Emotions, Play and Graduate Student Writing

While playfulness is important to graduate writing to shift students into new ways of thinking about their research, a key obstacle to having fun is writing anxiety. Writing is emotional, and despite a growing field of research that attests to this, emotions are often not explicitly recognized as part of the graduate student writing journey. Many students experience writing anxiety, particularly when receiving feedback on dissertations or papers for publication. Feedback on writing-in-progress is crucial to meeting disciplinary expectations and developing a scholarly identity for the writer. Yet many students are unable to cope with the emotions generated by criticism of their writing. This paper presents pedagogical strategies—free-writing, negotiating negative internal dialogue, and using objects to externalize feelings—to help students navigate their emotions, while recognizing the broader discursive context within which graduate writing takes place. Reflections on the pedagogical strategies from nineteen Masters and PhD students attending a course, Graduate Research Writing, were used to illustrate student experiences over the semester. The pedagogical strategies helped students to recognize their emotions, to make decisions about their emotional reactions and to develop agency in the way they responded to critical feedback. By acknowledging the emotional nature of writing, students are more open to creativity, originality, and imagination.

higher education contexts, particularly in relation to writing anxiety (Huerta, et al., 2017). While I am aware that the validity of emotional intelligence is contested in academic contexts, it provides me with a language to discuss emotions since most students have heard of the concept. With emotional intelligence, students would ask themselves: What is the emotion I'm experiencing? Why am I experiencing this emotion? What can I do to manage it?
However, despite its usefulness in creating the classroom space for broaching emotions, emotional intelligence is an uncomfortable fit for me because it places accountability squarely on the individual student and encourages perceptions of deficit. Students just need to "fix" themselves and "manage" their emotions and all will be well. The institutional and contextual pressures fade into the background. To understand this tension better, it is useful to visit Burford's (2017) summary of three conceptualisations of emotions in doctoral education research. The first way emotions are understood, is to frame emotions as a problem that "ought to be absent, or at least carefully managed, so as not to cause a disturbance to the doctoral experience" (Burford, 2017, p.22). Here, students are encouraged not to let emotions surface which privileges the idea of the independent rational scholar toiling away in isolation. Emotions are often perceived as a weakness and an obstruction to the objective knowledge of research (Aitchison & Mowbray, 2013;Leathwood & Hey, 2009;Wellington, 2010). This is the reality many students experience, so much so, that researchers are now recognizing that graduate students (and faculty) often experience emotional labour (Aitchison & Mobray, 2013;Aitchison, et al., 2012;Cameron, Nairn & Higgins, 2009). One way of understanding emotional labour is that it is a form of work where one hides unwanted emotions in an attempt to conform to a prevailing norm which can contribute to even higher levels of anxiety (Jarzabkowski, 2001).
The second conceptualization of emotions is a reaction to the first and constitutes a growing body of research in graduate research education. This conceptualization emphasizes that emotions are "necessary in the production of doctoral subjects" (Burford, 2017, p.23). Emotions are the natural outcome of the processes and struggles of graduate work and should be acknowledged as such (Cotterall, 2013;Bosanquet & Cahir, 2016;Beard, Clegg & Smith, 2007;Doloriert, et al., 2012;McAlpine, et al., 2012;Sawir, Marginson, Deumert, Nyland & Ramia, 2008;Värlander, 2008). There is a recognition and that the embodied nature of graduate writing is important, and that some experiences in the doctoral journey generate more emotions than others. Both personal and collaborative strategies are offered as a way of managing emotions. conditions of work intensification, time compression, career uncertainty, and job-prospect insecurity that have inevitably led to high levels of anxiety and stress among students. Writing anxiety, then builds from the pressures of having to succeed in these pressure-cooker circumstances. Burford (2017) critiques the role that "managing" emotions can play by arguing that by managing emotions we encourage students to become (impossible) perfect neo-liberal subjects.
I find myself straddling the latter two conceptualisations of emotions in graduate research education. To me, it is critical that students recognise the role emotions play in helping or hindering their writing but at the same time I want to mentor students as intentional subjects who can shape their own subject positions. To do this, they need to be able to see their positioning in the discourses around them. Emotional intelligence, then, is not a question of "managing" personal emotions to fit in, instead, it requires the student to see these emotions as both individual but also a result of broader systemic pressures. I have called this discursive emotional intelligence-a more nuanced tool than the available ways of talking about emotions. This is the ability to recognise and make decisions on the broader relations and pressures that appear individualistic but are often more systemic. In this way, we can view emotions as individual (emotional intelligence) but also as a consequence of wider systems of pressure (discursive) that are sometimes not obvious or apparent. Here students would ask: Am I at fault here? Do I need to take this emotion on? How do I negotiate this feeling? Discursive emotional intelligence helps students become aware of their positions of power within the discourse and make decisions about how to negotiate their positionality. In the next section, I describe how I present discursive emotional intelligence in the course.
relational and the product of social relationships and when we enlarge our teaching spaces to include emotions, we counter the "unchecked individualization, increasingly embedded in hegemonic discourses of neoliberalism, which push us further from a sense of our human interdependence, connectivity and social belonging" (Burke, 2015, p. 388). In other words, when we include emotions we encourage students to feel connected and part of a community.

Conclusion
The participants in this study echo the research literature in claiming that writing is an emotionallydriven activity and that feedback from supervisors is a main source of anxiety. The pedagogical strategies I have presented here-free-writing, dealing with negative internal dialogue, using objects to externalise feelings which build toward a discursive emotional intelligence-are mechanisms to achieve this balancing act. Controlling their negative internal dialogue became a key strategy for negotiating emotions for students in this study. By acknowledging negative internal dialogue, many were able to develop writing fluency, make the most of the feedback, and maintain a sense of self even in the face of severe criticism. The cats provided a fun, tangible way to deal with emotions that promoted self-care, self-compassion and creativity. Through recognising and negotiating their emotions, these participants transformed their emotional reactions to writing. Although many still acknowledged that writing was challenging and emotional, they felt they were able to cope better with their feelings by the end of the course. This is evidence of more than a change of attitude, but rather a shift towards agency where the writer is no longer passively at the receiving end of feedback but is an active participant in negotiating how that critique will be absorbed and used.

Endnotes
1. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Cecile Badenhorst cbadenhorst@mun.ca 2. These quotes come from Assignment A which formed part of the data set for the research project.
Names have been changed to protect participants' privacy and anonymity.