The Emotional Aspects of
Resistance and Solidarity (TEARS)
Research
Shame, guilt, and fear are known to be salient emotional harms of social oppression. Resistance against oppression therefore involves forms of emotional transformation allowing the development of more empowering affective dispositions. What gives emotional transformations their emancipatory power? Combining phenomenological analysis, emotion theory, and narrative literature, TEARS pays special attention to the way narrative practices can foster a fertile ground for affective resistance and solidaristic relations.
Work Package 1:
What kind of emotions shape the affective landscape of resistance? The first aim is to offer a phenomenology of emotional resistance against oppression. Secondly, to clarify what model of emotional self-transformation is better suited to account for resistance. Thirdly, to elucidate the relationship between awareness of oppression and the recalcitrance of some debilitating emotional patterns: how can the gap between what we know and how we feel be reduced? The fourth objective is to clarify the criteria that narrative thinking should meet in order to have an emancipatory potential.
Work Package 2:
In its second part, TEARS focuses on the emotional changes that can foster solidaristic resistance. This enquiry has two main goals. First, the aim is to provide a phenomenological account of the emotional conditions for solidarity. Secondly, the purpose is to outline some recommendations for individual and institutional engagements with narrative practices as a way to foster more cooperative ways of living together.
TEARS CONFERENCE, 8-10 June 2026
Publications
Sáenz Benavides L. Narrative Resistance and Emotional Transformations. Hypatia. Published online 2025:1-22. doi:10.1017/hyp.2025.16
Principal Investigator
Laurencia Saenz Benavides
P.I.
Laurencia Sáenz Benavides is a Marie-Skłodowska Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Bologna (Project TEARS, Grant Agreement n°1011105929) She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Birkbeck College, University of London, in July 2019. She works on moral and political philosophy, feminist philosophy, critical philosophy of race, and philosophy of emotions
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