Teaching controversial issues in an antagonistic age: the challenge of affective polarization for open classroom climate

This theoretical and argumentative paper contributes to the scholarship on Open Classroom Climate (OCC) and on teaching controversial issues by highlighting how broader societal polarization and antagonistic tensions undermine efforts to cultivate OCCs in higher education. Using a widely publicized incident in a Swedish master’s program as an illustrative case, the paper shows how in-group/out-group dynamics, hostile rhetoric, and chilling effects on participation can disrupt teaching. Bringing research on teaching controversial issues and OCC into dialogue with scholarship on affective polarization and with Chantal Mouffe’s distinction between antagonism and agonism, the paper argues that OCC is both increasingly necessary and increasingly difficult to sustain in an ‘antagonistic age,’ a heuristic label used in the paper. The paper concludes by formulating this as the OCC paradox: the classroom climate needed to resist affective polarization is itself threatened by the social conditions that make such resistance urgent.