Emma Hutchison passed away on 23 November 2024, leaving an immense void in our emotion research community. Emma was ARC DECRA Fellow and Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland, an academic discipline which she renewed by analysing emotions as central social and cultural forces that explain the formation and transformation of political communities – including nation-states, international and transnational organisations – in times of violence, conflict resolution and peacebuilding. This was the main argument of her PhD thesis, ‘Trauma, Emotion and the Construction of Community in World Politics’, which she defended in 2008 at the University of Queensland and was later published as the highly praised book Affective Communities in World Politics: Collective Emotions after Trauma (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
Emma provided us with an original approach not only for comprehending emotions as true agents of political change, but also for understanding the complex affective dynamics and ethical dilemmas which operate in the representation of distant suffering. It was Emma’s passion for examining the visual culture of humanitarianism which led my colleague Beatriz Pichel and myself to invite her to write a chapter for our edited book Emotional Bodies: The Historical Performativity of Emotions (Illinois University Press, 2019). Although Emma was not a historian, she was a remarkable interdisciplinary researcher who did not hesitate to accept our proposal. Emma was not happy working within an intellectual comfort zone, as what mattered to her was being able to cross unfruitful academic boundaries. Her contribution to Emotional Bodies – ‘Humanitarian Emotions through History: Imaging Suffering and Performing Aid’ – remains a must-read for scholars who are interested in critically analysing the shifting politics of pain which have shaped humanitarian imagery from the abolition of the slave trade to present-day crises.
Despite facing manifold health challenges, Emma always remained enthusiastic about creating new dialogue spaces, as shown by the keynote lecture ‘Seeing and Feeling in the History of Humanitarianism’, which she gave at the Geneva conference ‘Regarding the Pain of Others’ in 2019. Even though Emma could not fly to Switzerland, she and her husband – Roland Bleiker – made all the necessary arrangements to be with us virtually. Every time I proposed a new collaboration to Emma she used to say that she was honoured. It is now my turn to say that it has been an honour and a privilege to work with such a creative, supportive and generous person and to have learnt from her that we have nothing to fear from studying how emotions constantly make and (un)make world politics.
