As my past research showed, the contemporary concept of „comfort“ emerged in connection with the “American way of life”. It at first referred to the comfort of cooled cinemas. After World War II it referred to the airconditioned manager-populated offices and, later, rapidly increasing number of apartments. It entered everyday language to express the limits of personal comfort in interpersonal as well as formal relations. It was Elizabeth Moss Kanter – a famous organizational sociologist – who noted the “emotional discomfort” of male managers confronted with the first generation women and minorities positioned not in subservient service jobs, but as their occupational equals. Jumping ahead to the Trumpist roll-back politics, it employed the idea of emotional discomfort to abolish government and teaching courses raising “divisive issues” such as racism or slavery. In my current research I try to identify general social category-, norm- and body-related phenomena that cause emotional discomfort. Among other illustrations of situations causing emotional discomfort, I take up Gestalt switch about sexual preferences, gender and gendering language, ambivalent stages or forms of sexual harassment, and tabooed bodily fluids and bodies. Self-focused emotional discomfort can also emerge: when one diagnoses one`s own envy, intense guilt or excessive pride and incorrigible love. How to distinguish between “emotional discomfort”, on the one hand, and embarrassment and shame felt about the others` and own breach of norms, on the other, in my own thinking still remains open.

About the speaker:

Prof Emeritus Helena Flam has gained her Fil Kand in Lund, Sweden and her PhD at Columbia University, USA. As a professor of sociology she taught at the University of Leipzig, between 1993 and 2017. As prof emeritus she is still its affiliate. Professor Flam pioneered European research in the Sociology of Emotions. Recently, she called for connecting research on social movements, professions and civil societies. In her most recent publication, she shows how to bring together the study of emotions and institutions.

Among her major texts and (co-)edited volumes are "The Emotional ‘Man’" in two consecutive issues of IS (1990), States and Anti-Nuclear Movements (1994), Mosaic of Fear (1998), Emotions and Social Movements (2005), Methods of Exploring Emotions (2015), "Civil Society and Professions" in Professions & Professionalism (2019) and the Research Handbook on the Sociology of Emotions (2024).

📅 Date: Friday, 24 April, 2026

🕑 Time: 2:30pm – 3:30pm

📍 Venue: CJT-9.29

🗣️ Speaker: Prof. Helena Flam

🔗 Register here: https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=106258