Feeling Taiwan : Emotions in Everyday Politics, Social Movements, and Research Practices

In re-centring emotion in Taiwan Studies, a field long dominated by rationalist approaches, this interdisciplinary volume highlights how feelings—of belonging, grief, intimacy, distrust, and ambivalence—shape political life, social formations, and scholarly practice.

In re-centering emotion in Taiwan Studies, a field long dominated by rationalist approaches, this interdisciplinary volume highlights how feelings—of belonging, grief, intimacy, distrust, and ambivalence—shape political life, social formations, and scholarly practice. Its chapters range across colonial legacies, transitional justice, queer kinship, migrant representation, public health, disability, and more-than-human ethics, showing how emotions illuminate everyday experiences and reframe academic inquiry. By putting feeling in the foreground as both method and object, Feeling Taiwan benefits readers by offering new ways to interpret Taiwan’s histories and futures, while also modelling how to integrate reflexivity, positionality, and affect into research practice. It demonstrates that studying Taiwan is never only an intellectual endeavor, but also an affective one—an engagement that invites readers to reimagine scholarship, community, and otherwise. This book will appeal to scholars and students in Taiwan Studies, Asian Studies, sociology, anthropology, political science, cultural studies, and gender/sexuality studies, as well as to researchers interested in the “affective turn”.