Halboth, Olivia, authorLangstraat, Lisa, advisorCloud, Doug, committee memberHepburn, Susan, committee member2021-01-112023-01-082020https://hdl.handle.net/10217/219524Bullying is a serious and exigent public health concern that affects millions of students in K-12 education every year. This thesis employs Critical Emotion Theory to reconceptualize bullying as a discursive issue of social justice, not merely behavioral. The first chapter outlines bullying as an affective issue. The second chapter analyzes ways that shame, disgust, and hate mechanize bullying. Chapter three traces discourses of empathy, pain and regret in public responses to four bullying incidents. Chapter four examines social-emotional learning (SEL) and federal programmatic prevention models, addressing empathy, love, and the absence of emotioned discourses. Finally, conclusions are outlined in chapter five. This inquiry ultimately found that the role emotions play in bullying's cause, prevention, and response are undertheorized on the macro- (emotions as a whole) and micro- (as individual emotions) level. Additionally, a prominent theme throughout each chapter that warrants critical consideration is an emergent pattern of entrenched affective divides between bullying's actors: how bully and victim become divergent, performed roles and how that affective performativity allocates attention and, subsequently, prevention and response resources.born digitalmasters thesesengCopyright and other restrictions may apply. User is responsible for compliance with all applicable laws. For information about copyright law, please see https://libguides.colostate.edu/copyright.causeempathyresponsecritical emotion studiesbullyingpreventionText