Introduction: Political Emotions and Ideological Performance

This special issue, ‘Political Emotions and Ideological Performance’, emerges out of a series of workshops of the same name, held in 2020 and hosted by the Macquarie University node of the Australian Research Council Centre for the History of Emotions (CHE@MQ), with funding support from the Macquarie University Faculty of Arts. The idea for both the workshops and this special issue emerged in late 2019 out of conversations revealing the surprising number of CHE@MQ members who were currently undertaking research on political extremism, political violence and ideological identity formation. Because the node was only established in 2019, and its members hail from a wide range of disciplines, many had not yet had an opportunity to collaborate, but all were keen to learn from one another’s disciplinary approaches to the intersection of politics, ideology and emotion. The resulting collection of essays situates itself at the nexus of theoretical-textual research on emotions and data-driven sociological research, offering a novel consideration of political emotions: it explores how emotions sustain ideologies, as well as how they generate, and are generated by, political engagement. almost commonsense that to allows us to address the of how subjects become invested in particular structures’