Making Emotional Connections in the Age of Neoliberalism

Abstract

Emotional expression, long derided as inimical to material success in the context of industrializing capitalism, now is seen in pedagogical circles as crucial to children's development into workers and citizens.Moving away from an emphasis on market rationality's so-called person of reason, post-Fordist economic environments increasingly venerate the less tangible "person of affect." This study theorizes that a teacher's own emotional discourse shapes children's subjectivities and that this process corresponds with late capitalism's needs for workers who are reflexive and emotionally adept. Our analysis shows how the teacher uses emotional expression to accomplish a pedagogical goal, namely that of encouraging children to name and to know their own emotionality so they can better manage the "when and where" of its expression in other contexts, most especially the workplace. Children who effectively deploy these "softer" aspects of the self now represent yet another facet of entrepreneurial (neoliberal) subjectivity. [emotion, neoliberalism, narrative, pedagogy] ETHOS, Vol. 44, Issue 2, pp.

The affective assemblage of internationalisation in Japanese higher education

“…While many internationalised academics are animated and positive about their experiences, translation through displacement from one context to another can sometimes be a form of symbolic violence, with affective consequences (Bondi and Davidson 2011 ). We argue that the immaterial or affective labour (Bialostok and Aronson 2016 ; Oksala 2016 ) that is required to unstick, install and maintain an internationalised academic identity and navigate the translations and antagonisms from everyday encounters with difference is substantially under-estimated. The paper proceeds in four directions.…”

Potentials of care: The uncertain politics of social and emotional ability and difference in American childhood

“…This examination of social and emotional surveillance and care in middle class North American childhood is in conversation with recent critical examinations of SEL in educational contexts that have explored the institutionalisation of SEL, its deployment of neuroscientific knowledge and dynamics of subjectification it spawns (op cit. Gagen, 2015; op cit Hoffman, 2009a, 2009b, 2010; Bialostok and Aronson 2016). Building on this work, I explore SEL assessment as a dynamic of subjectification and differentiation, and middle class parents' commitments to school‐based SEL as a key form of social and emotional care.…”

“…The construction, via SEL pedagogy, of this social and emotional ideal within children's public school learning environments and the dynamics of subjectification that it provokes has been recently taken up by anthropologists and critical education scholars who have begun to study the effects and implications of introducing SEL into children's (and adult work) environments across diverse national contexts (Wilce & Fenigsen, 2016). Such scholars have highlighted the processes of subjectification at work when, for example, low‐income kindergartners in a Colorado public school learn to become adept emotion‐managers who deploy the right kind of emotionality at strategic times as they develop reading comprehension skills (Bialostok & Aronson, 2016).…”

Student behaviour, motivation and the potential of attachment‐aware schools to redefine the landscape

“…This discourse first emerged as a critique of SEAL and associated emotion‐based approaches (see Craig, ; Ecclestone & Hayes, ). Bialostok and Aronson () argue that an over‐emphasis on emotions and emotional responses in the classroom socialises children into ‘appropriate’ emotional behaviours in the workplace, thereby reinforcing the entrepreneurial skills required under late capitalism and the knowledge economy and reducing potential challenge to it. A similar point is made by Ecclestone and Lewis () in their analysis of programmes which purport to ‘teach’ resilience, but which they suggest are based on normative assumptions about the individual which marginalise social and welfare responses.…”