Alcorn examines qualities of student resistance to new and uncomfortable information and proposes methods for teachers to work productively with such resistance. Drawing on research from numerous disciplines showing how emotion grounds human reason, he outlines an agenda that makes emotional experience central to educational practice.

1. The Emotional Demands of Information Assimilation 2. The Psychology and Biology of the Desire Not to Know 3. Symptomatic Fixation, Emotion, and Social Alliance 4. Academic Allegiance and Attacks on Linking 5. Information Relays and the Touched Nerves of Global Injustice