Emotional Governance, Digital Compliance and the Restructuring of Professionalism in Schools

This article argues that emotional governance has become a defining mechanism of control in English schools. By this we mean the expectation that teachers and pupils render themselves emotionally legible through digital and managerial systems. Drawing on Foucauldian and post-Foucauldian frameworks (Ball, Rose, Berlant), we show how affective norms are embedded in institutional life through platforms, biometrics, and managerial discourse. We identify three mechanisms – affective visibility, emotional calibration, and infrastructural emotional labour – through which mood and resilience are mobilised as proxies for coherence, and classify this as a form of ideological soft governance.