The political dimension in ESE: the construction of a political moment model for analyzing bodily anchored political emotions in teaching and learning of the political dimension

Abstract

This article departures from the understanding of environmental sustainable education (ESE) as a political project that consists of dissonant and conflicting voices. The aim of the article is to understand how affection, i.e. bodily sensations, transform into political emotions in teaching and learning settings. The article offers a philosophical and empirically based model called the ‘political moment model’ for analyzing bodily anchored political emotions in teaching and learning of the political dimension. The model was developed in response to an empirical case study where the data were somewhat confusing. In order understand the empirical data, we used parts of Mouffe’s theory of the political and various scholars’ work on political emotions and placed these aspects in a pragmatist standpoint of experience, emotions and meaning making. The model helped to investigate students’ experiences of the political dimension in situations where they experienced affection, i.e. bodily sensation, and emotions in connection with reflections and discussions about how to handle public issues of sustainable development. The article ends with a theoretical discussion of the findings in order to understand the political dimension in teaching and learning activities and to discern possible directions for future research on political moments in ESE.

Keywords:

• Political moment
• Mouffe
• Dewey
• political emotion
• bodily sensation

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the anonymous reviewers of this article, the SMED (Studies of Meaning-making in Educational Discourses) research group and Professor Jim Garrison at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, USA, for valuable comments.

Notes

1. Several scholars within ESD research field are using Mouffe’s theory of the political (Hasslöf 2015; Lundegård and Wickman 2012; Sund and Öhman 2014).

2. Mouffe (1996) explains her view of radical democracy as a ‘radical democratic society will still be a liberal democratic society, in the sense that we are not going to put into question the basic institution of political liberalism. The purpose of the project is to radicalize it by extending the sphere of equality and liberty to many more social relations. In a sense, it could be called radical liberal democracy. It is not an alternative to liberal democracy’ (145).

3. Mouffe (2005) takes her departure from Schmitt (1976) in her ontological understanding of antagonism. Our pragmatic perspective has the consequence that the political as an ontological condition for the social becomes naturalized in the model, i.e. ontology is situated in everyday practices, making it a practical lived ontology.

4. Gould (2010) clarifies the importance of making a distinction between affects and emotions by saying that:

in practice, it can be difficult to distinguish between affect and emotions. Affective states, for example, often generate immediate emotional displays, creating a sense that affect and emotional expression are one and the same. … nevertheless, even with these empirical difficulties, making some conceptual distinctions is important, particularly because the category of affect has specific qualities of import in social life that are minimized and even obscured if we collapse all distinction into one broad, undifferentiated category – emotions – that is tightly coupled with cognition. (28)

5. Another way of explaining the situation would be to say that the alternatives are incommensurable.

6. This relates to Warren’s (1996) claim that ‘political relations are the most difficult of all social relations’ (251–253). Warren (1996) points to a crucial aspect, namely that doing politics can concern either the issue that is discussed or the decision to or not to interrupt the social relations in the classroom. This can be one explanation as to why political moments are rare in ESE practice (see Öhman and Öhman 2013).