Recognition, Feelings of Injustice and Claim Justification: Deaf People’s Storytelling on the Internet

Abstract

In the recent upsurge in research on the role of emotions in politics, ranging from cognitive science to philosophy to the social sciences, several scholars have demonstrated the importance of understanding how emotion affects the cognition and reasoning capacities that underlie political behavior (Marcus, Neuman, & Mackuen, 2000; Thompson & Hoggett, 2012). Emotion helps create group identity and mobilization (Barnes, 2012; Nussbaum, 1995, 2003) as well as engagement in deliberation (Krause, 2008; Mackuen, Wolak, Keele, & Marcus, 2010; Maia, 2012d; Steiner, 2012b). In this chapter we draw on Axel Honneth’s work to explore the sensitive dimension of suffering and issues of injustice. We argue that his political philosophy helps to deepen and refine the understanding of subjective reactions to injuries, without assuming that emotions are a kind of individual “property.” Despite claims to the contrary, we contend that Honneth’s attempt to establish a link between a normative dimension in “feelings of injustice” and collective action opens promising paths through which empirical studies of emotion could be expanded and reconceptualized.