By Michael Orsini and Jennifer M. Kilty
We think with emotions. We reason with emotions.
Straightforward enough? These statements may seem uncontroversial, and yet significant energy is expended banishing emotions from political discussion, arguing that they muddy the waters and get in the way of “reasoned” debate.
Why? Must the commitment to evidence-based policy making be devoid of feeling? Isn’t evidence marshalled in ways that reflect affective attachments to policy ideas? Is it because some are opposed to the specific emotions that are being mobilised in politics?
Our recently published article in Policy & Politics: Emotions and anti-carceral advocacy in Canada: ‘All of the anger this creates in our bodies is also a tool to kill us’, examines a subject that has aroused intense debate: the expansion of the punitive state. We were interested in how activists mobilise others to resist punitive policies, the resources they bring to their activism, and the feelings that guide them. We were struck by how activists understand themselves as feeling actors, as people with thoughts, hopes and dreams that are grounded in their embodied experiences. Our focus group interviews with activists in Ottawa, Canada revealed three key findings about the role of emotions in organising: (1) anger mobilises anti-carceral activism; (2) fear of state actors and surveillance are motivational forces to become or remain involved in activist organising; and (3) organisers understand care and mutual aid as alternatives to incarceration and mechanisms to support one’s activist peers.
Anger is often interpreted as a negative emotion that has no place in political discourse. We argue that it is important to provide space for anger to surface even if it does not transform into more hopeful emotions. Political actors, like the activists we spoke to, enacted practices and policies of care to assist members of neglected communities, but they did not necessarily leave their rage at the door. They provide a powerful example of how anger can be transformative, and remind us that the feelings attached to the expression of feelings in others is highly racialised. We draw on the idea of “racialised emotions” to emphasise that politics and policy reflect and reproduce ideas about what is appropriate to feel in different circumstances, and who has the moral authority to express their feelings. In this way, structural racism shapes the emotional landscape of political contestation.
The activists we interviewed work to resist carceral expansion in different spheres, which means that when we say ‘carceral’, we are speaking about more than just prison settings. We are referring to the increased surveillance of specific communities that state authorities have deemed to be of concern. This includes attempts to police people with mental health issues and the regulation of the movement of people in public spaces. Not surprisingly, many of the policy issues activists are concerned about evoke a range of emotions, from fear, to disgust, and shame.
What is the message for policy makers trying to navigate the thicket of thorny issues influencing public policy? First, they need to appreciate that their own assumptions about the place of emotions in public policy are not the last word on what is or is not appropriate to express in policy debate. Social movement actors who oppose carcerality embrace a politics of hope that is backed up by actions to support members of communities who have been neglected and harmed by state institutions. Understanding the emotional contours of these community-based initiatives is another way to shift what is commonly understood as policy relevant knowledge. Disliking or recoiling at the tactics of activists is not a reason to disregard them, or to frame activists as unreasonably prone to emotional outbursts, or unnecessarily angry. Anger provides a template for a range of feelings that matter for activists and for those charged with devising policies that do not harm already vulnerabilised communities.
In the rush to ground policies in the language of evidence, one can lose sight of actors who embody evidence that they feel in their bones. Instead of seeking to manage the emotions of others, policy makers would do well to ask whether they should try to contain these emotions, and what politics would look like if there was a deep appreciation for the structuring role that feelings play in contested policy spaces.
You can read the original research in Policy & Politics at
Kilty, J. M., & Orsini, M. (2024). Emotions and anti-carceral advocacy in Canada: ‘All of the anger this creates in our bodies is also a tool to kill us’. Policy & Politics (published online ahead of print 2024) from https://doi.org/10.1332/03055736Y2023D000000024
If you enjoyed this blog post, you may also be interested to read:
Durnová, A. (2022). Making interpretive policy analysis critical and societally relevant: emotions, ethnography and language. Policy & Politics, 50(1), 43-58 from https://doi.org/10.1332/030557321X16129850569011
