Anger, hatred, fear, sadness and pain often accompany discussions of racial and ethnic matters (Ahmed 2004; Author2008). Emotions are deemed important in challenging or re-enforcing prevailing practices and discourses about race and ethnicity in both schools (Callahan 2004) and the society (Ahmed, 2004). As Ahmed argues, emotions circulate between people, they ‘stick’ as well as move, and they involve relations of ‘towardsness’ or ‘awayness’ in relation to how race and ethnicity are understood. In particular, the notion of emotional geographies (Anderson and Smith 2001, Davidson and Milligan 2004, Davidson, Bondi and Smith 2005) that has been invoked in recent years signifies the growing concern with the spatiality and relationality of emotions. An emotional geography, explain Davidson, Bondi and Smith (2005), attempts to understand emotion in terms of its socio-spatial dynamics of movements and relations rather than as entirely interiorized subjective mental states. For example, an interpretation of the socio-spatial dynamics of racism and other oppressions shows how exclusion is understood as manifestation of emotions that arise in real or imagined movement between ‘selves’ and ‘others’ (Sibley 1995).

While emotions have always been acknowledged as important components of discussions about racial and ethnic matters (Srivastava 2005, 2006), there have been a few sustained investigations of how and with what implications emotions are constituted through school practices and discourses in relation to perceptions of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ (Author 2005, 2007). More importantly, emotions have remained in the margins of discussions about the socio-spatial dynamics of racialisation and ethnicisation processes in schools, or at best, are regarded as epiphenomena rather than constitutive components in students and teachers’ lives (Other and Author 2008).

This presentation highlights the idea that educators need to look more carefully at how school practices and discourses are entangled with emotion in relation to perceptions of race and ethnicity. More specifically, the focus is on how emotional geographies are manifest in the formation and maintenance of particular racialisation and ethnicisation processes within a multicultural school in the Republic of Cyprus. The uniqueness of this school is that both Greek-Cypriot students and teachers (the majority) and Turkish-speaking students (the minority) are enrolled; this interaction takes place in the background of the long-standing political and ethnic conflict between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots. Given that my main interest is to explore how emotional geographies work as spaces of exclusion, I want to clarify at the outset of this presentation that my focus will be mostly on the ‘negative’ rather than the ‘positive’ emotions. My central argument is that the emotional geographies of exclusion can be understood as manifestations of the racialisation and ethnicisation processes in schools—a finding that has important implications for how to understand the insidious power and tenacity in certain manifestations of these processes.

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