Doing Emotions: Emotional Practice and Reflexivity in Everyday Life
A BSA Postgraduate Forum Regional Event
19 May 2026 (8.00am-5.00pm BST)
George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LD
About the Event
This event explores emotion as a social, relational and generative practice. Sociological approaches to emotion understand our experiences of emotion as deeply social, that is, as both shaping, and being shaped by, broader social structures and processes. To do emotion is to engage in social life itself, negotiating gender, power, identities and social positions.
Bringing together postgraduate and early-career researchers from across the UK, the event provides an interdisciplinary platform for engaging with both established and emerging areas in the sociology of emotions. Themes include emotions in family and intimate life, emotion and food, emotion and non-human relations, and emotion in digital contexts. By placing classical concerns of care, intimacy and inequality alongside emerging engagements with material, technological and more-than-human worlds, the event highlights how emotional life is continually reconfigured across social worlds.
Speakers
The keynote lecture will be delivered by Dr Irmak Karademir (University of Nottingham), whose work examines emotion and class, offering critical insight into how affective life is structured by social hierarchies. A roundtable discussion on power, gender, equality and emotion will feature scholars, including Dr Fiona McQueen (Edinburgh Napier University), and other researchers based at the University of Edinburgh. The event will also include postgraduate paper presentations and extended discussion sessions.
Together, the day aims to create a space for critical dialogue, reflexivity and new collaborations in the sociology of emotions.
Call for Papers
The conference will comprise three paper sessions featuring nine selected presentations that explore diverse dimensions of emotions in everyday life. Please submit your abstract of 250 words maximum by 24 March 2026.
Possible themes include but are not limited to:
- Emotions in Family and Intimate Lives: How emotions in intimate contexts are shaped by and shape wider social processes.
- Emotion and Food: Exploring how emotional practices and food practices intertwine in everyday acts of cooking, eating, and caring.
- Emotion and Non-Humans: How emotional practices unfold in human–animal relations, material encounters, and more-than-human worlds, and how these shape everyday attachments, agency, and social meanings.
Registration
This event is free to attend but registration is required. Lunch and refreshments will be provided.
Travel costs for presenters could be reimbursed up to £20 per person (receipts required).