Feeling Power: Emotions and education

Feeling Power: emotions and education

MEGAN BOLER, 1999 London, Routledge L13.99 paperback

Feeling Power is a scholarly, political and deeply ethical book, which powerfully challenges the reader to re-examine personal assumptions about the social and political role of understandings about emotions in philosophy, research and pedagogy. Boler's analyses are thought provoking and personally challenging. She presents a coherent case for critique of prior understandings of emotions, and for redeveloping understandings through a pedagogy which explicitly sets out to recognise power positionings and the cultural practices in relation to emotion which underpin them.

Using the ambiguity of meanings in her title, Boler discusses both Feeling Power, and Feeling Power. The former expresses `ways in which our emotions ... "embody" and "act out" relations of power', while the latter `refers to the power of feeling' (p. 4). Boler thus offers a construction of emotion both as a site of social control and as a site of resistance.

Through relational and political constructions of power, Boler shows how discourses of the emotions, past and present, have been used to define and maintain hierarchical power positionings. She...