I know newspapers are not responsible for shaping the totality of experiences of people or even reach every person. I do, however, think that newspapers can be of influence on the experience of a crisis like this flood, especially in this time when newspapers were the main source of information about these types of events. For people actually living in the region, newspapers would have been far less important, but for people ‘experiencing’ this flood from a distance, I think newspapers were of vital importance. Journalists wrote (often very emotional and visual) eyewitness reports after visiting the region for example, giving people an idea of what it was like to be there.
But yes, other sources are needed to track in how far my hypothesis is correct that these newspapers shaped the experience. I will for example look for a discourse (an explanation or accusation, for example) and see where it first crops up and how it does or does not spread. Do newspapers start a discourse, do they find something and magnify it, do they follow an existing discourse, or is there something entirely different going on? Maybe Marie’s idea of experiential interdepence can help me here as well – I have looked into emotional contagion for example, but found this idea to limiting and it lacked explanatory power and depth (at least for my case study).
I do not think I need a very large corpus in quantitative respect, but that it is more important to have a wide variety of sources to view the actors with different ‘lenses’. This means that I use five national newspapers and one national newspaper (with the number of issues for each varying between 20 and 100). For the government I have about 40 documents, but I still have to look at the official anouncements. And the ego documents are still very much a work in progress like I said, but I have a number of diary entrees from people within the region (citizens of different ages and classes, but also a priest for example). I still hope to add some different viewpoints to this, hopefully from government as well as the people (citizens and organisations) giving aid to refugees for example.
If my response raised new questions, please feel free to ask!
Godelieve Peters-Boselie
16.3.2022 11:08