Performing an Archive of Feeling: Experiences of Normalizing Structures in Teaching and Teacher Education

Abstract

The reader's theatre text that follows is a written text documenting and representing as public culture experiences of ‘insidious trauma’ that most often languish in private lives and emotions. We are indebted to the work of Cvetkovich (2003) on ‘insidious trauma’ and Boler (1999) on the presence/absence of emotion in producing our public ‘archive.’ Our text is deliberately polyvocal and fragmented to draw attention to and mirror the way in which insidious trauma pulses in education. We write as a collective to produce this counter-normative text as a deliberative part of our strategy to resist the normative practices of academe and elsewhere that continuously produce and reproduce social inequities.