Christian von Scheve is Professor of Sociology with a focus on the sociology of emotions at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. He is also a Research Fellow at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin), co-spokesperson of the Einstein Foundation Research Unit “Coping with Affective Polarization,” and a member of the executive board of the Collaborative Research Center “Affective Societies.” Before joining Freie Universität Berlin, he was Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Vienna. His research broadly examines how culture and social structure shape the ways people feel, think, and interact—and how these processes reproduce or transform social order. His current work spans three main areas. First, he investigates the social and cultural constitution of emotion, focusing on socially shared patterns of feeling, both as enduring affective dispositions and as short-lived collective emotions, and their roles in groups and societies. Second, he explores the role of emotions in political contexts, including their influence on conflict, cohesion, and social divisions, as well as the politicization of emotions in social movements and party politics. Third, he seeks to integrate different approaches to affect across sociology, psychology, and cultural studies.

Kate Rossmanith is an academic and an essayist. She is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and an Associate Professor in the School of Communication, Society and Culture at Macquarie University, Sydney. Drawing on her background in anthropology and creative writing, she researches narrative and emotion concepts in legal settings. Her research on ‘remorse’ and ‘closure’ is influencing the working practices of judges, coroners, lawyers and support workers, and is improving outcomes for people caught up in the justice system. She is the author of Small Wrongs: How we really say sorry in love, life and law (nominated for literary awards in the UK and Australia), and is the co-editor of Remorse and Criminal Justice: Multi-disciplinary perspectives (Routledge, 2022). She will be a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford in 2026.

Ronnie de Sousa is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, where he spent his entire career apart from visiting appointments in the USA, Switzerland, Britain and China. His books include The Rationality of Emotion (1987) Why Think? Evolution and the Rational Mind (2007), Emotional Truth (2011), Love, a Very Short Introduction (2015), and Why it’s OK to be Amoral (2025). His current research has focused on the bearing of dual processing theory on the connection between language, emotions and values, as well as on the Philosophy of Biology and the Philosophy of sex and gender. Many of his papers are available on his website at http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~sousa.