Chapter 17 - The Power and Politics of Emotions in Teaching

Abstract

Nowadays, emotions are increasingly being recognized as part of everyday social, cultural, and political life. Emotions in the classroom are not only a private matter but also a political space in which students and teachers interact with implications in larger political and cultural struggles. The notion of politics refers to a process of determining who must repress as illegitimate, who must foreground as valuable, the feelings and desires that comes up for them in given contexts and relationships. Thus, power is located in emotional expression—in who gets to express and who must repress various emotions. The politics of emotions, then, is the analysis that challenges the cultural and historical emotion norms with respect to what emotions are, how they are expressed, who gets to express them, and under what circumstances. In this context, it is argued that there is always something political in which teachers and students are caught up as they relate emotionally to one another across classroom spaces, because power relations are essentially unavoidable; there are always emotion norms influencing emotion discourses and emotional expressions.