Centering Affect and Emotion Toward Dignity and Justice in Science Education

ABSTRACT How might science education researchers expand the study of affective and emotional phenomena in ways that afford a better understanding of human learning experiences, support conditions of justice, and affirm learners’ dignity? How far from the realization of these goals we now feel in the fall of 2025. And yet, we persist in pursuing them. In this introductory editorial to the special issue on Centering Affect and Emotion Toward Dignity and Justice in Science Education, we explain what animates this question, introduce the structure of the special issue, and provide an overview of the papers. To us, questions like, “what is the emotion in this situation?” lead to analytical dead ends. They seek to apply a flimsy nametag over a phenomenon that runs much deeper and holds much greater consequence. As affect emerges, how is it channeled and mediated, and by whom? When people apply emotion terms to the ways they feel, what forms of social understanding and possibilities for action follow? Seeking justice and dignity in science education will require us to stop treating emotion as something ready‐made, with uncontested and straightforward meanings, and start treating it as a matter of social coordination and meaning‐making processes, inflected by power, shaped by history, and creating contingent openings for imagining futures and acting on the world. Toward charting these possibilities, we introduce 29 manuscripts (14 original papers and 14 corresponding responses, plus a synthetic essay) that emphasize the social embeddedness of affect and emotion in science teaching and learning rather than interiorizing and individualizing accounts.