Challenging the politics of negative emotions in educational policy-making

This paper discusses the role of negative political emotions in educational policy-making through a particular case of banning asylum seekers’ visits to local schools and day-care centres in one of the largest cities in Finland. The paper uses the case example to demonstrate that while political emotions may often serve positive functions in democratic politics, especially concerning highly
controversial and polarizing issues such as immigration and asylum-seeking, political emotions may also be employed to justify the overruling of established democratic values, procedures, and human rights principles. In our case example, the educational policy-making prompted by citizens’ expressions of negative political emotions exemplified ethnic or racial stigmatization and led to the diminishing of schools’ possibilities to engage with the advancing of significant educational aims associated with human rights and social justice. Therefore, while we affirm the requirement to pay increasing attention to the role of emotions in democratic politics, we also use our case to highlight the need to consider the nature and justification of affectively charged political actions and decisions in light of general, higher-order principles, such as democratic and human rights principles.