Historically, educational institutions have had an uneasy relationship with emotions. Following the Enlightenment tradition, schools and universities have often been concerned only with educating the mind, while side-lining the body. Their focus has thus, traditionally, been on reason, rather than emotion. Analyses of contemporary higher education have, however, suggested that recent years have witnessed a significant shift in the place of emotions within the academy. Indeed, Ecclestone and Hayes (2009) argue that higher education has become ‘therapeutised’, evidenced through: a concern with emotionally vulnerable students and staff; the rise of degree-level therapy and counselling courses; and an emphasis on therapeutic teacher training, which has influenced the nature of learning at university. Such changes, they suggest, are not confined to higher education, or even education more generally, but have permeated many areas of social policy – underpinned by a desire on the part of policymakers to promote ‘positive psychology’. This, Ecclestone (2011) maintains, is the latest manifestation of a long-running tendency within public policy to psychologise deep-seated social and political problems and present them as individual traits that can be remedied through specific interventions. In this way, individualistic solutions are offered in response to complex social and cultural concerns.

While many scholars have been sympathetic to arguments about the individualisation and psychologisation of social problems (e.g. Gillies, 2011), Ecclestone and Hayes’ wider analysis of the place of emotions with higher education has had a more critical reception. Clegg (2013), for example, has taken issue with their assertion that any recognition of the affective has the effect of infantilising students and leads to the therapeutisation of higher education. Moreover, others have pointed out that there is a long history of feminist scholarship that has argued for the role of emotions within higher education to be made more visible, exploring the impact of ‘passionate attachments’ on pedagogy, and questioning the traditional binary split between emotion and reason (Hey and Leathwood, 2009). Indeed, Hey and Leathwood (2009) argue that the therapeutisation thesis ‘strikes us as yet another version of [the] resistance to understanding the depth as well as the contradictory nature of affects on institutions and the complicated forms of subjectivity produced therein’ (p.111-112).

Others have contended that, despite arguments made about the rise of a therapeutic culture in higher education, emotions are still often expunged and/or managed in particular ways, which serve the interests of those who hold power (Clegg, 2013). Clegg (2013) argues that within many contemporary universities, students ‘confront a situation where the recognition of emotion is denied and in which the need for support ignores the historical advantage of those from privileged backgrounds’ (p.76). For example, the social nature of learning is often downplayed; instead, emphasis is placed on an ideal of the independent, autonomous learner – confident, and unencumbered by self-doubt (Leathwood and O’Connell, 2003) – and abstracted from the context of his or her private life (Marandet and Wainwright, 2009). This construction of the rational, non-emotional learner can be alienating for some students, particularly women and/or those from ‘non-traditional’ backgrounds (Read et al., 2003).

This paper seeks to contribute to this literature on the place of emotions within higher education through exploring the experiences of one particular group: students with dependent children. By focussing on feelings of guilt, in particular, it contends that emotions are indeed significant for learning. Moreover, it emphasises that such emotions are socially patterned and spatially differentiated. This argument is made by drawing on data from two different European nations – the UK and Denmark – and, within each of them, from HEIs with different market positions.

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