Emotions, power and schooling: the socialisation of ‘angry boys’

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between power and emotion in a junior school context. I consider emotions to be constructed in social interactions within which power relations are produced, sustained and contested. In this paper, I consider the ways that power and emotion are implicated in children’s struggles for social recognition through their interactions with both adults and other children. To do so, I focus on an example of a boy with the ascribed emotional identity of an ‘angry boy’ from an ethnographic study in a junior school. I suggest that the conceptualisation of anger as a problem belonging to angry individuals works to separate the expression of anger from wider social contexts and legitimises the spatial exclusion of ‘angry boys’. The paper shows how ascribed emotional identities are reflective of the ways that institutional power plays out within children’s school lives, and in social interactions between adults, children and their peers. I argue that while children resist these identities they are also affected by them as they seek social recognition from their relationships with others.

Keywords:

• emotional identities
• power
• social recognition
• schooling
• children

Notes

1. Peer-mediators have received conflict resolution training. During break times, they work in pairs to look out for children in the playground who might be having a disagreement. If they do see a dispute, they invite the ‘disputants’ to mediation. During which, the peer-mediators ask questions and listen to both parties point of view in order to identify the cause of the dispute. They then work with the disputants to support them to find their own way to resolve the conflict. This is part of a much wider ‘peer-mediation’ scheme that has been developed across primary schools in Sheffield.