This site is hosted by

Serendip Home
On The Emotional Landscape of What We Do

Anne Dalke, Laura Rediehs and David Ross
FAHE, at the George School
Friday, June 23, 2006
We'd like to host a conversation about the relationship between emotion and the academic work we do.
How do disciplines that rely on models of rational choice (e.g., economics, political science, logic) live with the anomalous irrational behavior we encounter all the time?
How do we engage with academic traditions that reinforce (perhaps patriarchal) cultural cues that set up a false dichotomy between emotions and rationality as ways of knowing?
The lack, indeed often the denial, of a public vocabulary for acknowledging our emotions can cause difficult (what Steve Gilbert calls "dangerous") discussions on our campuses to bog down into alienating conflict and ill will as participants find all sorts of clever ways to shut down, escape, or build walls. Peacemaking will founder unless we acknowledge and address the strong emotions affecting all of us involved.
Round One: Some Background
Anne: Alchemies of Mind: The Emotional Landscape of Classical 19th C. Texts
(As explained on Day One of the Course)
This session had its beginning in a course I taught @ Bryn Mawr this spring:
The Emotional Landscape of 19th C. American Lit
(taught big books taught many times before: Moby-Dick, UT's C, ScL, HF)
made very deliberate attempt to teach them differently
to invite students' direct unmediated experience w/ the texts,
see what use-value canonical texts might still have for them
(see what use their reactions had for field of Am lit!)
Decision to focus on "emotion" fed by a # of different streams:
- disciplinary love of big 19th c. texts
- religious alignment with/affection for/use value of transcendentalists, RWEmerson and MFuller
-
"intellectual Quakerism"
- reliance on diret experience
- cultivation of independence of mind to discover it
- impatience w/ disciplinary approaches
- not-entirely-successful course on "Beauty,"
where we agreed to respect our different "feelings" about different objects,
and stopped the conversation (the thinking?)
- my own gut-driven, emotion-led decision-making
(marriage, childbearing, dropping in and out of school)
- my current psychoanalysis:
a process of reading/altering my emotions,
realizing I can't chose my feelings,
but can control actions that establish "dispositions,"
make myself the kind of person who will feel a certain way;
the choice is not about individual moments,
but about the larger context of character and intentions.
Wanted, in short, to use my students' direct experience of texts
to highlight a strand of philosophy counter to the one that
treats emotions as a "threat to rationality,"
& uses them instead (as Proust said) as
"intelligent responses to perception of value."
To help in this project, I invited a philosopher from Harvard,
a biologist, psychologist and economist from Bryn Mawr
to give guest talks about how their disciplines thought/feel about emotions--
& David was one of these
David: On Rational Choice and Economic Behavior
Laura:
My own work in philosophy concerning emotion has been in two inter-related
ways. First of all, much feminist epistemology has critiqued the exclusion of
serious consideration of emotion from philosophical thinking about knowledge.
Knowledge at its best must be rational (grounded in logic), and rationality is
often defined explicitly against our emotional natures. We are trained by our
culture often to interpret our emotions as going against rationality. But not
only the feminists, but also cognitive neurosciences are beginning to
recognize the deep interrelations between rationality and emotion. In some of
my work, what I'm trying to do is expand the notion of rationality to include
careful consideration of its emotional dimensions. I do believe that our
emotions are linked to other, less appreciated forms of knowledge, but we must
learn to read and interpret them in sophisticated ways. It's not that we
should shy away from everything we fear and lunge fearlessly towards
everything that attracts us. But we must be aware of our emotions and learn
good ways of questioning them and understanding them and then take that into
account along with our other "rational" processes of discernment.
The other way I have been exploring the significance of emotions
philosophically is in my interest in peace issues. The question that most
haunts me about nonviolent action is: how do peacemakers summon the courage
to walk straight into conflict unarmed? In watching difficult discussions on
our campus, what I see inhibiting these conversations and contributing most to
the acceleration of conflict and ill will is when people do not know how to
handle the emotional stress associated with difficult topics and issues. You
can teach effective communication techniques, but if those techniques do not
directly address the emotional difficulties involved in these kinds of
conversations, people just won't follow them. People have trouble dealing
with their own or other people's strong emotions (because our culture does
very little to teach us how to do this well), and so they find all sorts of
clever ways to shut down, escape, or build walls. But when you try to teach
explicitly about the emotional dimensions and help people prepare for this, so
that they learn to stay centered themselves within the strong force-fields of
emotions that can develop (instead of yelling at everyone else for getting
emotional!), then there is the hope of making some real progress.
Round Two: Some Questions, Scenarios and More Questions- What are the standard academic coping methods when emotion
unexpectedly emerges? What's lost--and what's the alternative?
- How does one stay centered when an unexpected emotion emerges -- and
what are the tradeoffs involved in alternative next steps?
- How can we get better at blending the rational and the
emotional?
Anne: - The Brokeback Mountain forum on Serendip filled up w/ anti-gay diatribes
webmistress/partner tried to "take it back to the text":
use of flashbacks, omniscient point of view
I thought the focus on technique disassociated the way the film is put
together from what it is about, how it affects us, how we might USE it;
(Paul Lauter:) "we attend to the shape, sinew, texture of hand,
not whether it offers us peace or a sword"
this marked the end of a comfortable (public) community of shared values--
it marked the end of several people's participation (both gays and anti-gays)
was there any other way to make that conversation useful?
to attend to the emotions underlying the angry expressions?
-
The name change of the Bi-College Program in Feminist and
Gender Studies to the Program in Gender and Sexuality
deliberative, slow, "Quakerly" process
ended in much anger, w/drawal of some faculty from participation in program,
request to president to overturn the decision,
eventually to my stepping down from running the program (lightening rod)
etc. etc.
ditto: how better handle emotional triggers/identity issues?
David
In discussing price discrimination I sometimes (but
less often than I would like) get a student to say "that's so
unfair!" Now, if I ignore the exclamation point, the discussion moves into a
conversation about justice and tradeoffs between justice and
efficiency. But, I am particularly ill equipped to help that
student (all of us) think about why a sense of injustice has
tripped an emotion rather than a line of argument.
Laura
Scenario A. In a philosophy of science class (this was before 9/11,
by the way), we were reading some feminist philosophy of science.
One article was written by an anthropologist who went to a nuclear
weapons lab to analyze the language of nuclear defense
intellectuals. She saw that the language "protected" the
intellectuals from the emotional impact of the horrors these weapons
would unleash if they were ever actually used (e.g., "collateral
damage"). And she criticized this as dangerous, because the more
insulated people are from the real effects of their decisions, the
more likely they are to make really damaging decisions. A student
and I get into a debate about this article. The male student
defends the need for such language in order to proceed with
planning. We both are having quite a lively debate and both are
enjoying it -- it is a debate that, not surprisingly, gets into
questions about whether war is ever justified or not. Also, not
surprisingly, I am defending pacifism. But the rest of the class is
silent. When I pause to notice this and ask why, another student --
also male -- says what is clearly obvious to the rest of the class:
"You two are fighting." Question: how would you, as teacher,
respond?
David
Scenario A got me thinking about the academic seminar or colloquium -- a collaborative activity in which exposing ideas to the critical evaluation of others is designed to produce "better" ideas -- truth-seeking through conversation.
Some seminars -- particularly at the graduate level -- are famous for the seeming (or actual) brutality with which new ideas are received -- the cut and thrust of argument. Many of us are trained to receive new ideas with a "Yes, but" -- often without the "Yes." Outsiders looking in will say the participants are fighting. Sometimes participants will deny that (like Laura and her student in scenario A) -- citing the pleasures of the intellectual back and forth, the mutual admiration for arguments well couched. Sometimes participants will say, "yes we are fighting" -- and claim that the adrenaline pumped by the emotions (fear, anger, disappointment) fuels new insights, enhances the achievement of the seminar.
An alternative seminar structure receives new ideas, however flawed, in nurturing ways -- "we appreciate your contribution" -- identifying positives in each person's participation, and seeking paths of inquiry best matching each participants gifts. Outside observers might complain that participants are more concerned with self esteem than the quality of ideas -- that they are undercutting the rigor of their academic fields. But, if feeling safe, connected, loved makes one more willing to share, more open to one's own insights and the insights of others, then the seminar may achieve great things.
Laura
Scenario B: In my class that was meeting during the events of 9/11
(we adjourned class to watch the news reports), we had a follow-up
discussion a few class sessions later. So immersed had I been in
Quaker subculture and the advocacy of nonviolence, that I happened
to make a passing remark that I never dreamed would be
controversial: that the horror of these events demonstrated the
urgency of our learning nonviolent ways of resolving our
differences--these events show exactly why violent response is so
wrong. To my enormous surprise, a student accused me of being
"uncompassionate" for thinking this. A cousin of his had died in
the collapse of one of the World Trade Center towers, and, in his
view, it was "uncompassionate" not to want to retaliate against the
terrorists who had committed such a horrific act. This scenario
raises the question of how to remain centered oneself in the midst
of strong emotional fields: the student's enormous grief and
distress at the loss of his cousin; my shock and distress at finding
my pacifist stance the basis for being regarded as
"uncompassionate"! Question: how to stay centered during the
emergence of such emotional complexity (the students' emotions;
one's own), and where to take the discussion from here.
David
In this case, does emotion (a) get in the way or (b) need to be incorporated in the discussion/analysis?
What do you make of claims for the virtues of "dispassionate" analysis? A conversation we three might have now about whether Laura was "uncompassionate" would be very different from what happened in that classroom, since it would be devoid of emotional content (except perhaps for Laura's lingering memories of that day). Something is lost by having participants "calm down" before resuming a conversation.
(Isn't calming down -- having the emotion go away -- different from staying centered.)
It often seems that folks in the grip of strong emotion can't hear one another. Mediators often advise that they take a break and then resume the conversation. But, there must be some process for capturing the lessons/implications of the emotion: "When X happened, I felt Y, because of my need for Z." Otherwise, a crucial aspect of the conflict may be lost -- or not (suppose the emotion that was triggered was severe anxiety at being in conflict).
I find it very challenging to implement the lesson that person A's strong emotion doesn't require that I respond with a strong emotion.
When facilitating a class or committee, how does one determine whether strong emotions are integral to processing the task at hand, as in scenario B, or represent a side issue (anxiety at speaking in public or feelings of low self esteem)?
Round Three: Some Alternatives?
Let's imagine together some possible outcomes for one/some of the scenarios above.
Round Four: - What have we learned?
- What is the relation between emotion and academic work?
- What might it be?
- How might each of us work towards that goal?
|Deepening Our Roots, Spreading Our Branches:
Joint Conference of FCE&FAHE, June 22-25, 2006
|Friends' Association for Higher Education
This site is hosted by

Serendip Home