International Journal of Applied Linguistics VIEWPOINT ARTICLE The (Un)Bearable Wellness of Being: Problematizing Emotions as Entanglements in Applied Linguistics Peter I. De Costa Michigan State University, East Lansing, USA Received: 10 July 2025 Accepted: 11 July 2025 The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness? (Kundera 1984, 3) In his novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the Czech novelist Milan Kundera wrestles with the existential dilemma of whether to choose lightness over burden; selecting the latter brings with it the promise of freedom. However, as we know and as Kundera demonstrates in his novel, life is not always black and white. Rather, it is tinged with multiple shades of gray. Extending Kundera’s metaphor to the realm of affect, I would argue that emotions, too, are characterized by grayness in that, depending on context and circumstance, they can either uplift us or drag us into an emotional abyss. Such complexity is certainly borne out in this collection of papers that builds on De Costa et al.’s (2018a) earlier observation that teacher emotions are inextricably linked to teacher beliefs, agency, identity, and cognition, as well as Sah’s (2023, 617) more recent notion of emotions as entanglements that frames emotions as an interconnected phenomenon with other social “variables such as language ideology, identity, and agency,” while also recognizing that emotions “are shaped by the social hierarchies” in language teaching and learning. Taking a step back, we need to situate this set of papers in relation to recent developments within language education. For one, there has been an expanding interest in teacher wellbeing (e.g., Mercer and Gregerson 2020) and social emotional learning (Martinez- Alba and Pentón Herrera 2021). To some extent, this interest was spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic, which put the spotlight on the emotional stress borne by teachers and learners. More recently, we have also seen a growing emphasis on compassionate teaching (e.g., Mercer 2024), as well as the need to enact an ethics of care (Cinaglia et al. 2023) in the classroom and school, both of which represent vibrant lines of inquiry that align with a broader push to embrace a humanizing approach to language education (e.g., Peercy et al. 2025). Importantly, while a positive psychology approach to emotions (e.g., Mercer 2021) has in recent years taken on an ecological approach to understanding how emotions are influenced by factors beyond the individual and the classroom, a critical approach to emotions (e.g., De Costa et al. 2018b; De Costa and Nazari 2024) and the very notion of emotions as entanglements that guides this thematic issue underline the need to take into account the power dynamics, inequities, and ideological tensions in educational spaces. Instead of reiterating the various emer- gent themes of entanglements—belonging and unbelonging, power and inequities, agency and solidarity, and transformative potential—that were discussed in the introduction to this special issue (see Sah et al. 2025), I would like to highlight one thread across the majority of the papers that warrants attention; this thread is how English language ideologies and the hegemonic nature of these ideologies appear to have an extricable impact on emotions. For example, in his critical autoethnographic narrative, Yazan (2025), details the emotional vulnerability of his partic- ipant, Robert, who wrestled with academic standard English ideologies that “forced” him to change his “poor” grammar [that he] learned in rural Alabama. Such vulnerability was precipitated in large part by Robert’s fear of being judged as a “deviant speaker” of English. It is these prevailing hegemonic ideologies that also animate the host of emotions encountered by the students enrolled in English as a medium of instruction (EMI) programs reported in Hillman et al.’s (2025), Hopkyns’ (2025), and Song’s (2025) studies. While all three sets of authors © 2025 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 2025; 0:1–3 https://doi.org/10.1111/ijal.12821 1