Interrogating the emotional turn: Making connections with Foucault and Deleuze

In this paper I use theoretical insights from Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari to explore what I have called ‘the emotional turn’ in education. In following trails of the pedagogical repercussions of the Foucauldian notion of the care of the self, I trace various ways that it has been used and transformed in discourses of progressive pedagogy. The Foucauldian conceptualization of the care of the self is further making connections with the Deleuzian notion of desire and affect. What I suggest is that revisiting education as a site of intense power relations at play, but also as a plane for the production of intense flows of desire and affect, can perhaps create moments for thinking critically about the possible dangers of current discourses revolving around emotional learning