Affective Practices in Social Contexts

Affective practices refer to the routinised ways in which emotions, sensations and corporeal responses are coordinated and reproduced across social interactions and material settings. Rather than treating feelings as purely individual phenomena, this perspective emphasises how affect is embedded in the interplay of bodies, objects, discourses and environments. In everyday life, affective practices shape how people sense and respond to one another—from the unspoken tension in institutional meetings to the collective excitement at cultural events. Research in this area draws on sociology, human geography, psychology and cultural studies to investigate the choreography of feeling: how affects circulate, how they are governed by normative feeling rules and how they evolve over time. Global concerns such as sustainability, migration and health have brought renewed attention to affective practices, revealing both their capacity to reinforce power relations and their potential to enable resistance and transformation. By integrating qualitative observation, participatory methods and theoretical analysis, scholars explore how affective routines are learned, how they change in response to crises and how they mediate belonging, identity and social order. Practical applications range from designing more inclusive public spaces and therapeutic interventions to informing policy on community cohesion and digital communication.

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Affective Practices in Social Contexts publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in affective practices in social contexts across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Affective practices: Routinised patterns of feeling and sensing that emerge from the interaction of bodies, objects and social norms.

Affective assemblage: A composite of bodily sensations, emotions, language and material elements that shapes the intensity and direction of interpersonal encounters.

Feeling rules: Socially prescribed norms that guide which emotions are appropriate, when and how they may be expressed.

References

1. Experimenting with arts-based methods and affective provocations to understand complex lived experience of a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. Social Science & Medicine (2024).
2. Studying Intimacies that Matter: Affective Assemblages in Research Interviews with Forced Migrants. NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research (2021).
3. Introducing Affective Practices: Disgust in Finnish Consumers’ Everyday Meat Consumption. Cultural Sociology (2023).