This paper is interested in how risks and opportunities emerge in meaning processes in a pluralistic ESE-practice. Using the work of the Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe (2005; 2013), we perceive the pluralistic ESE-approach as conflict-oriented, which enables us to problematize the political dimension in educational situations that involve inclusionary and exclusionary processes of personal – emotionally invested – values (see also Ruitenberg 2010; Lundegård and Wickman 2007). We explore Dewey’s (2016) thinking on democracy, pluralism and conflicts along with his philosophy of embodiment and education (Dewey 1922; 1934; 1938) and apply it to an empirical analysis. In doing so, our aim is to create knowledge of the privileging and meaning making processes that occur in situations when conflicts about public affairs are bodily and emotionally felt. We call such situations “political moments”. A political moment consists of three interrelated phases: an immediate experience followed by a deliberation – an inquiry – that ends in meaning-making of an immediate experience of the political dimension. The meaning-making inevitably contains an act of exclusion, where a “we” and a “them” is construed, or to use the term of Mouffe, where antagonism is constituted. In the paper we define an immediate experience (Overgaard 2008) as a non-intentional and a non-calculable bodily experience. Thus our empirical work is focused on political moments and the aim of the research is to create knowledge on the meaning-making when the political becomes embodied and when antagonism is constituted and handled through deliberation.

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