Old and New Questions for Sociology: The Global Importance of the Sociology of Emotions

Abstract

This essay presents the sociology of emotions as a device to search for answers to the questions that the post-pandemic reality triggers. To achieve this goal, the essay takes the central idea of the book “The emerald handbook of the Sociology of Emotions for a post-pandemic World. Imagined Emotions and emotional futures”. This work displays a diversity of ideas that cover the current situation of emotions in relation to the world of the pandemic. Taking their contributions, and from the question about the action of the subjects, we elaborate a proposal that allows us to configure a vision about the experience/bodies/emotions today, based on the past, but thinking about future possibilities. The present text is an opportunity to call attention to the importance of the sociology of emotions in the elaboration of questions that allow us to build a social analysis in a new world, so complex and diverse that it is impossible to apprehend it in a unique way. Thus, seeing the effects of the pandemic, but from a sociology of emotions perspective, allows us to observe both individual bodies and the social processes that shape emotions based on their ties and the various locations they constitute.