Guided Emotion Participation in Shame: The Manitoba Prostitution Offender Program

• In Event: Emotion and Sense-Making in Politicized Contexts: Expanding the Conversation

Abstract

This project investigates the Winnipeg Prostitution Offender Program (POP), a diversion program offered to sex work clients to avoid criminal charges. Its central component is a day-long seminar known as “John School” intended to deter participants from purchasing sexual services. In partnership with the Sex Workers of Winnipeg Action Coalition (SWWAC), this research explores how emotion is used by the POP. John School enables particular educational and emotional outcomes among sex work clients through coercive participation. We argue that the pedagogical strategies used by POP facilitators treat shame as an emotional target for learning, and they rely heavily on guided emotion participation to generate and sustain guilt, fear, and shame to promote an ideological response to sex work.

In recent years, important learning sciences research has drawn our attention to guided emotion participation (Vea, 2020). This work shifts the field toward considering emotion not as a natural/neutral phenomena but rather toward thinking about emotion as a key piece of sensemaking, and a culturally and pedagogically mediated one. Vea pushes us to examine the ways that emotion is a product of sensemaking at the same time that it shapes the sense that is made in learning ecologies. For our work this is an essential insight that draws analytic attention to the ways that fear, shame, and other emotions are actively cultivated in order to foster ideological sensemaking.

Over the last two years, we have conducted a critical inquiry into the POP. As part of this critical inquiry, we have used data collected by SWWAC members in their role as a member of the POP oversight committee, including an audio recording of the POP workshop. We conducted a detailed content analysis of what was said by facilitators, how the materials and content of the day were structured, and how language, volume, pacing, presented ideology, and other communication strategies are used to mobilize particular emotional responses. We focus on how particular kinds of emotion were encouraged and examine how those emotion configurations shaped sensemaking.

Key findings include:

1. Shame, fear, and guilt were cultivated through both the content of the seminar and the interactional pedagogical strategies: including pacing, order of the content, and volume.

2. Guided emotion participation was deeply interwoven with the “end demand” and anti-sex work ideological content that was communicated.

3. We argue that this sensemaking strategy is unethical, particularly for education ecologies where participants have not freely consented to participate, and the guided emotion participation toward guilt, fear, and shame creates conditions for sex workers that are unsafe, further stigma and dehumanization, and perpetuates whorephobia.

For the learning sciences, this analysis provides a context to examine how guided emotion participation is facilitated, and it provides some critique of the political and ideological impacts of emotion for learning contexts and the broader political struggles they are embedded in.

Authors

• Joe Curnow, University of Manitoba
  Presenting Author

• Amy Lebovitch, University of Manitoba
  Presenting Author

• Sarah Broad, University of Manitoba
  Presenting Author