In this article I analyze the collective management of ambiguous emotions in the case of grief arising from perinatal loss/stillbirth. Based on a content analysis of selected Polish discussion lists for bereaved parents and interviews with moderators of these lists, I conceptualize the experience of grief arising from miscarriage/stillbirth as both culturally “disembedded”—not regulated by a coherent set of feeling and display rules, and interactionally “disenfranchised”—framed by the immediate social surrounding of the bereaved as illegitimate. This study then focuses on subsequent social processes surrounding the collective management of such emotions through interactions within online bereavement communities, leading to the creation of local definitions of the situation of loss and formation of subcultural feeling and display rules of grief. I posit that in a wider perspective these community processes can be seen as grassroots mechanisms that agents use to transform the existing emotional culture of grief.

Through the lens of modernization theories, the process of European integration can be perceived as Poland’s second modernization, following the systemic transformation in the nineties. In this article, we analyze the divergent perceptions of the European Union, and attitudes toward European integration, as they coexist within contemporary Polish society. We introduce the notion of European integration as a triple modernization, encompassing economic, institutional, and cultural changes. Using a mixed methods approach based on qualitative and quantitative data from the European Values Study 2017, we demonstrate that Poles generally accept the peripheral status of Poland in the economic context and expect financial support from the core of the EU. Simultaneously, within the cultural context, there exists a marginal but salient attitude that is based on opposition toward cultural pressures and on a claim to an active role in the shaping of the European axiological agenda. Distinguishing the three aspects of this general process of European integration allows for the identification of the source of tensions that are described in literature as cross-European populist tendencies to question the very idea of European integration in member societies of the EU.

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In this article, the author presents cultural theories of emotion and the concept of emotional culture’ as a tool of sociological analysis. The cultural perspective, in her opinion, is worthy of sociologists’ particular attention; it brings factors of a strictly social nature to the analysis of emotion, for instance, the impact of changes in social organization on the presence of emotions in social life. The idea of emotional culture is essential for this perspective. In the proposed meaning, it refers to the ordering of the ‘emotionality’ of a given collective at the supra-individual level. It comprises scenes for the appearance of emotions, manners of expressing emotions, emotional norms, ideas about emotions, the values attached to emotions, and the language of describing emotional experiences. Analyses from the cultural perspective connect changes in expression and emotional norms with changes in social organization, as is shown through the examples of Norbert Elias’s and Cas Wouters’s work.

In this article, I analyze the meaning-making struggle within a major Polish vaccine-hesitant cyber community triggered by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on an online observation of interactions directly following the outbreak in Poland, and in-depth content and conversational analysis of selected conversations, I posit that the pandemic circumstances were experienced in this community as a pervasively ambiguous situation: ambivalent in cognitive, emotional, and epistemic dimensions. The article identifies collective social processes embedded in digital interactions through which this initial ambiguity was ordered, and narratives of the pandemic emerged, enabling the collective management of fear of the novel infection.