Emotions have been gaining ground in educational discourses and practices since the beginning of the 21st century. A clear example of this is the growing importance given to Social Emotional Learning (SEL) in the globally structured educational agenda, as promoted fundamentally by International Organisations, especially since the pandemic caused by COVID-19 (Abramowski & Sorondo, 2022). SEL has been criticised for its underlying link to the production of subjects adapted to the needs of the labour market and the precarious conditions of life in neoliberal society, and for its contribution to the psychologisation and therapeutisation of education and of social problems in general (Bryan, 2022; Cabanas Díaz & González-Lamas, 2021). However, the proposals that advocate for a space to reflect, express and work with emotions in schools are not limited to SEL and come from heterogeneous political stances.

Hence, in this paper, we aim to examine the approach to emotions within the critical educational discourse on a transnational scale, including the education for social justice paradigm. Our goal is to describe the prominent place taken today by the emotional dimension in this discourse, and to analyse how and from what theoretical perspectives this new dimension is incorporated. Research questions guiding this inquiry include: which shifts in meaning can we observe in key critical pedagogy concepts, such as social-awareness and conscientization, justice or agency? What are the ethical and political implications of these changes? To answer these questions, we will draw a map of the meanings given to affect and emotions by critical educational discourse and of how these meanings are articulated with social justice and educational justice’s main concepts.

Our theoretical framework is based on socio-anthropological approaches to emotions (Illouz, 2014 and 2019; Leys, 2017; Lutz, 1986). From this starting point, we critique the current ubiquity of emotionalised language in contemporary educational projects, which we interpret as part of an epochal ethos that privileges emotional vocabulary and explanations over other registers (Sorondo & Abramowski, 2022). This pre-eminence given to emotion grants it with a new status of truth, with ontological, normative and epistemic value (Illouz, 2019). Thus, this cultural and discursive matrix –which began to take shape alongside the political, sexual and identity claims of the 1960s (Ehrenberg, 2000; Illouz, 2014)– operates today as a regime of truth that regulates how we think and act in the educational field. Indeed, we might be witnessing the naturalisation of a dominant discourse on emotions that installs certain meanings, imaginaries and routines of interaction in schools. This emotionalisation of education reinforces what other researchers have called the therapeutisation of education, to describe the installation of psychological and therapeutic ideas and practices as a way to interpret and intervene on social and educational problems –using, for instance, individual and depoliticised terms such as emotional vulnerabilities or psychological traumas– (Ecclestone & Brunila, 2015; Ecclestone & Hayes, 2009).

To conclude, our underlying interest is to examine how critical pedagogy is placing emotion at the centre of educational research, in order to assess which boundaries of the dominant emotional discourse are actually challenged and which are maintained and reinforced. In this regard, to focus on the critical educational research field is especially relevant in a context marked by the dominant SEL agenda. Considering emotions as a new normative discourse, formed by a system of privileged ideas and underpinned by power relations (Downing, 2023), is key to understanding and problematising current research trends, and the resulting policies and practices.

This paper uses social cartography as a methodological approach that applies mapping tools to identify, integrate and relate different perspectives within a discursive field (Paulston, 1995). In this case, our object of study is the critical academic discourse itself, on a transnational scale. Researchers working on these issues are mainly based in the USA, the UK, Australia, Canada, Cyprus, Spain and Mexico. We have constructed, for this purpose, a corpus of academic articles that we identify as "critical" in a broad sense. We have included works that are in explicit dialogue with the tradition of "critical" or "radical pedagogy", whose main referents are Freire, Giroux and McLaren. In addition to this, we have taken into account productions that contain references to feminist, decolonial/postcolonial, black, anti-racist pedagogies, and developments on social justice by authors such as Nancy Fraser and Judith Butler. In spite of the heterogeneity of this corpus, all selected articles share a commitment with an education that aims to expose power relations and the structures of class, race and gender domination of the social order, and to move towards their transformation. The final corpus comprises 27 articles, mostly selected from the academic search engine Google Scholar by combining the following keywords, both in Spanish and English: critical pedagogy, emotions, affects, affective justice. For the analysis of this corpus, each document was disassembled into free-flowing units of analysis, using a qualitative coding method. In order to process this information, the units of analysis were conceptually grouped in tables. This facilitated the comparison of categories and segments in terms of similarities and divergences, in order to identify different perspectives at play and draw a map to visualise its variations and inter-relations (Paulston, 1995). In accordance with the research objectives, a list of codes referring to the theoretical categories –regarding the shifts around the concepts and principles of critical pedagogy and social justice education– was prioritised for the analytical-interpretative work. This allowed us to recognise the different perspectives and its underlying stances and proposals. These categories were: 1) the reformulations of the concept of conscientization with the introduction of the emotional variable; 2) the articulations of critical theory with the pedagogy of discomfort; 3) the attention to the emotional conditions of justice in education, 4) the relevance attributed to empathy in education for social change proposals, 5) the place of emotion in the conceptualisation of agency.

The analysis of the corpus shows a general interest in examining and addressing the emotional roots of stances, commitments and motivations as a way to successfully conduct education towards social justice. With this, the concept of social justice is shifting towards an emotionalised approach: the discussions on educational justice and social justice education are moving from the socio-economic arena to a psycho-emotional framework. Even if the recognition of emotional vulnerabilities and the action to ensure the emotional well-being of learners are often presented as preconditions for social justice education, they tend to acquire justice value in themselves within the frames of therapeutic culture (Ecclestone & Brunila, 2015). The risk here is to divert from the questioning of the structural causes of social justice. This new role of emotions within the critical educational discourse could be interpreted as an attempt to reinvigorate critical pedagogy giving a new momentum to processes previously conceived from a predominantly rationalist perspective, such as awareness-raising and action for social transformation. However, it can also be interpreted as a withdrawal towards individualisation and the deepening of epistemological and social fragmentation. The disproportional power granted to this emotional dimension should pose the question of whether we are facing the configuration of a new regime of truth within the critical discourse itself, that overvalues affect at the expense of political questions about meaning and content (Downing, 2023). As a discursive power, it sets certain limits to the problems that can be raised and addressed as such in the educational field, obstructing collective and political ways of thinking about subjects and social action (Gore, 1992). It is therefore essential to warn about a discourse that, despite wanting to be critical, fails to put into question the meanings imposed by the dominant educational agenda and its neoliberal discourses, such as SEL.

Abramowski, A. & Sorondo, J. (2022). El enfoque socioemocional en la agenda educativa de la pandemia. Entre lo terapéutico y lo moral. Revista IICE, 51(1), https://doi.org/10.34096/iice.n51.10739 Bryan, A. (2022). From ‘the conscience of humanity’ to the conscious human brain: UNESCO’s embrace of social-emotional learning as a flag of convenience. Compare. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2022.2129956 Cabanas Díaz, E. & González-Lamas, J. (2021). Felicidad y educación: déficits científicos y sesgos ideológicos de la «educación positiva». Teoría de la Educación. Revista Interuniversitaria, 33(2), 65-85. https://doi.org/10.14201/teri.25433 Downing, L. (3 de mayo de 2023). Against affect. For a Feminist Neo-Enlightenment. [Conference]. School of Modern Languages & Cultures. University of Glasgow. United Kingdom. Ecclestone, K. & Brunila, K. (2015). Governing emotionally vulnerable subjects and ‘therapization’ of social justice. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 23(4), 485-506. Ecclestone, K. & Hayes, D. (2009). The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education. Routledge. Ehrenberg, A. (2000). La fatiga de ser uno mismo. Depresión y sociedad. Nueva Visión. Gore, J. (1992). What we can do for you! What can “we” do for “you”? Struggling over empowerment in critical and feminist pedagogy. In C. Luke & J. Gore (Eds.), Feminisms and critical pedagogy (pp.54-73). Routledge. Illouz, E. (2014). El futuro del alma. La creación de estándares emocionales. Katz/CCCB Illouz, E. (Comp.). (2019). Capitalismo, consumo y autenticidad. Las emociones como mercancía. Katz. Leys, R. (2017). The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique. University of Chicago Press. Lutz, C. (1986). Emotions, Thought, and Estrangement: Emotions as a cultural Category. Cultural Anthropology, 1(3), 287- 309. Paulston, R. G. (1995). Mapping knowledge perspectives in studies of educational change. In P.W. JR. Cookson & B. Schneider (Eds.), Transforming schools (pp. 137-179). Garland. Sorondo, J. & Abramowski, A. (2022). Las emociones en la Educación Sexual Integral y la Educación Emocional. Tensiones y entrecruzamientos en el marco de un ethos epocal emocionalizado. Revista de Educación, 25(1), 29-62.