The Emotional Geographies of Education - Symposium 2008

About the Symposium

This 'agenda setting conference' will explore this relatively unexplored perspective - the emotional geographies of education. While over recent years there has been increasing interest in the insights that geographical perspectives offer educational research, the emotional geographies of education is a new line of inquiry in education as well as geography. With a view to generating fresh lines of investigation and conceptual resources, the conference papers will address the following:

• the emotional landscape of class relationships in inner city comprehensives in the UK
• the emotional geography of contemporary classrooms, raising questions about current pedagogy and the desire to teach
• how the physical spaces of different types of schools are implicated in creating recognisable student subjectivities and demarcating belonging and exclusion
• 'scapes of feeling' and the emotional state of the nation within the global assemblage of power/ knowledge
• how traditional demarcation and ordering practices of naming, spacing and placing of schooling are interrupted; and the potential for transformative action or resignification
• the relationship between the trans-national mobility of moral anxiety as it relates and is responded to, by low-income young people living on the edge of the new global city
• how virtual engagements in social networking sites create new spaces for competition, hierarchy and exclusion which extend and intensify affective relations within peer groups inside school
• how the tropes associated with young mothers and lower class young men are imbued with affects that spill out into everyday life to produce symbolic and material geographies of youth.

In many ways this conference is inspired by the Message from the Editors for the journal Emotion, Space and Society. As they say: 'Emotion, Space and Society 'provides a forum for interdisciplinary debate on theoretically informed research on the emotional intersections between people and places'. It 'encourages investigations of'

• 'feelings and affect in various spatial and social contexts, environments and landscapes'
• 'the multiplicity of spaces and places that produce and are produced by emotional and affective life, representing an inclusive range of theoretical and methodological engagements with emotion as a social, cultural and spatial phenomenon'
• 'new ways to think about natures, cultures and histories of emotional life'
• 'issues emerging from work on emotion from feminist, geographical, historical, philosophical, psychotherapeutic, sociological, anthropological, political and other disciplinary perspectives and from the spatial turn in cultural theory'
• 'the importance of 'everyday' life as a social category and with interactions between place, identity and felt values.'

Speakers

• Diane Reay, University of Cambridge, Cambridge UK
• Megan Watkins, University of Western Sydney, Australia
• Karen Nairn University of Otago, New Zealand
• Jane Kenway and Johannah Fahey, Monash University, Australia
• Deborah Youdell and Felicity Armstrong, London Institute of Education, UK
• Jo Dillabough, University of Cambridge, Cambridge UK
• Jessica Ringrose, London Institute of Education, UK
• Anoop Nayak, Newcastle University and Mary-Jane Kehily, Open University

Order of presentation

9:15 - 9:30 Introductory remarks

9:30 - 11:00

• 'Too close for comfort?': The white middle classes in multi-ethnic inner city schooling
  Diane Reay, University of Cambridge, Cambridge UK
• Understanding alienation from school: reading spaces, reading emotions
  Karen Nairn University of Otago, New Zealand

11:00 - 11:30 - Coffee

11:30 - 1:00

• Spaces of belonging and not-belonging - the psychic, social and educational lives of schooled subjects
  Deborah Youdell and Felicity Armstrong, London Institute of Education, UK
• Moral registers and young people in a new age: 'states of injury' resting at the edge of the global city
  Jo Dillabough, University of Cambridge, Cambridge UK

1:00 - 2:00 - Lunch

2:00 - 3:30

• Intensifying Affect: Sex, gender, and conflict in young people's negotiations of online social networking sites
  Jessica Ringrose, Institute of Education, London
• 'Lads, Chavs and Pram-Face Girls': Embodiment and Emotion in Working-Class Youth Cultures
  Anoop Nayak, Newcastle University and Mary-Jane Kehily, Open University

3:30 - 4:00 - Coffee

4:00- 5:30

• Teachers' Tears: Affects and the Emotional Geography of the Classroom
  Megan Watkins, University of Western Sydney, Australia
• Scapes of feeling and the emotional nation: knowledge politics from the edge of empires
  Jane Kenway and Johannah Fahey, Monash University, Australia

5:30 - 5:45 - Closing remarks

5:45 - Drinks/food