Week 1: What is emotion?
The first module session introduces students, irrespective of academic or professional background to the exploration of emotions in the social sciences. While feelings are often constructed as natural or inevitable psychoanalytic studies and sociology have sought to understand how they are manifest and experienced by the subject and indeed societies as a whole, both internally and externally.
Week 2: A history of emotions in society – becoming civilised and navigating `feeling rules`
This week will provide a sketch of the history of emotions in contemporary western post-enlightenment theorising with a focus on the regulation of emotions as part of Elias` civilising process and Foucault`s exploration of governmentality and repression.
Week 3: Children`s emotional development and experiences – developmental psychology
Having considered the exploration of emotions in the social sciences more broadly, this week we turn to considering how emotions, and in particular the articulation and management of emotional experience develops through childhood (in not necessarily linear ways). This week introduces perspectives from developmental psychology.
Week 4, 5 and 6: Children`s emotional development and experiences – psychoanalytic studies
Students will be introduced to the central tenets of exploring children`s emotional development and experiences from a range of psychoanalytic and psychodynamic perspectives, including Anna Freud, Klein, Bowlby, Bion, and Winnicott.
Week 7: Children`s emotional development and experiences – neuroscientific approaches
Continuing our exploration of different approaches to emotional experience and development, today we bring forward what neuroscience can offer to supplement understandings gained in sociology, developmental psychology and the psychoanalysis of children's emotions.
Weeks 8 and 9: A psychosocial approach to emotions and subjectivity
Concluding our weeks on different perspectives, today we consider the unique offering of a psychosocial approach for understanding children's emotional experiences. Here we will consider what it can offer us to better understand children's emotional development but also broader concepts of affect and the subject. These weeks offer the opportunity to consider contemporary issues in the psychosocial study of emotions and childhood for example touch in a socially distanced world or emotions as a collective experience.
Week 10: Plenary and Reflection
This week provides an opportunity for reflection on the emotional explorations that have characterised this modules journey. There is the opportunity for Q&A and assessment support here – as well as throughout the module – and a chance to actively consider and reflect upon ways in which this module has informed students` understanding here, in other modules, in their workplace, and in thinking through potential approaches to their dissertation.