Emotions as Entanglements in Language Education: Power, Inequality and Possibility

This book moves beyond treating emotions solely as individual psychological experiences to examine how they are lived, shaped, and negotiated through entanglements of language, identity, ideology, history, institutional structures, material conditions, and power in language education. Drawing on diverse educational and sociopolitical contexts across the Global North and South, the volume explores how emotions are implicated in colonial histories, racialization, linguistic inequalities, migration, neoliberal educational reforms, and the professional lives of teachers and learners. The chapters collectively argue that emotions are never neutral or apolitical; rather, they are central to processes of exclusion, resistance, and transformation in educational settings. By conceptualizing emotions as entanglements, the volume advances a critical and relational approach to emotion research in applied linguistics, highlighting the unequal organization of emotional life and considering how educational institutions and practices might move toward greater emotional justice.