1st Edition

Constellating Emotional Dialogues in Secondary Education Autoethnographic Insights into Queerness, Race, and Compassion

By Emily Wilkinson Copyright 2026
172 Pages
by Routledge

172 Pages
by Routledge

This innovative, autoethnographic study examines 12 stories of “wobble” moments—looking at “wobble” as an emotional experience—to illuminate new perspectives on LGBTQIA+ identity, school violence, racism, mental illness in students and teachers, and the emotional costs of empathy. Utilizing the author’s experiences as they navigate education’s most difficult years of practice from 2020 to 2022... Read more

1. Part I: An Emotional Orientation to the State of Jefferson  2. Introduction: Swimming with Sharks in Tanks of Our Own Making  3. Chapter 1: It’s All Relational: A Framework Diffracted and Emotional Literature Review  4. Chapter 2: Crystallizing Experiences into Autoethnography  5. Chapter 3: Red is the Color of Anger, Embarrassment, and Love  6. Chapter 4: An Explosion of Secondary Traumatic Stress at the Secret Gay Trade  7. Chapter 5: The Intricacies of Depression in the Classroom  8. Chapter 6: Racing Through the State of Jefferson  9. Chapter 7: Open House is a Borderland  10. Chapter 8: Implications: Seeing Sharks in the Light   










Biography

Emily Wilkinson is an educator specializing in autoethnography and emotion. They are a recent graduate of Columbia University’s PhD program in English Ed., where they studied the intersections of emotions, dialogical pedagogy, conservatism, and queerness in a rural middle school classroom. They currently teach social studies in Northern California, USA, is Teacher Consultant with the Bay Area Writing Project, and serves as the secretary of the Genders and Sexualities Equality Assembly of the National Council of Teachers of English.