Call or Papers Emotion Pedagogies/Emotions Inc.: Producing the Emotional Self

[Janina Fenigsen]

AAA 2014 Panel Call for Papers
Emotion Pedagogies/Emotions Inc.: Producing the Emotional Self
Organizers: Jim Wilce and Janina Fenigsen, NAU
If you are interested, please contact Janina: jfenigsen at gmail.com 

	Around the world, new methods or practices for dealing with emotion(s) are rapidly gaining popularity. These practices differ from emotion socialization (Kusserow 2004) and from previously described forms of “emotional training” (Jones 2012). They are better named “emotion pedagogies” (Wilce and Fenigsen 2014). In their typical small groups “workshop” format, emotion pedagogies follow institutional educational practices, down to assigning participants homework. They are not only highly institutionalized but highly commercialized and metacommunicatively explicit—a combination of features that, together, distinguish emotion pedagogies from emotion socialization. “Emotional training” is the term historians have used in relation to older phenomena; they typically focused on a single desirable emotion (e.g., the Christian emotion of “wonder” in relation to the deity, Bynum 1997), or culturally and historically specific categories of “good” and “bad” emotions, such as the Christian theological distinction between “passions” and “affections’ (Dixon 1999). By contrast, “emotion pedagogies” embrace a broad range of emotions, conceptualizing them as worthy of exploration and expression and such exploration and expression as important teachable skills. They can be found, for example, in the burgeoning numbers of programs offered in K-12 schools, churches, and New Age centers that aim to teach adults and children how to feel and express emotions, and to find emotional healing. 
	Papers for the proposed panel might address any such emotion pedagogies, be they secular, holistic, or theistic. Papers should also address these questions: What is the nature of emotion pedagogies? What kinds of discursive tools do they draw upon? How do participants experience emotional training, particularly training in self-healing, self-care, or “emotional hygiene” (preventive practices of self-awareness and expression)? What relation do emotion pedagogies have to what Heelas has called “the new vitalism,” manifested most clearly in courses offered in the contexts oriented toward “subjective-life spirituality” (Heelas et al 2005) and “emotion-positive Evangelicalism” (our term for Peter Scazzero’s Emotionally Healthy Churches, 2010)? And finally, how could ethnographic study of emotion pedagogies contribute to the literatures on “medical” discourse, language socialization, language and emotion?