Conceptualizing Oppression-Related Emotions

Project Information

CORE

Grant agreement ID: 101066941

DOI

10.3030/101066941

Project closed

EC signature date 3 June 2022

Start date 1 October 2022

End date 30 September 2025

Funded under

• Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)

Total cost

No data

EU contribution

€ 256 442,88

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI PADOVA
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - CORE (Conceptualizing Oppression-Related Emotions)

Reporting period: 2024-10-01 to 2025-09-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

CORE is a project that brings together Women and Gender studies, Philosophy, and Psychology to respond to a scenario in which women (along with other marginalized groups) suffer acts of violence and oppression that trigger unpleasant emotions to a much greater extent than other subjects. The main idea of the project is that these experiences may have effects in terms of mental and physical health while being an indispensable resource for changing society for the better.
CORE proposes the category of Oppression-Related Emotions (ORE) to identify a cluster of aversive emotions related to experiences of oppression, discernible from more universally experienced types (referred to as ‘negative emotions’ or ‘pain-related emotions’ in the scientific and medical literature). The project aims to investigate the relation between ORE, oppression, knowledge, and painful manifestations.
The main research hypothesis is that oppression-related emotions are influenced by the axes of oppression: i.e. these emotions may be experienced differently depending on the dimension of gender, class, race, etc. The project focuses on the gender axis, while acknowledging that the other dimensions may be relevant. That is, the project is informed by the awareness that intersectionality is a critical social theory (Hill Collins 2019) that is crucial to understand the phenomena investigated. This research focuses on the women distress (to respond to the data available in relation to pain in women); but the notion of oppression-related emotions may be applied in future to other axis of oppression (provided the availability of relevant data).
The research has two branches: the first and main one is related to the epistemic role of oppression related emotions; the second is related to the consequences, in terms of health problems, of frequently experiencing oppression-related emotions.
The first research branch, therefore, investigates of the role of oppression-related emotions' in the production of female, feminist, and anti-oppressive subjectivities and knowledge. The core idea explored in this investigation is that oppression-related emotions help to better understand the world, and particularly oppression, ultimately leading to produce anti-oppressive, emancipatory theories. Vice versa, these theories may shed a new light on oppression-related emotions, bringing to a reconsideration of them and a different way of understanding and therefore experiencing them. The research main objective is to establish a comprehensive, robust, and effective philosophical theory, focusing on the role of ORE in the production of subjectivity and knowledge. It aims to answer the questions: What is the relationship between oppression, painful emotions, and anti-oppressive/feminist theory? What role does anti-oppressive theory play in subjects’ relationships with painful emotions on the one hand and with knowledge production on the other? Can feminist theory have a therapeutic role, and how should this role be understood?
The second research branch, instead, explores how to connect the physical pathologies more experienced by women rather than men to the emotional experiences of oppression. This part of the research is the most ambitious and difficult, as it needs to be interdisciplinary. The second research objective is therefore to answer the question: What is the relationship between painful manifestations and ORE?

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

During the first two years of research, I worked as a Visiting Post-Doc at Brock University (BrockU), and completed two secondment periods at the University of Granada (UGR) for a total of 8 months (January-April 2023 and January-April 2024).
During my work at Brock University, I trained in various philosophical traditions: feminist phenomenology (Beauvoir, Bartky); posthumanism; new feminist materialisms; and reflections on interdisciplinarity. My activities included participation in training and research with colleagues from various disciplines pursuing doctoral degrees in interdisciplinary humanities at Brock. Additionally, I studied the philosophy of emotions, attending workshops and panels on the subject. During the secondment in Granada, I underwent scientific training to comprehend and analyze scientific literature in psychology, to enhance the interdisciplinary approach of the research. In the final year of the project, based at the University of Padova, I focused on advancing research in feminist and naturalist philosophy (including feminist phenomenology, new materialism, posthumanism) and expanded my focus to include education and pedagogy, responding to emerging needs identified through my earlier research. During this period, I also concentrated on disseminating my work, presenting it to various scientific audiences across Italy, thereby enhancing the project's impact and visibility within the national academic community, participating in several conferences and seminars. Throughout the project, I organized two interdisciplinary workshops, one at Brock University and another at the University of Padova. I also presented my work at international conferences and to various philosophical communities. My work has significantly engaged with critical and feminist phenomenology, providing a philosophical framework for understanding lived experiences of oppression and related emotions. As part of the project outcomes, I published an article on the diagnostic role of emotions in feminist philosophy. Furthermore, a book detailing the epistemological premises of my research and several articles regarding the work done during the CORE project are forthcoming.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

To investigate oppression-related emotions in a philosophical framework through interdisciplinary research, and to propose new perspectives on their relationship with painful manifestations, CORE develops a methodology that is naturalized, interdisciplinary, feminist, and intersectional. The project is carried out through a philosophical framework informed by contemporary naturalized feminist philosophy, implementing research integrating feminist philosophy with relevant research in psychology to achieve CORE’s goal of developing a theoretical framework that will support interventions into health issues experienced more frequently by women.
The project goes beyond the state of art producing a philosophical account of ORE that is both naturalized and feminist. It is naturalized as it actively interacts with scientific literature, in this case that of psychology. It is feminist as it involves a comparison with feminist and anti-oppressive literature (feminist philosophy, feminist phenomenology, and new materialism), in addition to traditional philosophical literature (theories of emotion, philosophy of nature, naturalism). Although the combination of phenomenology and naturalized approach can be problematic, because, in some ways, the two perspectives are antithetical, following the tradition of feminist epistemologies a path of mutual translation and dialogue has been taken, in order to make the analysis more inclusive and able to account for the complexity of human emotional experience.
As mentioned, CORE’s main objective is to investigate oppression-related emotions’ epistemic role. Oppression-related emotions have characteristics that they share with all emotions. As emotions, they are action-oriented (they motivates us to do things), embodied (they are felt and experienced in our body), and both social (shaped by the context, and by socialization) and biological (shaped by our evolutionary history). What seems to characterize them is their being in a dynamic, potentially emancipatory relation with the world, and their contradictory stance towards oppression, being both shaped by oppression and antagonistic in respect to it.
The project’s second objective explores the hypothesis that ORE may play a role in painful manifestations of girls and women. The main result of this part of the project is the delimitation of the research questions to a narrow group of pathologies (fibromyalgia and arthritis). Further research is needed to explore the possibility of establishing a strong link between oppression-related emotions and these pathologies, as, at the moment, while the research is exploring these ideas, it is not possible to argue in favor of a relation of causality. Furthermore, a result of this research is the individuation of the need to build tools for interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary dialogue between philosophy and psychology scholars: the comparison between the respective metaphysical, epistemological and methodological frameworks may prove worthy.