Emotional Transition in Social Movements. The PAH Case

Abstract

We find that some fractured societies, in grappling with Neo-Liberalism as a political project, embark on an emotional transition to win hearts and minds for new, fairer policies to tackle inequalities.Thus, there are ’affective spaces’ facilitating this emotional transition, thereby allowing the building of collective action. For these spaces to work well, they must be configured as chains of interactionrituals, which use emotional transformation to drive social change.This paper is based on a documental analysis and an ethnographic study carried out between 2013 and 2018 in several assemblies of and actions taken by the PAH (a platform for those affected by home foreclosure) in several Catalan municipalities. It was conducted by participatory observation, focus groups and in-depth interviews with activists.