All loved up – exploring love in everyday life
Love is often presented as a universal human experience, but in reality it is deeply shaped by cultural, social and historical contexts. We invite contributions that explore how love is understood, practised and experienced in everyday life — not as a fixed or ‘hard-wired’ emotion, but as a socially constructed, culturally mediated and contextually bound phenomenon.
We are interested in scholarship that examines love in all its everyday expressions: not solely romantic love, but also familial love, friendship, care, community bonds and the experience of being or not being loved. How is love expressed across different cultures, identities and social positions? What does it mean to feel loved — or unloved — within specific social, economic or relational contexts?
This issue seeks to explore how love is shaped by gender, class, race, migration, education, sexual identity and cultural background — and how these factors influence the expectations, availability and meanings of love in people’s lives. We particularly encourage submissions that address underexplored experiences and voices, including those of migrants, marginalised communities and individuals who fall outside dominant narratives of love and intimacy.
We welcome submissions on topics including (but not limited to):
- How people define, seek and experience love in different contexts
- Love and care as culturally and socially constructed practices
- The experience of not feeling loved: emotional misattunement, exclusion and neglect
- Love in marginalised communities: immigrant, racialised and diasporic perspectives
- Cross-cultural and cross-country comparisons of the meanings and expectations of love
- The impact of social class, education and economic conditions on the experience of love and care
- Love, wellbeing and mental health: connections to loneliness, belonging and social cohesion
- Gendered expectations and performances of love and emotional labour
- Love and identity: how love affirms or challenges cultural, sexual and social identities
- Dating, match-finding, marriage, cohabitation, chosen families and the institutional shaping of love
- Everyday narratives of love in media, consumer culture and storytelling
We welcome empirical research, qualitative studies, conceptual and theoretical work, literature reviews, and interdisciplinary contributions. Submissions should aim to explore the situated, relational and culturally embedded nature of love in contemporary life.
This collection sets out to move beyond universalist or romanticised accounts, and instead illuminate how love is lived, negotiated and understood within diverse social worlds. To that end, research is invited from a range of disciplinary vantage points.
