What is it about?
Teaching is more than delivering lessons. Teachers' experiences, emotions and working conditions influence how they see themselves as professionals and how they approach their work. This chapter examines the experiences of nine English language teachers in Herat, Afghanistan, following the Taliban's return to power in August 2021. Drawing on interviews conducted in Dari-Persian in 2022, we explore how institutional restrictions, political changes and psychological pressures affected teachers' emotions, professional identities and teaching practices. We use the concept of "emotioncy", which connects sensory experiences, emotions and understanding, to examine how teachers' engagement with their work develops or becomes restricted. The teachers described difficulties including low salaries, limited teaching resources, restricted professional autonomy, gender segregation and uncertainty about their futures. Although many remained committed to teaching, these conditions affected their motivation, emotional well-being and opportunities for professional development. The chapter also reflects on our experiences as researchers. By bringing together an Afghan researcher's knowledge of the local education system and the perspectives of two Iranian co-researchers, we examine how our backgrounds, assumptions and interpretations influenced the research process.
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Why is it important?
Teachers' professional identities are often studied through their beliefs, experiences and relationships within educational institutions. This chapter adds an emotional and experiential perspective by examining how teachers' opportunities to engage with their work are shaped by institutional conditions and political restrictions. The experiences of Afghan English language teachers show how limited resources, inadequate salaries, restrictions on teaching and uncertainty about educational policies can affect professional motivation and identity. Teachers' commitment to their students did not remove these difficulties, and some described growing frustration and concerns about their professional futures. The chapter also addresses the challenges of conducting qualitative research in politically sensitive settings. Our collaboration required us to examine how an insider's familiarity with the Afghan context and outsiders' perspectives affected the questions we asked and the interpretations we developed. Interviews in Dari-Persian and discussions about translation helped us attend to cultural and emotional meanings that might otherwise have been overlooked. The research offers a basis for thinking about teacher support, professional autonomy and the importance of reflexivity when studying education in Afghanistan and other politically unstable contexts.
Perspectives
My involvement in this research grew from my years of working in Afghanistan's education sector as a teacher educator, programme director and researcher. These experiences gave me some familiarity with the difficulties teachers faced, but they also influenced how I initially understood their accounts. I became interested in emotioncy during my studies at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad. The concept offered me a way to examine connections between teachers' emotional experiences and their professional identities. After the Taliban returned to power in 2021, these questions became more pressing as teachers faced new restrictions and uncertainty about their work and futures. Conducting interviews with Afghan teachers in Dari-Persian allowed me to understand experiences and expressions that might have been difficult to communicate in English. At the same time, working with my Iranian co-authors made me reconsider some assumptions I had taken for granted. Their questions encouraged me to look beyond my initial interpretations and consider how institutional pressures, professional exhaustion and political conditions were connected. Looking back, I also recognise the limitations of our research. Although we tried to create a safe and trusting environment, we cannot know whether participants felt able to share everything they experienced or whether our interpretations fully represented their feelings. For me, this chapter is also about the responsibility of researchers to question their own understanding, particularly when studying people and educational settings with which they have strong personal and professional connections.
Dr Mir Abdullah Miri
University of Bath
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Reflexive Qualitative Inquiry into Emotioncy and Teacher Identity in Afghanistan, October 2025, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003626435-15.
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