Interrogating the role of emotion and race in anti-oppressive language and literacy practices in education

In his 2019 Presidential Address at the American Sociological Association, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva called on scholars to ‘take emotions seriously’ because, as he contends, ‘racialized emotions are fundamental forces shaping the house of racism’ (Bonilla-Silva 2019, 2). His metaphor of the ‘house’ as reflecting the structural and material nature and impacts of race but still being ‘shaped’ by an “emotional skeleton of racism troubles the onto-epistemological divide, a divide that also haunts understandings of emotions and education. In taking emotions seriously, we recognize the potential of emotions to shape the ‘house’ of educational oppression and mobilize ‘affective agency’ (Bucholtz, Casillas, and Lee 2018, 5) and activism (Zembylas 2013).

As critical, equity-focused literacy educators, we are keenly aware of the missing, misinterpreted, and maladapted role of emotions in scholarship on language and literacy education. Even as scholars attend to the educative potential of affect, embodiment, and emotions on literacy (e.g. Leander and Ehret 2019; Lewis 2020), we continue to see emotions being misunderstood (Pyscher 2016), overlooked (Dunn and Johnson 2020), and conflated with behavior (self) management, emotional intelligence (Goleman 1995), and other harmful ideologies (Hoffman 2009; Ris 2015; Staub 2016).

Much of the work on emotion in the field of literacy takes up Massumi’s (2015) theorizing of affect as autonomous and outside of social signification. As such, affect is viewed as a pre-discursive, non-representational sensation before it is socially or culturally expressed as an emotion or as feeling that is in excess of conscious emotion. Scholars such as Leys (2011) are critical of this separation of affect and emotion, arguing that this view ultimately reinforces the classical body/mind and emotion/rationality binaries despite its grounding in philosophies of duality. In this special issue, we align with those who view affect/emotion as inseparable and integral to sense making.

Wetherell (2012), for example, views affect as embodied and mobile, and entangled in processes of semiosis. She uses the term ‘affective practice’, which encompasses the iterative thickening of practice as well as its potential for improvisation. Ahmed (2015) argues that affect (as sensation) should not be viewed as separate from emotion, pointing out that emotions ‘involve sensations’ but that sensations – what we think of as direct feeling – are mediated by the bodily memory of past histories. These histories include, for example, histories of pain or trauma experienced by women collectively and individually within a dominant patriarchy that is constituted in racism and misogyny. Thus, emotion is a kind of political bodily response that connects past histories and present sociocultural contexts. Given our emphasis on anti-oppressive education and our analyses of how race and power operate in classrooms, we draw heavily from the cultural politics of emotion as laid out in Ahmed’s work. We are interested in what emotion does and with what consequences. How and what do emotions mobilize?

This special issue foregrounds studies focused, broadly, on emotions, literacy, and anti-oppressive education. Drawing from feminist cultural studies of emotion (Ahmed 2015; Boler 1999), feminist standpoint theory (Hill-Collins 2000), and discursive/semiotic analyses of affective practice (Wetherell 2012), we focus less on what emotions are relative to language and literacy and instead ask, what do emotions do relative to language and literacy? Ahmed (2015) asserts that feelings are produced as effects of circulation, embedded in relations of power, and endow ‘others’ with meaning and value, working not only ‘to exclude others from the realm of thoughts and rationality’ but also ‘to conceal the emotional and embodied aspects of thought and reason’ (Ahmed 2015, 170). Emotions are therefore one discursive tactic used to maintain power, particularly white supremacy, and to divide and dis-ally oppressed groups. Boler (1999) distinguishes between ‘feeling power’ and ‘feeling power’. The former focuses on ‘expressive conduct’ and ‘socially enforced rules of power’ such as, ‘How does one learn not to express anger at one’s boss, or that doing so is a very risky business? How are people taught to internalize guilt, shame, and fear as ways of guiding “appropriate” social conduct?’ (p. 4). The latter, however, ‘directs us to explore how people resist our oppression and subjugation. For example, what gives women the courage to publicly challenge sexual harassment?’ (p. 4). Drawing from across these frameworks, our studies examine how emotions are embedded in multiply-marginalized bodies (Camangian and Cariaga 2021), creating affordances for mobilizing emotions and literacies to forward social justice and positive social change.

The seven articles in this special edition offer commentary, critique, and theoretical, methodological, and empirical opportunities for harnessing emotions in anti-oppressive language and literacy education. (We use the term ‘emotion’ or ‘affect’ in our discussion of the articles in this issue with deference to the term used by the author(s) of each article.) Recognizing emotions as profoundly ideological, we open with Feeling Anti-Racism: How Neoliberal Multiculturalism and Racialized Emotions Impede Equity in the Aftermath of George Floyd. Here, contributor Justin Grinage examines the phenomenon of antiracist reading groups, particularly among white readers, and the complicity that ‘feeling good’ plays in maintaining and upholding whiteness while undermining opportunities to advance equity, social activism, and racial justice. Noting that anti-oppressive literacy education requires more than words or simply ‘feeling antiracist’, Grinage calls on readers to ‘reject individual self-satisfaction and embrace collective forms of resistance and activism that search for transformational and sustainable change’.

Grinage’s broad call sets the stage for our next three articles, each of which offers an analysis of how the normative social and emotional ideologies implicit in trauma-informed practices (TIP) and Social Emotional Learning (SEL) frameworks reify the hegemonic impacts of language and literacy practices and then shows how teachers and students resist and disrupt these ideologies. In their piece, Engaging with Literacies of Resistance, Tracey Pyscher and Anne Crampton draw on sociocultural conceptions of emotions as embodied social action to examine two illustrative data sources – one drawn from a ‘feel-good article’ about TIP, the other from a study of a child and caregiver, both with traumatized histories, who enact literacies of resistance as a means of ‘survivance’ (Vizenor 2008) – a reference to indigenous people’s efforts to resist and survive the legacy of colonization – in the face of corrective and therapeutic SEL-based responses aimed at ‘fixing’ a child’s ‘bad behavior’ in school. Seeing resistance as ‘expressions of embodied cultural knowledge’, Pyscher and Crampton urge educators to rethink their own social-emotional responses to learners who seek love and humanization in school when faced with violence and racism in the wider world. Next, Caroline T. Clark, Suzanne G. Lewis, and Alyssa Chrisman offer a critical content analysis of two exemplar Young Adult (YA) novels in their piece, Interrupting the Hegemony of SEL: The Productive Potential of Anger in Young Adult Literature. Through their analysis of Anger is a Gift, by Mark Oshiro, and Furious Thing by Jenny Downham, they argue for the use of quality literature rather than pre-packaged SEL materials to explore emotions with young people and illustrate the affordances of such books to critically discuss what anger does in the face of injustice related to race and gender. Finally, Jungmin Lee draws from a year-long, ethnographic study to critique the limited and limiting portrayals of young English language learning (ELL) students in a U.S. early childhood English as a Second Language (ESL) classroom. In her piece, Examining the Role of Emotion in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students’ Classroom Underlife, Lee demonstrates the emotional assets and semiotic resources of several ELL first graders through a close analysis of the classroom ‘underlife’ (Brooke 1987; Goffman 1961) – a way of characterizing spaces where individuals can resist institutionally imposed norms – including their use of humor as a form of competence that supports their language and literacy learning. Her work challenges prevailing narratives of ESL students as always/only learning English to show how emotions function as social action, cultural knowledge, and linguistic assets in classrooms.

Next, contributors James Joshua Coleman and Mandie Bevels Dunn offer an account of how teachers resist the white, heteronormative norms for reading they are expected to teach, and invite educational researchers to expand how we approach emotions, methodologically, in their piece, Disaffected Teachers: Disrupting Normalized Feelings of Race and Gender in Teacher Education Research. Arguing that scholars of teaching and teacher education need to resist both ‘normalized feelings’ and ‘methodological norms’ in research on emotions, feeling, and affect, Coleman and Dunn encourage readers to look beyond intense, ‘legible’ displays of emotion and, instead, attune to disaffection and other overlooked affective practices. Doing so, they argue, will allow researchers to name and code disaffection in their empirical work (Yao 2021), revealing opportunities to notice and disrupt oppressive norms related to affective expectations among educators both in theory and in practice.

Roberto S. de Roock and Cynthia Lewis ask readers to pay attention to the regulation of feelings in everyday literacy contexts. In Literacy, Racial Capitalism, and the Politics of Good Feeling, they examine two emotional poles – joy and sorrow – demonstrating how the drive towards ‘good feeling’, whether the joy of reading or the pangs of death, demand ‘proper’ emotional responses from readers, educators, and students in community-based settings. These strictures, which are so normalized as to be invisible, in turn often conceal neo-liberal, capitalistic, and oppressive structures. They argue for educators to resist the siren song of ‘good feeling’ so as to analyze and root out the harmful impacts of the ‘affective economy’ embedded in everyday literacy practices more critically. Finally, in their article, Pedagogies of Collective Intersectional Care: The Possibilities and Promises within Women of Color Feminisms, Josephine H. Pham, Kiese Vita, and Tiffany M. Nyachae provide a response to this call for critical vigilance, offering a pedagogy of collective intersectional care as a framework for noticing the emotional labor of Black and women of color educators in their everyday interactions and culturally sustaining practices with students. Showcasing the use of multimodal analytic research tools, and drawing on theorizations of their own classroom practice, their work makes tangible the affective and spiritual dimensions of teaching among educators working for racially just literacy learning.

Across these studies, authors analyzed language to understand how emotions contributed to and disrupted oppressive systems using a range of methodological approaches, including classroom observations, video ethnography, micro-analytic discourse analysis, textual content analysis, historical and cultural analysis, interviews, and focus groups. Guided by theoretical framings that illuminate how language and emotions influence social and political action, as well as how social and political actions influence emotions, these studies also showcase empirical methods for studying emotions in social science contexts where language is the central focus.

In their analyses, authors show that emotion circulates and mobilizes through language and that language itself is spatio-temporal and embodied in ways that play a major role in putting emotion into motion. Across these studies, readers will see that emotions, when normed and regulated, further reify oppressive systems. However, some emotions – anger, humor, being disaffected or joyful in the face of grief – in particular were very powerful for resisting and disrupting oppressive norms. And, critically, emotions were attached to positions: for marginalized people emotions were a form of resistance, but for allies/accomplices, seeing the ways emotions were normed according to maintaining white supremacy helped them to potentially disrupt as well. Each article in some way intervenes to dispel commonplace notions of emotion in education and to suggest new directions for understanding the role of emotion in interrogating reified systems and inciting more liberatory and humane spaces for language, literacy, and being.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).