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This chapter uses the pandemic crisis to explore the social processes that structure happiness and shape fantasies of living a happy life. Considered herein are issues of human potential, gendered and classed possibility and people's differing chances in cultivating a sense of satisfaction in ‘being happy’, despite living through COVID-19. Interviews with 40 Australian women living during lockdown restrictions with varying levels of social, cultural and economic capital are utilised to make sense of women's happiness. Vastly different avenues for achieving a happiness fantasy outside of drinking alcohol were possible for more privileged women than for those in middle and working classes. The classed differences in women's gendered roles in managing emotions (their own and other people's) and their chances to be happy are exemplified in how the changes to the structure of the day that resulted from COVID-19 restrictions did not devastate or cause stress (as we heard from working-class women) or need to be filtered or blocked out using alcohol in order to retain balanced emotions (as we heard from middle-class women) but rather provided an opportunity to celebrate the achievement of their happiness fantasy. We deduce that for those with less agency available to control their chances of living a happy life, prevailing COVID-19 discourse that places happiness within individual responsibility and focuses on personal resilience rather than tending to the conditions for flourishing, is problematic.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, trust considerations have been amplified to levels not seen in most of our lifetimes. We have been asked to trust: epidemiologists, virologists and immunologists in terms of the nature of COVID-19 transmission and vaccinations; politicians, public health planners and policymakers in terms of the need for various responses such as lockdowns, school closures, border closures and economic recovery plans; media sources in terms of accurately reporting COVID-19 news; and members of our community in terms of doing their best to protect themselves and others from COVID-19 transmission, including mask wearing, hand washing, isolating and social/physical distancing. Within this chapter, we attempt to explore the emotional responses to this complex web of trust considerations from qualitative data in a study we conducted amidst the beginning of the pandemic. We then offer some interpretations about how trust considerations may have been altered as a result of living in and through the pandemic. We suggest that trust can be a primary emotion, or at least function that way during times of crises, and be (reflexively) deployed by citizens to manage emotional repertoires during crisis and to position themselves as responsible neoliberal citizens. We add understanding about the strains in horizontal/interpersonal trust relations during a pandemic – where the virus spreading between people necessitates social and relational distancing measures for containment – and inflames questions about whether or not we can trust each other.

Popular soup kitchens multiplied rapidly during 2020 in Latin America in the Covid-19 context, seeking that those who do not have guaranteed food access achieve some predictability in their daily food intake. Managing these kitchens requires specific practices, such as organising goods, resources, services and actions that make food, health and personal hygiene viable, as well as the management and emotional care associated with care. The main objective of this chapter is to analyse the emotions associated with food in soup kitchens as a care practice that is configured as an interstitial practice and an affirmation of love and hope. For this, a virtual ethnography and virtual interviews were carried out with people participating in the organisation of soup kitchens in Latin America during the second half of 2020. We will focus on two aspects of our records: the registered groups' names and ‘logos’ and the photos of six countries that appear as ‘identifiers’ of the groups reported there.

To achieve this objective, the argument is structured as follows: (1) The relationship between love, interstitial practices and food is conceptually defined, (2) the methodological strategy used and a vision about bodies/emotions are synthesised, (3) the results of the empirical information are presented and (4) some traces of the emotions surveyed and their connection with love are outlined. It ends by emphasising it is necessary to continue investigating how the set of collective practices that elaborate day-by-day love.

In this chapter we apply a range of insights drawn from social science studies of hope amidst contexts of illness, and studies of hope emerging from the sociology of emotions, in critically considering social processes of hoping amidst the Covid-19 pandemic. While much of the health sciences literature on hope emphasises positive outcomes in terms of coping and motivation, we also draw upon various perspectives which denote a dark side of hoping, whereby inequalities and injustices are tolerated, or where feeling rules insidiously coordinate collective hopes in ways which serve various political-economic interests. Reflecting this ambivalence across different literatures, our examples and analyses suggest that hoping as a social process is itself inherently conflicted, dissonant and rife with tensions. As we explore the contradictions of hoping amidst a pandemic, the tensions between expectations and desire, tragedy and optimism, aspiring to act and fatalistic acceptance make apparent that emotions of hope can be neither neatly delineated nor disentangled from a ‘messy’ web of related feelings and framings. We extend our emphasis of these blurry, dissonant and messy aspects of hoping through work on ‘tragic optimism’, following Frankl, wherein wider lifeworlds or imaginaries pertaining to deeply embodied and implicit notions of self and a good life are central to maintaining hope amidst heightened vulnerability and uncertainty. We close by laying out a post-formal approach to hope, which methodologically and conceptually focusses on contradictions and dissonance in narratives of hope, whereby living hopefully always involves living awkwardly with these tensions.

This chapter explores courage as an emotionally involved form of action. The notion of courage is challenging as we have physical, psychological, moral and existential forms of courage but also because what engenders courageous actions is still somewhat of a puzzle within social science. Firstly, I introduce the main forms and explanations of courage. Secondly, dating is discussed to illustrate how courage is an important analytical category to understand people's actions. In dating persons often overcome their fear of being rejected. During the COVID-19 crisis, new insecurities and fears were added to the practice of dating which now could imply both fear of being infected and fear of moral condemnation by others who would consider dating a morally irresponsible behaviour. Thirdly, I discuss theoretical and methodological implications of a mini analysis of a story about active and direct dating interactions during the first lockdown period in Denmark during the COVID-19 crisis. Often courage is thought of as so extraordinary that it is not part of people's ordinary social life. But it is not. People do experience situations that call forth courage, which implies overcoming fear and insecurity in striving to realise goals more important than avoiding feeling such uncomfortable emotions – situations in which they cannot merely rely on routine and/or self-confidence and others' trust. Consequently, this chapter explains how and why courage is an important analytical category for the sociological enterprise. Finally, the conclusion offers some reflections concerning courage and dating in future neo-COVID predicaments and how courage can be studied methodologically speaking.

Anger responding to government-imposed COVID-19 pandemic mandates is examined in relation to 2021 international reports of street protests in cities, with a focus on Perth, Western Australia. Angry protestors displayed a variety of signs and symbols, united under banners demanding freedom. A multi-disciplinary analysis attends to distrust in public health mandates in the global context of an insecure biosphere. Mandates can signify symbolic death, and anger an ‘immune’ response to lifeworld constraints. Anger among nurses and vaccine-hesitant protestors signifies ethical rejection of super-imposed mandates, and fear of alleged vaccine harms. Official pandemic communications are held to be ill-timed, lacking information meaningful to diverse citizens' needs, and offset by poorly contextualised data and unreliable pre-packaged interpretations communicated via digital technologies. A novel hypothesis proposes semiotic misrecognition of the global nature of communications from intersecting ecosocial crises may underlie protestors' anger. Modelling of a management system to validate broad contextual knowledges may restore meaningful balance and public solidarity, to creatively respond to future human crises.

In this chapter, we examine how the concept of heroism was defined and used during the Covid pandemic in 2020, particularly in connection with the nursing profession. We begin with a sociological examination of heroism and courage. Using textual data from US newspapers, we then compare current constructions of nurses as heroes with views of them during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. The analysis will show that during the earlier pandemic nurses were seen as essential health workers who were in great demand, but there was little reference to them being heroic. However, with Covid, nurses were often presented in the media as heroes. This was largely done by transposing the ‘emotion codes’ (Loseke, 2009) of warfare on the Covid crisis. Emotion codes like ‘fighting the enemy at home’, ‘sacrifice’, ‘bravery’ and ‘service to the country’ were used rhetorically to construct the administration of medical care in the context of a pandemic as inherently courageous and heroic. We end by arguing that the expansion of the concepts of heroism and courage, especially in the context of a profession dominated by women, offers new possibilities for a less masculine orientation toward courage and heroism.

This chapter explores theory and local context of socially constructed pandemic fears during COVID-19; how material and non-material fear objects are construed, interpreted and understood by communities, and how fears disrupt social norms and influence pandemic behavioural responses. We aimed to understand the lived experiences of pandemic-induced fears in socioculturally diverse communities in eastern Indonesia in the context of onto-epistemological disjunctures between biomedically derived public health interventions, local world views and causal-remedial explanations for the crisis. Ethnographic research conducted among several communities in East Nusa Tenggara province in Indonesia provided the data and analyses presented in this chapter, delineating the extent to which fear played a decisive role in both internal, felt experience and social relations. Results illustrate how fear emotions are constructed and acted upon during times of crisis, arising from misinformation, rumour, socioreligious influence, long-standing tradition and community understandings of modernity, power and biomedicine. The chapter outlines several sociological theories on fear and emotion and interrogates a post-pandemic future.