‘Seen, Corrected, and Shamed’ : Affective Justice and the Ethics of Participation in Physical Education

Abstract

Physical education (PE) involves not only movement learning but also ethical concerns surrounding visibility, correction, comparison, and assessment. This conceptual paper proposes the Affective Justice Framework to explain how fear, shame, humiliation, anxiety, and withdrawal may become affective costs of participation. The framework comprises embodied exposure, shame-producing ecologies, affective misrecognition, dignified difficulty, relational attunement, and reparative movement futurity. It distinguishes educational difficulty from affective degradation, understood as avoidable emotional harm that undermines dignity without defensible educational purpose, and positions affective justice as preserving challenge without degrading participation.