On the image of hate in education: desirable emotions, learning, and the visibility of bodies in educational relations

In this article I explore how images of hate from the work of feminist, psychoanalytical educational thinkers Deborah Britzman and Alice Pitt, and from Sara Ahmed's investigation into the cultural politics of emotion, function to shift the ideal-image of pedagogically desired emotions and complicate the emotional landscape of educational relations. Analysing two counter-images, I consider the ambivalent role of hate in the pedagogical lives of teachers and students, and the ways in which hate may actually support learning and motivate a desire for pedagogy as shared world-making. In different ways, each of the counter-images explores the idea that educational relations need to be able to address hate. Yet the second counter-image leads me to question whether all the bodies involved in those relations have been taken into account.