Emotional education in times of crisis: personal accounts in settings of armed violence and health emergencies

Abstract

This article explores literary imagination as a pedagogical resource to foster emotional education among students affected by the armed conflict in Colombia. Two approaches were implemented: (a) life stories and (b) "cartographies of the self"—used as a bodily metonymy—to activate memory, future projection, and self-representation. Theoretically, the study engages with Nussbaum (1997, 2001/2012, 2013/2014) regarding imagination and public emotions; Bisquerra (2011) and Mayer and Salovey (1997) regarding education and emotional competencies; González Rey (2013) regarding historical-cultural subjectivity; and Halbwachs (1992) and Jelin (2002/2021) regarding social memory. Additionally, Latin American psychosocial perspectives (Martín-Baró, 1998) and frameworks from the National Center for Historical Memory (CNMH, 2013) are incorporated. Methodologically, the study combined case study research and collective creation with qualitative reliability criteria (analytical triangulation, auditing, and "big tent" criteria). Participants included 52 students from Bogotá, Villavicencio, Villagorgona, and Chitaraque. Results regarding the "aversive axis" show that environmental conditions, overcrowding, the digital divide, and the pandemic reconfigured the school's affective landscape and, in several cases, displaced the conflict from the center of the narrative; regarding the "bucolic axis," young people envisioned futures linked to family well-being, technical or university education, and social and symbolic mobility. The study concludes that literary imagination functioned as a public technology of sensibility that channels complex emotions, reinterprets pain, and enables agency and emotional citizenship within contexts of vulnerability and the post-agreement era.