Joy for Whom? Joy to What End? The Promise and Peril of Joy-Centred Pedagogy

In this essay, we trouble the notion of joy in teaching and learning. We trouble it because we do not want to offer another status quo, shiny intervention grounded in hegemonic hierarchy. We trouble it because we want to explore how to co-narrate joy in a way that lets us, our colleagues, and our students realize our “magical” capacity, to borrow Sylvia Wynter’s word. Writing as three educators in a single analytic voice, with first-person narratives in which our standpoints diverge, we ask: joy for whom, to what end, and at what cost? We enter through the debate over generative AI because it reveals how students and educators are often positioned as objects of policy. Drawing on Sara Ahmed, Achille Mbembe, and Lauren Berlant, we examine how institutional calls for joy, if not critically interrogated, can function as affective governance, shifting responsibility for structural conditions onto individuals and their emotional performance. We then read joy through traditions that have long refused to separate it from struggle–Black and abolitionist thought, Chicane and Latina thought, and West and North African Sufi teachings. We close with questions, rather than how-to’s, that invite our readers to reflect on what joy is worth defending and working toward.