Edwards, D. orcid.org/0000-0002-1028-6239 and Canning, R. (2024) ‘Is this a joke?’ Exploring how care experienced people feel their way through inheritance and what their emotions ‘do’. Emotions and Society, 6 (3). pp. 329-348. ISSN 2631-6897
Abstract
Inheritance provokes mixed emotions and feelings for people who engage in this ‘family practice’ (Monk, 2014; 2016). Inheritance can be a way of ‘doing’ and ‘displaying ‘family’ but can also be a way of un/making families (Edwards and Canning, 2023). The aim of this article is to explore how care experienced people ‘feel their way through’ (Ahmed, 2014) inheritance. We do this by triangulating findings from informal empirical research we undertook on social media with an analysis of the broader literature on inheritance contained within blogs, autobiographies and museum exhibitions about care experience. We make two key arguments. The first is that inheritance can be attributed as a source of feeling for care experienced people. We consider how our question on social media immediately sparked negative ‘emotional expressions’ (Bericat 2016), related to feelings of exclusion, loss and anger of inheritance not being of relevance to them. The quote in our article title – ‘Is this a joke?’ – was an expression from a person who responded to our research. Second, we argue that while marginalised and absent within orthodox inheritance practices, care experienced people are ‘feeling subjects’ (Bericat, 2016), who derive new forms and ways of creating and (re)imagining inheritance from the emotions associated with being ‘othered’ by inheritance practices. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s (2014: 4) question: ‘What do emotions do?’, we show that care experienced people ‘feel their way through’ and ‘do’ different things with the emotions they attribute to inheritance to forge new inheritances.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
Authors/Creators: |
|
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © Authors 2024. This is an author produced version of an article published in Emotions and Society. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
Keywords: | care experience; doing emotions; sociology of emotions; feeling through; (re)imagined inheritance |
Dates: |
|
Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Education, Social Sciences and Law (Leeds) > School of Education (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 22 Jan 2025 12:09 |
Last Modified: | 22 Jan 2025 12:09 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Bristol University Press |
Identification Number: | 10.1332/26316897y2024d000000025 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:222076 |
Download
Filename: E and S article - Final.pdf
