Shame and Other Political Emotions: From Cohesion to Dissent

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

One of the main challenges facing political theory, and political science, today is to try to understand the significance of political emotions like shame, resentment, empathy, and pride for the mass political movements of the 21st century, especially for the populist resurgence in the developed world.
This panel seeks to build on earlier work on political emotions in political theory, moving from "the politics of fear" towards a broader understanding of the political passions at play in contemporary politics by using a variety of theoretical approaches. This inquiry invites a number of questions. Have technological disruptions (such as social media and the concomitant widespread use of ground-up photography and video) and the social movements associated with them (including #metoo and #livingwhileblack) changed norms and practices around shame and shaming? How does social positionality (including "privilege") affect the experience of emotions like shame and the uptake of experiences like shaming? Is shame always a tool of social conformity or can it act against settled hierarchies and vertical power structures? How does shame interact with other emotions like pity, guilt, and fear? Where might we find resources for understanding shame within the history of political thought?
The panel's four papers touch on aspects of all these questions. Lowry Pressly tackles the connection between shame and privacy in light of recent work in normative political theory. Priya Menon questions the relationship between shame and social knowledge by bringing the study of political emotions to bear on theories of political equality. Tsiona Lida excavates the place of shame at a particularly important moment in Hannah Arendt's work, and Jacob Abolafia shows how questions of shame, social consensus, and the conditions for successful democratic decision-making are problems that have been with political theory since before Plato.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Individual Presentations

• Shame, Reticence, and Common Goods - Lowry Pressly, Brown University

• Inequality and Shame’s Knowledge - Priya Menon, Harvard Law School

• Is Shame Necessary? Social Context and Political Emotions in Democratic Athens - Jacob Samuel Abolafia

• The Role of Emotions in Hannah Arendt’s Writing on Jewish Politics - Tsiona Lida, Harvard

Chair

• Jill L. Locke Gustavus Adolphus College

Discussant

• Adriana Alfaro Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico