<p><strong>ABSTRACT</strong></p> <p>This dissertation is a philosophical inquiry into the pragmatics of emotion as an inherent dimension of the learning self (Ellsworth, 2005). This inquiry first establishes the socio-political context regarding emotional responses to critical forms of pedagogy currently rising across the United States. Secondly, this inquiry explores philosophical conceptualizations of emotions as pedagogical within the fields of public pedagogy, affect theory, and arts-based educational research, as well as the paradigmatic contexts underlying these philosophies. Finally, this inquiry “thinks-with” (Jackson & Mezzei, 2017) these conceptualizations by enacting an affective pragmatic inquiry, centering emotions and embodied experiences of learning through my own neurotypicality as pedagogical inquiry via an arts-based empirical component, consisting of my enrollment in a community pottery class over the course of 40 weeks. I advocate for the need to reconsider the current paradigm around critical forms of pedagogy toward a pragmatist paradigm that uses emotions and value systems of learners to facilitate ethical pedagogical <em>response</em>-abilities (Haraway, 2016) for what to do, pragmatically, with complicated knowledge about social problems that result in ideological and axiological impasses. </p>