M Zembylas
Biographic Data
| ID | 14161 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Zembylas |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Zembylas |
| SIGNATURE | ZEMBYLAS M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Open University of Cyprus |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6896-7347 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 282 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1750 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 279 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 20 |
Toward an ethical framework for affective AI in education
Fostering affective attention to lead coherent school change
With equity and inclusion as national education priorities in Australia, school leaders commonly articulate aspirations related to embedding intercultural understanding, indigenous ways of knowing and/or culturally responsive pedagogies school wide. But at the same time, dominant discourses related to school improvement driven by neoliberal demands emphasize narrow measures of numeracy and literacy, data‐driven instruction and adopting decontextu…
Dread, hope and the politics of emotion in engineering education
A socio-ecological polycrisis threatens life on Earth. Learning about the current state of the world can invoke dread, understood as fear of severe futures, and hope that such futures can be avoided. This study asks how dread and hope manifest in sustainability education in engineering, and how educators and students navigate these emotions. Drawing on a theoretical framework that conceptualises emotions as socio-political, we examine educators’ …
Looking Local
Visions of what the university is and ought to be, whom it should serve, and the possibilities it entails, have long been fiercely contested.A battle of imagination over the past, present, and future of higher education continues to play out across various sectors, with frictions arising on multiple fronts.Images of the university as a civic institution oriented towards social justice compete with those of the university as a corporate entity and…
Decolonising data in higher education
This paper revisits the concept of ‘data colonialism’ and its critiques, suggesting a reframed conceptual framework tailored to interrogating and resisting data colonialism in the context of higher education, with the aim of advancing decolonial insights. Theorising data colonialism needs to move beyond simply identifying processes of data extractivism – e.g., how global university rankings and citation indexes are used to shape education policy,…
Boomerangs and blind spots
This paper revisits Hannah Arendt’s reflections on imperialism and colonial violence to explore their relevance for contemporary debates on decolonising education. While Arendt has been critiqued for her Eurocentric blind spots – particularly her neglect of anti-Blackness and settler colonialism – her ‘boomerang thesis’, which describes how imperial practices abroad return to haunt the metropole, offers a provocative entry point for considering h…
Tensions between decolonisation and social justice in education
This conceptual paper examines the tensions that emerge in debates about decolonisation in education, particularly those that position decolonisation as incommensurable with social justice projects. Scholars have identified pitfalls in the incommensurability thesis, including the risk of reifying colonial binaries – such as the settler-Indigenous dichotomy – and fragmenting alliances between decolonisation, anti-racism, and other justice-oriented…
From Arendtian antipolitical love to decolonial love
This paper explores the pedagogical and political significance of love in times of global affliction, marked by war, inequality, ecological devastation, and enduring colonial legacies. Bringing Hannah Arendt’s conception of antipolitical love into dialogue with decolonial understandings of love as an insurgent and world-making force, the paper examines how contrasting visions of love illuminate different risks and possibilities for education. Are…
Artificial intelligence as a site of global educational governance
This article critically examines UNESCO’s engagement in the global governance of artificial intelligence in education (AIED). Through a structured website mapping and a qualitative document analysis of key documents published between 2019 and 2025, the paper shows how UNESCO constructs AI as an object of educational policy, articulates normative frameworks, and positions itself as the leading actor in shaping the governance of AI in educational s…
World-traveling and decolonial aesthesis
This conceptual paper aims to rethink the contours of coalition-building in higher education by drawing on the insights of decolonial thinker María Lugones. It is argued that these insights help challenge monolithic conceptualizations of decolonization, such as the “decolonization of the curriculum” or decolonization understood primarily as “land return.” The analysis advocates for a shift toward centering anticolonial intellectual and political …
Theorising reparative futures in global education
Global education seeks to foster critical engagement with global issues by emphasising dialogue, inclusion and sustainability in the pursuit of justice. However, despite its inclusive aims, global education has been widely critiqued for perpetuating Eurocentrism and reinforcing epistemic injustices. In this paper, we explore the intertwined concepts of conviviality and dis-enclosure as generative frameworks for decolonising global education. Whil…
Rethinking the shared agenda of posthumanist and decolonial thought in comparative education
This conceptual paper critically examines the convergences of posthumanist, new materialist, and decolonial frameworks in comparative education, situating this dialogue within the broader ‘post-foundational’ turn in the field. While these approaches share a commitment to decentering anthropocentrism and reimagining education as an entangled, more-than-human process, their intersections also reveal deep tensions around race, coloniality, and the c…
Chrono-affective nationalism and higher education
An Affective‐Political Theorizing of Backlash to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion ( DEI ) in Higher Education
In recent years, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in higher education have become the focal point of intense political and academic contestation. While these developments are frequently described as a “backlash,” the concept of backlash itself has rarely been theorized in education. Drawing on recent affect and political theory, this article offers a conceptual framework for understanding contemporary resistance to DEI initiativ…
The affective moralization of educational policy discourse
Conservatism as affective ideology
When harmony harms
Navigating controversial issues
This qualitative study investigates the emotional and epistemic responses of 16 Greek-Cypriot primary school students to controversial issues related to the Cyprus conflict. Drawing on interviews conducted before and after an intervention designed to mitigate ‘myside bias’ through the teaching of argumentation skills, the study examines how students make sense of the 1974 Turkish invasion and their encounters with Turkish settlers and Turkish-Cyp…
Chrono-affective nationalism in higher education
Neuroliberalism in global education policy
Commemorating difficult history in schools
The Ethics and Politics of New Brutalism in Education
This paper explores the emergence of new brutalism in education as a political, infrastructural, and affective formation that normalizes hardness and domination. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s (2024) notion of political brutalism and Michael Truscello's (2020) theorization of infrastructural brutalism, the paper examines how contemporary regimes of governance reconfigure education through violence—epistemic, material, and affective. Two examples—Tru…
Affective Eugenics
This conceptual-speculative article examines political polarization as a deliberate strategy of affective governance in an age defined by mass dispossession and ecological collapse. We argue that polarization should not be treated as a temporary crisis to be resolved but as a governing technology that organizes fragmentation, consolidates elite power, and deflects attention away from demands for structural transformation. To theorize this dynamic…
Bringing intersectionality and (De)Coloniality into dialogue
This conceptual article engages with the ‘decolonial turn’ in higher education and argues for a decolonial-intersectional framework that integrates decoloniality and intersectionality to address the interconnected oppressions of race, gender, class, and other axes of marginalization. Drawing on foundational scholarship in decolonial thought and intersectionality theory, this framework critiques the coloniality of power and knowledge, while advoca…
Fostering inclusion through digitalisation
In the aftermath of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, school leaders are increasingly expected to navigate complex challenges across multiple domains, including digital transformation and inclusive education. Although existing research often addresses these areas separately, no study to date has explored how digital tools have reshaped inclusive leadership practices in the post-pandemic context, nor the challenges school leaders e…
Emotions and Teacher Identity
This article illustrates the significance of teachers' emotions in the construction of teacher identity by invoking a poststructuralist lens in discussing the place of emotion in identity formation. In suggesting a poststructuralist perspective of emotions and teacher identity, it is argued that teacher identity is constantly becoming in a context embedded in power relations, ideology, and culture. In theorizing about teacher identity two ideas a…
Discursive practices, genealogies, and emotional rules
The emotional labour of caring in teaching
Theorizing "Difficult Knowledge" in the Aftermath of the "Affective Turn
This essay draws on the concept of "difficult knowledge" to think with some of the interventions and arguments of affect theory and discusses the implications for curriculum and pedagogy in handling traumatic representations. The author makes an argument that affect theory enables the theorization of difficult knowledge as an intersection of language, desire, power, bodies, social structure, materiality, and trauma. To show the possibilities of t…
"Interrogating "Teacher Identity
Witnessing in the Classroom
A bstract In this essay, Michalinos Zembylas explores the meaning of affect and its importance to educational efforts to create the classroom conditions necessary for students and teachers to become critical witnesses to trauma and oppression. Zembylas draws out some of the ethical and political possibilities that emerge through such efforts, and extends our thinking about the affective possibilities of witnessing . His aims are threefold: (1) to…
The “Crisis of Pity” and the Radicalization of Solidarity
This article joins discussions concerning education as a means of cultivating compassion and pays explicit attention to the emotional complexities of teaching for/with compassion to help students become active and critical compassionate citizens. After reviewing the emotional aspects that establish feelings of pity and a sentimental relationship between the student as spectator and the ‘other’ who suffers, the article suggests that a politics of …
Diffraction or reflection? Sketching the contours of two methodologies in educational research
Internationally, an interest is emerging in a growing body of work on what has become known as ‘diffractive methodologies’ drawing attention to ontological aspects of research. Diffractive methodologies have largely been developed in response to a dissatisfaction with practices of ‘reflexivity’, which are seen to be grounded in a representational paradigm and the epistemological aspects of research. While work on ‘reflexivity’ and ‘critical refle…
When saying you care is not really caring’
Drawing on one of the author’s experiences of teaching white teacher candidates in an urban university, this paper argues for the importance of interrogating the ways that benign emotions (e.g., pity and caring) are sometimes hidden expressions of disgust for the Other. Using critical race theory, whiteness studies, and critical emotion studies, it is shown how whiteness ideology erroneously translates disgust for people of color to false profess…
The affective dimension of everyday resistance
The main objective of this article is to discuss the affective dimension of resistance in critical pedagogy in a way that would recognize neoliberalism’s affective repercussions. The point is not merely to show that affect is involved in the emergence of resistance in critical pedagogy, but rather to expand the articulation of resistance in neoliberal education through the lens of affect theory. Specifically, the paper theorizes how critical peda…
Theory and methodology in researching emotions in education
Differing theoretical approaches to the study of emotions are presented: emotions as private (psychodynamic approaches); emotions as sociocultural phenomena (social constructionist approaches); and a third perspective (interactionist approaches) transcending these two. These approaches have important methodological implications in studying emotions in the field of education. Researchers of emotions in education need to make their theoretical assu…
Education and the Dangerous Memories of Historical Trauma
The purpose of this article is to explore the meanings and implications of dangerous memories in two different sites of past traumatic memories: one in Israel and the other in Cyprus. Dangerous memories are defined as those memories that are disruptive to the status quo, that is, the hegemonic culture of strengthening and perpetuating existing group-based identities. Our effort is to outline some insights from this endeavor—insights that may help…
The emotional characteristics of teaching
Emotional Capital and Education
This article seeks to explore existing conceptualisations of emotional capital in educational research, and to undertake a critical analysis of these conceptualisations, including a reflection on my own explorations of teachers’ and students’ emotional practices. Drawing from Bourdieu's work, I offer a theoretical discussion of how emotional capital as a conceptual tool suggests a historically situated analysis of the often unrecognised mechanism…
Tronto's notion ofprivileged irresponsibilityand the reconceptualisation of care
This article takes on some of care theorist Joan Tronto's ideas on care and responsibility and asks what implications they have for critical pedagogies in higher education. The authors argue that Tronto's political ethics of care framework enriches the transformative potential of critical pedagogies, because it helps expose how power and emotion operate through (ir)responsibility. In particular, Tronto's notion of 'privileged irresponsibility' is…
Emotional ecology
Rethinking race and racism as technologies of affect
This article draws on the concept of race and racism as "technologies of affect" to think with some of the interventions and arguments of critical affect studies. The author suggests that critical affect theories enable the theorization of race and racism as affective modes of being that recognize the historically specific assemblages which are practiced in schools and the society. It is also argued that rethinking race and racism as technologies…
Peace education in the present
In this article, we sort through various fundamental premises about peace education to figure out how those premises operate to normalize particular meanings for peace, conflict, education, and other related concepts. We argue that peace education may often become part of the problem it tries to solve, if theoretical work is not used to interrogate the taken for granted assumptions about peace and peace education. For this purpose, we make explic…
Promoting peaceful coexistence in conflict-ridden Cyprus
The Contribution of Non-representational Theories in Education
Critical pedagogy and emotion
This article critiques some of the existing literature in critical pedagogy and the way it tends to overlook or downplay the strong emotional investments of troubled knowledge in posttraumatic situations. Examining existing literature in critical pedagogy reiterates the argument that the discourse of critical pedagogy constructs and sustains its own disciplinary affects. This article builds further on this argument and highlights the importance o…
Discomforting pedagogies
This article examines the potential and limitations of pedagogy of discomfort in a classroom of 10‐ and 11‐year‐old students of an integrated school in Northern Ireland. At the centre of the analysis are the students’ and the teacher's emotional experiences and the resulting consequences when a discomforting pedagogical activity (an adaptation of the classic ‘Blue‐Eyed, Brown‐Eyed’ exercise) is implemented to teach students about social injustice…
The specters of bodies and affects in the classroom
Drawing on the poststructuralist notions of the body and affect by Gilles Deleuze, the author will show that bodies and affects in the classroom may be redefined as intensities and energies that produce new affective and embodied connections. What he suggests is that reconceiving teaching and learning as a plane for the production of intense affects that connect bodies can perhaps problematize current educational discourses around 'emotional inte…
Pedagogies of discomfort and empathy in multicultural teacher education
To show the potential and limitations of pedagogies of discomfort and empathy in anti-racist and multicultural teacher education, this paper engages in an in-depth analysis of two ‘critical moments’ that are drawn from a series of teacher workshops. The purpose of the analysis is to show how discomfort and empathy may be combined together pedagogically in the context of multicultural and antiracist teacher education. The contribution to the liter…
Beyond teacher cognition and teacher beliefs
This article is an attempt to show the value of the ethnography of emotions in teaching, and the importance of exploring teacher emotion in understanding teaching. A coherent account of teacher emotion must find a dynamic outside the cognitive, discursive or normative practices that have monopolized attention in research on teacher cognition and teacher belief. Thus it is argued that this dynamic can be found in the very character of emotional ex…
Something ‘Paralogical’ Under the Sun
(2000). Something ‘Paralogical’ Under the Sun: Lyotard's Postmodern Condition and science education. Educational Philosophy and Theory: Vol. 32, No. 2, pp. 159-184
“Structures of Feeling” in Curriculum and Teaching
Michel Serres
When all the people of the world finally speak the same language and commune in the same message or the same norm of reason, we will descend, idiot imbeciles, lower than rats, more stupidly than lizards. The same maniacal language and science, the same repetitions of the same in all latitudes–an earth covered with screeching parrots. (Serres, 1997, p. 124) The goal of instruction is the end of instruction, that is to say invention. Invention is t…
The Effect of Attitudes on Science Achievement
Caring for Teacher Emotion
Emotions and Teacher Identity
This article illustrates the significance of teachers' emotions in the construction of teacher identity by invoking a poststructuralist lens in discussing the place of emotion in identity formation. In suggesting a poststructuralist perspective of emotions and teacher identity, it is argued that teacher identity is constantly becoming in a context embedded in power relations, ideology, and culture. In theorizing about teacher identity two ideas a…
"Interrogating "Teacher Identity
The emotional characteristics of teaching
Teaching with Emotion
The purpose of this book is to provide new theoretical, methodological and empirical directions in research on teacher emotion. An attempt is made to encourage a missing conversation in the area of emotions in teaching, by invoking a discussion of ideas that explore how discursive, political and cultural aspects define the experience of teacher emotion. I begin to build an analysis upon which the role of emotion, emotional rules and emotional lab…
Beyond teacher cognition and teacher beliefs
This article is an attempt to show the value of the ethnography of emotions in teaching, and the importance of exploring teacher emotion in understanding teaching. A coherent account of teacher emotion must find a dynamic outside the cognitive, discursive or normative practices that have monopolized attention in research on teacher cognition and teacher belief. Thus it is argued that this dynamic can be found in the very character of emotional ex…
The emotional labour of caring in teaching
A Pedagogy of Unknowing
Discursive practices, genealogies, and emotional rules
Sources of teacher job satisfaction and dissatisfaction in Cyprus
This paper aims to contribute to the limited literature on teacher job satisfaction in developing countries, especially in Cyprus. Drawing on interviews with 52 teachers and administrators in 17 schools, the paper describes the sources of job satisfaction and dissatisfaction of Cypriot teachers and the impact on how teachers feel. Teachers emphasised their satisfaction with interactions with students, relationships held with colleagues and opport…
An empirical investigation of differences between mathematics specialists and non-specialists at the high school level in Cyprus
Science Education as Emancipatory
In this essay, I argue that Roy Bhaskar's philosophy of meta‐Reality creates the middle way to theorize emancipation in critical science education: between empiricism and idealism on the one hand, and naïve realism and relativism, on the other hand. This theorization offers possibilities to transcend the usual dichotomies and dualisms that are often perpetuated in some feminist and multiculturalist accounts of critical science education. Further,…
Witnessing in the Classroom
A bstract In this essay, Michalinos Zembylas explores the meaning of affect and its importance to educational efforts to create the classroom conditions necessary for students and teachers to become critical witnesses to trauma and oppression. Zembylas draws out some of the ethical and political possibilities that emerge through such efforts, and extends our thinking about the affective possibilities of witnessing . His aims are threefold: (1) to…
Theory and methodology in researching emotions in education
Differing theoretical approaches to the study of emotions are presented: emotions as private (psychodynamic approaches); emotions as sociocultural phenomena (social constructionist approaches); and a third perspective (interactionist approaches) transcending these two. These approaches have important methodological implications in studying emotions in the field of education. Researchers of emotions in education need to make their theoretical assu…
The politics of trauma
In this article I examine ways in which educators can use discourses of empathy and reconciliation to problematise the prevailing conflictive ethos in their curriculum and pedagogy. The ideals of empathy and reconciliation are examined through the lens of emotion; the emotional effects of trauma narratives raise a question that has been largely ignored in the peace education literature. Can (and should) educators work to contribute toward the goa…
The affective politics of hatred
This paper argues that using the notion of ambivalence in understanding ethnic hatred can be helpful to educators who struggle to address the pedagogical implications of students' feelings of hatred. It is suggested that, although hate feelings are difficult to change, unraveling the ambivalence in the affective politics of hatred creates possibilities for enriching educators and students' perspectives on mutual understanding and solidarity with …
Emotional ecology
The Unbearable Lightness of Representing ‘Reality’ in Science Education
This article responds to Schulz's criticisms of an earlier paper published in Educational Philosophy and Theory. The purpose in this paper is to clarify and extend some of my earlier arguments, to indicate what is unfortunate (i.e. what is lost) from a non‐charitable, modernist reading of Lyotardian postmodernism (despite its weaknesses), and to suggest what new directions are emerging in science education from efforts to move beyond an either/or…
Risks and pleasures
This article provides an analysis of a pedagogy of desire from a Deleuzo‐Guattarian perspective. A pedagogy of desire can be theorised in ways that mobilise creative, transgressive and pleasurable forces within teaching and learning environments. It also enables a new view on affect in education as a landscape of becoming in which forces, surfaces and flows of teachers/students are caught up in a desiring ontology. This marks an attempt to reclai…
Reframing emotion in education through lenses of parrhesia and care of the self
A Politics of Passion in Education
Prompted by what is seen as a missing analysis in the discussions about passion and affect in education, this essay attempts to clarify and provide a context for understanding the contribution of Foucault in the discourse of passion. In particular, the author traces the politics of passion in Foucault's work. A ‘politics of passion’ is the analysis that challenges the cultural and historical emotional rules with respect to what passion is, how it…
Sociology (228 works) · Political science (191 works) · Psychology (154 works) · Law (144 works) · Politics (138 works) · Pedagogy (123 works) · Epistemology (111 works) · Social Psychology (102 works) · Law (93 works) · Philosophy (81 works)