Students' emotional bargaining in higher education: a case study of staff views

In a bid to investigate what would appear to be a relatively under-explored aspect of staff-student interactions, this paper offers a critical examination of the ways in which emotion is sometimes utilised as a resource by students in Higher Education (HE). It begins by reviewing a number of psychological and sociological studies of emotion, before moving on to an examination of the role of emotion in the HE context. Devised as a qualitative case study located in a modern English university, the paper in part adopts a discursive psychology approach to explore students’ use of emotion as a bargaining tool in emailed requests for study concessions. It also makes use of interview data collected from 12 university staff members to provide a staff perspective on the issues at hand.