Making Sense of Change: Emotive-Cognitive Reframing of Young People in Post-crisis Spain

Abstract

This article explores how people interpret deep transformations, how they integrate them into their everyday meaning-making and what role emotion work plays therein. To do so, the article draws on the experiences of young people (n=68) in post-crisis Spain and their narratives of change. In the wake of the severe economic crisis of 2008, many of them had lost their jobs as well as their future prospects. They experienced a mismatch between their expectations of their (working) life and the actual opportunities on the precarious labour market. Disappointed expectations and crumbling future prospects made it necessary for them to search for explanations and coping strategies. The article proposes the concept of emotive-cognitive reframing to capture the ways in which the young people adapted their emotions, ideas and expectations and the different forms and directions this could take. It shows that emotive-cognitive reframing was a complex and embodied process of emotional and cognitive work in which existing patterns of explanation were questioned and partly replaced by new ones. If these explanations were individualistic in nature, people considered their emotions and how they dealt with them to be a personal matter. In this case, emotion work was more about appeasing and suppressing emotions rather than channelling them into action. If the explanations were systemic, though, emotion work consisted primarily of turning emotions inside out and redirecting them from the individual towards external actors and structural conditions laying the seeds for collective mobilisation.