Changing meanings of university teaching: the emotionalisation of academic culture in Russia, Israel and the US

Abstract

In this study, we reflexively focus our gaze on the global shift toward the emotionalisation of academic culture, taking the perspective of a university institution and its staff. We argue that emotional consumerism is fundamental to the current condition of academic teaching; it is embedded in its institutional agenda and shapes faculty’s subjective experiences. Our ethnographic analysis reveals also that understanding emotional academic capitalism requires a cross-cultural lens. Thus, we probe the meanings of teaching in three academic contexts – Russia, Israel and the US – tracing how local neoliberalism, cultural emotional communicative scripts and educational traditions, as well as political cultures, shape the emotionalisation of university teaching differently. Academic teaching in the US appears as care combined with fear; teaching in Israel is articulated as a therapeutic power struggle; while in Russia, teaching is interpreted as a peculiar combination of authoritative impersonalised services. This juxtaposition exposes different local manifestations of neoliberal emotional university discourse that merges therapeutic logic and its emotional language, reconfigures hierarchical relations, and integrates national political ethos into the act of teaching.

On emotionalisation of public domains

“…It appears that selffulfilment through professional activity, the establishing of safe spaces and recognition of comfort zones, the right to wellbeing and care, the public recognition of trauma and depression, the collective building of resilience, and the declarations of national shame and pride -all are becoming ethical imperatives in public, political and collective talk and articulated agendas. The collection in this special issue includes cases of emotionalisation in national security, diplomatic, and governmental agencies (Matza, 2021;Sa'ar et al, 2021), universities (Lerner et al, 2021), health and mental healthcare organisations (Kidron, 2021;Bruner and Plotkin Amrami, 2021;Temkina et al, 2021), and communal and civic organisations (Kravel-Tovi, 2021; Shchyttsova, 2021;Wanner, 2021).…”

“…As the cases in this issue demonstrate, emotionalisation introduces a new shift in the boundaries between private and public domains; it combines reflections of individual interiority with processes of making sense of social relations and the constitution of collective identities. It reshapes professional relationships and other relations in the public sphere into primarily emotional encounters: for example, between the oppressive power and its vulnerable or traumatised subjects (Kidron, 2021;Sa'ar et al, 2021;Shchyttsova, 2021); between the depressed employer and harassed employee; between the stressed student and mentoring professor (Lerner et al, 2021); between frustrated service provider and unsatisfied client (Temkina et al, 2021) What emerges from these different case studies is that emotionalisation creates both a stage for power relations to be negotiated and the cultural language for doing so.…”

Emotionalisation of contemporary media discourse: A research agenda

“…Emotions are highly relevant in academic discourse (e.g. Gretzky & Lerner 2021Lerner, Zbenovich & Kaneh-Shalit 2021), in classroom settings (e.g. El-Dakhs et al 2019), in digital communication (e.g.…”

“…По наблюдениям исследователей, не являются исключением дипломатический, экономический и финансовый дискурсы, для которых обращение к эмоциям считается нехарактерным (например, Беляков 2015,Mackenzie 2018, Zappettini & Unerman 2016. Эмоции играют существенную роль в академическом дискурсе(Gretzky & Lerner 2021, El-Dakhsetal 2019, Lerner, Zbenovich & Kaneh-Shalit 2021. Некоторые ученые отмечают, что чрезвычайно сложно отделить эмоции от идеологии, поскольку чувства и идеи, которые их вызывают, тесно связаны друг с другом(Wetherell et al 2015: 57).…”

Threat and fear: Pragmatic purposes of emotionalisation in media discourse

“…Scholars have drawn attention to the emotionalisation of public domains such as political, academic and media contexts, presenting the emotions as important elements of social and political life (e.g. Bassols, Cros & Torrent 2013, Döveling et al 2011, Lerner & Rivkin-Fish 2021, Schwab & Schwender 2011, Lerner, Zbenovich & Kaneh-Shalit 2021. The fact that emotion is an essential part of every kind of communication, and can be observed in all types of text and discourse has been convincingly proven by psychologically oriented linguistic studies (e.g.…”