The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, Second Edition. Edited by David A. Snow,
Sarah A. Soule, Hanspeter Kriesi, and Holly J. McCammon.
© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Emotions in Social Movements
Justin Van Ness and Erika Summers‐Effler
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Introduction
Social movement scholars who emphasize emotions in analyses routinely argue that
earlier scholars have ignored or short‐changed the role of emotions in the literature
(e.g. Goodwin 1997; Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta 2001; Gould 2009; Jasper 1998),
thus attending to them was a needed contribution. At this point, social movement
scholars attend to emotions fairly regularly and the literature has developed in
important ways. In this chapter, we review the development of the field, particularly
the last 20 years of contributions to the study of emotions and social movements,
and argue for a fresh way forward for the study of emotions in social movements.
Specifically, we suggest turning to the interdisciplinary field of Cognitive Social
Science to extend the field’s understanding of both cognitive and emotive processes.
We conclude the chapter with suggestions for future development.
We can find the history of the social movement field in a variety of places (see
Goodwin and Jasper 2006; Jasper 2011; Moss and Snow 2016). Early collective
behavior theorists focused on the emotional dynamics of crowd situations and social
change. Many were interested in what they perceived as processes of unconscious
manipulation, hysteria, panic, and tended to interpret emotionality as a sign of irra-
tionality (for a review, see Van Ness and Summers‐Effler 2016). Those interested in
more structural explanations of collective behavior also argued that various forms of
tension and emotional distress could motivate action (e.g. Gurr 1970; Smelser 1962).
In the 1960s, activists who had become academics turned to existing literature and
found difficulty in explaining personal experiences with existing theoretical frame-
works. In light of these deficits, these scholars ushered in the emergence of the social
movement field and all but did away with discussions of emotionality to privilege
imagery of the rational actor, while also shifting away from theoretical explanations
of why and toward the analytical questions of how (Morris and Herring 1987). As a