Emerging emotions in violence and those that induce violence: a case study on subjectivities in the speech of adolescents in Basic Education

Abstract

Drawing on Foucault’s contributions, in dialogue with other theoretical approaches, this article examines epistemic violence (Zembylas, 2024) as a discursive event, understood as a meaning-producing practice, whose force mobilizes representations of power and care of the self, articulated explicitly and implicitly in the speech of ninth-grade students in a primary education institution.  The findings shed light on the ways in which the school, by operating through the subalternizationFoucault, 2016). Within the theoretical–methodological framework (Clarke & Braun, 2013; Denzin & Lincoln, 2006), the guided conversation/semi-structured interview constitutes the object of analysis, approached as a reflexive category and understood as “discursive facts that deserve to be analyzed alongside others, with which they maintain complex relations” (Foucault, 1995). This approach does not conceive the interview as a stable unit within the categorization of discourse genres, nor as a homogeneous unit, but rather as a dispositif of discursive practices and meaning trajectories that sustain regimes of truth concerning emotion and violence in the school context. The findings shed light on the ways in which the school, by operating through the subalternization and silencing of subjects, exercises a form of power that denies and renders emotional practices invisible, thereby directly affecting human interactions.