Restorative Practices for Preventing/Countering Violent Extremism: An Affective-Discursive Examination of Extreme Emotional Incidents

Schools worldwide are increasingly enmeshed in discourses of securitisation. Efforts to prevent or counter violent extremism (P/CVE) are a manifestation of this. P/CVE in education takes various forms; the pilot explored here is considered super-soft in that no mention was made of violent extremism. Attention was given to schools' capacities to enhance social cohesion through Restorative Practices (RP) -- a method for building social capital. We use an affective-discursive lens to explore how affects/emotions are caught in a dispositif of governance fundamental to efforts to regulate youth through this method. Specifically, we focus on extreme emotional incidents that highlight norms and practices in which violence and emotions are entangled, which expose limits and implications of RPs. While holding promise for transcending punitive disciplinary methods, we argue that RPs rely on logics that limit how violence is understood, locating violent problems within the problem bodies of marginalised youth.