Heroic Efforts The Emotional Culture of Search and Rescue Volunteers [Paperback]

Winner of the 2006 Outstanding Recent Contribution Award from the American Sociological Association, Sociology of Emotions Section
Many search and rescue workers voluntarily interrupt their lives when they are called upon to help strangers. They awake in the middle of the night to cover miles of terrain in search of lost hikers or leave work to search potential avalanche zones for missing skiers, snowboarders, and snowmobilers in blizzard conditions. They often put their own lives in danger to rescue stranded, hypothermic kayakers and rafters from rivers.
Drawing on six years of participant observation and in-depth interviews, Jennifer Lois examines the emotional subculture of “Peak,” a volunteer mountain-environment search and rescue team. Rescuers were not only confronted by physical dangers, but also by emotional challenges, including both keeping their own emotions in check during crisis situations, and managing the emotions of others, such as those they were rescuing. Lois examines how rescuers constructed meaning in their lives and defined themselves through their heroic work.
Heroic Effortsserves as an easy to understand sociological introduction to the ways emotions develop and connect us to our surroundings, as well as to the links between the concept of heroism and other sociological theories such as those on gender stereotypes and edgework.

Lois takes readers inside the social world of search and rescue volunteers, offering sociological insight into topics such as gender, emotions, and identity. [Lois] examines how rescuers construct meaning in their lives and define themselves through their risky, demanding work. Jennifer Loisoutstanding in-depth ethnography of mountain search and rescue teams yields insight not only into the specific heroic culture of rescue workers, but also more generally into that of other risk-takers such as firefighters, police officers, and ER doctors. Lois focuses on the way emotions drive soml3%