ABSTRACT
There is a strong current of concern in education research over the significance of feelings, or emotions and affectivities, in education. Psychoanalytic theory has offered an important set of conceptual tools for considering the place and significance in education of psychic processes such as recognition, identification, desire and abjection, and for unsettling the usual rational lens through which education is perceived (Benjamin 1998; Britzman 1998; Henriques et al. 1998). Alongside and connecting with this, post-structural thinking about discourse, subjectivation and affectivities has offered further tools for moving beyond the usual rational framing of education and engaging with feelings and their political potentials (Braidotti 2005; Butler 1997a, 2004a; Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 2008; Foucault 1990a, 1991a; Laclau and Mouffe 2001). Making use of these conceptual frameworks in various ways, education research concerned with the significance of feelings has foregrounded a subject who is incomplete and who does not and cannot fully ‘know’ her/himself and emphasized both subjects in relation to each other and the affectivities that flow between them.
