Anja Laukötter

An Introduction to History of Science and the Emotions

This essay introduces our call for an intertwined history-of-emotions/history-of-science perspective. We argue that the history of science can greatly extend the history of emotions by proffering science qua science as a new resource for the study of emotions. We present and read science, in its multiple diversities and locations, and in its variegated activities, products, theories, and emotions, as constitutive of the norms, experiences, expressions, and regimes of emotions. Reciprocally, we call for a new reading of science in terms of emotions as an analytical category. Assuming emotions are intelligible and culturally learned, we extend the notion of emotion to include a nonintentional and noncausal “emotional style,” which is inscribed into (and can reciprocally be generated by) technologies, disease entities, laboratory models, and scientific texts. Ultimately, we argue that emotional styles interrelate with broader emotional cultures and thus can contribute to and/or challenge grand historical narratives.

How Films Entered the Classroom: The Sciences and the Emotional Education of Youth through Health Education Films in the United States and Germany, 1910–30

This essay focuses on health education films in Germany and the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century, illustrating how these films developed their potential as a teaching tool capable of shaping the emotions and changing the behavior of audiences. The essay argues that the films’ educational goals were inspired by certain contemporary ideas on the relation between perception, cognition, and emotions. In concentrating on youth as a target audience, it traces the way in which the sciences of psychology and pedagogy discovered the significance of emotions to this specific age group’s learning process. The essay discusses the deployment of both general and specially created films in the classroom as a new educational practice, arguing that these films can be read as a negotiation of the modern human subject and its emotions.