Neoliberal subjectivities and the teaching and learning of emotional geographies

ABSTRACT

This paper reflects on tensions and challenges in encouraging and enabling students to foreground their personal emotional material in the learning process, while this process itself remains embedded in the neoliberal subjectivities of the university, wider social contexts and the individual selves. We explore our teaching on a final year undergraduate module in which students are asked to explore the emotional geographies of their everyday lives, and for which specific strategies were employed to create a supportive space in the classroom and beyond. We reflect on how these intentions to enable students to engage in emotional explorations conflict with: the overarching neoliberal infrastructures of the university and its intrinsic grounding in assessment and monitored performance; the wider societal landscapes of inequality; and with how these structural issues pervade individual hopes, routines, anxieties and interpersonal relationships. We conclude by outlining how emotional geography pedagogies need to simultaneously provide adequate space to engage with personal emotional experiences and to question and challenge established institutional frameworks and practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotional geographies
• neoliberalism
• classroom
• politics of emotions
• geography teaching
• student subjectivity

Introduction

The last twenty years or so have played witness to a burgeoning field of emotional geographies, as geographers working on a range of themes and issues recognised and sought to map the interplay of emotions with social, economic and political spaces in our everyday lives (Askins, 2019). Whilst there is now a significant body of research on emotional geographies, translation of this scholarship into teaching has been somewhat slower, with relatively little work that explores how we teach and learn about emotional geographies in higher education published until recently. This recent work has an emerging focus on the emotional dynamics of student fieldwork and fieldtrips (Golubchikov, 2015; Holton, 2017a), classrooms (Hill et al., 2021; Morris, 2020), and assessment and attainment (Turner, 2020; Whittle et al., 2020).

This paper adds to understandings of the teaching and learning of emotional geographies by exploring the tensions and challenges present in asking students to foreground their emotions in the learning process, in the somewhat contradictory context of the neoliberal subjectivities of the university experience, wider socio-economic worlds, and their individual selves. We do so by reflecting on a final year optional module Emotional Geographies of Everyday Life, taught at the Newcastle University, UK, in 2018 and 2019. We focus in this paper on how we – as teachers – planned for and negotiated students bringing their everyday emotional geographies into the classroom while enveloped in broader structural contexts. Whilst we acknowledge that a number of factors, educational, structural and personal, came into play in shaping students’ experiences on this module, in this article, we explore in particular how this foregrounding of the students’ own emotional narratives was articulated with the overarching neoliberal infrastructures of the university and its intrinsic grounding in assessment and monitored performance, the wider societal landscapes of inequality, and with the ways in which these structural issues pervade individual hopes, routines, anxieties and interpersonal relationships.

In this article, we draw on our experience of teaching this module, in the classroom, in conversations with students, and in our own discussions, and on both formal and informal feedback from students about the form and content of the module. We do not use material from students’ assessments, quote their feedback directly, nor include their voices, as we do not have consent to do so. This article was conceived after teaching the module discussed, and, as a result, no research ethics or consent procedures were possible or appropriate. The article rests primarily our own experiences and reflections, including our ongoing discussions with each other and our recollections about the various interactions we had with students in the course of teaching.

The paper is written at a time of nascent discussions about the transformation of university campus that have emotional politics at its core – whether that is related to the questions of anti-racist practices and decolonising the university (Esson, 2020; Johnson, 2020), on-campus gender-based violence (Bartos, 2020) or the mental health crisis in academia (Peake & England, 2020). We seek to make a broad connection to these and other debates by spatialising the links between students’ everyday lives, classroom experience and wider structural positions, and by demonstrating how emotions are fundamental to the everyday politics of individuals and institutions across different scales, asking what possibilities and challenges this poses for geographical teaching.

Emotions in, and of, the geography education at UK universities

More than two decades of scholarship on emotional geographies transformed the discipline from “an emotionally barren terrain, a world devoid of passion [and] spaces ordered solely by rational principles” (Bondi et al., 2005, p. 1) to one where at least some research epistemologies and methodologies recognise the significance of challenges posed by emotional experiences to uncritical rationality. Yet, where emotions became central to geographical understandings of how society and space interrelate, approaches to geographical university education, at least in the UK, have not necessarily followed the same route. In line with the broader shifts in higher education, geographical teaching has tended towards a standardisation and calibration of requirements, processes and intended outcomes (Wyse et al., 2020) that emphasise an intellectual understanding of the world with limited engagement with emotional forms of knowing. The most recent Subject Benchmark Statement on Geography produced by the Quality Assurance Agency for UK Higher Education (QAA, 2019), for instance, offers no mention of embodied or emotional dimensions of learning and work within its detailed overview of knowledge and skills that geography students should demonstrate and the formats of teaching and assessment that are likely to be employed by pedagogues. As Hill et al. (2021) reflect, “affective aspects of learning have often been side-lined in higher education” (p. 167).

One contextual factor for the protracted uptake of emotional approaches in geographical teaching is that the period of the emergence of emotional geographies has also been one of major change in higher education. Tuition fees were first introduced in the UK in 1998, with the cap gradually increased to £9000 per year in 2010, a move which provoked widespread student protests (Brown, 2013; Hopkins & Todd, 2015) and led to increased marketisation of UK higher education as university financing became heavily reliant on student intake rather than state teaching grants (Hall, 2015). In addition, the UK government removed the cap on student numbers in 2015, accelerating the institutional competition over students and the associated income from fees and other expenses such as accommodation. It also deepened the culture of auditing and ranking, where the relationship between the university and students is assessed by the comparative value of degree interpreted through standardised and quantifiable data outputs, such as measures of student satisfaction (via the National Student Survey), study attainments and graduate employability (Broecke, 2015; Lynch, 2015). The shift towards commodification and marketisation of higher education has arguably meant that teachers can be discouraged from experimenting with unexpected and non-traditional methods in geographical curricula and teaching practices, in order to minimise the risk of student dissatisfaction. As Gravett et al. (2020) summarise, the commodification of higher education increased the pressure on both students and staff; students are dealing with the burden of piling debt and challenging prospects after graduation, increasing the importance of their academic performance; while teachers are expected to deliver teaching that does not diverge from student expectations, as students’ positionality as customers is emphasised.

From 2010, the UK also moved into a period of recession and austerity, with significant implications for students, including increasing economic uncertainty at home, loss of term-time jobs and income, diminished employment opportunities after graduation, and the reduction of young people’s safety nets (Horton, 2016). The varying generational impacts of austerity have been widely documented, recording the particular losses for young people (Sime & Reynolds, 2019). As with the experiences of recession and austerity more generally, these were marked by significant inequalities of class, race and gender, in particular (Sime & Reynolds, 2019), creating inequalities at the starting point of the geographical education (who gets to study, where and with what resources). They also generated heightened patterns of aspiration and anxiety about “succeeding” in and beyond the university, in line with what Brown (2013) calls a “particular form of neoliberal social hope” (p. 419).

These changing social and economic landscapes connect without doubt to the remaking of students’ emotional geographies. Surveys show that more and more students are struggling with their mental health, with high proportions reporting anxiety and depression, for example. 42.8% of students responding often or always felt worried and almost 90% said they experienced feelings of anxiety at times (The Guardian, 5.3.19). Young people are more likely to report that they have experienced loneliness than older people, despite the media focus on loneliness amongst older people. In the BBC’s 2018 Loneliness Experiment (BBC Radio 4, 2018), 40% of 16 to 24-year-olds who took part said they often or very often feel lonely, compared with 27% of over 75s, with life events such as moving home and exam pressures flagged as key triggers for increasing feelings of loneliness. In the survey cited above (The Guardian, 5.3.19), a third of students (33%) reported experiencing loneliness often or all the time.

There is a growing evidence that this student mental health crisis is exacerbated by patterns of inequality related to class (Stahl & Habib, 2017), sexuality and gender (Mearns et al., 2020), race (Ahmet 2020) and disability (Osborne, 2019). Feelings of stigma, being out of place, and disconnection is often identified by local and working-class students who can be seen to struggle the daily renegotiation of their home and university selves (Abrahams & Ingram, 2013; Holton & Finn, 2018). And, of course, many of these issues are also experienced by university staff (Askins & Blazek, 2017; Johnson, 2020; Todd, 2020), inevitably reflected in the emotional geographies they bring into the classroom (Analogue University, 2017; Carrigan, 2015). Crucially, though, while politics of inequality have been fundamentally reflected in all stages of geographical teaching, mirroring the critical focus of research, the emotional dimensions of these escape new developments in geographical curricula as the focus remains on standardization and rationality.

Obviously, the emotional geographies of student lives are not only about negative experience. University is also associated with major life transitions (Holdsworth, 2009) – leaving home, meeting life partners, negotiating sexual, gender and other identities, and much more; and these have their emotional geographies (Holton, 2017b). University is often seen and experienced as “intricately linked with projects of the self and transitions to adulthood” (Holdsworth, 2009, p. 1857), tied up with experiences of, potentially, both social and spatial mobility. It is also about mundane everyday moments of playfulness, joy, consumption, and gratification. Many students engage, perhaps for the first time, in activism, student politics, campaigning, volunteering (Baća, 2017; Holdsworth & Quinn, 2012; Yarwood, 2005), and universities can be experienced by students as sites of resistance and protest – indeed, the teaching which we review here took place in the context of the University and College Union’s strikes of 2018 and 2019 (Connolly, 2019). All of these, of course, are mediated by students’ identities, habitus, values, memories, relationships and by structures and institutions.

To describe student realities both in the contemporary (post-)austerity UK and in the marketized higher education, we deploy the term “neoliberal subjectivities”. This phrase encapsulates how UK students are positioned both in the society and at the university as autonomous competitive agents accountable for their own success and wellbeing (Schwiter, 2013). Reflecting on the wider literature on neoliberal subjectivity (Gao, 2020; Shaw, 2010; Türken et al., 2016), we need to highlight two points. First, subjects positioned within systems of neoliberal governance are likely to both abide by the expectations and resist it (Bondi, 2005). By analysing the student experience in the class through the prism of neoliberalism we are particularly interested in the disjunctions between the rational autonomy and individualism intrinsic to neoliberal organisation and the embodied, emotionally charged moments that elude, challenge or actively resist such positions. And second, although we argued that students’ agency is primarily situated in relationships emulating the logics of market, it is not purely economic, as neoliberalism operates via interrelated affective politics of aspirations (Pimlott-Wilson, 2017), gratification (Rutherford, 2018), shame (Hoggett, 2017) and anxiety (Brunila & Valero, 2018). This resonates with ongoing research which explores neoliberalism as something that is experienced both materially and emotionally (Hoggett, 2006; Layton et al., 2006; Peltz, 2006; Walkerdine, 2006) and which draws attention to the ways in which neoliberalism is often entangled with feelings of uncertainty, loss, expectation, hope, and much more (Stenning, 2020).

And it is in these individual emotional entanglements with neoliberal rationality within and beyond the university that lies our focus in this paper. To be clear, we do not claim that the lens of neoliberalism fully encapsulates students’ social realities and personal learning experiences. The issues on which our analysis centres, such as the unsettling effects of assessment or the classed nature of the university experience, do predate the neoliberalisation of university education. Rather, we focus on how the pervasive processes of neoliberalisation both in the university and in the wider society come to a clash with emotions, and how pedagogies that draw on emotional learning, experience and politics can help counter the harmful effects of neoliberalisation. In the rest of the paper, we seek to unpack some parallels between the structures in which students’ everyday lives and identities are embedded and the university pedagogies, with showing how foregrounding emotions disrupts the commodified logic of the contemporary university and as a result can be unsettling for students accustomed to a certain landscape of learning.

Teaching everyday emotional geographies

Module context and setup

The module Emotional Geographies of Everyday Life was offered to final year (third year) students at the Newcastle University in 2018 and 2019. The Geography programme in Newcastle is one of the largest in the country, with about 220 students in every year of studies. In the final year, students have to complete a dissertation project and take four other, fully optional modules, each worth 20 credits, or one-ninth of their final degree award. Emotional Geographies of Everyday Life was also offered to other students in the university, as long as they had completed one of the core human geography modules in the second year on social, political or economic geography.

As is the case elsewhere in the UK, Geography in Newcastle is externally marketed as a study programme exploring “key societal, economic and environmental challenges”. Even though the programme includes modules focused on different scales (for instance, students may participate in community volunteering as part of their degree and conduct fieldwork in the North East region of England), an important selling point of the programme – again, like elsewhere in the UK – is the prospect of Geography as a discipline inquiring about global issues and the “world out there”. Modules highlighted to potential students in the course prospectus accentuate this provision (Cities of the Global South, Geopolitics, a range of international residential fieldtrips), and these are the most popular among the students, with the numbers of students often exceeding 100, compared to 20–30 in some other modules, including Emotional Geographies of Everyday Life during the two years covered in our article.

The module ran over one semester (12 weeks) with three contact hours per week, a one-hour lecture and a two-hour seminar. Student were expected to commit about 120 hours of independent study (such as reading, reflection, keeping a reflective journal) as part of the module. The module aims were: 1) to evaluate the emotional dimensions of the relations between people, places and environments in everyday contexts; 2) to examine a range of techniques for researching and conveying the Emotional Geographies of Everyday Life; 3) to explore a range of everyday spaces and the emotions that animate them; and 4) to encourage students to critically reflect on their own everyday emotional geographies. Our focus in this paper is particularly on how we worked with students to achieve the final aim, enabling them to recognise, think and write about, and critically reflect on their own everyday emotional geographies. Because this was a module aim, in the context of the degree structure at our university, we also had to find ways to assess the extent to which students had achieved it and award a numeric grade. As we explore below, this created a tension between enabling and encouraging students to bring their own experiences and emotions into the classroom, for their own reflection and learning, and finding ways to assess this which did not undermine the process or put students at risk.

We identified this as a module aim for two primary reasons. First, we wanted this module to address emotions not just conceptually, but also to foster practical engagement with emotional content in order to help students explore emotional reflexivity and emotional forms of knowing. Second, recognising the importance of emotions as not only the object but also medium of knowledge necessary to encapsulate our experience of the world (Thien, 2005), we believed that students’ learning would be deepened and strengthened by working with their own emotional material as situated “among-others” (Askins, 2019), in the intersubjective spaces of the classroom and students’ own everyday lives. In other words, we wanted to students to use their own emotions to explore the emotional geographies of everyday spaces around them.

This structure enables students to bring together ideas from the literature and their own everyday emotional experience. It also uses the carefully-managed environment of the class as a source of material for understanding and learning through emotions. As students will be bringing their own experience as a material for reflection, confidentiality and safe environment will be an important element of the learning process. The class will agree on a group contract during the first session to help maintain these aspects, but there will be also a Health and Safety framework implemented throughout the course to mitigate detrimental effects from working with emotions.

(Excerpt from Module Handbook (2018–19))

The weekly one-hour lecture introduced students to key theoretical concepts and the two-hour seminar, that took place on the same or next day, included discussion of set readings further developing the lecture topic, and structured activities where students were usually asked to bring personal content (experience, emotional reflection) and draw on the theoretical material from that week to explore it. For instance, a session on psychodynamic approaches asked students to explore parallels between their important relationships in the past and present, while the session on the everyday spatialities of the university required students to walk through the campus and reflect on the atmospheres, associations and memories evoked in different spaces.

Unlike most modules on the programme where lectures tend to be longer and more frequent than small group activities, our focus was on the seminars. Whereas at Newcastle seminars are often run by postgraduate or postdoctoral teaching assistants, on this module they were always led by both of us as module leaders. The seminars purposefully took place in an open-plan room with movable chairs organised in a circle and without desks. We also made use of breakout rooms or used teaching rooms much bigger than the size of the group so students could disperse for activities conducted individually and in pairs or small groups where privacy was needed. We asked students not to hold computers on their laps in order to reduce a physical barrier in communication within the group. The class established a group contract at the beginning of the year, including commitment to confidentiality (“what is said in the room will stay in the room”) and voluntary participation, with students allowed to skip an activity or leave the room without an expectation to provide any explanation. Our rule was never to call out a specific student to speak in front of everyone else. All discussions in the whole class were normally preceded by discussions in smaller groups of students’ choice (of 2–4 students) where students could share their reflections privately, but they also had the right to skip an activity or complete it privately without sharing with anyone.

The credit value of the module accounted for one ninth of their final degree result. It was assessed by two related pieces of work, a reflective summary of a learning journal and a presentation exploring “the emotional geographies of a particular everyday space”. The learning journal served both as assessment and as a pedagogical tool:

Students will be expected to keep a learning journal throughout the module. This should reflect on all aspects of their experience in the module – moments and events, learning materials, personal development (cognitive, conative or affective), interactions – in the context of their everyday experiences. This will enable you to engage with and reflect on the module and your experiences of it, inside and outside the classroom. It is important that the journal is updated regularly, even if by only one or two paragraphs at a time. The journal is a student’s personal material and it will not be shared with anyone (unless they wish to).

The second assessment requires you to produce a summary of your learning journal (see below), but the purpose of the journal is for more than assessment. It should help you reflect on your own experiences with people and places.

(Excerpt from Module Handbook (2018–19))

What students had to submit for the journal was a summary focused around key questions which reflected the module aims – we asked students to use the journal material to demonstrate, in whichever way they found most appropriate, that they can:

1. understand the importance of emotions in the processes that shape everyday spaces;

2. critically evaluate different approaches and techniques for engagement with emotional contents and identify key challenges in understanding emotions;

3. reflect on [their] own everyday emotional geographies.

This required students to draw on their own experiences but also connect to academic ideas and literatures. They did not have to cover the whole range of theoretical approaches we introduced and could focus only on ones they found most interesting or useful. Whilst students were required to draw on their own experiences, inside and outside the classroom, they did not have to submit verbatim journal entries; they could select and edit the material they were comfortable using and sharing, and we emphasised that a good summary would not expect them to deal with difficult or sensitive content. This meant that the entries in the learning journal that we were encouraging students to write regularly were private and would only ever be shared on the student’s own terms.

The other assessment was a presentation that differed from the journal by the focus on a particular space in students’ lives rather than their personal everyday geographies more broadly. Through this difference, we wanted students to still attend to their emotions in their understanding of the world around them, but to expand the reflection towards wider elements that constitute everyday spaces. By choosing the format of presentation, we also wanted to enable different form of representation of emotional contents, beyond the textual format of an essay.

Teaching everyday emotional geographies in practice: concerns about diverting from established routines

The very first group session invited students to express concerns about the module so we could adapt the group contract and our own teaching practices. In both years, the main concerns raised by the students were similar. First, students noted the module being different from others, both in terms of the style of teaching and learning and as the subject of emotions was scarcely addressed in the curriculum. Second, students felt unease about the assessments. The personal learning diary was particularly a subject of worries as it contrasted with the established teaching practices that expect students to engage with (mainly academic) readings and adopt a critical, rationally-reflexive approach to knowledge, rather than emotionally-reflexive approach to personal experience. We initially asked students to record their daily experiences, suggesting that as we progress through the conceptual material on emotions, it will become clear how that material can be translated into the reflexive summary. The lack of immediate clarity about how maintaining the journal will lead to the written assessment caused stress and some students asked for examples of learning diaries, which we could not provide. The presentation was also a concern, especially in the second year we ran the module, although this had to do with the expectation to present in front of others rather than with the medium of the assessment as such. Third, students expressed concerns about the seminar dynamics and participation. They explicitly called for good use of ice-breakers, emphasis on work in smaller groups rather than activities together, and especially for avoiding putting people on the spot. To facilitate this, students were able to participate in seminars without ever speaking in front of the whole group as we never asked any specific students to talk except for a tune-in/tune-out exercise at the beginning and end of each session, when we went around the room and asked everyone to attribute their current emotional state to an object but without any further explanation (e.g. “What colour do you feel like right now?”).

We managed to address these concerns with varied levels of success, especially in the second year. Our initial approach to address the concerns about different nature of the module was about accentuating the scaffolding nature of the module and its assessment and about requesting students to trust us. We sought to reassure students that what they do – writing open-ended learning journals and being selective about theoretical approaches useful for analysing their own material – is the right thing and will provide them with appropriate outcomes. However, the novelty of activities and the lack of timely tangible outcomes as both assessments were scheduled at the end of teaching semesters meant that concerns remained in place. On top of that, teaching in the first year was interrupted by four weeks of industrial action and along with a university Easter holiday, we had no contact with the students for almost two months. Some of the qualitative feedback we received that year showed confusion and even anger about lack of support.

The overall student feedback in the first year was mixed, with some students mentioning the module as a highlight of their university experience while others expressed bewilderment and frustration. In the second year, the feedback was more consistently positive. While we maintained the scheduling of both assessments at the end of the semester (in order to allow students to engage with a wide variety of ideas and tools before deciding which they would implement for their own project), we also arranged compulsory individual tutorials halfway through the semester. At these tutorials, students were asked to share their plans about both assessments and we also discussed their overall progress and feelings about the module. In many meetings we did little but confirm and reassure that the student’s approach to work was appropriate, but scheduling this individual reassurance had a huge impact on students’ confidence about the module and their own work. In addition, in the second year of the teaching, we shared a breakdown of marks from the previous year. These showed that despite similar concerns about the novelty of the module, the first cohort produced fascinating work with grades well above the usual for this stage of studies – the median mark was around 70, which is the threshold for First Class award typically awarded to some 20–25% of students on the programme. We offered these data along with the confirmation that the previous cohort, so well performing in terms of assessment, followed the same scaffolding approach, only with less support due to the industrial action disruption.

The other two concerns – about speaking in front of others in the seminar and during the assessed presentation – were not necessarily about the expectation to talk about student’s personal experiences but about the matter of speaking in public as such, perhaps reflecting broader issues of mental health and performance-related anxieties increasingly endemic to higher education in the UK (Topham et al., 2016). Newcastle University has a formal system in place where students can be exempt from “active” seminar participation (in the sense of contributing to discussions) on the grounds of mental health if evidence is provided. We decided to offer this option to everyone and to allow students to speak only when they felt comfortable. Most activities in the seminar took place in small groups. We did not join those small group discussions and activities unless invited by the students. When the group met as one afterwards – which was not the case of every activity – we did not ask groups to report back one by one. Instead, the invitation to speak in front of the whole group was always open to individuals who could draw on small group discussions or on their personal reflections. Small group activities were thus not intended to build up towards the whole group discussion, and these two settings, along with activities that students did individually, served instead as separate platforms to accommodate individual students’ preferences to engage with the content differently.

These arrangements received varied responses from students: some found seminars slow and thought that as teachers we did little as we left students on their own for extended periods of time; yet others appreciated the student-led focus, freedom in exploring the topics and the responsive format of seminar leadership where two module leaders interacted and exchanged ideas. Especially in the second year, we repeatedly emphasised and explained the reasons for such arrangements, and the scaffolding approach to learning where students are asked to identify and choose conceptual lens that will help them explore their personal emotional geographies. Therefore, anything said in the seminar could rarely be right or wrong, as the purpose of these sessions was to actively explore one’s personal experiences and to facilitate this process by learning from others. To emphasise the elasticity of this approach in the second year of the module, we offered students to choose the topic of the final lecture and seminar; where the first half of the module addressed theoretical perspectives on emotions (e.g. feminism, psychoanalysis, non-representational theory) and the second half draw on these to explore some key spatialities in students’ own lives (home, university, city), the students asked for the final week’s sessions to be on emotional geographies of relationships, leading one of us to write a lecture and design a seminar on this subject on a short notice.

Reflections on these concerns and how they were addressed in practice reveal broader points about the role of emotions in teaching and its juxtaposition with neoliberal subjectivities. First, students experienced significant anxieties about the module due to it being different from what they understood and had become accustomed to as the discipline of geography. Emotions as a geographical subject were an oddity and working with them – and working emotionally – was a new approach. With almost one-ninth of students’ degree award at stake, doing things differently from the ways that helped them progress for two and a half years was unsettling. Second, students were concerned about learning centred on social interaction. The safe stance for many was one of where teaching materials are produced by teachers and received by students in their own time, and where they have an autonomous control over their learning process.

We suggest that these reflections identify how the student experience is framed within particular neoliberal subjectivities of students as individualised actors adverse to risk and motivated by their grade goal (Bunce et al., 2017), but that regardless of how problematic such a focus on individualistic and assessment-oriented performance might be, dismissing it in teaching could be harmful to the students themselves. Students are positioned as individual consumers and producers whose participation in higher education will be valorised via the assessment system (Tomlinson, 2014). The pressure to perform – at the university and consequently in the neoliberal society, with one link between the two being the employers’ demands for a certain overall grade – causes significant anxieties and a chief coping mechanism established by the students is to stick to the proved, established routes and avoid risk and uncertainty. As we found out, decentring the importance of assessment and performance measures would not facilitate the learning process we envisioned as it led to disquiet and was met with resistance. Instead, anxieties became eased and engagement heightened once we validated these concerns and repositioned the assessment at the heart of the seminars. Especially in the second year, students gained confidence once we made more frequent and explicit references to the assessment in seminar discussions, highlighting as much as possible how specific reflections and thoughts could be presented in the learning diary or presentation.

In relation to the positionality of individual, autonomous subjects (learners, consumer, producers), students experienced a heightened sense of safety when they were enabled to work individually. Although our teaching format was centred on shared collective space of engagement, we found it crucial not to disrupt the sense of safety and to allow students to open up to others entirely on their own terms. In this respect, we highlight the difference between class attendance, participation and contribution. Whereas low seminar participation has become a major concern to study programmes such as ours, we never perceived it as a problem on this specific module. A major factor in our approach that facilitated learning was to reconsider the link between attendance and participation and decouple participation from contribution. In contrast to a common pedagogic tenet that requires students to actively participate, not just attend in classes, and this requires contribution, our postulation was that students could actively participate (and thus engage with learning) in the seminars without explicitly contributing to the group as a whole. The seminars were still engaging, with small groups generally working very well, and the whole group also generating smooth and fascinating discussions. A key factor was to establish the importance of collective space while at the same time allowing fully autonomous space for students’ individual journeys. Overall, there was a relationship between students’ attendance at seminars and their assessment marks, reflecting our centrality of seminars as central teaching spaces, but there was no relationship between marks and students’ contribution to the seminars – some of those who almost never said a word produced exceptional work demonstrating major learning achievements.

Academic literature often highlights the contrast between independence and individual responsibility as formative elements of neoliberal politics and interdependency as a feature of societal relationships that are driven and sustained by ethics of care (McEwan & Goodman, 2010; Power & Hall, 2018). The discussion above shifts this debate to the context of students’ embodied learning and indicates that independence/autonomy and interdependency/sharing/care do not have to be perceived as one diminishing or eliminating the other. Our seminars were designed as a social space centred on sharing and mutual support, in which the individual learners were both responsible for and reliant on others (Bowlby et al., 2010). We sought to cultivate care and compassion as pedagogical tenets and to encourage students to help each other learn by letting others in on their experiences, listening and thinking through the emotional contents together. Thus, on the one hand, the seminar dynamics emphasised interdependency (underpinned by care) as central to the learning process. Yet, on the other hand, the involvement in this process did not prescribe specific modes of participation and did not oblige every student to engage the same way. The interdependent contribution was only a superstructure to the formative baseline for participation which guaranteed all students the opportunity to remain quiet, introspective and share only as much as they wished to (including nothing). To proceed “inside” the learning process, students were allowed to stay “aside” from the collective dynamics of the seminars and were encouraged to learn by working autonomously through their emotional experience. The relationality of the learning experience comprised the social dimension of the classroom dynamics grounded in interdependency, care and responsibility (Raghuram et al., 2009), but also the relations students carried over from beyond the classroom (and the university), encapsulating the positionalities of class, gender, race and sexuality, aspirations, personal experiences and established coping strategies. We allowed students to set a barrier between these sets of relations if they chose in terms of sharing with others. It is worth noting that students never commented on others being silent at the seminar – any critical reflections were on those not attending at all. This suggests that active learning can take place in solitude among others as much as by actively contributing to voiced discussions.

Neoliberal subjectivities in and outside the classroom

The discussion so far focused on the learning experience. We have shown how teaching seeking to embark on new assessment procedures or to decentre the assessment itself is ultimately likely to add to anxieties. But despite the struggles with the format of the module, the effort most students demonstrated, their understanding of the content and their ability to explore emotional geographies were very good. Even with those concerns present, many students settled into the more unusual module format, seeing that it offered space for development of own ideas and interests, and that we would scaffold their learning appropriately. The level of engagement for most students was very high; we would see many in our office hours as they reflected on their learning and started work on their assessments. Emotions as a subject of geographical thinking were a challenge, but not one that students on the module were mostly concerned about.

However, encounters with neoliberal subjectivities were about more than just the grade attainment. A particular issue we encountered was about the links between emotions and politics. A point of critique was raised by one of the students before the end of the first year that the in-depth explorations of one’s emotions do not easily offer clear links to the questions of power or injustice. Indeed, there was at times a strong sense at the seminars that students struggled to imagine alternatives to engrained social norms (e.g. around employment expectations, gender) – not that they could not think critically but that the space for alternatives had been closed down. At times, the discussion fell into an individualistic argument about “taste” and “personality” in everyday lives (e.g. around their homes/bedrooms) rather than any social understanding of emotional governance and identity that impact on these. We were asking students to think critically about their emotional geographies so there was some sense that their struggle to make bigger connections beyond the individual and personality framing was problematic.

However, the assessments, and especially the first one – the reflective presentation on emotional geographies of a particular everyday space – revealed that thinking about politics was at the forefront of how students approached emotional geographies and demonstrated their learned competence to do so. Many presentations addressed highly personal but also political subjects, from explicit themes of spatial and social justice (exploring the politics of campus, community, church or subjects such as the right to urban space and homelessness) to more subtle explorations of gender and sexual politics in spaces such as gym, nightclub or home. These presentations revealed concerns, anxieties, hopes and testimonies of social and personal injustice. We were impressed by the depth and critical attention to relevant social issues coupled with the aptitude to explore and present emotional contents.

The actual themes addressed in assessments reflected to a large extent the cohort of students. Geography students in Newcastle are predominantly White, and the emotions of race and racialisation were rarely brought up in the seminar discussion or the presentations, although the topic of religion and especially spiritual spaces was more commonly explored. Similarly, the questions of sexuality and sexual identity were rarely touched upon in the seminar. Much more frequent references were to gender, linking together diverse spatialities (of home and family, spaces of exercise and leisure, night-time spaces and the city) and temporalities (childhood, teenage years and early adulthood). The most emotionally charged dimension was class, though. Newcastle Geography has a fairly diverse group of students, ranging from highly mobile (upper) middle class students with a history of private education to students from working class background, especially from the local area. These positionalities are reflected in their everyday geographies, including whether students stay on the campus or in their home community, whether they work or not, in resources to access leisure and in social circles. Debates on such differences almost never materialised in the classroom, but we saw several political, emotionally invested (and brave!) presentations from some (especially local) working-class students focused on the emotional geographies of community, home and work, compared to presentations (often still political and brave!) from campus-based and more middle-class students addressing spaces of leisure and home with the accentuated angle of the personal and individual rather than social.

The positionalities outside the classroom also fed into the dynamics within it. Discussions in the seminar were often fuelled by students who knew each other well, offering safe grounds to share and discuss emotional contents. The peer and friendship groups among students are themselves stratified across axes of class (Papapolydorou, 2014), thus impacting on what was shared, said and to whom on the module. In the seminars, everyone had the option to opt out from participating in smaller group activities, but students rarely took this, unlike their contribution to whole-group discussion. We also set an agreement that whatever would be shared within the classroom stays in the classroom, with a special consideration given to the impact that an inappropriate disclosure might have within students’ friendship circles. Yet, the group dynamics clearly mattered as the students who knew each other were more comfortable interacting, including speaking to the whole group, and they benefitted from mutual support and trust. The more isolated students were those from non-Geography programmes but also students from the local community as a noticeable minority. As with sharing in front of the whole group, having friends in the classroom was not a determinant of a good mark, as some students actively engaged in discussions and supported by their friends did not do as well in terms of assessment as others who knew very few and could not rely on these forms of support.

These reflections show us two points. One is that despite silence on critical themes of social injustice during classroom activities, students are critically engaging with such subjects and capable of exploring the politics of emotions in everyday geographies. However, they might prefer to do it individually, on their own, with appropriate pedagogic support. The classroom can be a radical tool insofar as it provides space for individual emotional reflection and encourages students to pursue topics relevant to their personal geographies while maintaining the sense of personal autonomy and emotional security. Addressing politics in teaching does not always require the classroom to instigate critical discourse or collective practice; initiating a private emotional reflection on questions of politics in a carefully facilitated environment can be an equally powerful tool for engaged learning.

Second, the politics and emotional positionalities within the classroom are inevitably linked to those outside it. In our module, we sought to create a space for dialogue between students with very different life experiences and personal backgrounds and allow all to be seen as valid, especially with regards to the question of how such experience can translate into good assessment. The success in the first part – in fostering critical dialogue across different positionalities – was rather partial as far as the discussion within the classroom went. However, there was much to be found in the presentations and learning journal summaries that revealed Geography students’ perceptiveness to the question of politics in everyday emotional geographies particularly with regards to their personal experiences and positionalities.

Conclusion

This paper framed the student experience of learning emotional geographies within the processes of neoliberalisation. These processes are at least twofold and interrelated. On the one hand, student subjectivities are embedded within the marketisation and commodification of higher education as well as the performance anxiety associated with the university experience enveloped in the tuition fee system. On the other hand, student lives unfold from relations with the wider society and its entrenched inequalities across the axes of class, race, gender, generation and others.

An aspect of the neoliberalisation of higher education, as we argued, is the ejection of emotions from the teaching and learning process. Despite emotions being fundamental to the student experience, and despite the mounting mental health crisis at universities, emotions fail to be properly recognised as both the medium and potential object of geographical studies at the university, even though such a recognition clearly exists in the wider geographical scholarship. The standardisation of curriculum and teaching methods, the league table politics and competitiveness among marketized institutions, and the fixation on measurements and rational logic disqualify emotional learning from geographical education and pose emotions as an anathema to students.

We found that introducing emotions as the central focus of teaching and learning practices, as both the objects of inquiry and the medium of the classroom, may be perceived as a threat and cause discomfort and alienation, regardless of what emotional content is brought forward. Displacing students from the carefully established system with clear expectations on performance and assessment disrupts the sense of security and might not be welcome. Our experience with Emotional Geographies of Everyday Life showed us the need to accept students’ concerns and anxieties and integrate them carefully into the pedagogies of emotional geographies with scaffolded and ongoing support. In order to achieve that, we recommend the following three principles:

First, designing teaching underpinned by ethics of care means to be attentive and responsive (cf. Tronto’s (1989) principles of ethics of care) to students’ concerns rather than dismissing them as unfounded. Introducing emotions to geographical education, especially late in the degree, is likely to cause disruptions which simply cannot be overcome by a rationalised narrative seeking to convince students that their concerns are unsubstantiated. Working with emotions requires time and space, opportunities to check and be re-assured, an invitation to engage in multiple ways so individual students may be able to identify those that suit them best.

Second, working with emotions necessitates providing students with autonomy and to respect their preference for the degree and modes in which they feel comfortable to share emotional contents and to receive those of others. Although pedagogies of care draw on the idea of interdependency, establishing collective engagement and sharing as a condition of participation in learning might threaten the patterns of security that some students require if they should learn with and through their own emotions. Emotions are individual, personal and risky, with much at stake. That investment in learning needs to happen on students’ own terms and in the spatialities and timeframes that provide the security students require.

Finally, we suggest that pedagogies of emotional geographies need to be explicit about the role of emotions in everyday lives and politics, and to invite students to deliberations about why and how emotions matter to political geographies at various scales, including their very personal ones. Thinking about the interscaled nature of politics is essential for learning from a geographical perspective, and the intimate, personal experience explored with patience and care provides a good starting point for such an inquiry,

Acknowledgement

We are indebted to students who took Emotional Geographies of Everyday Life at the Newcastle University, and to the reviewers and editors of Journal of Geography in Higher Education.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).