Workshop: Police education as an emotional practice

A workshop with researchers from different fields reflecting on police education as an emotional practive. How are emotions cultivated as collective patterns and habits of feeling? What emotions are recognized and what emotions remain tacit?

To initiate the project "The cultivation of force – An investigation into emotional practices of teaching the use of force in Swedish and German Police Education", funded by the Baltic Sea Foundation, we have invited researchers from different fields to reflect on police education as an emotional practice. By emotional practice we mean the emotional dimensions intrinsic to the practice – how the specific tasks, skills, and ideals within the practice involve emotions (in a broad sense, including affects, moods). In the background of our research is an assumption that emotions are not merely or primarily something a police officer need to control, but that collective patterns and habits of feeling, as well as ideals of their cultivation, are important parts of police practice and culture. We are interested in how such dimensions come to light (or not) in police education, and how educators reflect on them.   

Questions that might be relevant here are: How are emotions cultivated in the educational setting? What emotions are recognized and what emotions are in the background and remain tacit or implicit? How do masculine ideals and conceptions of emotionality inform police education? We are also interested in more conceptual and methodological questions such as how one gains access to tacit and implicit dimensions of this sort of practice, and the balance between having an insider’s perspective and maintaining a critical researcher’s perspective.  

The workshop is open to all and free of charge. Please contact the organizers for registration.

eva.schwarz@sh.se or stina.backstrom@sh.se


Program

9.00-9.30 Introduction, Eva Schwarz and Stina Bäckström

9.30-10.30 Thomas Feltes, “Police: Culture, Education and Leadership. A German Perspective”

Coffee

10.45-11.45 Synne Myreböe, University of Vienna, "Sentimental Values: Academic Mythography as Ideas in Action"

11.45-12.45 Tomi Lazar, Södertörns University/Umeå University “Learning to Use Force: On the Formation of the Violent Self in Swedish Police Education”

Lunch

13.45-14.30 (on ZOOM) Luke William Hunt, University of Alabama, TBA

14.30-15.30 Mehdi Ghazinour, Södertörn, “What do Emotions and Affects do with the Police Officer?”

Coffee

15.45-16.45 Kira Vrist Rønn, University of Southern Danmark, “Knowing from Within”

Final words, Dinner