This project examines Swedish and German police education as a place where collective practices of handling emotions and possibly
forceful situations are cultivated and reflected. Emotional dimension of professional action, such as e.g. shame or sympathy, are often
implicit in action and therefore difficult to access and conceptualize. By studying how experienced police teachers describe and reflect on
forceful situations during practical training sessions we aim at conceptualizing the role of emotions in professional action not just as
something that needs to be kept under control or as tied to individual expertise, but as collectively constituted and cultivated.

This project examines Swedish and German police education as a place where collective practices of handling emotions and possibly

forceful situations are cultivated and reflected. Emotional dimension of professional action, such as e.g. shame or sympathy, are often

implicit in action and therefore difficult to access and conceptualize. By studying how experienced police teachers describe and reflect on

forceful situations during practical training sessions we aim at conceptualizing the role of emotions in professional action not just as

something that needs to be kept under control or as tied to individual expertise, but as collectively constituted and cultivated.

Our methodological framework is a virtue-ethical philosophical perspective within the interdisciplinary research field of Studies in practical

knowledge. This field takes its starting point in an investigation of concrete complex situations that are of both ethical and epistemological

significance and gives them philosophical conceptual analysis. By anchoring the analysis in two distinctive national contexts in the Baltic

Region with similar challenges, such as lack of educated police and an increase in police-related violence, the project will promote a novel

understanding of police education as a practice of emotional cultivation. Furthermore, it will contribute to the development of an urgently

needed humanistically oriented research-tradition on police professionalism in the Nordic and Baltic Sea Region.