Framing emotions in early childhood teaching within Deleuze’s concept of sense: Intensity and significance

Abstract

This article explores how concepts from Deleuze’s writing can be used to reconceptualise emotions using a concept-as-method mapping approach. Posthumanist perspectives and Deleuze’s concept of sense frame emotions as complex, nuanced, pre-individual, and impersonal. Emotions are conceptualised as processes of sensing intensity and significance. Following Deleuze, sense is understood to be sensed as changes in intensities among verb infinitives that express ‘what is going on’ in a localised situation. Data from a research study into emotions in early childhood teaching is analysed using Deleuzian concepts of sense, nonsense, paradox, and problem. Teachers and researchers are challenged to consider themselves as dynamic, always-emerging, individuating processes and relationships rather than pre-existing knowing individuals containing emotions as distinct entities.