Re/imagining higher education pedagogies: gender, emotion and difference

Abstract

This article explores work published in Teaching in Higher Education that critically engages complex questions of difference and emotion in higher education pedagogies. It considers the ways that difference is connected to gender and misrecognition, and is experienced at the level of emotion, often through symbolic forms of violence such as shaming. Through such processes, some bodies are pathologized through misogynistic discourses that manipulate fear of the ‘feminization of higher education’. Characteristics associated with difference in HE, such as ‘being emotional’ or ‘caring’, are regulated and controlled through a range of disciplinary technologies. Pedagogical relations are thus deeply implicated in the gendered politics of (mis)recognition, and profoundly connected to the impact of the emotional on the body and the self. I conclude by re/imagining difference within feminist and critical pedagogies, aiming to open up interventionist spaces that address our relationality with Others.

Keywords:

• diversity
• emotion
• difference
• gender studies
• critical pedagogies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.