‘Being there’: emotional memories, gatherings of the Emotions Research Network and happy birthdays

Abstract

Waffles and sausages and summer rain. It is pleasantly warm in Hamburg and the pavement has that smell that comes after a rain shower. The city emits a host of other city-in-the-summer smells, sending each of us back to past times. Someone remembers the happiness of walking home from school on steaming, wet-smelling tarmac. A woman is smiling at the memory of eating waffles in the park, the syrup running down her chin. A man stops to sniff the smell of sausages in the air, not quite like the ones at ‘home’. Suddenly he feels homesick. At the university, a conference begins: the smell of linoleum blends with the particular aroma of coffee poured out of a university catering flask. Standing next to the coffee are colleagues from the Emotions Research Network in their full corporeal form. Some are taller than we remember; we have to lean up for the hug. Others have a smile that is just so good to see in person. As we encounter each other and interact after two years of online conferences, the importance of the full range of our senses becomes clear and the feelings and memories flow. The European Sociological Association Emotions Research Network (ESA RN11) is having its mid-term meeting in Hamburg. It is the end of August 2022, and with a mixture of alarm and delight the long-standing members of the network are realising that it will soon be 20 years since our first mid-term in Augsburg, Germany, in 2004. We think back to that time, just 15 of us in a meeting room in a hotel. Smells of breakfast, hotel carpet, beer and meat. We gave papers, but we had more time for discussion. There was much discussion about how to define emotions. What is an emotion? How do we feel? What conceptual tools might be useful for understanding