Laura Waddell

Laura Waddell is a third year PhD student in Social Anthropology. Her work combines a curiosity with the anthropology of emotion and educational ethnography and grows out of her experiences of working at a teacher’s college and junior high school in France in 2009-2010. Interweaving ideas about the production of social knowledge, education and training, emotion and affect with citizenship in Europe, her current research investigates the emotional lives of teacher trainees in southern France as they understand and grapple with their arrival in laïque and increasingly culturally diverse classrooms. How is this “emotion work” and training influenced by recent reforms to teacher education by the state? What does it mean to provide intimate labour in an increasingly neoliberal, secular and multicultural context? Through this ethnographic research, she explores questions of emotional narrative, life in the classroom and the various social and political entanglements that are reshaping what it means to live and work in France.

Email: waddell@yorku.ca