Researching emotion and affect in the history of education

Abstract

This exploratory paper was prepared for a symposium held at the 2011 ISCHE conference in which participants were asked to envision future challenges in the historiography of education, to predict where the field was moving, and to imagine what innovations and new interests would arise in the subsequent 30 years. While the paper is playfully written from the vantage point of 30 years in the future and pretends to offer a retrospective review of what happened in the field over that period, its primary purpose is to seriously suggest a number of ways that historians of education might engage with the history of emotion and affect in their work. The first section of the paper describes the consolidation of the history of emotions as a field of historical study and discusses the importance of a ‘governmentality' approach. It is then suggested in the second section that historians of education increasingly drew on the concept of ‘affect' and developed ‘affective histories' of education that both built upon and departed from earlier histories of emotions. The third section of the paper discusses some of the ways in which historians of education incorporated into their work insights from neuroscience into consciousness and choice-making as well as an increased awareness of the object-mediated body.