Investigating the emotional geographies of exclusion at a multicultural school

Abstract

This article highlights the idea that educators need to look more carefully at how school practices and discourses are entangled with emotion in relation to perceptions of race and ethnicity. More specifically, the focus is on how emotional geographies are manifest in the formation and maintenance of particular racialisation and ethnicisation processes within a multicultural primary school in the Republic of Cyprus. The uniqueness of this school is that both Greek-Cypriot students and teachers (the majority) and Turkish-speaking students (the minority) are enrolled; this interaction takes place in the background of the long-standing political and ethnic conflict between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots. The central argument is that the emotional geographies of exclusion can be understood as manifestations of the racialisation and ethnicisation processes in schools—a finding that has important implications for how to understand the insidious power and tenacity in certain manifestations of these processes.