Podcast musings... Emotions & the Self
In Podcast Musings, I will go over some of the interesting ideas and research being discussed in a selection of podcasts I regularly listen to. If you have some of your own listenings you'd like to share, please send in a reflection!
Listening to the Suff Mom Never Told You (SMNTY) podcast on the Secret Life of Fashion Bloggers made me reflect on my own blogging persona. I've been quiet for the last little while; at first it was because I was busy with grant applications and project analysis report deadlines, but now I feel I am hesitating and looking for my voice. I'm not quite sure how to share my thoughts on Caesura. I'm not really sure who I'm writing for and how I should position myself in relation to that reader. Most of these posts stem from reading notes, so am I writing to myself? Does sharing it online mean it's no longer for myself? I'm not quite sure yet. I guess the best way to learn is to try it out! So I will go ahead with a few different things and see how they work out. My interest was piqued by the idea of emotional labour brought up by Duffy and Hund in their study of bloggers published this year. They did an analysis of the top-tier bloggers online to see how they presented themselves and how much work they invested in maintaining their image. They found different amounts of emotional labour that bloggers invested in their image. I wonder if there may be a parallel phenomenon amongst teachers, particularly as both are highly feminized profession and men and women manage and invest in emotions differently. The women in the study that I'm working on for my doctoral thesis have invested a lot of emotion into their professional learning community. I also like the idea of the gendered, embodied physique of the bloggers represented in their professional self. It ties into bell hooks' idea of the physical embodiment of teachers in the classroom and its effect on students in learning in her book Teaching to Transgress (1994). I also had some thoughts while listening to the Hidden Brain podcast on Humour Looking at the reasons people laugh --> laughter gives us a scan of the brain: we get a better understanding of the underlying assumptions or biases of the group. Used as an in-group strategy. What kind of humor did group members use?
In my own analysis of the data I'm working with for my research project, one of the group leaders uses humour to challenge her in-groupness which is an unspoken tension diffused implicitly through humour. Using humour as a starting point to examine the group and how they might express bias, assumptions and underlying tensions can prove to be very useful to learn more about emotions in a community. I think these have been pretty inspiring listens!