Previous philosophical work on distrust in science has argued that understanding public distrust in science and scientific interventions requires that we pay careful attention not only to epistemic considerations (that is, beliefs about science), but also to values, and the emotional contexts in which assessments of scientific credibility are made. This is likely to be a truncated list of relevant factors for understanding trust/distrust, but these are certainly key areas of concern. The aim of this paper is not to further (...) innumerate the list of relevant factors. Rather, it is to map the ways that these key areas (beliefs, values, and emotions) are related to each other. These are not distinct categories, but rather they interact, making our picture of distrust more complicated than we might otherwise imagine. This discussion will take place in the context of resistance to medical interventions. Notably, Ebola interventions in West Africa, HIV/AIDS testing in South Africa, and vaccines across the world. (shrink)

This special issue explores the relevance of shame to feminist theory and practice. Across a number of contexts, theoretical frames, and disciplines, the articles collated here provide a stimulating engagement with shame, posing questions and developing analyses that have a direct bearing on feminism. For, the significance of shame to feminists lies in the complex and often troubling implications it holds as a feeling that may be experienced differently by people of certain genders (and none), and in its relation to (...) power. Indeed, as the contributions to this special issue highlight, shame may play a role in our moral development, but given its often readily acknowledged harmful effects, shame is frequently put to politically problematic and morally questionable ends. In patriarchal societies the outgrowths of this regularly entail gendered consequences, as gendered shame may form a disciplining device operating through structures of oppression, such as gender, but also class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, and related intersectional categories. The question of a politics of shame therefore arises in the context of a consideration of the social and political deployment and manipulation of shame, and the reported divergence in the shame experience itself, which feminists have attributed to its manifestation through, among others, gender. (shrink)

This article contributes to feminist expositions of emotion and “matters of the heart” by highlighting the gendered nature of the mobilization of shame. It focuses on the role shame plays in state apology and the desire to recover pride. Specifically, it analyzes the state apology offered to the survivors of Magdalen Laundries by Enda Kenny, the Taoiseach of Ireland. By drawing out how the state apology recreates the Irish nation, it traces the deployment of a potentially productive variety of the (...) politics of shame, which comes to be subverted in the service of keeping the virtuous, feeling “heart” of Ireland—the nation's very core—intact across a temporal, moral continuum. (shrink)

This article draws from the work of scholars in Critical Whiteness Studies to provide a nuanced analysis of ‘white shame’ in anti-racist education. In particular, it is argued that antiracist politics and pedagogy can be enriched by recognizing the affective and political complexities emerging from white shame and shaming. The purpose is to suggest that white shame has different manifestations depending on context and subject/group, and that those manifestations are related to feelings about white privilege, white ignorance, white fragility, and (...) white complicity. The author uses examples of white shame to discuss the pedagogical principles that inform the development of strategies for anti-racist education, emphasizing how educators can capitalize on teachable racial moments in the classroom that: move beyond white students’ tendency to default to shame; and, move beyond white students’ affective investments to racial inequality, while critically equipping white students to explore responsible ways of inhabiting their whiteness. (shrink)

This article shows how theorising the entanglement of securitisation and education can be enhanced by attending to the power of affect and emotion. The author proposes a methodological and theoretical framework that offers the potential of a rich and promising research agenda which includes the role of affects and emotions in exploring securitisation in education. It is argued that this framework would have to do two important things. First, it would have to show how biopolitical techniques emerge from historicising securitisation (...) processes to shape an understanding of the ways in which bodies are entangled with the invisible affective infrastructures of securitisation in educational institutions. Second, this framework would have to trace the capacities of educators and students for affecting and being affected in their engagements and negotiations with securitisation processes, and specifically how these capacities become normalised or enable counter-practices of interruption. The value of this framework is in its capacity to generate empirical work that extends beyond conventional securitisation theory’s focus on language and discourse analysis. As such, what this article offers is both new ways of researching affect and emotion in educational contexts of securitisation and some insights about the pedagogical consequences of this framework of research and theorisation. (shrink)

This paper brings attention to the notion of ‘religious affects’, namely, the affects, emotions and feelings related to religion and religious experience. It is argued that educators and students have a lot to gain from paying attention to and exploring the meaning and role of religious feelings in the context of controversies and debates surrounding Islam in the West. In particular, the paper suggests that by exploring the affective dimensions of religious injury (e.g. irritation, dishonour, insult, injury, offense, outrage), educators (...) and students can enhance their understanding of how religious emotions are involved in religious controversies such as the recent cartoon controversies in several European countries. It is argued that a richer comprehension of affective dimensions of religious controversies will help promote inter-religious understanding and respect, an important educational aim in contemporary times, especially in school subjects such as religious education. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship of shame to class and to desire in Michelle Tea's memoirThe Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America. Through applying a class analytic to the framework of shame recently advanced by feminist, queer, postcolonial, and affect theorists, I foreground shame as central to the experience of being poor and queer, and examine shame as not only negative and positive, but as productive. I operationalize an “oppositional reading strategy” to insist on attention to (...) the materiality of embodied desire and labor, in particular queer desire and sex work, that is made available in poor and working‐class women's life‐writing. Tea's memoir demonstrates how writing about an ambivalent relation to shame is an act of resistance, an opportunity to transform private, individual experiences into public, and therefore collective, articulations. (shrink)