Audrey Bryan: Affective Pedagogies – The Role of Emotion in Social Justice Education. Minority Research Public Talk 7 June 2021.

This presentation advances a conceptual framework through which to explore the centrality of feeling, emotion and affect in social justice education. More specifically, it examines the role that emotion plays in teaching and learning about some of most critical challenges and social injustices facing the world today, including global poverty, racialized systems of oppression, climate catastrophe and the global refugee crisis. While the political consequences of more established emotions such as fear and hate of the Other is well documented, evolving global trends such as the climate and contemporary global refugee crises are giving way to new forms of trauma, guilt, fear, despair and helplessness as well as indifference and denial. Because emotion has until recently been largely neglected in education, how learners affect and are affected by education remains under explored. Conceptualising learners as feeling thinking beings, I make the case for foregrounding emotion in social justice related teaching, and suggest that coming to a deeper understanding of how learners feel about various social injustices as well as how they actively negotiate, contest and interpret them is a necessary starting point for effective social justice education. Central to this is a consideration of the pedagogical challenges associated enabling learners to think more deeply about their own involvement in, and connection to, both past and present social injustices in order to derive new ways of seeing, and being in, the world.

© Audrey Bryan 2021
All rights reserved