Who am I? I am the anger that will change the world

Author(s):

Michael Håkansson(presenting / submitting)David O Kronlid Leif Ostman

Conference:

ECER 2013

Network:

08. Research on Health Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

08 SES 13 B, Perspectives on Teaching and Learning in ESD

Paper Session

Time:

2013-09-13

11:00-12:30

Room:

D-403

Chair:

Matthias Barth

Contribution

This paper explores political emotions in education concerning environment and sustainable issues. Presently, such issues are situated in a post-normal condition (Funtowicz & Ravetz 1993) characterised by complexity, contingency, and uncertainty ( Jickling & Wals 2012, Saloranta 2001). The post-normal condition calls for a respect for pluralism as in diverging values and interests, respect for different worldviews, values, understanding, and takes on environmental moral dilemmas; all which are crucial parts in environmental political processes.

However, the democratic terrain calls for decisions and in the decision making procedures and there will be disagreements about the interpretation of political values. Issues like sustainable development opens for conflicts about individuals’ fundamental values. Such conflicts also opens for strong emotion that comes from our commitments to worldviews, and these emotions are mobilized especially when the individuals feel that their fundamental values are at stake or being violated.

In this paper, therefore, we will focus on the role of emotions in political disagreement and argue that political education ought to provide opportunities to share emotional attachment to political identities. We use a theoretical framework based on Chantal Mouffes and Hannah Arendts poststructuralist view on the relation between disagreements, identities and emotions.

The political theorist Chantal Mouffes model agonistic pluralism is applicable because of her notion of conflicts and emotions. The methodological challenges in this paper is to use Mouffes concepts of political, agonism, antagonism, emotions and conflictual consensus in analysing the processes of political meaning making in an educational practice concerning issues of sustainable development.

The political dimension, for Mouffe, is bound up with the hegemonic nature of social relations and with disagreements over the ways in which a society ought to be structured, e.g. the kind of power relations that are just or unjust.

Accordingly, Mouffe argues that disagreement is not a detached exchange of rational arguments but rather a dispute that has emotional force because what is regarded as a fundamental value is being violated. According to Mouffe people feel moved, inspired, and affectively compelled by their political identity, i.e. collective identifications have affective force.

For Mouffe there are several kinds of emotions. There is for example anger, fear, hate or passions as enjoyment and excitement. She also distinguishes between moral and political emotions. According to Mouffe moral emotions could be about the anger one’s feel after seeing moral values one cherished violated; when one reads in paper how a person in need was treated harshly rather than with compassion. In case of political emotions, the object is political, as necessary bound up with the power relations in society and with a substantive vision of a just society.

Besides Mouffe, we use Hannah Arendt’s conception of action. She means that it is only in action we can be political. To do the work from Mouffes and Arendt’s political theory into educational settings we use Claudia Ruitenberg, Gert Biesta and Carsten Ljunggren.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse and discuss the role of political emotions of political meaning making in political conversations. Our research question is: how do political emotions directs the processes of political meaning making?

Method

The empirical material is video-recorded lessons in an upper secondary class. Using Mouffes perspective, we explore aestethical expressions as signs of emotional engagement through studying students’ responses to each other within a political conversation, i.e. conversations concerned with justice/injustice. Emotional expressions can be from a pragmatic/transactional perspective seen to be motivating forces as well as being crucial for privileging process that is crucial for any type of meaning-making; i.e. it is the privileging that gives meaning making a certain direction and not another. We draw our methodological departure from Hannah Arendts’ philosophical standpoint that we only become political in action, and that we need to have someone responding to your action. In isolation, we can never be political. The methodological challenges contains of how it is possible to get hold of the political emotions and of the political meaning individuals make by studying what they say and do. The philosophical and methodological basis for this approach consists of a combination of Dewey’s transactional perspective on meaning making and Wittgenstein’s first-person perspective on language use. This standpoint states that there are no division between language, meaning and reality.

Expected Outcomes

Our preliminary findings are that the agonistic model is useful to discuss students’ processes of political meaning making. In our empirical study of a political conversation, we find both moral and political emotions and both antagonistic and agonistic responses in the political conversation. Our findings contribute to education of sustainable development in at least two ways. First, by situating students’ in a problematic situation they have to deal with their own fundamental values by both having to express the values and meeting others responding to them. This gives the students’ opportunities to learn through having political experiences. Second, students’ experiences of political conversation gives the educator possibilities to clarifying both how and why different privileging have different implications of the processes of political meaning making, e. g. between using moral or political emotions and/or antagonistic or agonistic responses. Our empirical findings supports Claudia Ruitenberg theoretical statement that education (for sustainable development) ought to focus on educating a capacity for disagreement, and that it ought do so in a way that recognizes that political disagreements is a passionate affair.

References

Arendt, Hannah (1977): Between Past and Future. Eight Exercises in Political Thought. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Biesta, G.J.J. (2006) Beyond learning. Democratic education for a human future. Boulder, Co.: Paradigm Publishers. Biesta, G.J.J. & Burbules, N. (2003). Pragmatism and educational research. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Funtowicz, S. O. and Ravetz, J. R.: 1993, ‘Science for the Post-Normal Age’, Futures 25, 739–755. Jickling, B. & Wals, A. 2012 Debating Education for Sustainable Development 20 Years after Rio : A Conversation between Bob Jickling and Arjen Wals, Journal of Education for Sustainable Development 2012 6: 49 Ljunggren, C (2009) Agonistic Recognition in Education: On Arendt’s Qualification of Political and Moral Meaning, Studies in Philosophy and Education An International Journal, 29(1) Mouffe, C. (2000b)The Democratic Paradox, London: Verso Mouffe, C. (2005a) On the Political, New York: Routledge Mouffe, C. (2005b) The Return of the Political, London, Verso Ruitenberg, C. (2009) Educating Political Adversaries: Chantal Mouffe and Radical Democratic Citizenship Education, Studies in Philosophy and Education 28, no. 3, 269-281. Ruitenberg, C. (2010) Conflict, Affect and the Political: On Disagreement as Democratic Capacity, Journal of Peace Education and Social Justice, 4(1), 40-55 Saloranta, T.M. 2001. Post-normal science and the global climate change issue. Climatic Change. 50. 395–404 Östman, L. and Öhman, J. (2010) A transactional approach to learning, paper presentation AERA Östman, L. and Öhman, J (2006) Developing the sociocultural perspective on moral meaning-making – the question of individual continuity and change, Journal of Moral Education

Author Information

Michael Håkansson (presenting / submitting)

Uppsala University

Department of Education

Uppsala

David O Kronlid

Uppsala University, Sweden

Leif Ostman

Uppsala unıversıty

Department of ducatıon