Conference Agenda

This symposium will explore the relational, emotional, and affective dimensions of education through the lens of the Theory of Practice Architectures (TPA). The purpose of this is to challenge prominent ideals that valorised the autonomous, rational subject while relegating emotions to the feminised private sphere. Recent developments in social theory, including the “practice turn” and the “affective turn,” offer new ways to conceptualise education as an intrinsically relational and affective practice. This symposium includes papers that respond to the questions: Why does relationality, emotions and affect matter in education as a discipline and in research in this area? How might practice theorising and in particular, the theory of practice architectures, contribute to debates in this area?

The Theory of Practice Architectures provides a powerful framework for understanding how educational practices are socially, materially, and discursively constituted. Practices are not isolated actions but socially established projects comprising sayings, doings, and relatings, which are prefigured by cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political arrangements. While TPA has illuminated the structural conditions that enable or constrain educational practices, critiques have identified its limited engagement with emotions and affect. This symposium (and the book it is based on, Wilkinson et al, 2026) seeks to address this gap by arguing that emotions and affect are integral to educational practices. This approach to considering affect and emotions in education counter the traditional psychological paradigms that relegate them to individual concerns. Rather, this symposium presents papers that consider emotions as ‘socially constructed, produced and reproduced in the relations between humans and humans and the non-human environment’ (Wilkinson et al., forthcoming). Reckwitz (2002, p. 254) suggests that “every practice contains a certain practice-specific emotionality (even if that means a high control of emotions). Wants and emotions thus do not belong to individuals but – in the form of knowledge – to practices”. The affective dimensions shape what feels appropriate in practice, influencing participation, power relations, and possibilities for change.

Foregrounding relationality, the symposium draws together papers that demonstrates how intersubjective encounters in educational sites are mediated by affective and emotional dynamics. These dynamics are realised through shared language, spatial-temporal arrangements, and social relationships, which together shape identities, values, and dispositions. By situating emotions and affect within the sayings, doings, and relatings of practice—and the arrangements that make these possible—TPA offers a nuanced account of how educational practices “stick” or “move” across contexts, and why some practices acquire stronger affective valence than others. The implications of this theorisation and focus on affect, emotions and relationality are twofold. First, incorporating emotions and affect into TPA enriches its explanatory power regarding social change, addressing critiques that practice theories lack robust accounts of transformation. Second, it opens new possibilities for praxis, understood as collective, critical action to overcome injustice and unsustainability. By recognising the affective conditions that enable or constrain educational practices the papers in this symposium contribute to a more holistic theorisation of education as relational, embodied, and affective, challenging instrumentalist logics that dominate contemporary schooling.

Trust plays a key role in the resettlement experiences of young refugees, who often face disrupted relationships and heightened mistrust due to the trauma of forced migration. During resettlement, these youth strive to reconnect with trusted individuals from their countries of origin while forming new, meaningful relationships in host countries. These relationships are essential for fostering support and a sense of belonging. In this chapter, we explore trust as a dynamic, relational, and learned process, emerging through shared care practices and social interactions. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 17 young refugees building new lives in Finland, our study highlights how this relational trust is cultivated through social practices and shaped by broader socio-political and material contexts. Our findings highlighted how relational trust was linked to active, dynamic and reciprocal forms of participating in shared care practices. Participants could be seen to draw on their moral, emotional, intellectual and practical know-how to simultaneously trust and be trustworthy as they flexibly and attentively support each other within the unstable and shifting circumstances and conditions they encounter during their transitions to a new life in Finland. This research offers insights into how trust transforms across cultural boundaries and contributes to refugee youth wellbeing

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This paper will present and explore different forms of students’ embodied participation in learning practices of 19th century classic literature in a Nordic upper secondary classroom context, looking at the role embodiment plays in the understanding of relationality. Drawing on a rich data set - especially video observation - from a PhD project in literature education and using a theory of practice architectures (Kemmis et al., 2014) lens, the paper will present analyses of three different classroom scenes, focusing on how students interact with each other, the teacher, the literary object, and other available resources (i.e., the nonhuman). Analysing scenes 1 and 2, the paper examines how particular students cope bodily and emotionally with the transmission of an authoritative and highly specialised body of knowledge by focusing on their sayings, doings and relatings as having a frontstage and backstage dimension (Goffman, 1990). That is, to handle the pressures of this transmission, the particular social relationships present at the site of the learning practices enabled the students to create a social space, in which they used their bodies to perform the emotional labour needed of them to be able to go on in the practices (Hochschild, 2012). In scene 3, the importance of students’ shared perception of and embodied interaction (Schatzki, 2017) with their surroundings as a means of realising an inquiry-oriented approach to classic literature teaching is explored. As the students during a learning practice on 19th classic literature develop a shared mode of embodied interaction with their surroundings, they are able to build a strong argument in front of their teacher, while at the same time performing emotional labour. Findings suggest that students’ embodied participation in and the emotional labour they perform during learning practices of 19th century classic literature are crucial aspects of these practices. Theoretically, analyses identify a connection between the theory of practice architectures and Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis of social life, thus showing a genealogy of thinking from Goffman to contemporary practice theory concerning relatings, embodiment, emotional labour and affect. From a teaching perspective, findings make the case that embodied and emotional aspects of literature teaching and learning should be recognised as disciplinary knowledge in L1 education. By L1, we refer to the school subject L1, for example, English in English-speaking countries, Danish in Denmark, and so on.

Goffman, E. (1990). The presentation of self in everyday life. Penguin Books. Hochschild, A. R. (2012). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling In (3rd ed.). University of California Press. Kemmis, S., Wilkinson, J., Edwards-Groves, C., Hardy, I., Grootenboer, P., & Bristol, L. (2014). Changing practices, changing education. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4560-47-4 Schatzki, T. R. (2017). Pas de deux: Practice theory and phenomenology. Phänomenologische Forschungen, 25–40. https://doi.org/10.28937/1000107734

The twin-island republic of Trinidad and Tobago (T&T) is the most southerly Caribbean islands, with a strong Petro-Chemical industry and a complex colonial and transnational history. Historical archetypes of inequalities, continue to shape social stratification and marginalization and therefore prefigure relational elements of power which come to be operationalised within school experiences and outcomes. In this study, we draw on the theory of practice architectures and use video elicitation to make sense of the reported emotional effects of school violence on the relational practices of three teacher educators (TEs) in Trinidad and Tobago. We define school violence as the maladaptive activities of school youth, including those related to fighting, carrying and using weapons, cursing and engaging in disruptive/ aggressive behaviour during class sessions. Given that TEs are agents for continuing professional development and can intercede through their relational practices with teacher trainees, we: examine the relational effects of school violence on the practice of TEs; illustrate the role that TEs can play in a systemic response to school violence; and, define a set of practices that can be used by TEs to support teacher trainees’ responses to episodes of violent disruptions in the classroom. Research on TE’s perceptions of school violence is limited. More importantly, research that helps us understand the ways in which a practice of school violence has prefigured the relatings of TEs and their teacher trainees is limited. Relational/emotional affects are often areas of silence that can be unconsciously deterministic or influenced by socio-environmental contexts. These effects are particularly so in postcolonial/ decolonised sites. Understanding the role of emotions in transformative and decolonised educational practices the Caribbean is a gap in the research that the findings from this study flags. This is related to the socio-political arrangements and conditions needed to achieve “affective decolonisation” (Zembylas 2023, p. 301) in education, and through teaching. Affective decolonisation is achieved only when the complexity of colonialization and decolonisation is apprehended through, for example, experiences of anger, love, fear and loyalty in postcolonial educational sites. The findings of the study point to the ways in which TEs, through their relational practices with teacher trainees, can mitigate and reshape the emotional effects of school violence. In so doing, TEs can engage in explicit teaching for conflict resolution, problem solving and critical thinking. These actions can support the reduction of violence in the classroom.

Zembylas, M. (2023). Toward affective decolonization: Nurturing decolonizing solidarity in higher education. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 20(4), 300-319. https://doi.org/10.1080/15505170.2022.2034684