Mapping the Affective Turn in Education: Theory, Research, and Pedagogies 9780367031183, 9781003004219

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Mapping the Affective Turn in Education

Passions are high in education, and this edited volume offers bold new ways to conceive of the affective intensities shaping our present historical moment. Concerns over school practices deemed “ineffective,” “disruptive,” “irrational,” or even “promising” are matters modulated by and through feelings, such as, optimism, shame, enhanced concentration, or empathy. The recent turn to affect offers vibrant methodological and theoretical material for an educational present marked by high stakes rhetoric, heated debate, teacher and student vulnerabilities, and extreme educational measures. Affect studies are a part of new materialist and post-humanist turns, and this volume connects these new theoretical directions within education. This comprehensive volume on affect crosses educational subfields and responds to the transdisciplinary interest in thinking through pedagogy, education, and feeling. This comprehensive reader addresses affect in education from a wide range of styles, topics, and perspectives. This collection offers an introduction to theory, empirical research studies, interviews with affect studies scholars, and an assessment of the current and future significance of affect studies in education. Contributors utilize a range of theoretical and interpretive approaches to thinking with and through schooling phenomena. Interviews with affect scholars in the humanities and social sciences address affective dimensions of teaching. The editors’ introduction, different foci, and interdisciplinary genres of writing help readers feel their ways into what affect studies in education does and might do. This field-defining collection will be of interest to a range of readers—from graduate students to established scholars—with varying levels of expertise and familiarity putting affect theories to work in education. All the contributions are accessible to those new to the theory, methods, and debates in this vibrant area of educational studies. Bessie P. Dernikos is Assistant Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Florida Atlantic University, US. Nancy Lesko is Maxine Greene Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University, US. Stephanie D. McCall is Assistant Professor in the Professional and Secondary Education Program at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania, US. Alyssa D. Niccolini teaches courses in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University, US.

Routledge Research in Education

This series aims to present the latest research from right across the field of education. It is not confined to any particular area or school of thought and seeks to provide coverage of a broad range of topics, theories and issues from around the world. Recent titles in the series include: Legacies of Christian Languaging and Literacies in American Education Perspectives on English Language Arts Curriculum, Teaching and Learning Edited by Mary M. Juzwik, Jennifer C. Stone, Kevin J. Burke, and Denise Dávila Critical Explorations of Young Adult Literature Identifying and Critiquing the Canon Edited by Victor Malo-Juvera and Crag Hill Dance, Professional Practice, and the Workplace Challenges and Opportunities for Dance Professionals, Students, and Educators Edited by Angela Pickard and Doug Risner Pedagogy in the Novels of J.M. Coetzee The Affect of Literature Aparna Mishra Tarc Integrative and Interdisciplinary Curriculum in the Middle School Integrated Approaches in Teacher Preparation and Practice Edited by Lisa M. Harrison, Ellis Hurd, and Kathleen Brinegar The Generation of Utopia Decolonizing Critical Curriculum Theory João M. Paraskeva For a complete list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge. com/Routledge-Research-in-Education/book-series/SE0393

Mapping the Affective Turn in Education Theory, Research, and Pedagogies

Edited by Bessie P. Dernikos, Nancy Lesko, Stephanie D. McCall, and Alyssa D. Niccolini

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Bessie P. Dernikos, Nancy Lesko, Stephanie D. McCall, and Alyssa D. Niccolini to be identified as the author[/s] of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-03118-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-00421-9 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Images Acknowledgements Introduction 1 Feeling Education

viii ix 1 3

B E S S I E P. D E R N IKO S, N A N CY L E SKO, STE P H ANIE D. McCALL, A N D A LYS SA D. N ICCO L IN I

Ordinary Charges 2 Teaching Affectively

29 31

K ATH L E E N STE WA RT

PART I: Politics

37

3 Passion, Pedagogy, and Pietas: An Interview With Rosi Braidotti

39

4 The Ethics and Politics of Traumatic Shame: Pedagogical Insights

54

M I C H A L I N O S ZE MB YL A S

5 Post-Threat Pedagogies: A Micro-Materialist Phantomatic Feeling within Classrooms in Post-Terrorist Times S H I VA Z A R AB ADI

69

vi

Contents

PART II: Pedagogies

85

6 Affect’s First Lesson: An Interview with Gregory J. Seigworth

87

7 Resistance Is Useful: Social Justice Teacher Education as an Affective Craft

94

L E E A I RTO N

8 Love and Bewilderment: On Education as Affective Encounter

108

N ATH A N S N AZA

9 Art Encounters, Racism, and Teacher Education

122

A S I L I A F R A NKL IN - P H IP P S

PART III: Materials/Bodies

141

10 Thinking through the Body: An Interview with Anna Hickey Moody

143

11 The Fecundity of Poo: Working with Children as Pedagogies of Refusal

149

S TE P H A N I E S P RIN GGAY

12 Machinic Affects: Education Data Infrastructure and the Pedagogy of Objects

164

SA M S E L L A R

13 The Affective Matter of (Australian) School Uniforms: The School-Dress That Is and Does

179

M E L I S SA J OY WO L FE A N D MA RY L O U RASMU SSEN

PART IV: Spaces

195

14 Student Viscosities: A Conversation about the Micropolitics of Race: An Interview with Arun Saldanha

197

15 (Re)storying Water: Decolonial Pedagogies of Relational Affect with Young Children

209

F I K I L E N X U MAL O WITH MARL E E N TE P E YO LOT L V ILLANU EVA

Contents 16 On Learning to Stay in the Room: Notes from the Classroom and Clinic

vii 229

G A I L B O L DT

Coda

245

17 Intimacy and Depletion in the Pedagogical Scene: An Interview with Lauren Berlant

247

Notes on Contributors Index

251 257

Images

9.1 Head Collage #1, right side 9.2 Head Collage #2, left side 9.3 Three-dimensional Head, with a thick, white substance dripped over the top and over the eyes 9.4 Many collages juxtaposed, past and present images 9.5 2016 presidential election 11.1 Ask Me Chocolates (2013) by Helen Reed, Hannah Jickling, and grade-six students from “Multiple Elementary” 11.2 Your Lupines or Your Life (2013) by Helen Reed, Hannah Jickling, and grade-six students 12.1 Composite image of data dashboard from the My School website (school anonymized) 13.1 The event assemblage 15.1 Creek-waste encounters 15.2 Water song drawings 15.3 Sharing the Coahuiltecan creation story

134 135 136 137 138

157 160 172 181 214 217 222

Acknowledgements

We wish to acknowledge the generosity and patience of all of our contributors as we navigated the fits and starts and slowdowns of this book. We are grateful for Matthew Friberg’s belief in and excitement about this book project and for Elsbeth Wright moving the book forward. Sarah Gerth van den Berg’s copyediting was vital and impeccable. We continue to be moved, uplifted, puzzled, and thrilled by affect scholarship, and our hope is that this edited collection contributes to the understanding of and inquiry into affective dimensions of education and schooling. The shape of this volume was most directly inspired by the The Affect Theory Reader (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010), which helped contour our emergent understandings of scholarship in the field. In our current political, environmental, and academic environments, we turn to affect theories and studies to help us parse everyday experiences in ways attuned to structures and to emergent edges.

Reference Gregg, M., and Seigworth, G. J. (Eds.). (2010). The affect theory reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Introduction

1

Feeling Education Bessie P. Dernikos, Nancy Lesko, Stephanie D. McCall, and Alyssa D. Niccolini

—scratch— Perhaps you recognize it. A sudden screeching of chalk that sets the teeth on edge. Or nails stuttering down the blackboard, a sound that hangs in the throat, reverberates through the limbs, threatens sudden nausea. Setting up my classroom before my first day of teaching, some colleagues stood in the doorway and laughed, “You can always tell the new teachers by how often their chalk squeaks.” One came over and realigned my wrist. “Angle it like this and it won’t scratch as often.”  But that scratch is a sound my body remembers as a teacher and a student. A sudden screech sending shame down my arm as a neophyte teacher or as a student, a visceral jolt that called us to attention, snapped our bodies upright in desks, set the room groaning. The scratch changes the tenor of the space, echoes through bodies, and like a slipped needle on vinyl, cuts momentarily into the flow of the present.

Affective Scratchings While the sound of scratching chalk may not resonate with everybody, most of us can certainly recall moments in which listening to some-“thing” (maybe a song playing on the radio, a sudden scream, or a crowd chanting “I can’t breathe”) exposed us to sounds we hadn’t previously encountered, sounds that triggered uncontrollable visceral responses, sounds that would later wash over us, individually and collectively, again and again and again. Sometimes sound is swift and imperceptible. Other times bodies cannot help but feel “those points where time stands still,” draws you back, leaps ahead, and “you slip into the breaks” (Ellison, 1952, p. 9, as cited in Weheliye, 2005, p. 17). Sound extends into bodies ↔ Bodies extend into sound. These sonorous flickers, gut punches, or complex mobilities reveal crevices and fissures that launch new worlds and open us up to multiple possibilities (Weheliye, 2005), all the while attuning us to affect’s promise, threat, shimmers, and splutters (Stewart, 2007).

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Within this edited collection, we call attention to these flickers and ruptures as affective scratchings and suggest that each essay, in its own way, attempts to feel education differently by dwelling in the sensation of affect, rather than the logic of representation1 (Deleuze, 1994). At the same time, we hope that something emerges in the juxtaposition of these entangled scenes. Much in the same way that hip-hop DJs create mixes or new compilations through the rhythmical scratching of records (Weheliye, 2005), this introduction and the essays that follow move with and against the groove. Here, we play with the multiple meanings of the word groove, for example: (a) a colloquial expression (get into the groove) that invites people to enter into the moment-to-moment intensities present within any given situation; (b) the track on the surface of vinyl records, where the record player needle has to ride in order to produce music; (c) any long, narrow depression that is meant to guide motion. (Dictionary.com, n.d.; Weheliye, 2005) Inspired by Weheliye (2005), specifcally, we draw and build upon his discussion of grooves as they relate to the rhythmical scratching of records and Dubois’ “scratching” or text blending to “articulate what exceeds the scopic as it has been formed in Western modernity” (pp. 82–83). Grooves are sociohistorical forces that guide and bring people (e.g., musicians) and things (e.g., records) together in magical ways, yet like the scratching of vinyl records moving back and forth on turntables, going with ↔ against the groove enables us to exceed what “is” in order to produce slippages, allurements, intensities, and newness (Weheliye, 2005). We offer affective scratching as a figure of thought to help us feel out what affect does over what it is. The scratch is a frequency: a cut or vibration that momentarily slips out of groove and exceeds capture in language. It guides, dis/connects, excites, startles, interrupts, diverts, and reorients. The scratch contains many possibilities: It can leave a mark, scrape away, skit across the surface, wound, or tear open. We feel it simultaneously as bodily sensation and emotion—disgust, surprise, irritation, shock, disorientation, anger, and pleasure. A jolt that extends into us, the scratch impacts our agency (if only momentarily) and, by doing so, reminds us that we are never truly alone—that is, we are always in the company of others. The scratch binds our bodies to others in the shared groan or pleasure, the collective jouncing from our individualized bodies, thoughts, and feelings. It also tunes us into the vibrations and capacities of nonhuman bodies (e.g., chalk, needle, sound, board, vinyl, and space). And yet, there’s always a body out of tune, an “affect alien” (Ahmed, 2010). To scratch—as in scratch an idea—is to start over, rework from the middle, redraw, or try again. The scratch serves as a constant reminder

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that something always lingers, remains, leaving a humming in our bodies we’re left to wonder about. As Crawley (2017) puts it, sound “keeps moving, it is open-ended. It can be felt and detected but remains obscure, almost unnoticed. And this is for its protection. . . . It is the gift, the concept, the inhabitation of and living into otherwise possibilities” (p. 2).

Feelings and Emotions: WTF Is Affect? Defining affect has left all of us scratching our heads at one point or another. While some contemporary affect scholars do use affect as a category that includes feelings (Cvetkovich, 2012; Muñoz, 2000; Ngai, 2005) and emotions (Ahmed, 2010; Cvetkovich 2012; Zembylas 2014), many tend to primarily characterize affect as an immanent social force (Massumi, 1987; Stewart, 2007). Drawing upon the Spinozist-inspired philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari (1987), Massumi (2015) argues that affects are not “mere” personal feelings but, rather, prepersonal and precognitive intensities that augment and/or diminish a body’s capacity to act. As an intensity or force-relation, affect emerges with/in encounters and describes the change or becomings (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) that occur when bodies make contact or collide with one another (Leander and Rowe, 2006). More specifically, affects are the forces (intensities, energies, flows, etc.) that register on/with-in/across bodies to produce and shape personal/emotional experiences. In other words, affect is not what you feel, as much as it is an event that forces you to be(come) affected, to feel some-thing (Shaviro, 2010). A body then is a processual “event” constantly being re/modulated through affects, rather than a static and self-contained entity being acted on from without; a body is defined not by what it is, but by what it does and can do (Clough, 2007; Massumi, 2015; Puar, 2011). Affect has also been described as rangy and capacious (Seigworth, 2017), a force that emerges, passes between, and sometimes “sticks” (Ahmed, 2010) to bodies as they make contact with, and connect to, one another. According to Deleuze (1988), bodies are not restricted to human bodies and, in fact, can take shape in just about anything at all, such as “an animal, a body of sounds, a mind or an idea; it can be a linguistic corpus, a social body, a collectivity” (p. 27). Such a capacious conceptualization of bodies enables a radical refiguring of the human subject as an intra-active2 (Barad, 2007) configuration of entities or force-relations, whereby the “self” is thought to extend into an ever-changing assemblage of signs, objects, bodies, languages, discourses, emotions, and so forth. Bodies are then endlessly entangled with other bodies—human and nonhuman—in a rich symphony (or perhaps, at times, cacophony) of encounters. For example, Sam Sellar (this volume) explores the way bodies of data move with(in) human and institutional forces, while Lee Airton (this volume) theorizes how social justice teacher education is a

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dynamic network of relations rather than a stable or prescriptive set of curricular moves. School uniforms move within assemblages of memory, discipline, and (hetero)sexist circuits in Melissa Wolfe and Mary Lou Rasmussen’s chapter (this volume). In such conceptualizations, each entity within the assemblage acts on the subject—albeit not equally—and has some form of distributive agency (Bennett, 2010), which disrupts the humanist notion of individual free will and the orderly hierarchy of representational thinking (MacLure, 2013). The affective turn (Clough, 2007), thus, seeks to disrupt the Cartesian notion of the self-contained, rational subject by embracing a view of bodies as porous and permeable human and nonhuman assemblages (Blackman, 2012; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). The authors in this collection explore such pedagogical assemblages when Indigenous histories entangle with both children’s bodies and bodies of water (Nxumalo with Villaneuva, this volume), when chocolate opens up the messy possibilities of failure (Springgay, this volume), when glue, glitter, and scraps of images are taken into the hands of preservice teachers while they think through race and race thinks through them (Franklin-Phipps, this volume). Rather than attending to the human subject as a distinct entity or ideological/discursive formation, these affect theorists highlight the openness, interconnectedness, and vulnerability of bodies (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010)—the ways that affective encounters have the potential to, at any given moment, move us forward ↔ keep us stuck, mark our belonging ↔ non-belonging to social worlds, and attune us to the promise ↔ threat of each relational encounter: the “‘more-than,’ the ‘other-than,’ the different-than’” (Seigworth, 2017, p. ii; see also Dernikos, 2018b; Niccolini, 2016a; Stewart, 2007). —scratch— The cool metal of a jungle-gym bar under the knee. The heady waft of cafeteria food. The smooth melamine of desks and chairs. The Castile shame of the girl’s bathroom. A ripple moving through the class, a swell of stifled laughter passed on body to body. The thousands of subtle and not so subtle ways being the only “whatever” in the room is felt and sounded. As a “bodily” impulse or sensation, affect can start out as a sensory experience or charged habit, but then, quite unexpectedly, surge up in ways that intensify the capacity of bodies to act and be acted upon (Hickey-Moody, this volume; Massumi, 1987; Stewart, 2007). More often than not, we don’t always know how these surges will incite us, where they might go, and whom they might affect. It can be disorienting, to say the least, but is a constant reminder that anything, at any moment, can emerge, happen.

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Such radical openness, however, doesn’t always signal possibilities for every-body. As Nxumalo and Villaneuva (this volume) explore in their piece on children and Texas waterways, erasures of Indigenous pasts and histories of settler colonialism can bubble up in pedagogies in unexpected ways. The authors follow the complex, multisensory affective encounters of Austin children with the material water of a local creek in ways that disrupt ahistorical, individualized, and human-centered modes of thinking, feeling, learning, and being in the world. Or as Asilia Franklin-Phipps (this volume) highlights, racism works on and across bodies, teaching outside of rational or conscious grasp like buzzing background noise. When atmospheres “thicken” (Saldanha, 2006; Sheehy, 2004), things can quickly become tense, uncomfortable, and even violent. In the current “post-truth” political era (Strom and Martin, 2017), such moments of affective contagion undoubtedly matter, as hate spreads fast. It can be anything from White children chanting, “BUILD A WALL!”(Wallace and LaMotte, 2016), swastikas carved into classroom desktops and walls (Lewak, 2019), a homemade clock being mistaken for a bomb (Fantz, Almasy, and Stapletone, 2015), a confederate flag hanging from a classroom ceiling (Greco, 2017; Iannelli, 2018), to middle-school children yelling “SHOOT HER!” to a Muslim teacher (Noguchi, 2017). This hate resonates within bodies of all kind—those of students, teachers (see Zarabadi, this volume), and even the “active body” of the classroom (Dernikos, 2018a). These intensities tune us into something happening— something both local and small and global and bigger—and have the potential to be both threatening and promising (Stewart, 2007). Affective encounters make us “more than one,” enabling other social bodies, spaces, and things to extend into us and register in diverse, multisensory, and multitemporal ways (cf. Dernikos, 2018a; Kinnunen and Kolehmainen, 2018; Niccolini, Dernikos, Lesko, and McCall, 2018; Renold and Mellor, 2013). After all, one cannot affect without being affected.

Affective Intensities: What’s Heating Up? —scratch— In the first-floor bathroom, someone has carved a name and “is a XXX” into the metal of a stall door. A set of hands work furiously to scratch the words away. Anna Hickey Moody (this volume) points us to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994) provocation in What is Philosophy? that “the flesh is only the thermometer of a becoming” (p.  178). Scholars have been feeling out affect and how affect impinges on bodies (human and nonhuman) in a number of ways: for example, as atmospheres (Anderson, 2014; Brennan,

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2004), charges (Stewart, 2007), energies (Brennan, 2004), feelings (Cvetkovich, 2012; Muñoz, 2000; Ngai, 2005), moods (Flatley, 2008), flows (Manning, 2016), forces (Coleman and Ringrose, 2013; Seigworth and Gregg, 2010), frequencies (Henriques, 2010), intensities (Deleuze, 1994; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Massumi, 1987), mobilities (Leander, Phillips, and Taylor, 2010), and vibrations (Henriques, 2010). Despite the various terms, affect scholars generally theorize human subjects as conduits for—rather than self-contained individual authors of—such vital relations: “dynamic, responsive, and autonomous from intentionality and cognition [while being] open and permeable to the other” (Blackman, 2012, pp. 22, 30). Instead then of being a “thing” outside of us, affect happens to, with, on, through, and across us in divergent ways: “the light that causes our eye to flinch, the sound that makes us start, the image of violence which raises our body temperature” (Colebrook, 2002, p. 39). As Massumi (2002) famously puts it, affect is “autonomous,” occurring before conscious thought. Such mobile intensities can prime bodies and alert us to fleeting events before language codifies and stabilizes them (see Airton’s, Franklin-Phipps’, and Zarabadi’s pieces in this volume). For Berlant (2008), “the affective event is an effect in a process” (p. 229), and by slowing down our apprehension of processes, we may better sense what’s heating up, shattering, or colliding. Once embodied contact occurs, infinite potentialities may emerge and unfold—where we might feel the pull of one direction or another; veer from our life course for a minute, a day, or perhaps indefinitely (Stewart, 2007); or even enter other virtual realities ↔ possible worlds (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). In this way, affect is both actual and virtual. According to Deleuze (1994), the virtual is an abstract relational realm where the body can escape the material world or the “actuality” of life as we know it. For example, the smell of avgolemono soup might trigger a childhood memory that elicits a feeling of happiness and comfort, as it all the while takes you back to another time and place. Yet, since affects are thought to be “unformed and unstructured” (Massumi, 1995, p. 107) and generally outside conscious awareness, once the subject becomes conscious of its affective capacity to act—for example, once affect is felt/ experienced as an emotion (e.g., here happiness)—affect’s virtual potential is presumably contained (see Blackman, 2012). Despite this virtual capture, affects constantly move and vibrate through the social world, registering intensities across bodies and objects of all kinds.

Re/turning to Affect Theory: Provocations and Concerns Affect theory is not without its critics. One concern is if affect’s “autonomy” can be described as a form of social indeterminacy (Bakko and Merz, 2015), does that mean affect is already always outside the social? While Massumi (2015) acknowledges that affect does indeed “include[s]

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social elements,” Hemmings (2005) takes aim at his claim that affect’s potentiality ultimately rests in its autonomy from the social. She goes on to say that Massumi fails to adequately attend to issues of power and the ways that affect has the potential to be both transformative and normative. By normative, she means affect’s ability to possibly strengthen dominant cultural norms or white, patriarchal ways of knowing, being, and doing. As Ahmed (2010) notes (see also Hemmings, 2005), affect has the potential to spatially orient and, in turn, “hold” particular bodies in place, where, for example, students of color cannot easily escape others’ affective responses to their racialized bodies. For only certain privileged subjects, then, does affect tend to “stick” in more “open” ways (Hemmings, 2005). We highlight this concern not to reject the importance of affect within the field of education but, rather, to stress how the study of affect becomes crucial for sensing how social, cultural, and political inequalities are also mediated affectively (Juvonen and Kolehmainen, 2018). We see this attention to mediation as vital in an age of increasing digital and technological sophistication; ever-quicker relays of information; intensifying wars; global displacements of bodies (human and nonhuman); capitalistic extraction; and catastrophic ecosystem disturbances in the age of the Anthropocene (Braidotti, 2013; Tsing, 2015; Tsing, Swanson, Gan, and Bubandt, 2017) as well as their entanglements with education (see e.g., Malone, 2015; Rautio, 2013; Taylor, 2011). We, like many others, are hungry for new modes of understanding movement (Massumi, 2002), change, and dynamic relations. These movements are often what we initially feel as something being off from the familiar, a palpable but subtle shift in the atmosphere (Anderson, 2014). As Anna Hickey-Moody (2013) beautifully puts it, we feel affects as “a hunch” or “visceral prompt” (p. 79). Massumi (2015) proposes the hybrid term, “thinking-feeling,” to mark that the hunch or visceral prompt accompanies and often precedes conscious thought. In her turn to affect, Deborah Gould (2010), a scholar of activism, refuses presumptions of individualism, linearity, and rationality that are common in much academic research—that is, analyses that do not engage with difference “as movement, change, and emergence” (MacLure, 2013, p. 169). Critical and structural analyses have been critiqued for subtracting emergences and “subordinat[ing] movement to the positions it connects” (Massumi, 2002, p. 3). Discursive analyses that emphasize language and signification are feeling increasingly inadequate for mediated worlds in which war, hate, torture, and terror intensify (Clough, 2007) and for mediated events “marked by a gap between content and effect” (Massumi, 2002, p. 24). Shiva Zarabadi (this volume), for example, explores how counterterrorism politics work on classroom bodies like a phantom force moving through multiple bodies. For the Muslim schoolgirls in her study, the atmospheres emerging around the

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UK Prevent policy have racialized, embodied, and affective impacts on their everyday schooling experiences. In light of these provocations and concerns, we use the scratch to help us remember affect’s promising possibilities—its capacity to tear open new worlds in stuck moments—but also to remind us of its threats, mobilities, and fizzles. We are living in uncertain times—moments where bodies, spaces, and things are continually disciplined, managed, marginalized, and even violently erased; when disorientation opens im/possibilities; and when confidence in conventional actions falters. As William Pinar (2004) asserts, we are living in the “nightmare of the present,” or an educational age marked by standardization and accountability (Boldt, Salvio, and Taubman, 2009; Taubman, 2009)—where students are surveilled, policed, and inevitably punished for their “failures” to conform, and teachers are all the while compelled to “teach by numbers” (Taubman, 2009). This nightmare, of course, doesn’t impact us all equally: Black and Brown bodies are under assault, expressions of white supremacy have become widespread, and racist, xenophobic, (hetero)sexist, and homophobic rhetoric remains “wrapped in the guise of ensuring national safety and preserving culture” (Strom and Martin, 2017, p. 5). —scratch— “Learn to speak English! Go back to your country!” . . . It’s been a lifetime since these words first assailed my ears, and yet, somehow, the hate continues to swell. “BUILD A WALL! BUILD A WALL!” Walls protect us, keep us safe, they say. I know something about that. The wall around me had begun to grow higher and higher and higher . . . Air. I needed air. I needed them to give it to me. All they wanted to do was push me away, watch me crumble— Nobody can love you when you’re “dead”(Chen, 2012). Nobody can love a wall.

Public Feelings and Affective Genres Theories of affect provide new ways of conceptualizing the social that break from the representational logic of rational humanism (Braidotti, 2013), or linear thought processes that do little to help educators make sense of sociopolitical landscapes that have become exceedingly “irrational” (Strom and Martin, 2017, p. 5). Sedgwick (2003), for example, invites a “reparative” turn as a move away from what she calls paranoidleaning critical theory in order to curate different spaces of scholarship and welcome a wider range of affects outside of the critical go-to of the “paranoid” revelation of truths. She asks for scholarship to welcome

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surprises and mistakes. We see this reparative work coming to life in this volume as our authors “wrestle” with resistances (see Airton, this volume); the after-affects of histories (Braidotti, this volume); the vibrancy of matter (Nxumalo with Villaneuva, this volume; Sellar, this volume; Wolfe and Rasmussen, this volume and see also Bennett, 2010); the liveliness of the (class)room (Boldt, this volume; Franklin-Phipps, this volume; Stewart, this volume; Seigworth, this volume); and the unexpected pedagogies of failure (Springgay, this volume), shame (Zembylas, this volume), and bewilderment (Snaza, this volume). As the affective turn offers different assumptions and tools for social science and humanities scholars, it has also helped us cultivate new resources for conceptualizing and understanding the complexities of teaching and learning within a neoliberal era “characterized by corporatism, rugged individualism, and privatization” (Strom and Martin, 2017, p. 4). Many scholars understand affect as central to neoliberalism (Anderson, 2015) and multinational capital, which are unrepresentable and irreducible to “experience” (Shaviro, 2010). For example, Berlant (2004) asserts that affects haunt our lives in “aesthetic conventions, their place in political theories, and their centrality to modern subjectivities” (p. 5). In Affective Mapping, Jonathan Flatley (2008) claims that “[o]ur most enduring and basic social formations—patriarchy, say, or capitalism itself—can only be enduring to the extent that they are woven into our emotional lives in the most fundamental way” (p.  79). More recently, educational scholars (see Strom and Martin, 2017) have suggested that the United States and perhaps the Western world are actually moving away from neoliberalism into “a new political period that combines aspects of ultra-conservatism, White ethno-nationalism, corporate statehood, and authoritarianism .  .  . where good and common sense (Deleuze, 2004) ways of understanding the world and the current political movements are unable to account for the complexity and contradictions inherent in the confluence of today’s socio-political phenomena” (Strom and Martin, 2017, p. 5). These complexities and contradictions that have many of us wondering, “What on earth is happening in the world today?,” remind us that the public sphere is not rational, but “moody” (Berlant, 2018; Flatley, 2019; Highmore, 2017). As Highmore (2017) so aptly puts it, we are not living within social worlds that we rationally control. Rather, we are always living within the “mood-worlds we’ve inherited” (p. 13) from our entangled encounters with the past/present. What this suggests is that our affective feelings or moods in regards to teaching and learning are shaped by various cultural forms, such as television series, assessment practices, and national elections (Flatley, 2019). In other words, different genres for living have interwoven rhetorical and affective appeals, that is, “formations or institutional practices that carry with them narrative expectations about how a situation will turn out when we get a job, start grad school, enter into a romantic relationship, visit the doctor, vote, go to the

12 Bessie P. Dernikos et al. grocery store, or whatever” (Flatley, 2019, p.  1; see Berlant, 2018). As Berlant (2011) attests, affective appeals or attachments do not necessarily feel optimistic, but she persuades that being drawn to return to questions and potentialities around the good life, proper teaching, effective classroom discipline, intelligible literacies (Dernikos and Thiel, 2019), or relational boundaries “is the operation of optimism as an affective form” (p. 14). Berlant goes on to say that these attachments can work to guarantee and/or discredit a “life,” often in ways that foster a narrow view of gender, sexuality, race, social class, and intelligence/ability. Affect theorists have explored these contemporary moods in a number of ways that, as Berlant suggests, don’t always evoke optimism—for example, as affects associated with failure (Halberstam, 2011), depression (Cvetkovich, 2012), feeling white (Matias, 2016), feeling brown (Muñoz, 2000), compassion (Berlant, 2004), the aspirational hustle (Wilson, 2018), and happiness (Ahmed, 2010). Such affective appeals shape collective feelings toward teachers and students, for example, the teacher as motherly facilitator (Walkerdine, 1990), as a “good” White woman (Franklin-Phipps, this volume), the innocence of early learners (Blaise and Andrew, 2005), the enchantment with books, “proper” student bodies (Morris, 2016; Pillow, 2004, 2007), or the dominance of particular masculinities (Pascoe, 2007). They also affectively orient us towards the future. In education narratives, both students and teachers are to be positively influenced toward the future in that they plan for good futures (Harris, 2004; McCall, 2019), assume that the future will bring positive benefits, and accept that education is preparation for the future. Affects related to planning for educational futures likely include happiness, anxiety, envy, and even shame (Zembylas, this volume). Is it any wonder then that we often collectively equate such things as going to college—as opposed to becoming a domestic housewife—as a life choice that will make us “happier” (see McCall, 2019)? More often than not, we can recognize and feel the familiarity of certain stories about teaching—the White teacher savior, the angsty adolescent (Lesko, 2012), the angry Black girl (Morris, 2016), and the failing and dangerous “inner-city” school (Theoharris, Alonso, Anderson, and Su, 2009). Lee Airton (this volume) shares how resistance to social justice teacher education has become its own expected and familiar “genre” in teacher education. These stories become “public feelings” or “sentiments” (Cvetkovich, 2012) that stutter repetitively across media, policies, and “texts” of all kind. Central to our understandings of public life, they move bodies (of protestors, policies, and funding) in particular ways. More specifically, they collectively bind human and nonhuman bodies together through the transmission of affects that produce, for example, a sense of national patriotism or activism on behalf of—or perhaps against—a social concern, cause, or movement (Cvetkovich, 2012), such as gun control legislation and school safety.

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Of course, stories about teaching have shifted over time and space and oftentimes we find ourselves “flailing” (Berlant, 2018) for the right words or actions to respond to what’s going on. As Jonathan Flatley (2019), who borrows from Berlant, writes: When we lack the right genre for the affects generated by a particular historical situation, we may often feel ‘off’ as we try out the existing genres (like protest, or reading the newspaper, or obsessively reading social media, or working really hard), sometimes ‘flailing’ . . . sometimes repurposing or inventing new genres. (pp. 1–2) Now more than ever, we see this “genre flailing” (Berlant, 2018) at play. Asilia Franklin-Phipps (this volume), for example, considers how narratives of “goodness” affect how White women teachers think— and don’t think—about their entanglements with race and racism. In terms of the teacher “revolts” sweeping the United States beginning in early 2019, American teachers, who have often in the past been portrayed as selfless, hardworking, and devoted to students, are now being positioned as obstinate obstacles to reform, along with their unions, tenure, and opposition to merit pay. This new narrative about teachers has exerted a force on district administration, public legislation and funding, and classroom dynamics (Cochran-Smith et al., 2018). Claims that teachers have “lavish benefits,” for example, have been a potent actant in state cuts to education and in recent teacher revolts. And yet, the impassioned red waves of protesting teachers around state capitol buildings across the United States might be seen as collectivized affective ripostes to stories of diffident, lazy, overpaid teachers in it for the summers off. These affective intensities and often “flailing” narratives around teachers are not unique to the United States. For example, in both the United States and the United Kingdom, narratives of “lewd” teachers with “desiring bodies” continue to circulate and cause concern (Jones, 2004; McWilliam, 1996). Erica McWilliam (1996) of Australia points us to some of the “risky” pedagogical pleasures mobilized within teachers’ practices to help us better understand how the relational entanglements of desires, bodies, utterances, texts, time, and space have informed popular formulas for defining “good” and “bad” teachers. As McWilliam argues, the phenomenon of surveilling teachers and their desires so as to judge “good educational practice” has increasingly positioned teachers as “functional ‘no/bodies’” (p.  313) with desires that still remain either “invisible or entirely malevolent.” Thus, affects are involved in attempts to modulate, document, and scale the effects of good teaching practices (see also Franklin-Phipps, this volume) as well as the crafting of particular narratives about exemplary, mediocre, and ineffective teachers.

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While Western schools have been affectively mapped as spaces of, for example, risk, danger, and violence, schooling in the global South and African continent, particularly for girls, has become a space freighted with hope. And yet, these affective investments may not be without entrenched colonial power geometries. Shenila Khoja-Moolji (2015, 2017), for example, has used affect theory to explore how complex intersections of hope, pity, and disgust have marked girls in the Global South as both sites of educational promise and as in particular need of Western pedagogical intervention. And, in many instances, we are still “flailing” for adequate words, actions, and responses to new and emerging conditions in education. —scratch— Although I accepted the pervasive portrait of teachers as resistant to changing their teaching practices, my own stuttering pedagogy refuses that conclusion. My stuttering has been going on since I taught a “new social studies” curriculum in the 1970s. I never succeeded in teaching the legalistic, reason-centered, policy-oriented curriculum I was expected to, yet I clung to the “promises” of student talk—those moments of intense attunement, the weighty wait times, and the half-articulations of students’ wonderings. For Barad (2015), stuttering evidences “hauntings by other times, matter, and yearnings” (pp. 406–407), what Deleuze and Parnet (1977) gloss as “and, and, and.” My pedagogical stammerings mingle yearnings and finite class times, electric openings and lackluster closings, deep laughter, and distracted glances at screens. Stuttering pedagogy appreciates the immanent quality of teaching, “allowing more of what is not ourselves to transform what we take ourselves to be” (Colebrook, 2005, p. 4). New concepts, vivid encounters, and/or failures of conventional practices can make curriculum swerve. Stammering, breathlessness, sudden voids, and minor dissatisfactions have tipped me off that a reworking of my teaching is underway.

Schooling Lessons: Affect Theory in Education The scholarship of Deleuze and Guattari (1987) has become one touchstone in moving affect into the field of education (see Coleman and Ringrose, 2013; Hickey-Moody, 2009, 2013; Ringrose, 2011). In particular, this work has troubled the current era of standards and accountability, largely marked by techno-rational approaches to education. Headlined by such US initiatives as No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and, more recently, Common Core State Standards, this era has prioritized linear and prescriptive analyses of teaching and learning and refused interpretations without accountable metrics (Cochran-Smith et al., 2018). Deleuze and Guattari’s theorizing of immanence and emergent possibilities instead

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offers otherwise imaginaries. Deleuze’s use of affect foregrounds the “audible, visual and tactile transformation produced in reaction to a certain situation, event or thing” (Colman, 2005, p. 11), an increase or decrease in bodily capacity. Affect in teaching—associated with the coming together of ideas, differences, and intensities across students, teachers, and knowledge—can slow down or speed up events or make moments more or less impactful; it can capacitate and incapacitate bodies differently. Affects sparked by a video clip, discussion, material, or sound, for example, may speed up or slow down classwork, thus contributing to different feelings of excitement or languor in classroom spaces and connections among participants (Airton, this volume; Franklin-Phipps, this volume; Lesko, 2019; Springgay, this volume). —scratch— “It’s just a scratch.” A body stands up and dusts itself off. “I’m fine.” “You sure? Do you want to see the school nurse?” “No, it’s alright.” Eyes meet from across the school parking lot and then quickly look away. As Greg Seigworth (this volume) beautifully muses, perhaps “pedagogy is affect’s first lesson or, maybe, affect is pedagogy’s first lesson.” Scholars of affect and education have explored what happens when we think of affect as a form of pedagogy (see Albrecht-Crane and Slack, 2007; Hickey-Moody, 2013; Mulcahy, 2012, 2019; Niccolini, 2016a; 2016b; Probyn, 2004; Zembylas, 2007). Within this thinking, affective pedagogies happen outside of teachers’ conscious intentions with learning sparking in the becomings encountered when bodies (human and nonhuman) meet. Pedagogy, then, is not a vehicle for exchanging information from one being to another; rather, teaching has immanence—“it creates new connections, new styles for thinking and new images and ways of seeing” (Colebrook, 2005, p. 4; see also Boldt, this volume; Seigworth, this volume and Stewart, this volume). For Colebrook (2005), to teach (as to think) is “not to recreate oneself . . . repeating habitual orientations;” teaching (and thinking) can only occur if there is an “encounter with relations, potentials and powers not our own” (p. 3). Colebrook (2005) perceives thinking/pedagogy as a confrontation with chaos, “allowing more of what is not ourselves to transform what we take ourselves to be” (p. 4) (see also Airton, this volume). Manuel Delanda (n.d.) writes of this immanence more generally, and his language shifts how educational researchers might narrate teachers, teaching, and curricula: “Communities can’t be reduced to the people who make them up; social justice movements can’t be

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reduced to the communities that make them up. Assemblages have emergent properties” (Delanda, n.d.; see also Airton, this volume). Rather than imagining communities and movements as individual endeavors, Delanda invites us to consider how the potential, or function, or meaning attached to teacher (student, etc.) bodies cannot be fully grasped without considering processes of becomings, or the range of connections bodies are capable of (Ringrose, 2011). As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) explain, becomings are dynamic processes of emergence, where we are “already-there that is at the same time not-yet-here, a simultaneous too late and too-early, a something that is both going to happen and has just happened”(p. 262). Similarly, Roy (2003) submits that new concepts or encounters can “shatter existing modes of thinking about the everyday” (p. vii). Brought to bear on the conditions of schooling, they allow us to access and explore “scratchy” grooves that can make curriculum swerve from the old terrain. Teaching is generally considered to be about relations of knowledge transmission, primarily through language or words. Teaching as knowledge encounters with/in curricula swell with affects beyond—or even before—words. Scholars are now theorizing what these affective swells can do rather than what they mean (Boldt, this volume; Lesko, 2019; McCall, 2019). And what is surprising is that this does not call for grand movements, nor for great reforms, but depends on the subversive power of the very small and minor “flections”; barely perceptible lines of disorientation (Roy, 2003, p. vii). Since teaching is generally considered to be sets of discrete actions in a linear, universal time, these perspectives might allow us different and fuller reconsiderations.

Affective Atmospheres in Schools: Geographies and Mobile Energies —scratch— Something is in the air in schools. It is hard to describe yet presses on you. Heavy, an invisible blanket you can’t shake off. You can’t touch it, but you know it is there . . . Recent scholarship in geography has pursued an understanding of how emotions and affects imbue “places” such as the Lake District in the UK (Urry, 1995), Texas (Nxumalo with Villanuava, this volume), or San Francisco (Nold, n.d.) with specialness. Similarly, Stewart (2007) conjures Vermontness as a “grab bag of qualities and technologies thrown together into an event and a sensation,” such as “fall colors, maple syrup, tourist brochures .  .  . country stores, liberalism .  .  . racial homogeneity yet everywhere White lesbian couples with babies of color” (p. 30). School buildings also have recognizable atmospheres, with smells, colors, natural and artificial light, noise, athletic fields, and materials like

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student work, charts, and posters that affect staff, students, and visitors. American school architecture in the early twentieth century consciously designed high schools to be “cathedrals of learning” (George, 2018), while suburban schools beginning in the 1960s mimicked shopping malls and then military bunkers. Much has been written about the installation of school security screenings at entrances, which liken entering schools to TSA airport scans and prison surveillance (Noguera, 1995). In recent decades, the language of schools as “safe spaces” has proliferated as a scene of desire, yet students report that zero-tolerance policies, for example, differentiate spaces as welcoming, inclusive, and/or threatening by different students (Niccolini, 2016b; Snaza, this volume). —scratch— Desperation—if that is what you call it—filled the air in my first classroom in a school with families and children that ached with hope for higher test scores, grade-level reading mastery, less violence in hallways and bathrooms, more stable high school graduation rates, less stable dropout rates, and more resources and stamina to accomplish all of that. To undo the shame of a history of “school failure.” I did not take any failure as a teacher there lightly; the atmospheric pressures were palpable—acute, excitable, heartwarming, urgent, and, after three years, really hard. Leander et al. (2010) propose shifting our frame from the bounded physical spaces of schools—the usual set of “classroom containers”—and recognizing “flows” that move across spaces, such as flows of sounds or technologies. Using awareness of school flows and grooves, Chris Emdin (2012) similarly portrays science students’ boredom and their almostcomatose bodies beginning to animate when hip-hop rhythms float in from a car parked at a stoplight outside the school. Particular teaching practices can speed up or slow down affect and movements. Julian Henriques (2010) identifies affective communication through rhythm or the speed of repetitions. For him, music is the best example of the transmission of affects through repetitious patterns or “vibey-ness.” Drawing upon Henriques, Dernikos (2020) explores how sonic frequencies permeate classroom spaces to simultaneously reinforce processes of affective assimilation (i.e., “feeling white”—Matias, 2016) and open us up to nonnormative ways of listening, sounding, knowing, being, and doing. For Dernikos, such intensities enable new affective entanglements between humans and nonhumans that run “pedagogical interference” (Niccolini, Zarabadi, and Ringrose, 2018) into mandated literacy curricula and racialized identity scripts, thereby opening up opportunities for “struggling readers” to become “successful.” To return to Weheliye (2005), going with ↔ against these “vibey” grooves enables us to exceed what “is” in order to produce slippages, allurements, intensities, and newness.

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Schools offer different affective atmospheres for different groups of children and youth. As with other public spaces, historical expectations for proper behavior contribute to school atmospheres. Scenes of incivility may involve the “weaponizing of disgust, the subtle retreat, the flared nostril” (Nyong’o and Tompkins, 2018, n.p.). This “affective violence” humiliates, shames, misrecognizes, or trivializes ideas and attitudes, and operates among administrators, teachers, and students (see Niccolini, 2016a). In the televised testimony by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford in October 2018, the affective violence involved the assembled senators and Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, yelling about innocent high school boys while enacting a textbook example of cross-generational “boys being boys.” Commentators described the “cruel laughter” toward Dr. Ford’s assertions. While these hearings took place in the US Congress, they evoked, echoed, and affirmed affective patterns in schools (Runcie, 2019). As in the hearings, teachers and students routinely talk to different individuals and groups, utilizing distinct tones, words, and looks that construct students with dignity, as deserving a second chance, as humiliating failures, or as unreachable. Arun Saldanha (this volume) considers how bodies thicken in schools and produce durable phenomena like “all the Black kids sitting together in the cafeteria” (Tatum, 1999). He argues that students’ affect-full “clothing, glances, jokes, slang, music, Instagram, hand movements, and sitting styles” thicken connections and bodies, all of which are generally ignored in studies and policies about race and anti-racist approaches. School exclusion and unwelcoming atmospheres can be materially produced through thickened uses of homophobic language (Lesko, Fields, Gilbert, Mamo, and Niccolini, 2018). Atmospheres of inclusion and exclusion are also made up through material practices and regulatory relations of everyday school objects like school uniforms (Wolfe and Rassmussen, this volume). —scratch— The wonder and pain of my years in those classrooms and corridors have lingered.  .  .  . inspiring and haunting .  .  . since the day of my one-way flight out of Los Angeles. Places called schools are precarious and provocative affective atmospheres (Anderson, 2014) made up of layers of affects and effects through knowable and unknowable collective histories, social conditions, and everything else that flow through space-time relations.

Affective Otherwises While affect has been termed a “phenomenon in need of fresh study” (Blackman, 2014, p. 1), there is concern that a “turn” to affect signifies a

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rupture with the past or a turning away from something else (e.g., feminist poststructural theories; social constructionism) (Blackman, 2014). For this reason, Hughes and Lury (2013) instead propose that “return” may be a more productive concept to consider, as the word itself signals both a coming back to and a revisiting of historical “troublings” (see Blackman, 2014). Inspired by this concept, we see affect studies as building on the work of feminist scholars who have long attended to the importance of bodies, corporeality, and embodiment within educational, curricular, and social spaces (see, among others, Butler, 1990; Grosz, 1993; Grumet, 1988; Irwin, 1999; Jones, 2013; Pillow, 2007; Springgay, 2008; Springgay and Freedman, 2007; Walkerdine, 1990). Affect theory continues this attention by figuring bodies as intensely permeable, interconnected assemblages of both material and immaterial, human and nonhuman forces (Bennett, 2010; Blackman, 2012; Brennan, 2004; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). For us, affect theory helps us “take embodiment seriously [by] . . . emphasize[ing] the entangled nature of events and the ways in which multiple figurations [discourses being but one such figuration] interact to produce the sites, scenes” (Wetherell, 2013, p. 263) and markedly uneven textures of social life. Yet, by focusing on the emergence of trans-corporeal3 (Alaimo, 2010) encounters and the ongoing capacities of bodies to affect and be affected, affect also offers new and different possibilities for understanding and politicizing the social (Kinnunen and Kolehmainen, 2018). And while the renewed attention to affect within the humanities, social sciences, and, more recently, educational research has greatly influenced our understandings and analyses of ontologies of subjectivity and corporeality—what a body “is” and can do—we wish to make clear that a turn to affect does not imply a turning away from the insights of other theoretical perspectives, such as poststructuralism, postcolonial, and queer theory. Rather, it signals a re/turning to, building upon, and sitting “beside” (Sedgwick, 2003) a vibrant body of theoretical accomplishments and analyses. Affect is happening all around us. It is precisely its emerging unpredictability that enables “margin[s] of maneuverability” (Massumi, 2015, p. 3), or spaces of hope and freedom from dominant ideologies or sociocultural “norms.” After all, with affect, anything can happen—what has been does not necessarily determine what is or what will be. There always exists the potential for new relationalities, movements, and social worlds to emerge and unfold (Bakko and Merz, 2015). Affect, as a creative, unpredictable, and vital force, offers a means of interrupting and remodulating dominant modes of power and rigid normativities (Berlant, 2011; Cvetkovich, 2012; Massumi, 2015; Sedgwick, 2003), yet—as we have previously noted—simultaneously bears the risk of re-entrenching racism, classism, and other exclusions (Dernikos, 2018a; Ohito, 2017; Saldanha, 2006) or doing nothing. Despite these risks, we believe that, as educators, scholars, students, and entangled

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multispecies beings, we have an obligation to attend to affect’s promise and threat so that things might feel and become otherwise. This attunement to affect also provokes a consideration of our own attachments to educational objects, narratives, and genres, including schooling as equality of opportunity, transformative teacher stories, individual sovereignty, critiques of neoliberalism, and K-12 teachers as obstacles to reform. Might efforts toward new narratives of schooling, images of good-enough teachers, or multiple conceptions of student success offer some sustenance in the impasse (Berlant, 2011; Schneider, 2017)? Our collective affective attachments as graduate students, as beginning teachers, as women, as educators committed to justice may work with ↔ against generative thinking-feeling, such as, acknowledging mistakes, registering surprise, sharing anxiety, or spurring wonder. What resonances, stirrings, impacts, scratches, grooves might be part of “new ordinaries” in education (Berlant & Stewart, 2019, p. ix)? We offer this volume then as a “middle” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987)— rather than a starting or endpoint—for readers to dwell with affect for a bit. The chapters are full of invitations to other writings, other places, other entering and exiting points. Scratch your way through—leave marks, strike out what offends, and, above all, tear open new possibilities. —scratch— The cursor blinks and then in a violent retour scratches a line we’ve written. How to explain affect? How to put into words something not quite finished, something congealing, taking form, pressing, present, but still in motion? What can affect help us think, feel, do, and be(come) in education?—we can’t help but feel we’re still only just scratching the surface.

Notes 1. Within Western humanism, representation refers to the idea that hierarchical binaries order the social world, where Man (White male, class privileged, heterosexual, able-bodied, etc.), as an autonomous, rational subject, is positioned as the definitive human being. As such, he is the default body presumably superior to all other people (e.g., folks of color or women) and things (e.g., animals or rocks). The assumption here is that reality can be represented or “captured” through binary classification systems based on language. By rendering all meaning singular and explicable, representation does not allow for difference, movement, emergence, and newness. 2. “Intra-actions are nonarbitrary, nondeterministic causal enactments through which matter-in-the-process-of-becoming is iteratively enfolded into its ongoing differential materialization” (Barad, 2007, p. 179). Within Barad’s concept, matter is agentive, and entangled agencies are mutually constituted. 3. Alaimo (2010) proposes “the term ‘trans-corporeality,’ which emphasizes the imbrication of human bodies not only with each other, but with nonhuman creatures and physical landscapes” (p. 15).

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Flatley, J. (2008). Affective mapping. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Flatley, J. (2019). Cultural feelings: Mood, mediation and cultural politics. Textual Practice, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2019.1621473 George, S. (2018). Schools should be cathedrals of learning. Retrieved from http:// blogs.edweek.org/edweek/next_gen_learning/2018/02/schools_should_be_ cathedrals_of_learning.html Gould, D. (2010). On affect and protest. In J. Staiger, A. Cvetkovich, and A. Reynolds (Eds.), Political emotions (pp. 18–44). New York, NY: Routledge. Greco, R. (2017). Grand Ledge school officials rethinking use of Confederate flag. Retrieved from: www.lansingstatejournal.com/story/news/local/2017/05/31/ grand-ledge-school-officials-rethinking-use-confederate-flag/358045001/ “Groove.” Retrieved from www.dictionary.com/browse/groove Grosz, E. (1993). Bodies and knowledges: Feminism and the crisis of reason. In L. Alcoff and E. Potter (Eds.), Feminist epistemologies (pp. 187–215). New York, NY: Routledge. Grumet, M. R. (1988). Bitter milk: Women and teaching. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Halberstam, J. (2011). The queer art of failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Harris, A. (2004). Future girl: Young women in the twenty-first century. New York, NY: Routledge. Hemmings, C. (2005). Invoking affect: Cultural theory and the ontological turn. Cultural Studies,19(5), 548–567.https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380500365473 Henriques, J. (2010). The vibrations of affect and their propagation on a night out on Kingston’s dancehall scene. Body and Society, 16(1), 57–89. Hickey-Moody, A. (2009). Little war machines: Posthuman pedagogy and its media. Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 3(3), 273–280. Hickey-Moody, A. (2013). Affect as method: Feelings, aesthetics, and affective pedagogy. In R. Coleman and J. Ringrose (Eds.), Deleuze and research methodologies (pp. 79–95). Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. Highmore, B. (2017). Cultural feelings: Mood, mediation and cultural politics. New York and London: Routledge. Hughes, C., and Lury, C. (2013). Re-turning feminist methodologies: From a social to an ecological epistemology. Gender and Education, 25(6), 786–799. Iannelli, J. (2018). Students outraged at Confederate banner at Miami-Dade charter school. Retrieved from www.miaminewtimes.com/news/confederate-flagat-mater-academy-hialeah-gardens-causes-controversy-10929026 Irwin, R. (1999). Facing oneself. An embodied pedagogy. Arts and Learning Research, 16(1), 82–86. Jackson, P. W. (1968). Life in classrooms. Chicago, IL: Hold, Rinehart, and Winston. Jones, A. (2004). Social anxiety, sex, surveillance, and the “safe” teacher. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 25(1), 53–66. Jones, S. (2013). Literacies in the body. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 56(7), 525–529. https://doi.org/10.1002/JAAL.182. Juvonen, T., and Kolehmainen, M. (Eds.). Affective inequalities in intimate relationships. New York, NY: Routledge. Khoja-Moolji, S. (2015). Reading Malala: (De)(re)territorializations of Muslim collectivities. Journal of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 35(3), 539–556.

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Khoja-Moolji, S. (2017). The making of “humans” and their others in and through transnational human rights advocacy. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 42(2), 377–402. Kinnunen, T., and Kolehmainen, M. (2018). Touch and affect. Analysing the archive of touch biographies. Body & Society, 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1357034X18817607 Leander, K. M., Phillips, N. C. and Taylor, K. H. (2010). The changing social spaces of learning: Mapping new mobilities. Review of Research in Education, 34, 329–394. Leander, K. M., and Rowe, D. W. (2006). Mapping literacy spaces in motion. A rhizomatic analysis of a classroom literacy performance. Reading Research Quarterly, 41(4), 428–460. Lesko, N. (2012). Act your age! The social construction of adolescence (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. Lesko, N. (2019). The promises of student talk: The Harvard Public Issues Series and stuttering pedagogies. Educação Unisinos, 23(1), 36–47. Lesko, N., Fields, J., Gilbert, J., Mamo, L., and Niccolini, A. (2018). “An island just for the gays”? Affective geographies of a high school in a historically gay neighborhood. In S. Talburt (Ed.), Youth sexualities: Public feelings and contemporary cultural politics (pp. 207–228). New York, NY: Praeger. Lesko, N., and Talburt, S. (2012). Enchantment. In N. Lesko and S. Talburt (Eds.), Keywords in youth studies (pp. 279–289). New York, NY: Routledge. Lewak, D. (2019). Students carved swastikas in my classroom: Jewish teacher. Retrieved from https://nypost.com/2019/01/19/students-carved-swastikas-inmy-classroom-jewish-teacher/ MacLure, M. (2013). Classification or wonder? Coding as an analytic practice in qualitative research. In R. Coleman and J. Ringrose (Eds.), Deleuze and research methodologies (pp. 164–183). Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. Malone, K. (2015). Posthumanist approaches to theorising children’s humannature relations. In K. Nairn, P. Kraftl, and T. Skelton (Eds.) , Space, place and environment. Geographies of children and young people (Vol. 1). Singapore: Springer. Manning, E. (2016). The minor gesture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Massumi, B. (1987). Translator’s foreword: Pleasures of philosophy. In G. Deleuze and F. Guattari (Eds.), A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (pp. ix–xix). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Massumi, B. (1995). The autonomy of affect. Cultural Critique, 31, 83–109. Massumi, B. (2002). Parables of the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Massumi, B. (2015). Q&A with Brian Massumi. Retrieved 2018, January 17 from https://dukeupress.wordpress.com/2015/08/19/qa-with-brian-massumi/ Matias, C. (2016). Feeling white: Whiteness, emotionality, and education. Boston, MA: Sense Publishers. McCall, S. (2020). Girls, single-sex schools, and postfeminist fantasies. New York and London: Routledge. McWilliam, E. (1996). Touchy subjects: A risky inquiry into pedagogical pleasure. British Educational Research Journal, 22(3), 305–317.

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Morris, M. W. (2016). Pushout: The criminalization of Black girls in schools. New York, NY: The New Press. Mulcahy, D. (2012). Affective assemblages: Body matters in the pedagogic practices of contemporary school classrooms. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 20(1), 9–17. Mulcahy, D. (2019). Pedagogic affect and its politics: Learning to affect and be affected in education. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 40(1). Muñoz, J. E. (2000). Feeling brown: Ethnicity and affect in Ricardo Bracho’s “The sweetest hangover (and other stds)”. Theatre Journal, 52(1), 67–79. Ngai, S. (2005). Ugly feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Niccolini, A. (2016a). Affect. In N. M. Rodriguez, W. J. Martino, J. C. Ingrey, and E. Brockenbrough (Eds.), Critical concepts in queer studies and education (pp. 1–14). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Niccolini, A. (2016b). Animate affects: Censorship, reckless pedagogies, and beautiful feelings. Gender and Education, 28(2), 230–249. Niccolini, A., Dernikos, B. P., Lesko, N., and McCall, S. (2018). High passions: Affect and curriculum studies. In C. Hebert, N. A. Fook, A. Ibrahim, & B. Smith, (Eds.), Internationalizing curriculum studies: Histories, environments, and critiques (pp. 157–175). Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Niccolini, A., Zarabadi, S., and Ringrose, J. (2018). Spinning yarns: Affective kinshipping as posthuman pedagogy, Parallax, 24(3), 324–343. https://doi.org/10. 1080/13534645.2018.1496582 Noguchi, S. (2017). San Jose: Muslim teacher wearing head scarf repeatedly bullied by students. Retrieved from www.mercurynews.com/2017/11/24/sanjose-muslim-teacher-wearing-head-scarf-repeatedly-bullied-by-students/ Noguera, P. A. (1995). Preventing and producing violence: A critical analysis of responses to school violence. Harvard Educational Review, 65(2), 189–212. Nold, C. (Ed.). (n.d.). Emotional cartography: Technologies of the self. Retrieved from www.emotionalcartography.net Nyong’o, T., and Tompkins, K. W. (2018). Eleven theses on civility (see #8). Blogpost to the Journal Social Text. Retrieved from https://socialtextjournal.org/ eleven-theses-on-civility/ Ohito, E. O. (2017). Thinking through the flesh: A critical autoethnography of racial body politics in urban teacher education. Race Ethnicity and Education, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2017.1294568. Pascoe, C. J. (2007). Dude, you’re a fag: Masculinites and sexuality in high school. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Pillow, W. S. (2004). Unfit subjects: Education policy and the teen mother, 1972– 2002. New York, NY: Routledge. Pillow, W. S. (2007). “Bodies are dangerous”: Using feminist genealogy as policy studies methodology. In S. Ball, I. Goodson, and M. Maguire (Eds.), Education, globalisation, and new times: 21 years of the Journal of Education Policy (pp. 139–147). London: Routledge. Pinar, W. (2004). What is curriculum theory? Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Probyn, E. (2004). Teaching bodies: Affects in the classroom. Body & Society, 10(4), 21–43. Puar, J. K. (2011). “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess”: Becomingintersectional in assemblage theory. Philosophia, 2(1), 49–66.

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Ordinary Charges

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Teaching Affectively Kathleen Stewart

Ten years ago, I started teaching affectively. This meant changing my state of being as a teacher. Actually the first time it happened was more like twenty years ago. I was teaching a large lecture class right after a yoga class, which always, for me, included falling into a deep sleep during the final relaxation. The yoga disconnected me from my drivetrain. I would awake refreshed, calm, and differently, less automatically, oriented. Then I would walk straight to my classroom where I would just stand in the front of the room, looking around for maybe a full minute. The first time I did this, the atmosphere in the room swelled. A pen dropped. The students looked anxiously around, and then, much to my surprise, they started to smile at me. Something subtle but powerful had shifted. The abstract high horse of classroom knowledge decorum had been contaminated with any number of things pinging around the room—possibilities, memories, preoccupations, eyes seeking contact, and bodies shifting in their seats. The room had become a scene we were in together as bodies and actors. That little pause opened onto all kinds of things ordinarily barely held in check in a classroom in the interest of what we think of as concentrated thought. The room’s qualities changed from those of a holding tank for a cleared ground to those of a threshold, or an energetic edge, which propelled what came out of my mouth. “Ok, let’s go.” I asked the students what had been happening and what they had noticed lately, leading with half stories of my own that pointed at very precise situations and the kinds of reactions they seemed to compel or enable. The trick was to use story openings not to illustrate a predetermined point but rather to catch up the animation of the room. The stories deployed like a series of tracks of thought-feelings we could develop together. I would say something like this: Let’s say you take a walk. Something throws together around you. Something intense but strewn across a field of bodies and things. A walker with a routine gets used to the little, ever-changing events of a walk, whether s/he likes them or not. This is not about desire and

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Kathleen Stewart not about the subject’s takeaways from a kind of experience, but about being in the vicinity of things that are taking place outside you, around you, or perhaps very close to your skin, calling you out. What could happen? What do people do? One walker might develop the habit of arming himself with giant headphones and a stick. Another might stay alert to the need for a quick response to comments from passersby. There are always questions provoked in any situation, like what to do with your eyes.

Then I would extend the case with more detail, giving us something more precise and more involved to think with. I would say, for example: One day, Ronn was walking Copper, our ancient Dachshund runt, on a busy Austin street. A man in a truck waiting for a light to change called out in an Irish brogue, “What a beautiful dog.” And then, perhaps noticing that the whiteness of her face was age, not a miracle, that her toothless mouth caved and her eyes were blind—a creature not what she once was—he revved up his proclamations. “She’s the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen.” Ronn was a little taken aback, but he was on it. “Thank you very much! She’s a doll.” He would have gone on, stepping up to the opening, but the light changed. Picture the two men gazing at each other as their paths pull apart, interrupting something set in motion. Another day I was walking our other dog, Kuka, past the schoolyard. A young boxer ran up to a man whose dog was on a leash. The man yelled, “Hey! Get your damn dog!” The boxer’s owner was cavalier, slowly starting to amble over from the other side of the field. He called out way too casually, as if it weren’t necessary to say anything at all, “He’s friendly.” The worked-up guy included me in his retort. “We don’t know that! Get your fuckin’ dog. Don’t give me that shit.” His body was now bouncing up and down but moving fast-forward, too, like a beach ball blown by the wind. I was a little worked up too, fashioning possible reactions in my head: “Ya, that’s right!” or “Hey, leave me out of this!” Strange, how a dog loosed by a casual owner sets another man aflame. But, also, he sounded like he was from New England. That explains something. Little stories like this of the ordinary charge in encounters and events and what people do with this charge gave us a starting point—something to talk about. I came to think of these opening stories as exercises aimed at building a muscle to respond to what happens around us in singular moments. Teaching itself became the exercising of acts of response. That meant first muscling out of the default model of knowledge as some kind of mental victory over what is somehow unclear and unwashed or irrational in the world. To muscle out the dull default of a judgment that

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finds fault in other people’s modes of thinking and begins and ends in a paranoid attention to the world itself, as if the whole point of being and thinking academically is just to catch it in a lie, we had to talk about what we were doing and take stock of what was happening all around us in the classroom. Checking in became funny—a staging of quips, silly reminders, and joking refrains. We relaxed the muscle of judgment, with all its presumptions and anxieties, to replace it with affect as a mode of thought. With that muscling out of one approach and the slow muscle building of a capacious curiosity, tangled lines of attention and reaction became central to our descriptions of worlds throwing together around us. We started to notice—and find interesting and of value—all the extensions of ways of being touched in a world, the lines of things on the move, the widespread joking, the voicing, the dark wakefulness, the sonorousness, how managing a life vies with an unwitting ungluing, how things get started, how people try to bring things to an end through things that slide or slam or in marathon serial immersions, the various things that happen to thought, why conceptuality might take the form of a speed list, condensing incommensurate elements into something ungainly but recognizable, or why it matters that attention sometimes slows to a halt to wait for something to take shape. Affect in the classroom was both an intellectual muscle and a social muscle that stretched the conceptual skin between an inside self and whatever was taking place outside it, pushing and pulling the subject into contingent, morphing shapes. As a mode of conceptualization, affect staged the sensing out of what was emergent and potential in something that was taking place; its orientation was in the midst of. One lesson of teaching affectively is that the world from which and about which we teach is more a set of provocations and problematics than something that can be captured in an analytical shorthand of abstracted categories. Teaching affectively means sidling up to what pushes us to respond in some world’s energetic and generative weight. It is the exercise of a capacity to respond. Affective teaching then is a matter of leaning into its subjects, not as things already laid out on the table, the only task left being to represent and evaluate them, but with an eye to their hardenings into something recognizable, their ironclad investments, or slippages, or failures to endure. Affect is a kind of conceptualization that approaches prolific forces and forms coming down to roost on people and practices. As such, it stands in sharp contrast to a sheer evaluative critique. Teaching affectively gestures at competence in a world. Its grounded curiosity instills a readiness to be in something unfolding in the world but also in this room. A joke, a story, or a moment of silence becomes not an awkward threat to the drive to impart knowledge from expert to pupil but a way of sustaining the project of thought. Now fast-forward about ten years. I started using a writing workshop method to teach graduate courses on new ethnography, affect, worlding,

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and the ordinary. A few years later I started using the same methods in undergraduate seminars on objects, everyday life, auto-ethnography, the memoir, and ethnographic writing. The price of admission to these workshops each week was 500 words to be read aloud. The pieces were not circulated in advance, copies were not distributed during the seminar, and I was never given a written version to evaluate. The only requirement of the writing was that it could not be an exegetical discussion of the reading for the week. It could be inspired by something in the reading, even a single phrase, or it could otherwise build itself in relation or reaction to the reading. But it should be primarily an active composition of each person’s developing dissertation project. The style of writing didn’t matter; it could be creative nonfiction, poetry, an abstract, a description, an essay, an analytical argument, or any combination of forms, but it had to be talking about something and from some line of approach. The writing didn’t have to be all of one piece. It could be five different pieces, each with 100 words, or two pieces of 250 words each, and the pieces could be completely disparate, or resonant, or they could constitute different angles taken on the same phenomena. The writing was an experiment. They were the writers. The aim was to learn to develop concepts through the practice of writing and reading. Before we could begin the semester, anxieties had to be relieved. The undergraduates, especially, wanted to know what I expected and the parameters of the genres and exercises I was asking for. Grades had to be eliminated. I developed for the undergraduate workshops a discipline of learning to write (daily writing journals, brainstorming, ethnographic exercises, a weekly quote from the reading, workshops on voice, descriptive writing, and editing, methods of responding to the other authors in seminar). I wrote a rubric in which students started with 100 percent and lost points for not completing assignments or not participating in seminar. Then it’s just a matter of sticking to the method of the seminar. It starts with a slow minute or two of checking in, some laughing, and some silence. Then I ask for a volunteer to begin, and we just wait. Each author begins by giving their name. The audience has to listen actively, taking notes to compose a response. After four people read, I call for comments and again just wait. What happens next is a remarkable improvisatory conceptuality as readers learn to build thoughts out of the points of precision they have heard within pieces and across them. Over the course of the seminar and the semester, we get to know each person’s work through the accumulation of angles of approach to it and the concepts that spin out of it, linking it to other projects and possibilities. Habits of thought-feeling begin to sediment; an associative logic builds muscle. This approach is simple, and strangely, it’s fundamentally different from the seminar method of assigning readings and then calling for discussion without the benefit of active compositional writing and reading.

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The room becomes intellectually, affectively, and socially energetic. The questions become more basic: what is it, what’s it doing, and where’s it going? The conversation builds points, methods, and ways of thinking in a collective process trained on the multiplicities of difference in the room. Teaching affectively produces a room in which things come up—funny things, traumatic things, and interesting things—and the people in the room are ready for it. We have chops of response. Thought-feeling is poised on the edge that links the actual and potential. It’s a relief.

Part I

Politics

3

Passion, Pedagogy, and Pietas An Interview With Rosi Braidotti

ALYSSA NICCOLINI:

You have had some very well-known teachers, including Genevieve Lloyd, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, and, of course, Gilles Deleuze. Could you walk us through a bit of your own educational genealogy? How would you characterize the different pedagogies your teachers offered? ROSI BRAIDOTTI: At the heart of all pedagogies, there are different ideas about the university. It’s the answer to your question: I was trained in a very different university where the teachers really mattered and the classrooms would be very informal. I did my BA university training in Canberra and the PhD work at the Sorbonne. Both were informal in different ways. With Genevieve Lloyd, Maurita Harney, and Ian Donaldson, my major teachers at the National University in Canberra, we worked within a sort of colonial variation of the British tutorial system, where students and teachers would sit down and talk; you read out your paper and the teacher comments. You go for a walk together. “When Jenny [Genevieve, ed.] Lloyd came” to visit me in Utrecht years ago, of course we went for a long walk, and we talked. I think that is crucial. It’s unimaginable in a quantified neoliberal university where every minute counts and where we have to clock in and out like a factory system, where everything is about being assessed, evaluated, and controlled. It’s the constant auditing system that destroys the meditative and critical soul of what is the university. A university training in the Humanities, as elsewhere, was supposed to be a moment of suspension in space and time, so you could focus completely on learning and on being trained to think, argue, and do research in a complex and ancient field of knowledge production. It was a suspension of daily reality in some ways, but a deepening and broadening of it in others. The taxpayers got their returns in helping to produce highly trained people, capable of innovating constructively, and to go out and construct the contemporary world of culture and science . . . I wonder whether the students of today still have a figure of the teacher. It can be an academic star, but that’s a different concept. An

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Bessie P. Dernikos et al. academic star is part of the celebrity circuit, and then it’s an object of idolatry but also of aberration. It’s an object of envy, emulation, of both positive and negative affects. And you can be a celebrity and a teacher, but it’s a lot more difficult because you have to get rid of the celebrity thing to try to act or use the celebrity aura to get to people.  .  .  . I guess the teacher dies when the figure of the intellectual shifts from content and critique to the whole culture of assessment and media presence. And that happens somewhere in the nineties, with the rise of the first academic stars. Because why is Jean Paul Sartre not an academic star? Why is Michel Foucault borderline? Because he’s an academic star in the United States, but not in France. He’s an intellectual, a public figure as a great professor. At what particular point does the academic star kill the teacher? I think it has to do with something the neoliberal system has deliberately done. They have encouraged the production of both academic stars and the academic “precariat.” Somehow every major university has to have the radical celebrity. Then they are a sort of brand, but the rest of the staff is in a different predicament.

My genealogy has moved generationally through moments where the academic Humanities, in general, but particularly philosophy—which is about dialogue and thinking through—was allowed the space and the time to actually be deeply influenced by incredible intellectual figures who worked in the university but addressed society as a whole . . . One important factor in being an outstanding intellect is the combination of passion and high levels of specialization. For instance, I wrote to Jenny Lloyd recently because I needed a reference on Spinoza. She came back—time difference notwithstanding—within 12 hours with the exact, direct, precise scholia in Spinoza’s Ethics, where he wrote the sentence I was looking for. When I was in Sydney in November 2016, of course I visited Jenny and took a long walk with her on Coogee Beach, talking. And in Melbourne, I always stay with my former philosophy tutor Maurita Harney, even after all these years. We’re looking therefore at a very specific genealogy, which now feels like a different era. And the different pedagogies were, of course, also an effect of the knowledge we shared. . . . The continuing factor was the history of philosophy. In her undergraduate course, Jenny Lloyd taught Michel Foucault as a historian of philosophy, in fact taught him as a commentator on the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century, [as a] commentator on Descartes, on Spinoza and beyond. So we used him as secondary literature because this was 1972, 1973, and post-structuralism was just starting. The key idea was that we do have a history of philosophy, but it is not one, canonized, untouchable, but a set of authors that carry on a tradition. And in a sense, Lloyd was very much an Oxford philosopher and worked within the British system, which, both in philosophy and in

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the Law, doesn’t believe in codes as such. They believe in jurisprudence, and I think that the connection between Jenny Lloyd and Deleuze is the flexibility of jurisprudence and its case stories. Applied to philosophy, this means there is no master code that asserts a proper and fundamental history of philosophy. That’s why Deleuze attacks Roman law and prefers British law because it is made of cases, of precedents. It’s jurisprudence, not the law. That is the constant factor for me in the way Jenny Lloyd taught the history of philosophy and how the French thinkers approached the issue. Both Lloyd and Deleuze taught Spinoza. Nobody else taught Spinoza then. She taught Foucault. Who was teaching Foucault? Most philosophy undergraduates are taught the big classical H’s: Hegel and Heidegger, or the three radical M’s: Mao, Marx, and Marcuse. Or they would follow the master narrative, where everything ends with Immanuel Kant. The history of philosophy dominates the practice of thinking philosophically: it’s the end of philosophy, isn’t it? But my teachers were different, and I developed my own pedagogics on very different premises that take respectful distance from that scholastic, canonical pressure. The constant fact of the radical pedagogies, apart from upholding the passion for ideas, is a critical engagement with the history of philosophy, but in a nondogmatic and antiauthoritarian manner. In fact, there is no such thing as the history of philosophy; there are only multiple narratives, some of which get territorialized as dominant accounts. There are many authors, but they are not “sacred monsters”; you rather need to see them as a network of interlocutors. The history of philosophy is just a collection of texts, but they’re in dialogue with each other. That conviction was what took me from Jenny Lloyd’s classes in Canberra to the Sorbonne where I took a degree in—guess what?—the history of philosophy. And then I attended the public lectures of Foucault, who was already a demigod at the Collège de France, but also went to the splendid, but not academically accredited, classes of Deleuze, who taught alongside so many other intellectual giants (Lyotard, Serres, Cixous, etc.) at the radical University of Vincennes, which had no legal value as a credit-giving institution in France at the time. The constant factor for me was this engagement with a project whereby the history of philosophy is what you deal with in a cartographic manner because it explains how we got to where we are at now. But the point of retracing the itinerary is to illuminate the present and raise the pertinent power questions. What we had in my generation is the strength of numbers: we had each other. So, we developed an alternative pedagogy where we self-supervised and we advised each other, and we talked extensively about the effect of being exposed to these incredible teachers. And why were they teachers? Because they gave us a method, an approach, a road map. They gave us a way of doing things with and while thinking. They weren’t into

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pastoral care like Jenny Lloyd was in the British system, where you actually remember the names of the students and worry about their health. The French academic system at the Sorbonne at the time—I don’t think they’ve changed much—didn’t believe in this nurturing approach. It rather followed the French Republican elite tradition, which is competitive and spurs the students on by exposing their weaknesses and assuming that the best ones will learn to swim and the others are destined to sink. There is a bit of sadism involved in this approach, and Deleuze does comment on it in Anti-Oedipus. He connects the practice of belittling others to an authoritarian institutional system that is reiterating dominant values, in the academy as elsewhere. We students didn’t care much about the lack of attention, however, because we had each other and we were learning new ways of thinking and speaking about ideas. I think the [post-structuralists’] use of language as well as their immense erudition were inspirational, and in that way, they had a big pedagogical impact. They were meta-methodological. No one told us the direct answers to our many-layered questions. But they did show us how we should do things. In their conversation about intellectuals and power, Deleuze and Foucault even say it, that a thinker has to be the provider of toolboxes. And Deleuze provides conceptual schemes and then lets you solve your own problems, as you should. This is practical philosophy, in the problematic mode, and you are responsible for the questions you raise and the possible answers they may evoke. So [there was] freedom in this respect, with a bit of indifference in the French academic system. Then we had our own alternative collectives, groups, and communities and the great excitement of creating new structures, which, in the course of time and with the unfolding of our careers, became women’s studies, gender and gay studies, environmental and peace studies, and all of that. ADN:

You yourself have taught for many years at Utrecht University; you started your career at Reid Hall and the Columbia campus in Paris, and you taught again at Columbia University in New York recently. You also have an annual summer course that attracts students from all over the world. Could you talk a bit about how you conceptualize your own pedagogy? RB: Well, you can imagine how much time I have spent thinking about, if not about pedagogy as a meta-discourse, about the styles through which I can convey what I am trying to achieve both conceptually and institutionally. Almost all I have done has been about this. And I had the honor of becoming a professor very young to set up a radical curriculum in women’s studies, partly because of advanced government support for innovative teaching and partly due to the Dutch policy of repressive tolerance. The thinking goes: let’s take a 30-yearold, put her in charge of inventing a university program, the chances

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that she will fail anyway are very high, just so we can say that we’ve tried to get it done. But when I did succeed, the Dutch system proved to be supportive, reliable, and truly innovative. From the start of the institutional practice, the question is: how do we translate our ideas into teaching models? I am very interested in institutions. Women’s studies, gender, queer studies are crucial because we brought . . . into the curriculum progressive groups that went into the universities in an activist mod, as opposed to staying outside fighting the whole institution of patriarchy. Going into the institution was a very big choice for my generation. The long march through the institution was very real. . . . Choosing to go in was a political tactic that in the end was all about meta-methodology: How do we do this? How do we stay loyal to a tradition of radicalism while feeding the institutions and changing them from within if possible? And in the early days of women’s and gender studies, the students were women from the movement. . . . The interaction was very, very dialogical and quite intense. It really went through different phases in my career. The first PhDs I passed were women older than I who had been in the university since the 1970s. .  .  . Many of my early PhD students were important feminist figures that I supported so that they could qualify and go on, and we continued doing that . . . How do we strike a balance between narrating the history and political passions of a social movement and how do we formalize courses that do this? Again, this is both a tactical and a meta-methodological issue. The first textbooks that were made available to the generation of women’s studies pioneers were written in the USA and narrated a completely American story. One of the first things my colleagues and I did, within the European networks that we were setting up from scratch at the time, was to produce local teaching material. Great examples are the edited volume Thinking Differently and the teaching manuals book series, which were part of the official publications of the Athena network. This was the official women’s and gender studies European institutional network, which I co-founded and was the first director of. It was funded by the European Commissions for a decade, from the mid-1990s, and consolidated both a web of connections and a strongly situated political and academic agenda. I think the Athena publications are extraordinary, though they are “grey literature” that was never officially published. But there are about ten volumes of the annual publication of Athena where you really have voices from all over the EU stating their own perspectives and also the desire to practice feminism locally, although we have to keep on thinking globally. My desire to work toward a European perspective was and remains a priority. We cannot teach only with textbooks generated in L.A. It makes no sense. . . . This is not Euro-centrism, but a way of practicing

44 Bessie P. Dernikos et al. the politics of locations, that is to say an immanent and grounded way of approaching the issues. Look at the problems that we have here in Europe: we may not have police that are shooting down Black boys, but we do have governments that are putting up fences against citizens fleeing from countries that the USA and allies are bombing. It’s a different predicament. But we can’t address that if we’re using textbooks that are completely inadequate. . . . This is nomadic feminist theory at work, and it comes down to developing a counter-memory. The idea of bringing European feminists to confront their own backyard, that is to say Europe and confronting its specific problems, including Islamophobia and racism, is necessary, but also painful and exciting. It is especially acute for Eastern Europeans because they experienced a dramatic erasure of their historical memory post-1989 and the fall of Communism. It is as if a new uniformity has befallen us all, and we had to think along one unique gender, citizenship, and activism model made in the USA. Confronting all of that is an urgent task. .  .  . There is a disembeddedness characteristic of so much European feminism, a tendency to follow the English-speaking “travelling theories” that I find problematic. For me pedagogically, if we’re studying the politics of location, we need to look at our situation. Take the case of the Netherlands, for instance: neutral in the first World War, they industrialized really late, and the women went out to work later than other EU countries. The influence of Calvinism also played a role in what looks historically as a complex socioeconomic condition for Dutch women. They still have relatively low access to executive power, and I confront my students with it. The kind of feminism that exploded in the Netherlands in the 1970s focused on social freedom and sexual rights, not so much on the acquisition of power and social visibility. I think around 10 percent of Dutch professors are currently women. There was something in the papers recently: of the 350 top companies in the world, the CEOs that are women are 14. These are problematic figures, and nowadays many emancipation-oriented organizations are looking into them. But the official discourse is that Dutch women have achieved complete equality. A great deal of my philosophical work is to go beyond identity politics and look at broader issues—how we are constituted as subjects of knowledge, of values, and of freedom. We must resist the pull toward identity issues and turn identities into locations out of which we observe the world. We need to address the world, and starting from the specific perspective—LGBT, gay bourgeoisie, gay radical fringe, alternative cis-, and straight people—we need to reflect the diversity of our community. There is no such a thing as a gay anymore, not in our world: there are too many variations on that theme. You have to be a lot more specific in what that means and, from that difference, the multiplicity of differences, address the issues of the day. And the issue of the day is not identity

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politics. . . . We need to address basics: poverty, racism and anti-refugee movements, populism, access to technologies, wars, and the class stratification within what was the radical wing. I am very concerned about intergenerational justice within the feminist and LGBT+ community: I will have a state pension, whereas most younger people today will not. In order to address this imbalance, my partner and I created the ROSANNA Fund to give away our money after we die: it is a sort of wealth transfer toward a younger generation riddled with debts. But it also works in the other direction. If we feminists connected to the second wave are coherent about the institutional itinerary that we’re coming to, we have to admit that we are really beginning to age now. There are a couple of the historical feminists in Amsterdam who are in residential care homes with very, very minimal income, and they were heroines of the movement. Why don’t we follow the logic of this through and then continue the solidarity to the end? I think a lot about this and how to try to innovate on my role of tenured radical with a strong work ethic and sense of institutional responsibility while trying to age gracefully. My passion for critical pedagogy, for teaching differently, and for the transmission of counter memory translates also into the intergenerational responsibility about debt and wealth transfer. To get back to the question: how would I conceptualize the pedagogy? I’m very aware of what the aging process means. .  .  . It’s difficult to age in the institutions. They don’t really have options for aging radical women intellectuals, people who are in the university because of their love of ideas. They prefer managers and good fundraisers, of course. When I look over my shoulder, a lot of the women behind me, younger ones of course, have to fulfil those neoliberal requirements because otherwise they will not survive in the university. It means raising funds, doing all the correct institutional things, and then you love ideas and activism, but that has nothing to do with how you construct the career. It is like having a second life, which moreover today is mediated technologically through so many social networks that it takes over most of one’s social existence. I discussed this with Paul Gilroy—we have recently edited a book together—and we think we represent a model of intellectuality that today you can’t quite recommend to people because it is not sure that it would get you jobs. I say it with a lot of pain, both in terms of ourselves because it means that we are—what exactly? relics of the past?—but also in terms of what the university has become—that people who are actually devoted to critical thinking are considered a luxury or irrelevant. It’s deeply painful because that, for me, was what the university stood for and the way I was trained by my teachers. But being a pathological optimist, I hope that maybe this wave will pass and the idea of a teacher as critical guide will return. .  .  . In the

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East, in the Confucian system, the teacher is a lifelong mentor—which is something that the Chinese education system is keeping up. There is something in the East about the idea of an apprenticeship, to learn from the best, taking the time to be trained. The training is dealing with the whole person. You’re not just dealing with an exchange of information. The Internet can do that. The idea is to go on looking at the self-styling of an intellectual mode where the self is always relational. It is the coming together: your life project is your threshold of sustainability, how much intensity you can take, what your aspirations are, and how you’re going to earn your living, which is a major quest. An ongoing balancing act and the idea is to age not only gracefully but also relevantly—holding onto some basic intellectual line as the academic institutions both sideline you and enhance you. ADN:

You have argued that “teaching is the ideal way to transmit the feminist genealogical capital and to empower the critical independence of mind of younger generations” (Braidotti, 2014, p.  237). Could you talk a bit about the affective force of feminist pedagogies? RB: The affect is, I think, absolutely fundamental. I think people have described me as the passionate teacher. I think it is an absolute passion for social justice, particularly feminist social justice, but also a passion for ideas, for reading, and for understanding the “felicity of expression” that Virginia Woolf talks about—a hunger for knowledge that you must recognize. That’s why we’re in this trade. I’ve talked with a lot of friends who went into business, and top businesspeople have it too. They read extensively and are knowledge-driven. In cognitive capitalism, there’s not a lot of difference between professors and leading figures in the corporate sector, particularly in manufacturing ITs, but even in finance: you have to know up-and-down values. The major dividing line is the profit motive: we university people are gratuitous knowledge producers, whereas the corporate sector cannot afford that. The Financial Times, for instance, reads political events in terms of their impact on the flow of capital and then attaches that flow to ideas or values, producing a fascinating grid to interpret social and political events. The fluctuations of certain currencies are indicators of the risks or opportunities afforded by certain political candidates or intellectual values. It is almost an illustration of the flows of codification, as described in Anti-Oedipus chapters one and two. It makes the semiotic system based on linguistic signs quite marginal. All of this is to say, in cognitive capitalism, knowledge is power, and the desire for profit is a deep affect. What this affectivity comes down to is the passion for understanding what’s happening to us. It’s a passion for the present—a passion for being in the here-and-now. By reading Spinoza, it becomes more and more primary that we have to get this right.

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The other major affect for me is the anger of social movements like feminism: the anger, the frustration of knowing that after all of this activism, a woman is still raped in the world every three minutes. There was a lecture at the symposium yesterday about the problems of women refugees that arrive in Lampedusa or Lesbos pregnant. And I was expecting the rest of the sentence, but the rest of the sentence didn’t come. Why are those women pregnant? Because they’ve been raped from the moment they embarked on their migration journey. The rape part was not talked about . . . A great deal of radical pedagogies speak about the indignation and the rage and how to transform them into productive driving forces. Here the leading figures are Paulo Freire, Gayatri Spivak, and bell hooks. There you really need the postcolonial and anti-racist thinkers. Nelson Mandela coming out of jail in 1989 and saying that he will not return the violence, and that liberation means you have to transcend. The transcending of negativity again, for me, [is] an ethics of affirmation. The Braidotti way is the feminist, anti-racist, affirmative route. And of course it’s an acknowledgement of vulnerability, not a denial of vulnerability, but we rework it in the mode of not sinking into melancholia and not returning to violence, but rather attempting the transcendence of that. And the key value, I would almost call it loyalty in the sense of thinking back through the women. This is important to me. Virginia Woolf said in her essay “Killing the Angel in the House,” “thinking back through our mothers.” Thinking back. . . . Not forgetting the voices of so many of these women that are almost inevitably condemned to oblivion. . . . So loyalty, memory, thinking back, forgetting to forget, constant consciousness raising, and burying our literal and symbolic dead. . . . I worry about so many feminist figures from the different European countries, with their respective languages and traditions—unknown to the Englishspeaking public. In this global era, they run the risk of being forgotten unless we write them back into the collective memory. I am thinking of figures like Françoise Collin—about whom I wrote in the journal Signs. She produced a momentous corpus in French but was a candidate for oblivion, being Belgian. Recently the Italian feminist Lonzi sisters were written about in English journals, but there are so many of these intellectual women scattered across the multiple feminist political cultures of this continent—how to do justice to them all?. . . . But I would like to write about at least one of those for every country in Europe—particularly the radical ones. Otherwise, these women are going to disappear from our collective memory. Burying our dead in a place where they will be remembered. . . . There must have been women who did anti-Fascist work in the war who practiced this politicized version of pietas. I am thinking of the Communist heroines, now despised and surely poor, surviving somewhere if they’re still alive at all. I need to stress again the European perspective here. Part

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of the problem of the oblivion of these women is that they didn’t write in English. So the polylingualism of Europe and of its great feminist figures is a drawback, but I would love for them not to be forgotten. That’s a very powerful affect for me, and it connects to many things: solidarity with the young, but also loyalty and respect for the older generation . . . So those are the pillars. The passion for the ideas of the present, the transformation of anger and indignation, and then the loyalty, the memory, and the pietas for so many who just did not make it, or they wrote fabulous stuff that was in Greek and Swedish, and nobody ever bothered to translate it. . . . Thinking through our mothers and a pietas, feminist pietas. These are in essence very humanistic and humane values, I am proud to say. The idea that a posthumanist is somebody who doesn’t care for humanity is nonsense. I don’t care for the hegemony of a certain universalist idea of “Man,” but care, pietas, dignity, and enormous responsibility for the future, for the next generation, these are fundamental values. They make up the core of my ethics of affirmation but are also the fundamental values of socialism. Compassion, solidarity, responsibility. By family tradition, I am a pure product of Italian anti-Fascist socialism through my grandfather and my father: those were the values that we learned to cultivate. That describes part of the affective force and the multiple pillars that uphold it. . . . And then of course there is Eros: I could talk about falling in love with a woman, but I’ve also loved many men. So I think Eros doesn’t really ask for the gender, and that fluidity makes the identity politics a little bit silly. You really do not fall in love with a gender. There is a complex singularity there, a bundle of intensity staring at you. And there are not many people one loves, retrospectively, and they are lifelong. They are the people that manage to access you across the distance of space and time. They just come in, and it’s like they were there all the time. And it’s one of the most wonderful things. I’m pathologically loyal to friends and lovers, but at times it’s been difficult because I’ve lived in so many different places, though Utrecht has been my home for almost 30 years. So what’s happening now is that I just spend a lot of time catching planes to funerals, but also to birthday parties, to births of children, etc. The nomadism comes a bit at a cost now, and it is hard to keep it all together. But honoring the connections whether they are intellectual or amorous, libidinal, or just affective. You honor the bond because life is about that. There’s nothing else. And there are very, very few of those, and I treasure them. So speaking of the recrudescence of humanist values, as a teacher specifically in the Humanities, what role do you see affects and affect theories in restructuring and perhaps moving the Humanities or the ways we teach humanities?

ADN:

Passion, Pedagogy, and Pietas RB:

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The classical humanist ideal is at the core of the institutional practice of the Humanities, but we, the radically-motivated, politically-driven critical theorists challenge this assumption. We are in the university because we believe that it can teach us critical citizenship through free democratic thinking, which is perfectly within the boundaries of Humanism. But this is, in some ways, only the beginning: so much more is going on today, also because of digital mediation. The reality is that we are shaping people’s affectivities, the students’ imagination as well as their reason, in ways that go behind the implementation of a set of normative values. Critical thinking training makes the students aware of their intensity, which I also define as potentia or the contradictions of their emotional as well as intellectual engagement in the process of learning, in an age where everything is quantified and made tradable immediately on the Internet. You can put any twitch of your emotional life online and get 7,000 responses. The timing of this technological mediation can be absolutely speed of light, whereas affective processes are usually slow processes of sedimentation, revisions, and revisitations. . . . It’s multiple revisitations to try to get a sense of what you’re all about. If we are doing that, then affect is central to the educational process—education being that which gives you the means of self-styling your intensity, your potentia.

The best thing I can do is to give my students, when they’re still very young, a sense of how intensity-driven critical theory can be developed and how it can help them to grow. It may not be immediately quantifiable in job openings: by the time they’re professionals, they may find out that this model of critical intellectuality—even if they are extraordinarily lucky or brilliant—is not going to function smoothly in neoliberalism. . . . Cognitive capitalism respects knowledge, provided it is tradable. Not-forprofit knowledge is a sin against the competitive greed of advanced capitalism. And there have been too many cases where I witness the damages that this competitive spirit inflicts upon the young. And my message has always been Affect Theory 101: Function in a group, function in a pack, make an assemblage. Function in a herd. Run with the she-wolves. Do not imagine for a minute that you can take on this system alone. You may emerge as the leader of the pack, but it’s a long way to go. .  .  . It may be that minimal aggregation, an aggregation affect. Function in packs. Don’t be so individualistic because even a Facebook page is a quantification of one. It’s me multiplied by total numbers of friends, “I like.” It’s not a collectivity in the Deleuzian sense. It’s not a qualitative transversal relationality, but rather just me/myself/ and I multiplied. We need critical Facebook thinking here, and that is hard work: you may be able to think Facebook assemblages, but then you must do that work. Think in a situated manner, starting from the

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mediated way you live. Then conceptualize your relations as aggregates of affective transversal units, of connections that happen to be carried by Internet. Why not? You can be a virtual pack, but that’s probably as far as it can go. What is crucial is to take a stand completely against the quantified self and its multiple forms of micromanagement and to adopt instead a qualitative approach. The point is learning to think differently about ourselves and resist both the quantification of the data-driven system and its lethal competitiveness. This all goes to show that affect theory can be very central. Of course, who does this very well is the corporate world, with its successful emphasis on sustainability and resilience, but also mindfulness and with empathy. Think of a crucial figure like Arianna Huffington, who just dropped her blog to set up the Institute for Global Wellbeing, which is about getting enough sleep and basically having a pre-industrial lifestyle with all the benefits of industrial culture. A certain type of affect theory is completely territorialized as micromanagement of optimism, positivity, and health by very advanced capitalism while people are drowning in debts and the state of public health, epidemics included, is deteriorating. It’s completely out of balance. If the tendency is to corporatize everything, then resistance means that we need to generate some interesting countermovement. I’m a bit scared about the affects because they are complex. If we take, for example, passion for ideas, intergenerational solidarity, loyalty to the past, and the management of anger, it’s a lot to ask of people who, in this phase of advanced capitalism, already have to cope with keeping up their digitally mediated online life. . . . It takes a lot of time, and the multiple temporalities are crucial. We need to practice with different time zones. I have a different conception of my time. That there are moments where you just empty out and maybe go for a walk, thinking with your feet. It’s that model that you think with the body and merge with the fluidity of movement. High-quality time. But then, and even in the gym, I see people that are quantifying themselves with their Fitbits data collection. . . . You’re there, and you’re still not there. . . . They are basically medical laboratories you put on your wrist, and they calculate your heartbeat. The consumption of calories. How much you move. How many hours you slept. They run your life. . . . I would love a generational assessment of how affectivity gets enhanced and transformed through mediation and is not narcissistic, but it is actually relational with nonhuman relations built into the picture. The way national health is going, we’re going to have to self-medicate through massive data collection. Clearly the dismantling of national health and the privatization of health [promote] the quantified self. And with insurance companies pitching in, giving you discounts if you self-quantify, that’s happening across the board. I would love an analysis that would at least contextualize contemporary subjectivity in that sense. Why it is the young ones that do this? Very few of the oldies do it because then it gets you closer to the notion of physical

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failure and death. I do not mind the thought of death, of course, but I’m a philosopher. I live with that. . . . But I wonder about the affective economy involved in such high levels of mediation of one’s stamina and sustainability. ADN:

In relation to notions of stamina and sustainability, your work has set forth a politics of affirmation. How do you theorize hope in a neoliberal educational landscape swamped by what we might call “sad passions” and by the opposite tendency to stress the need to think positively, be healthy, happy, and fit? RB: I think it is in Transpositions where I quote Ernst Bloch, saying hope is the modernist term because it is confident that tomorrow has to come, so it believes in the future and in progress. It’s a very classical passion. But it is a concept that I do embrace and try to redefine as a shared positivity—that we have to work to construct social horizons of hope. Now, that’s very complicated because hope is not shallow optimism. Recently, the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, issued through his secretary for education an open letter to the Dutch academic community. And the open letter was meant as an antidote and as a response to the populists, to Wilders, who are very pessimistic and nihilistic, and they keep saying, like Donald Trump, We’re in a mess! The sky is falling! Look at us! Terrible! What a loser! Sad! If the populist opposition is in an apocalyptic mood, the decent liberal, including the academic community, must cultivate and teach optimism. . . . Teach optimism. Now I’m somebody who teaches hope, and I thought, how does my affirmative hope differ from their corporate optimism?. . . . You can see how contiguous, how next to each other cognitive capitalism and critical theory are running. We’re really dancing a tango together. In some ways, hope is an antidote to the nihilism of the populists, which is completely without justification, often just a rhetorical gesture, like the classical text The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler. The twentieth-century Fascists always ran that apocalyptic refrain. But in the fight against the nihilism, the coercive optimism of cognitive capitalism is both escapist and futile. Since the punk generation of the late 1970s, the notion of “no future” has gained serious political credential as an activist position. What I object to is to conflate optimism with silencing the opposition— the stress on asking the intellectual class to stop being critics of the West—basically because our system is the best of all possible worlds. And politicians do so in the frame of the War on Terror, which is a civilizational struggle. What I would oppose to all that is hope as affirmative praxis. It’s something that we construct, and to construct it, we have to take on the negativity of the time and rework it together into a positive frame. We have

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to. We must acknowledge what doesn’t work in our social system, and we do that by siding with the people who are the losers of globalization, the victims of the digital divide, the refugees. We have to take on la misère du monde, as Bourdieu put it, and take in the negativity so as to fight for social justice. The acknowledgement of vulnerability is an essential component of the whole process. Spinoza starts from that, from the social turmoil and personal pain of witnessing the end of the Dutch republic. He is thinking through the ruins and the ashes of a world that is changing, exactly like we are. Any critical moment has to have that twist of pain. There is no other critique other than taking in the world, and if you’re taking in the world, you’re taking in the pain of the world. You’re taking the misery, the injustices, the missing people. That’s what we’ve done all our life. It’s not just solidarity. It’s a deep, visceral sense of partaking in it. Beauvoir, thinking about rape and social injustice, postulated the key formula of feminist solidarity: If it can happen to one of us, it can happen to anyone of us. It’s a sense that you can’t build walls to keep out such degrees of injustice. It’s just not possible. From there, the whole point of critical theory is to generate action. It is about putting the “active” back into activism. Even the party of vulnerability—Gilroy, Critchley, and Butler—would agree with this: the point is to overturn this pain into something that is action. Many different forms of action can ensue: in the case of the vulnerability theorists, action consists in melancholia. This entails actually beholding the misery, caring for it, honoring it, talking about it, giving it a shape, and keeping its memory alive through time. In my affirmative thought, whether in a Nietzschean mode or Deleuzian mode, or my nomadic feminism, the point is to transform it into something that fuels affirmative ethics, affirmative action. Extracting knowledge from pain, extracting projects from anger, transforming the howling, screaming passions into manageable, targeted projects that actually can modify and interrupt the system, that can actually make a difference, cognitively, emotionally, and ethically. That’s the praxis. It constructs hope in the sense that it gives you a horizon of action, but it also constructs a people. It puts together a group, a community, a cluster, a set, a plateau of singularities that want this and work for it and recognize each other in it and can act together for a while. It’s not a party forever, but it is a people, a transversal subject. [It is] nomadically targeted on an action, and it can actually last a lifetime, but it can also last the time of the occupation of Zuccotti Park. It’s that composition of a people, and you can belong to multiple peoples at the same time: nomadic subjects. The point of teaching critical theory is to inspire affective, ethical praxis. There has to be something that pulls you to this, and what pulls me at the moment is indeed the decolonization of the university, the posthuman turn, not only in the sense of accepting the relationship to the human and thereby rejecting anthropocentrism, but also of defeating the ethnocentric elements of Humanism. Humanism is too often a pretext for Eurocentrism. We have to stop this and understand that the South of

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the world is not looking to us for solutions. Do we ever think of learning from the South? Actually learning Indigenous epistemology and other local knowledge systems is unimaginable for a European university, at least outside the anthropology departments. .  .  . Academic institutions that have been there for hundreds of years have a strong cultural superego and are not going to revise the basic premises of their intellectual mission. Decolonizing the university is absolutely the idea, but it doesn’t mean that we have to Africanize it, as Mbembe put it. It means that we have to make it open, nomadic, and relational: understanding that Europe is one of the centers, but by far not the only one, and it has to struggle to remain relevant. Learning to look at yourself as other is a useful exercise, and it does not mean you are letting go of our tradition. Rather it’s sort of opening up to different genealogies and countermemories and acknowledging that there is thinking and knowledge production everywhere: in cognitive capitalism, on the Net, in the South of the world, and in smart objects. Foucault argued that knowledge is being produced everywhere. Some of it is recognized as science, but by whom and where? The political economy of that needs to be reviewed and to be assessed and not assume that it has immediate universalist value because it comes from one of the top 50 universities in the world. . . I have argued that hope is an affirmative praxis and that it posits an ethics and politics that produce actions and projects. . . . But projects require a people that carry them, that desire them, in the sense of aspiring to actualize it. And it can be a simple thing—constructing a curriculum, bringing out an aspect of the problem, or addressing the raping of refugees—or it can be the project of a lifetime. . . . You must not confuse the transformation of the negative into affirmation with indifference to pain; it is quite the contrary. . . . With affirmative ethics, you just stand witness to suffering onto death. But the point of affirmative ethics is to transform the pain by learning to live with death. Hope is connected to making friends with death. What we have discussed raises big questions. Pedagogy is a passion for transmission, I think. A reliance on potentia, memory, and affirmation is crucial. I stressed the importance of a great sense of respect for and solidarity with the young ones, but also pietas for the older ones. Feeling accountable for situations and events that we are not directly responsible for is typical of my generation. Maybe we could have done better, particularly on the radical wing when we broke so many rules. The legacy of our deeds is in your hands now. It’s for you to assess and carry on.

Reference Braidotti, R. (2014). The untimely. In B. Blaagaard and I. van der Tuin (Eds.), The subject of Rosi Braidotti: Politics and concepts (pp.  227–250). London and New York: Bloomsbury.

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The Ethics and Politics of Traumatic Shame Pedagogical Insights Michalinos Zembylas

Disgrace, a novel by South African writer J. M. Coetzee, is the story of David Lurie, a White Cape Town professor of Modern Languages who has an affair with a Black student that ends with a sexual harassment charge, an internal hearing, public scandal, and his resignation upon refusing to apologize. The novel takes place in the post-apartheid setting and was written during the highly mediatized proceedings of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, so it resonates with the national public spectacle of shame, confession, and forgiveness (Kossew, 2003). Toward the end of the novel, Coetzee has his protagonist visiting his pregnant daughter Lucy, who awaits the birth of a child conceived during a violent rape by two Black men. Lurie is certain that Petrus, Lucy’s neighbor, is behind the attack because he wants to take over the land. Yet Lucy agrees to marry Petrus and share her land with him in exchange for his protection. Lurie is outraged by Lucy’s decision and cannot understand her refusal to report the rape or to leave her land. Lurie insists that if Lucy accepts Petrus’ offer, she would “humble herself in front of history” and would lose all dignity and be unable to live with herself (Coetzee, 1999, p. 160). Lucy agrees that it is shameful and humiliating, yet she responds, “But perhaps that is a good point to start from again . . . To start at ground level. With nothing. Not with nothing but. With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity” (pp. 204–205). In her view, to be reduced to nothing and to start all over again is the price for the past and future. Lucy’s “nothing” is, in my view, the ultimate ground for rethinking shame as ethical and political affect because it suggests that we are always bound to an ethical orientation and relationality to the other that is inescapable; part of this ethical orientation and relationality is achieved through the unquestioning acceptance of shame. Shame, which is experienced on multiple levels and by several individuals in this novel—e.g., the loss of possessions; the loss of dignity and self-esteem—is tied to unlimited responsibility for the other (Boehmer, 2002; Marais, 2000b). The idea of shame as an affect that has important ethical and political implications articulates “the far more painful process of enduring rather

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than transcending the degraded present” (Boehmer, 2002, p. 343, added emphasis) since the possibility of “adequately saying sorry” (p. 343) to overcome shame does not exist. This position implies accepting that “perpetrators” and “victims” (not as fixed historical identities, but as shifting and very often interchangeable identities) are bound together in what Woodward (2000) articulates as traumatic shame. Traumatic shame is the “shame that cannot be transformed into knowledge” (p. 213) because it is “the sign of a catastrophic psychic wound and a devastating rupture of the social bond” (p. 236). Through such moments of disruption and failure though, a space opens up for an alternative ethical life that invites a starting point for a different relationality with others (O’ Donnell, 2017). In this chapter, I explore the idea of traumatic shame and its multiple manifestations and discuss possible openings for individual and social transformation that create spaces for shame to operate pedagogically. I have been drawn to this topic during my career because I have noticed the ever-presence of traumatic shame not only in the context of South Africa, which I have visited regularly for more than a decade now, but also in my own backyard, so to speak—Cyprus, the country where I was born and lived for most of my life, a country that is still ethnically divided and whose communities carry the burden of trauma from past violence. As there are multiple shames in different contexts, then there are also different pedagogies of shame that aim at rehabilitating the political and ethical value of shame—not by universalizing trauma, but rather by attending to the specifics of racialized, ethnicized, and/or gendered violence. Hence, by pedagogies of shame, I refer to pedagogies that become attuned to situated contexts without universalizing shame. Pedagogies of shame are theoretically inspired by critical pedagogies understood here as any oppositional pedagogies promoting educational experiences that are transformative, empowering, and transgressive (Giroux, 2004; Kincheloe, 2005; McLaren, 2003). I argue that traumatic shame raises provocative issues about the transformative possibilities that can be made available in situations in which shame forces people to witness the limits, or even dissolution, of human subjectivity (Guenther, 2011, 2012).1 For example, it is possible that recognition of shame for the injustices committed against others may work to reconcile a nation to itself by coming to terms with its own past (Ahmed, 2004). Or in providing opportunities for a nation to “feel bad” about its past wrongdoings, shame may allow a nation to consider how people change as a result of critical self-reflection (Probyn, 2000, 2005). At the same time, there are also challenging questions that emerge from pondering the pedagogical possibilities of traumatic shame, such as: How can spaces for witnessing traumatic shame be created in (and outside of) schools? Is the teacher/curriculum developer positioned as having the primary agency in producing such spaces? What are some

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possible risks or dangers in pedagogical attempts to create such spaces? Although these questions are difficult to address in the space of a chapter, my analysis will aim at highlighting two important insights: first, traumatic shame may evoke individually and socially transformative possibilities around which both those shaming and those being-shamed (again these are not essentialist categories) might meet; and second, traumatic shame can constitute a valuable point of departure for pedagogical openings that cultivate self-criticism, self-reflection, and ethical, political, and educational deliberation.

Affect Theory and Shame Emerging in the second half of the twentieth century, affect theory has various manifestations and multiple disciplinary expressions from psychology and philosophy to feminism, cultural studies, and postcolonialism (see Gregg and Seigworth, 2010). In general, scholarship on the affective turn (e.g., Bennett, 2005; Clough, 2007; Cvetkovich, 2012; Gandhi, 2006; Sedgwick-Kosofsky, 2003) refutes hard distinctions between the world “out there” (external) and the body (internal), acknowledging the entanglement between the social and the biological (and psychological). As the groundbreaking work of Silvan Tomkins (1995a, 1995b) on affect and shame shows, shame is a bodily affect that is profoundly social. According to Tomkins (1995b), shame is “an affect of indignity, of defeat, of transgression, and of alienation” (p. 133). Tomkins locates shame at the core of the self because of its capacity to indicate injury of the self, yet the self does not exist in isolation, as shame is felt in the presence of a real or imagined other. As Tomkins emphasizes, shame operates only when there is interest involved (Sedgwick-Kosofsky and Sedgwick, 1995). Drawing on Tomkins’ link between shame and interest, Probyn (2000, 2005) and Sedgwick-Kosofsky (2003) have furthered theorization on affect and shame. They argue that shame represents lines of connection between people and functions as amplification—that is, shame makes us care about things. If we feel shame, as Ahmed (2004) asserts too, we feel it because we have failed to approximate a social and political ideal about the Other; thus shame is the loss of indifference. Consequently, it may be argued that shame sensitizes us to a vast variety of actions— actions that have either brought shame upon us or caused others shame. But shame does more than sensitizing us; it also proposes a sensibility at once practical and ethical because the reaction to one’s own shame can bring a sort of self-transformation (Redding, 1999). As Probyn (2005) writes, “[S]hame makes us question what we are feeling, the nature of the loss of interest, and fundamentally . . . who we are, as a reevaluation of the self” (p. 64). Hence, it can be argued that shame is important “to discussions and debates about how to deal with pasts that could be called shameful; and

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to visions of life curtailed by the idea that there is something intrinsically wrong with feeling shame” (Probyn, 2005, p. xiii). Such a view of shame makes possible a space of solidarity that transcends feelings of resentment and anger invested in past collective histories of trauma and violence. It may be said that a political and ethical account that subverts the notion that shame is deeply shameful has important implications for the kinds of solidarities that may eventually be built. As such, shame interrupts traditional identifications (e.g., with a nation, a religion) and offers ethical and political leverage, “one that . . . has its own, powerfully productive and powerfully metamorphic possibilities” (Sedgwick-Kosofsky, 2003, p.  65). As Sedgwick suggests, a move away from the notion of shame as disapproval can offer new ways of avoiding the fixation on the dichotomy between shame-as-negative and pride-as-positive—that is, shame does not rest on an essentialist but rather a constructive conception that is also constitutive of a kind of ethical and political subjectivity. In contemporary discussions on shame in various disciplines, several scholars suggest that shame works to reform ethical and political spaces (e.g., Ahmed, 2004; Bewes, 2011; Hutchinson, 2008; Leys, 2007; Munt, 2008; Tarnopolsky, 2010). For example, Probyn (2000) writes about white shame and the prospects of reconciliation with Aborigines in Australia, being ashamed is painful, and an easy way out is to disengage from the affect, to distance oneself from the object of shame, to fall back on established knowledge. . . . In this way, one way out of the present shameful conundrum is to construct Reconciliation as about two massive and knowable blocks: whites and blacks, and worse, that the whites are doing something for blacks. Here shame either obscures relations of power or as a free floating sentiment can all too easily dissipate the presumably sincere feelings of its speakers. (p. 56) In the above example, it is suggested that the refusal of any shame—for instance, the shame of a nation’s past wrongdoings and the suffering of the other—is also a refusal to make shame ours in the frst place, as ethical and political forces of transformation (Fortier, 2005). As Probyn (2000) reminds us though, Tomkins has taught us that any account of shame that fails to confront the problem of human suffering is incomplete and that “the nature of the experience of shame guarantees a perpetual sensitivity to any violation of the dignity of man” (Tomkins, 1995b, p. 136). Probyn adds that “[t]he trick then is how to direct the intensity of shame towards constructing conditions for dignity” (2000, p. 57). In other words, a refusal to consider that shame and dignity can be intertwined as a result of admitting past wrongdoings and acknowledging the commonalities between us and others prevents a unique opportunity

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for creating new social and political alliances (Fortier, 2005). Invested in the process of eradicating shame from the collective body is a process of preserving the polarities between “us” and “others.” The misrecognition of the terrain of the political and social as one that sets clear boundaries between shame and pride fails to do justice to the complexities of the different ways that shame may work. On the contrary, the recognition of the possibilities opened up by shame to construct conditions of dignity may enable “a political vision of difference that might resist both binary homogenization and infinitizing trivialization” (Sedgwick-Kosofsky and Frank, 1995, p. 15). Against a model that theorizes shame as “negative” or shame as merely a bodily feeling in isolation, my point of departure is “in rethinking shame in its differently inhabited, corporeal and historical manifestations” (Probyn, 2000, p.  57). My ultimate focus in this chapter on traumatic shame then raises questions about the circumstances under which different manifestations of traumatic shame can have transformational power. It is important to remember, as Woodward (2000) points out, that “to argue that the affect of shame is—or can be—transformational is misleading. It is not the affect itself—or by itself—that carries the potential for transformation, although it may serve as the catalyst for it” (p. 227). Rather, it is the ways through which we rethink shame, ethically and politically, that create openings for transformation. As I discuss next in my analysis of Disgrace, we can see that not all shame can be “transformational,” yet some varieties of shame may open such possibilities.

The Ethics and Politics of Shame and Redemption in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace2 At the outset of Disgrace, the protagonist, Professor Lurie, is depicted as a self-absorbed womanizer who routinely reduces women to objects for the purpose of gratifying his desires. His lack of concern for others and especially for the harassed Black student is evident in his defense of his violation of this student, Melanie Isaacs, in terms of the “rights of desire” (Coetzee, 1999, p. 89). Lurie is convinced that he is free to realize every desire even if this means violating others’ rights. Although he pleads guilty before the university committee, Lurie refuses to confess and provide “a statement .  .  . from his heart” (p. 54), in a “spirit of repentance” (p. 58). He justifies his refusal with a rationalized explanation that reveals his economic understanding of justice and punishment: “I won’t do it. I appeared before an officially constituted tribunal, before a branch of the law. Before that secular tribunal I pleaded guilty, a secular plea. That plea should suffice. Repentance belongs to another world, to another universe of discourse” (p. 58). After he loses his job, Lurie leaves Cape Town in disgrace and visits his somewhat estranged daughter, Lucy, who is homesteading in the country.

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There, Lurie is trying to rebuild his relationship with her while working at the local animal clinic helping Bev Shaw to put down stray dogs. His stay at Lucy’s farm is shattered by a brutal attack by two Black men and a boy. The dogs are shot, Lurie is locked in the bathroom, his head is set on fire after a bottle of spirits is poured onto it, and Lucy is raped in her bedroom. Although Lurie thinks that Petrus, Lucy’s neighbor whom she hires to look after the dogs, is behind the attack because he wants to take over the land, Lucy agrees to marry Petrus in exchange for his protection. The novel ends with the disgraced former academic fully absorbed in his work at the animal clinic: comforting the dogs, stroking and speaking to them in their final minutes, and giving them “what he no longer has difficulty in calling by its proper name: love” (Coetzee, 1999, p.  219). There is a crippled dog of which he is particularly fond, but inevitably carries into Bev’s clinic for the final, fatal injection. The last words of the novel sharply contrast with the first part of the novel: “‘I thought you would save him for another week’ says Bev Shaw. ‘Are you giving him up?’ ‘Yes, I am giving him up’” (p. 220). Lurie’s act of giving up the dog is symbolic of the relinquishment of desire. The man who once said that he had been “possessed” by Eros and desire now assumes responsibility for the Other—who is not human but the “wholly other,” as Spivak (1991) described it, in this case, the extreme alterity of the stray dog (Boehmer, 2002). By relinquishing his care of the lame dog, sacrificing the emotional investment he has made in it, Lurie finds some reconciliation with himself. As Boehmer writes: “The self that has inflicted suffering is broken down by a partially unintended participation in suffering, and also by silently, bodily, bearing witness to” (p. 343). While never the portrait of morality, Lurie does, by the end, recognize that others experience suffering—a shift from his previous narcissism to a nascent awareness of others (Segall, 2005). The important transformation of (shameful) self and the recognition of the Other’s suffering constitute important points for further analysis of the ethics and politics of shame and suffering in this novel. As Marais (2000a) has suggested, the dominant theme in Coetzee’s Disgrace is the tension between desire and responsibility. This tension opens the way for an engagement with history and otherness that is grounded in the ability to be affected by the Other. Most importantly, in my view, the tension between desire and responsibility is indicative of the interruption of the political by the ethical; this is precisely where traumatic shame emerges as an ethics and politics of alterity. Coetzee intertwines ethical issues on shame, guilt, repentance, victimhood, responsibility, and redemption, set against the political context of South Africa’s social transformation (Nagy, 2004). But in a Levinasian spirit, he attempts to establish a relation with the Other as outside history and thus suggests that ethics comes before politics. The story is not grounded in the political transformation of South Africa but in the transformation from selfishness to radical

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alterity and the responsibility toward the Other. What Levinas (1969, 1985) means by the idea of radical and infinite responsibility for the Other is that responsibility cannot be included in a system of totality; it cannot be constrained within the boundaries of a particular concept. This is what Levinas calls the Other. The Other is infinitely beyond my grasp and slips away whenever I try to reduce it to a concept in an attempt to master or capture it. Thus, our responsibility to the Other is infinite, precisely because our learning from the Other has no limits. It is interesting to observe, for example, that after the rape, Lurie claims that he is too old to change, repeating this claim on a number of occasions; yet he does change in the course of the novel, a change that involves learning to become responsible toward the Other. He engages in charity work at the animal clinic, putting down uncared for animals—a voluntary task he describes as making “reparation for past misdeeds” (Coetzee, 1999, p.  77). Marais (2000a) sees in Lurie’s offer for death of the dog that he expresses some fondness for, “the transformation of his desire for the Other into self-substituting responsibility” (p. 178). As Coetzee writes: “he [Lurie] is sensible of a generous affection streaming out toward him from the dog. Arbitrarily, unconditionally, he has been adopted; the dog would die for him, he knows” (1999, p.  215). It is significant to acknowledge that after Lucy’s rape, Lurie begins to admit that “There may be things to learn” (p.  218). When imagining that he will become a grandfather—Lucy decides to keep the baby after being raped—Lurie realizes “he lacks the virtues of the old: equanimity, kindliness, patience. But perhaps these virtues will come as other virtues go: the virtue of passion, for instance” (p. 218). This change in Lurie’s self-image, from the seducer to that of a grandfather, is an indication of a series of small transformations that make him realize “that life is precious” (p. 162) and that tragedy needs to be mourned (p. 178). In this sense, rethinking shame in its differently inhabited, corporeal, and historical manifestations, as Probyn (2000) suggests, does create openings for moments of possible transformation—e.g., some sort of reconciliation— “without losing sight of the conditions which have produced their specific feeling and modality” (p. 57). To return to the incident described at the beginning of this chapter and Lucy’s response that she would start with “nothing,” including no dignity, Spivak (2002) contends that this word does not denote an acceptance of rape but rather a refusal to be measured by the old epistemological value system of “knowing the Other.” Drawing from Levinas and Derrida on the discontinuities between the ethical and the epistemological, Spivak suggests that literature stages powerful scenes of teaching that show us practically these discontinuities. For example, Lucy’s “nothing” is indicative of the ethical and political implications of traumatic shame through its unquestioning acceptance. Through Lucy’s stance and Lurie’s gradual transformation, the reader is offered an alternative perspective—that is,

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the idea of abandoning fixation on one category and constructing a position “that would allow the self to be within the world while viewing it from nowhere in it. . . . Only then would history stop speaking through the self in its predetermined relations with other beings” (Marais, 2006, pp. 81–82). Disgrace shows that transformation and reconciliation take place within a context in which sufferers patiently endure pain and are ethically generous in wanting to build an inclusive society. In refusing to acknowledge the extent of past injustice and one’s complicities within colonialism, racism, and state violence, subsequent ethical and political responsibilities are locked into static identities of oppressor and victim, repentant and forgiver; such moralizing approaches are clearly rejected by the novel, which sends the message that transformation can only work if one generously gives himself to the Other. This ethics of otherness constitutes an engagement with history that aims to interrupt all totalities (including political ones) through one’s infinite responsibility to the Other (Marais, 2000a). The five-volume final report of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission as well as the academic scholarship and the numerous literary and artistic works produced in the post-apartheid period include striking examples of shame and forgiveness both by White and Black South Africans in their struggles to bear witness to the trauma and suffering engendered by apartheid in South Africa. These examples invent new forms of mourning and politically viable communities in South Africa (Durrant, 1999, 2004, 2005) that are not locked into historicism’s desire to hold on to an essentialist version of the past, but rather offer openings for the hard, ongoing business left by shame and suffering.

Pedagogical Insights What does Disgrace teach us about bearing witness to traumatic shame and suffering? And more importantly, how can these ideas be “translated” into pedagogical insights that address traumatic shame and one’s complicities with past shameful acts while avoiding a moralizing position of you should be ashamed! or provoking further shame? First of all, it is important to acknowledge that traumatic shame is not monolithic in this novel. We see the shame (or multiple shames) of David Lurie as a “disgraced” professor, White South African, and victim of violence as very different from the shame Lucy might experience after being raped and this as different from the shame Melanie may have experienced as both a Black South African during/after apartheid and as a student involved with a disgraced professor. A valuable first lesson then is to recognize that there are multiple shames, and therefore, there are multiple pedagogies of shame that need to remain attuned to situated contexts without universalizing shame. In other words, different contexts

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might offer different pedagogies of shame by paying attention to the complexities of shame and its manifestation in each instance. For example, the trajectories of Lucy’s traumatic experiences seem to teach us the value of resisting the process of verbalization that turns traumatic shame and suffering into another (digestible) story—namely, limiting traumatic shame to verbal expressions of (superficial) feelings that ignore power relations—and so nothing changes in the end. Rather, the inconsolable shame and suffering experienced by Lucy in Disgrace urge us to confront the indigestible materiality of traumatic shame and suffering (Durrant, 2004). This means that traumatic shame and suffering are endured without applying essentializing categories (e.g., Blacks/Whites; victims/perpetrators, etc.) that often perpetuate previous injustices and (mis)recognitions. The violated body of Lucy is not something that can be comprehended or “digested” in any way; it can only be made visible as endless suffering that could potentially create small openings for change. Thus a teleological account of redemption—that is often implicit in historicist narratives of oppression, colonization, and racism, implying that traumatic affects can eventually be transcended—is rejected. Disgrace tells us that there is no easy transcendence of oppression and suffering, just as it is not easy to overcome traumatic shame and the specifics of racialized and/or gendered violence. This idea does not reject the possibility of individual and social transformation, but rather shows that change cannot take place unless oppressive relations of power are challenged and subverted. A major contribution of Disgrace then is not to teach us about recovering a history of racial oppression through merely “representing” or “understanding” the manifestations of different shames; rather, what is needed is to make these different manifestations of shame the point of departure for a new level of ethical responsibility and political community. The theories of shame discussed earlier in the chapter help us identify not only the complexities in different manifestations of shame, but also the possibilities for productive engagement with shame. Tomkins reminds us of the materiality of shame in Lucy’s visceral experiences of rape and its aftermath; Probyn’s theorization highlights the ethical possibilities of shame bringing a sort of self-transformation, as seen in Lurie’s life trajectory throughout the novel; finally Woodward teaches us that it is not shame itself that carries the potential for transformation, but rather the different ways we are urged to reconsider shame that create transformative openings. I would argue then that traumatic shame can function pedagogically in productive ways, when we—educators, students, and laypersons—manage to engage in critical conversations that expose the complexities of shame and its transformative possibilities. For example, pedagogies of shame can be productive when they identify different manifestations of shame experienced by different individuals or groups without telling moralizing

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tales or claiming that there is (or should be) teleological transcendence of shame. Critical theories and pedagogies are valuable tools in theorizing and practicing pedagogies of shame in schools and the public, but pedagogies of shame take into consideration the specifics of racialized, ethnicized, and/or gendered violence within a particular context. In other words, different contexts offer different pedagogies of shame, but I would highlight two important aspects of such pedagogies that emerge from considering multiple shames in Disgrace. First, pedagogies of shame essentially ask participants (e.g., teachers and students) to engage in alternative ways of relating both to otherness and history—not in the sense of recovering history from a shameful past, representing the Other’s suffering, or even recovering from a shameful past, but rather in the insistence on remaining inconsolable before history, traumatic shame, and suffering. For example, Disgrace does not offer any consolation; as the different shameful and/or suffering bodies in the novel attempt to mourn their own loss, they open out onto a wider history of loss—that does not belong to them—that ungrounds them as individuals and has the potential to create new forms of community (Durrant, 2004). Pedagogical engagement with different manifestations of traumatic shame in the spirit of Disgrace then does not bound teachers and students in the recovery of any historical narrative that “explains” or “confesses” who the perpetrator is (or has always been). This sort of pedagogical engagement is not locked in self-absorbed narratives assuming that I could do things differently to avoid my shame or the Other’s suffering. Rather, traumatic shame, suffering, and mourning can become the springboard of solidarity with the inconsolable demand of the bereaved. Second, to engage in alternative ways of relating both to otherness and history, as noted above, it is important to create spaces for witnessing the multiple manifestations, tensions, and complexities of shame. Witnessing multiple shames involves recognizing shame, suffering, and mourning through an awareness of injustice. This entails refusing easy notions of catharsis and reconciliation, but rather acknowledging the hard, unfinished business left by unspeakable atrocities (Durrant, 2004). Against the tendency of fixating the self and others in the historical narratives of one social/racial/ethnic/cultural group against those of another, the process of inconsolable mourning involves a radically different invention of community, in that it binds not simply by appealing to sameness but through the attempt to inhabit difference (Durrant, 2005). For example, through reading novels, learning from real-life stories from those who suffer, and engaging with small everyday activisms, educators may create spaces for students to become witnesses of different manifestations of shame and inconsolable mourning and thus broaden the sense of commonality by appealing to the “shared fact of our embodiment and thus our mortality” (Durrant, 2005, p. 447). Needless to say, responsibility to the Other

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is an interruption and not a condition for political transformation; yet witnessing different manifestations of traumatic shame and inconsolable mourning offers the potential for a renewed form of relationality with/to the Other. Although there are numerous dangers, limitations, and obstacles, the teacher, in my view, has considerable agency in his/her classroom to provide openings that prepare the ground for pedagogies of shame to flourish. However, one danger that deserves our attention is “cheap” or “empty sentimentality” cultivated by educational trauma tourism. The term “cheap sentimentality” was used by Hannah Arendt (1994, p. 251) to refer to what she saw as misplaced expressions of guilt among German youth after World War II. “Empty sentimentality” is a similar term that refers to a superficial feeling of empathy and solidarity with those who suffer (e.g., see Kaplan, 2005). In particular, there are two risks with leaving the door open for cheap sentimentality to intrude within a pedagogy of shame. First, by sentimentalizing suffering, it is likely to neglect the material/ structural conditions of inequality; second, sentimentalization may eventually cultivate pity rather than affective solidarity, which reinscribes dominant power relations (Zembylas, 2016). In other words, when confined to the individual or when traumatic affects are depoliticized from the social and political circumstances (e.g., racialized, ethnicized, and/or gendered violence), the sentimentalization of narratives of suffering may in fact reinforce the very patterns of economic and political subordination responsible for such suffering (Spelman, 1997). All in all, witnessing shame in the classroom is neither about making students feel bad about their parents’ or ancestors’ actions nor about telling them moralistic tales of how to apologize for things that they or others have (not) done. Witnessing shame becomes a pedagogy when it can motivate students and educators to recapture the constructive affective connections that suffering has impeded, such as the lost sense of solidarity, tolerance, and compassion (Zembylas, 2006, 2019). The example of the novel discussed in this chapter suggests that envisioning spaces of humanity and common vulnerability and engaging in acts of affective connectivity—e.g., acts of compassion, sociality, and dignity—are valuable ingredients of pedagogies of shame. Unraveling the ethical and political complexities of different manifestations of traumatic shame—both as analytic tools and as points of departure for cultivating individual and collective political consciousness and self-reflection—may create pedagogical possibilities for leaving students and teachers “inconsolable” and allowing them to “see” firsthand the “indigestibility” of traumatic shame within different contexts.

The (Im)possibility of Being Taught From Shame In this chapter, I have argued that pedagogies of shame—that is, pedagogical practices of reading, engaging, and learning from shame—expose

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the complexities of multiple shames and the opportunities to experience new relationalities with others. Pedagogical engagement with narratives and experiences of trauma “is not a linear process but one of constant return and reassessment” (Scott, 2001, p. 359). Spivak (1988) insists that those who are recipients of stories such as trauma narratives have a tremendous responsibility: first, not to presume that suffering can be understood universally, and second, to be vigilant about misuses of such stories. There is never anything transparent or universal about the meaning of wound, which means that knowledge about the wound may become a property of rhetoric (Berlant, 2000, 2001). It is precisely within this space that traumatic shame may be translated into moralizing stories or sentimental rhetoric, and thus we need to be constantly vigilant. Needless to say, pedagogies of shame must also consider the limits, potential failures, and even impossibilities of being taught from shame in some circumstances. For example, pedagogies of shame that are directed primarily at a White student audience, while ignoring the emotional burden carried by other groups, are less likely to encourage transformative insights (Zembylas, 2019). Also, pedagogies of shame that are addressed to students who have not directly experienced the trauma of oppression/racism/apartheid need to find powerful yet not merely sentimental ways to communicate emotions of trauma. There is clearly need then to further our understanding of how shame can be taught in different contexts. For this reason, it is important to remind ourselves that some of the most significant insights regarding the (im)possibility of being taught from shame might arise in moments in which there is failure and uncertainty of pedagogies of shame. Researching such uncertainties and ambiguities is a significant task in education that needs to be undertaken in future research and scholarship. Pedagogies of shame will undoubtedly be challenging and elusive, at times daunting or even impossible, conducted in uneven educational space-times; however, they call for revitalized pedagogical space-times that can contribute to less essentialist versions of past traumas and more productive pedagogical insights about shame in different contexts.

Notes 1. Clearly, there are different kinds of shame: body shaming, disability shaming, and queer shaming, to name a few. I want to make clear from the beginning that this chapter focuses on a specific kind of shame, namely, traumatic shame. 2. The discussion here draws on and extends my analysis in Zembylas (2009).

References Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Arendt, H. (1994). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. New York, NY: Penguin Books.

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Bennett, J. (2005). Empathic vision: Affect, trauma, and contemporary art. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Berlant, L. (2000). The subject of true feeling: Pain, privacy, and politics. In S. Ahmed, J. KIlby, C. Lury, M. McNeil, and B. Skeggs (Eds.), Transformations: Thinking through feminism (pp. 33–47). London: Routledge. Berlant, L. (2001). Trauma and ineloquence. Cultural Values, 5(1), 41–58. Bewes, T. (2011). The event of postcolonial shame. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Boehmer, E. (2002). Not saying sorry, not speaking pain: Gender implications in Disgrace. Interventions, 4(3), 342–351. Clough, P. (2007). Introduction. In P. Clough and J. Halley (Eds.), The affective turn: Theorizing the social (pp. 1–33). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Coetzee, J. M. (1999). Disgrace. London: Secker and Warburg. Cvetkovich, A. (2012). Depression: A public feeling. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Durrant, S. (1999). Bearing witness to apartheid: J. M. Coetzee’s inconsolable works of mourning. Contemporary Literature, 40(3), 430–463. Durrant, S. (2004). Postcolonial narrative and the work of mourning: J. M. Coetzee, Wilson Harris and Toni Morrison. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Durrant, S. (2005). The invention of mourning in post-apartheid literature. Third World Quarterly, 26(3), 441–450. Fortier, A.-M. (2005). Pride politics and multiculturalist citizenship. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 28(3), 559–578. Gandhi, L. (2006). Affective communities: Anticolonial thought, fin-de-siècle radicalism, and the politics of friendship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Giroux, H. A. (2004). Critical pedagogy and the postmodern/modern divide: Towards pedagogy of democratization. Teacher Education Quarterly, 31(1), 132–153. Gregg, M., and Seigworth, G. (Eds.). (2010). The affect theory reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Guenther, L. (2011). Shame and the temporality of social life. Continental Philosophy Review, 44(1), 23–39. Guenther, L. (2012). Resisting Agamben: The biopolitics of shame and humiliation. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 38(1), 59–79. Hutchinson, P. (2008). Shame and philosophy: An investigation into the philosophy of emotion and ethics. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Kaplan, A. (2005). Trauma culture: The politics of terror and loss in media and literature. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Kincheloe, J. L. (2005). Critical pedagogy. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Kossew, S. (2003). The politics of shame and redemption in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. Research in African Literatures, 34(2), 155–162. Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and infinity. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, E. (1985). Ethics and infinity (R. A. Cohen, Trans.). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Leys, R. (2007). From guilt to shame: Auschwitz and after. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Marais, M. (2000a). “Little enough, less than nothing”: Ethics, engagement, and chance in the fiction of J. M. Coetzee. Modern Fiction Studies, 46(1), 159–181.

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Marais, M. (2000b). The possibility of ethical action: J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. Scrutiny, 25(1), 57–63. Marais, M. (2006). J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and the task of the imagination. Journal of Modern Literature, 29(2), 75–93. McLaren, P. (2003). Life in schools: An introduction to critical pedagogy in the foundations of education (4th ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon. Munt, S. (2008). Queer attachments: The cultural politics of shame. Aldershot: Ashgate. Nagy, R. (2004). The ambiguities of reconciliation and responsibility in South Africa. Political Studies, 52(4), 709–727. O’ Donnell, A. (2017). Shame is already a revolution: The politics of affect in the thought of Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze Studies, 11(1), 1–24. Probyn, E. (2000). Shaming theory, thinking dis-connections: Feminism and Reconciliation. In M. McNeil, C. Lury, and S. Ahmed (Eds.), Transformations: Thinking through feminism (pp. 48 60). Florence, KY: Routledge. Probyn, E. (2005). Blush: Faces of shame. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Redding, P. (1999). The logic of affect. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Scott, S. (2001). Surviving selves: Feminism and contemporary discourse of child sexual abuse. Feminist Theory, 2(3), 349–361. Sedgwick-Kosofsky, E. (2003). Touching feeling: Affect, pedagogy, performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sedgwick-Kosofsky, E., and Frank, A. (1995). Shame in the cybernetic fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins. In E. Sedgwick and A. Frank (Eds.), Shame and its sisters: A Silvan Tomkins reader (pp. 1–28). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sedgwick-Kosofsky, E., and Sedgwick, A. F. (Eds.). (1995). Shame and its sisters: A Silvan Tomkins reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Segall, K. (2005). Pursuing ghosts: The traumatic sublime in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. Research in African Literatures, 36(4), 40–54. Spelman, E. (1997). Fruits of sorrow: Framing our attention to suffering. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Spivak, G. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313). Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Spivak, G. (1991). Theory in the margin: Coetzee’s Foe reading Defoe’s Crusoe/ Roxana. In J. Arac and B. Johnson (Eds.), Consequences of theory (pp. 154– 180). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Spivak, G. (2002). Ethics and politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and certain scenes of teaching. Diacritics, 32(3), 17–31. Tarnopolsky, C. (2010). Prudes, perverts and tyrants: Plato’s Gorgias and the politics of shame. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tomkins, S. (1995a). Exploring affect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tomkins, S. (1995b). Shame-humiliation and contempt-disgust. In E. Sedgwick and A. Frank (Eds.), Shame and its sisters: A Silvan Tomkins reader (pp. 133– 179). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Woodward, K. (2000). Traumatic shame: Toni Morrison, televisual culture, and the cultural politics of the emotions. Cultural Critique, 46, 210–240. Zembylas, M. (2006). Witnessing in the classroom: The ethics and politics of affect. Educational Theory, 56(3), 305–324.

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Zembylas, M. (2009). Bearing witness to the ethics and politics of suffering: J. M Coetzee’s Disgrace, inconsolable mourning, and the task of educators. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 28(3), 223–237. Zembylas, M. (2016). Toward a critical-sentimental orientation in human rights education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 48(11), 1151–1167. Zembylas, M. (2019). “Shame at being human” as a transformative political concept and praxis: Pedagogical possibilities. Feminism & Psychology, 29(2), 303–321.

5

Post-Threat Pedagogies A Micro-Materialist Phantomatic Feeling within Classrooms in Post-Terrorist Times Shiva Zarabadi

Classrooms Margined With Threat In this chapter, I explore the affective, embodied, and embedded capacities that threaten, and how terrorism cuts into pedagogical environments and practices. The threat of terrorism as the new affective partner of schooling spaces and experiences has emerged in the UK with two major events: the flight of three British-Muslim schoolgirls to Syria to marry Jihadi fighters in February 2015 and the enforcement of Prevent policy as a compulsory anti-radicalization duty for all schools, nurseries, and higher education institutions in July 2015. What I call post-threat pedagogies and post-terrorist times in this chapter refer to the understanding of threat as a new capacity or, along with Mbembe (2018), a “racist affect” that charges, intensifies, moves, and hooks learning, teaching, and identity formations. Drawing upon new materialist and posthumanist understandings, “post” in post-threat and post-terrorist neologism does not imply a chronological and linear temporality as after or the end of threat or terrorism, rather the many layers of humans and more-than-humans with and beyond threat and terrorism and the affective entanglements and capacities that it allows. Borrowing from Massumi (2015) in that the autonomy of affect is in its uncertainty and vagueness, which provides the “margin of maneuverability” (Massumi, 2015, p. 2) to materialize the affective intensities of threat, I propose an analogy between affect and phantom. I use the metaphor of phantom to speculate what the threat of terrorism does to pedagogical spaces and the ways in which it phantomatically affects and cuts across spaces, times, bodies, memories, feelings, and desires and agentically elicits new and different “boundary-drawing practices” (Barad, 2007, p. 140). For Derrida (1982), the metaphor of phantom enables responsibility toward “a past and the future yet to come that has never been present, and which never will be, whose future to come will never be a production or a reproduction in the form of presence” (p. 21). The threat that emerges with Prevent policy in schools as the new phantom in postterrorist educational environments enables an indeterminate temporal

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and spatial relationship between being and becoming and between present and future, which affirms the paradoxical existence of a specter of terrorism and potential terrorist students as neither being nor nonbeing, neither present nor absent, neither of the “past” nor of the “future.” Prevent policy, as what I call a threat-assemblage, that is, an affective constellation of interacting agentic forces of policy, teachers, students, relations, jokes, feelings, discourses, and more, allows generative phantomatic capacities to create fertile spaces and infrastructure for a new genre of racial bullying, mocking routes, racial harassment and racist affects, and, therefore, new directions of pedagogical practices and schooling experiences. To map the affective phantomatic spaces and moments that the threat of terrorism enables in the educational environments, I use data from the study I conducted on the identity formations (becoming) of UK Muslim schoolgirls aged 15–17 in relation to Prevent policy in two secondary schools in southeast London. My phantomatic reflections will proceed along the lines of Prevent policy, Muslim girls’ experiences, space, and time to explore how Prevent policy provokes threat and affects students’ relations and transactions with time and space.

A Racial Action at a Distance Prevent policy in UK schools is one component of the threat-assemblage that allows for uncertain perceptions, measurements, and decisions about Muslim students as being “risky” or having the potential to become a terrorist. One of the fundamental aspects of Prevent policy is its speculative measurements. Teachers and educators are obliged to monitor and report any (mostly Muslim) students whom they think and feel might be radicalized or are at risk of radicalization (Sian, 2015). They have to be vigilant about what Muslim students are not and have not done “yet.” Institutions such as schools, colleges, and universities that were previously acclaimed as supporters of intellectual freedom and debate have been drawn into compulsory security discourses and practices and bestowed a “duty of care” under the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 (HM Government, 2015). The government’s statutory guideline for schools not only proliferates this vagueness stating that “there is no single way of identifying whether a child is likely to be susceptible to an extremist ideology,” but also makes these measurements by teachers and school staff and consequences for students even harder when relating a child’s vulnerability to their background factors combined with specific influences such as family and friends (HM Government, 2018). None of the behavioral traits in the list of possible signs are unusual for any school child such as “becoming increasingly argumentative, refusing to listen to different points of view, unwilling to engage with children who are different, becoming abusive to children who are different, embracing conspiracy theories, feeling persecuted, changing friends and

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appearance, distancing themselves from old friends, no longer doing things they used to enjoy, converting to a new religion, being secretive and reluctant to discuss their whereabouts, sympathetic to extremist ideologies and groups” (HM Government, 2016), unless some students are being preemptively and predeterminedly assumed as potential terrorists. The aim of the government’s Prevent strategy is to disrupt what it believes is a “process of radicalization” by strategically identifying and capturing “would be” terrorists at the beginning of this process to root out extremism from its inception (HM Government, 2015; Kundnani, 2012). Since the biggest physical and ideological threat is posed by what are defined as radical “Islamist” groups, Muslim students are considered as prime suspects (Saeed, 2017). According to this preemptive doctrine, students’ views and ideas can be considered as signs of radicalization even if it does not lead to any extremist action. It is not about what students do, but what they think and feel. It is these radicalization risk measurements intertwined with the racialized and colonial assumptions of the mysterious and unknown other that makes many Muslim students become silent and feel stigmatized to the point that they do not participate in school debates (Busher et al., 2017; O’Donnell, 2016; Miah, 2017; Shah, 2017). Given that 80 percent of individuals referred to Channel1 on the basis of being supposedly radicalized or having the potentiality for it did not pose any concern, nor was any further action taken against them (Novelli, 2017), these needless and exaggerated referrals of innocent Muslim children can have damaging implications upon their everyday lives and futures, their families, the Muslim community, and other young Muslim children (Shah, 2017, pp. 62–63). The school environment loaded with suspect-ness and vagueness of threat, along with the where, how, and when of the radicalized act or idea in everyday encounters, creates affective phantomatic space and relations. The affective intensity of threat, along with must-security thinking, the imperative to be vigilant all the time as a rational citizen, fills the gaps in the knowledge production of terrorism as a dangerous and toxic thing that every ideal citizen and nation has to take action about, leaving no room for questions and critiques about the “how” of tackling terrorism. The “false positives” (Heath-Kelly, 2012, p. 70) as the practice of making mistakes with violence conceal the gaps between uncertain measurements and preemptive logics. Prevent policy and counterterrorism strategies are based on the logic of preemption, which aims to act on the time of before, before a terrorist action happens. These preemptive logics as sets of risk measurements and “what if” assumptions not only imply what Sjoberg (2015), drawing on Sedgwick (1990), calls “paranoid knowing” but also entangles schools, educational practices, and Muslim students into unique temporal assemblages. Within these temporal phantomatic relations enabled by preemptive logics, students, teachers, and pedagogical environments live and learn in “alternative temporalities” (Lind et al.,

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2018, p. 183), where the present and the normative framings of futurity is interrupted by the future-threat-yet-to-come. Threat unfolded by Prevent policy, and as having affective autonomy to remodulate boundaries and relations, creates a phantomatic and vague space. Threat as the phantom of the classroom and as a more-than-human affect can mobilize our perception, feeling, action, and decision about Muslim potentially threatening bodies. Phantomatic threat similar to Blackman’s alien as a post-posthuman manifesto (2017) and an affective and political figuration is a “performative image” that is lived, practiced, schooled, educated, and pedagogized through micro-registers of experiences. In other texts (Zarabadi and Ringrose, 2018a, 2018b), Jessica Ringrose and I have argued how jokes and comments as affective and material micro-forces amplify new decisions, actions, feelings, and thinking and engage us in different relations and assemblages. Hadil (year 12), a participant in my study explains her experience, They make jokes, that “it’s gonna be you next” and I just laugh, saying yeah, yeah, but NO (with strong and shaky voice, hand gesture). Even if they don’t say anything, they think “oh she is gonna be the one to go to Syria next”. (Zarabadi and Ringrose, 2018a, 2018b) Hadil being called the next terrorist or jihadi bride suggests affective transactions with “what if” assumptions, threat-assemblages, and preemptive school culture. She is being judged by something that may or may not happen in the future but does exist in the present, that is, her predetermined potentiality to radicalization. Threat phantomatically and affectively fows in schools and in between students, sometimes in a way that Hadil and others know through a contagious gut feeling (Probyn, 2004), even if they do not say it. The “it’s gonna be you next” comment implies the engagement with a “paranoid lens” (Sedgwick, 1990, as cited in Niccolini and Pindyck, 2015, p. 8) and phantomatic relations entangling Hadil, her friend, and the school space to new affective and material capacities, possibilities, and impossibilities. This joke as an affective phantomatic force and an “action-at-a-distance” (Puar, 2017, p. 6) increases the zones of contact between bodies, threat, and time rather than engaging in traditional divisions of proximity/distance, visible/invisible, and human/nonhuman. This is the work of affect that enables threat to transgress all the boundaries, animating new knowings, prepersonal, and unconscious feelings in Hadil and in the atmosphere; some feeling and knowing that phantomatically is both absent and present. Hadil and her fellow students live and carry this threat both with and without it emerging as a joke or a comment. These racialized phantomatic relations emerge from the supposedly extremist act or radicalized view that is not here in the present and was not there in the past and that we are not sure if it is going

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to happen in the future. Such phantomatic thinking and feeling that has emerged in schools through the affective transfers of threat works as a medium and material foundation of counterterrorism preemptive logics. Following Mbembe’s (2018) emphasis that affects need infrastructure, I argue that Prevent policy in schools, partly by circulating threat, fear as well as negative and dark emotions between bodies, maintains such an infrastructure for racial violence.

Not Just What You Say But Who You Are Phantomatic “thinking-feeling” (Massumi, 2015) enables the recasting of the body, affect, threat, space, and time as those registers of schooling experiences that cannot easily be seen but felt, the incorporeal and immaterial matters. Farah, another Muslim-veiled schoolgirl in my study, explains her affective entanglement with these phantomatic threat relations in school, When they monitor us, it means that we have to take into account everything that we say; we can’t be too extreme and I felt like if I say something then people . . . I have to hold myself back, or else they might think “oh I am becoming extremist” which obviously I am not. It’s not only you have to be careful what you are saying, but you have to be careful with who you are now, and you need to make sure they do believe you. (Farah, year 12) This phantom thinking-feeling with affect and here with threat implies a kind of material abstraction or what Massumi (2002), drawing upon Deleuze, calls “real-but-abstract” (p. 5), whereby the feeling exists that an abstract threat will come in the future, but in the real present and in the materialized time of now, it is felt as fear. Such affective material abstraction made Farah hold herself back and not say what she wants to say. Phantomatic post-threat pedagogy as a “sense-event” (Manning, 2007) suggests that threat and terrorism as a posthuman affect has phantomatic life beyond the human self, entangled with pedagogical practices. The affective phantomatic registers of threat become actualized in Farah’s realization that she has to be careful of what she says or else be judged and referred to Channel[1] as having the potential for radicalization or being radicalized. Threat as one of the affective forces proliferated by Prevent policy in schools, along with media “affective amplification” (Massumi, 2015, p. 31) in wider society, creates a potentialized and weaponized phantomatic space, which, for Farah, even affects her sense of being and becoming. Following the Spinozist (2013) understanding of affect as the power to increase or lessen the capacity to act, the phantomatic space as the

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new field of intensities created through threat, changes Farah’s affective transactions with herself, others, and more-than-humans. Threat as a new phantom in school, and as always material and relational, discloses the entangled relationships between the inner plateaus of the body, our perception and decision, and its exteriority, the classroom, teacher, students, and the policy. The affect of threat as “travelling materiality” (Nieuwenhuis, 2016, p.  502) induces into the body and morethan-bodies and into the classroom through the medium of schooling and pedagogical practices. Farah’s feeling of being monitored as a phantomatic relation to the school has changed her affective transactions with friends and teachers. In one of my English lessons, I remember a White boy said something and then the teacher said something and when I was saying something back my friend was like you have to be quiet, because you know it’s different for them, they don’t understand these things. (Farah, year 12) With Prevent policy, the threat and affective intensities circulate in schools in a phantomatic way as an absent-presence, something that we do not know (Blackman, 2017), but we feel the threatening presence of, something that slides from Farah’s schooling environment and media amplifcation to her body and other students’ and teachers’ bodies. Farah’s identity is affectively shaped in between the mobilization of uncertain affects of threat, fear, cruelty, pain, patriotism, and vertigo and the untrackable diffuseness of terrorism (Puar and Rai, 2004). Within these post-threat pedagogical spaces, the racial and affective barriers for Farah are those invisible but present forces that silence her voice and hold her body back. Her embodied and embedded identity formation (becoming) emerges through these silencing and holding back affective transactions. Silencing and holding back practices provoked in post-threat educational environments put Farah in a vague position about what “she” can say and how “she” can be. Here, the affective pointer is to Farah and her Muslim-veiled body than the general content of what is sayable or nonsayable; it is her Muslimness associated with threat-assemblage that makes it impossible to voice/not voice her ideas. The phantomatic space mediated by threat and Prevent policy in schools is neither a space nor a non-space; rather it is a sticky temporal affective and sensorial field that enables the movement of intensities beyond the representational regimes of social difference. In a sense, it reassembles the educational practices and relations not only through verbally expressed feelings or visibly dividing practices but relies instead on the affective capacities of bodies. This creates a vague temporal and spatial feeling of threat that is sometimes hard to explain, hard to locate,

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and even paradoxically considered as a joke but has the autonomy to remodulate relations between student peers and students and teachers. In other words, it answers the question of what threat does to us rather than what threat means to us, the affective intensities it enables rather than the meaning it represents. For Hadil, it enables an affective racist comment “it’s gonna be you next,” and for Farah, it’s a holding back and silencing force. Inas, another year 12 Muslim girl in my study, explains this vague phantomatic affective encounter in being called ISIS by her friend, In year nine I had a little fall-out with some girl, but she said she was joking but then it got a bit serious. She called me ISIS so, yeah, it was quite a big thing coz everyone was just so . . . she was like . . . she was just joking, I can’t remember how it happened. Then I got angry at my friend and my other friend attacked her like physically. (Inas, year 12) The ISIS name-calling as an affective material force opens up new relations. Inas became angry and walked out of the class, so a Jamaican friend also became angry with this “joke” about her Muslim friend and started fghting with the girl who made the “joke.” School staff became angry and made the girl write a letter to Inas to say sorry. Everyone found out. It went around, people asked me what she said, yeah . . . uhmm I don’t know, she thought it was a joke or something, but obviously I didn’t take it as a joke. (Inas, year 12) Inas’s affective and material entanglement with ISIS does not happen with the ideological connection or interest in their views but through her classmate’s “joke.” This ISIS joke as a new affect-laden imprecation created a buzz in the classroom (Niccolini, 2016) and then moved through and with Inas, her friends, teachers’ bodies, and Inas’s parents when she told them about this later on, entangling them to a new and different series of relations, feelings, and thinkings. Inas’s affective encounter and micromaterialist feelings with being called ISIS made her “feel paranoid.” I’m not gonna lie, sometimes I feel a bit paranoid, uhmm especially after that incident that people just look at you and you think “oh no they think I’m a terrorist”. (Inas, year 12) Being called ISIS as a new becoming for Inas enables different territorial entanglements that bring about complex material effects for her, displacing conventional boundaries and creating new feelings and hesitations

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about herself and others, silencing, paranoia, stigmatizing, exclusion, anxiety, and distrust. Being called ISIS affectively relates Inas to the threat-assemblage in school and wider society.

An Embodied Encounter With Time My proposition of post-threat pedagogies is as a phantomatic and temporal “sense-event” (Manning, 2007), a phantom thinking with time that enables us to understand the relationship between threat and terrorism and the affective and incorporeal sociopolitical construction of time, preemptive time, and the time of imperative securitization. Threat within these phantomatic relations in schools emerges as a new pedagogical force that teaches fear and the threat of Muslim students as being strange, risky, and the terrorist other. Prevent policy as a component of counterterrorism interventions cultivates temporal affective economies different from linear capitalist and colonial ones both inside and outside school (Tidgwell, Friedman, Rinaldi, Kotow, and Lind, 2018). The threat induced by Prevent policy in schools as part of broader counterterrorism initiatives enables an affective singular but collective becoming with time. Threat and terror as a phantom challenge our conception of time as a homogenous flow of self-identical moments. Post-terrorist pedagogy territorialized and reterritorialized through Prevent policy in schools emerges from preemptive logics generated in the aftermath of 9/11, the “war on terror” era, and ISIS terrorism (Massumi, 2015) represents new transactions with time (Powell, 2017). Such new temporal transactions bring profound consequences to the quality of Muslim students’ lived experiences as they are being monitored for their present supposedly threatening potentialities and the future radicalization or extremist act that may or may not happen. The experiences of post-threat pedagogical environments are not only affective, material, and temporal but also embodied. The imperative with Prevent policy for Muslim students to be transparent, clear, and nonthreatening is an embodied encounter with time. Bodies of veiled Muslim students carrying the “visualities of suspectness” (Heath-Kelly, 2012, p.  69) threaten the linear reproductive futurism in a way that there is no future for them and with them, as there is no future for the fat, nonWhite, disabled, gendered bodies (McFarland et al., 2018). Within the post-threat pedagogical environments and practices, Muslim girls’ veiled bodies as suspicious, threatening, and carrying the potentiality for radicalization fail to “keep up” with normative tempos, that is, to have a transparent and unveiled body. To become “properly temporalized bodies” (Freeman, 2010, p.  35) and nonthreatening, Muslim students are monitored, lectured, and harassed by Prevent duties in schools so they become deradicalized regardless of if they even are radicalized or have the potential to be.

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Farah encountered racist and hateful comments on London Bridge when she was only 13 years old. Farah does not like to repeat what was shouted at her, and after that affective encounter, she “becomes conscious” about how she looks. I felt really off-putting, you feel like you become really conscious about how you look when you are going out, I remember I used to have issues wearing a long skirt or abaya because I felt that makes me higher target for . . . I felt if I wear that people like judge me for it and think oh she is one of those, that kind of Muslim that don’t want to integrate to the society which is not true because there are loads of people wearing abaya that help society a lot. (Farah, year 12) Threat in post-threat classrooms as an affective pedagogical force in collaboration with compulsory transparency culture and must-security thinking allow the Muslim child to have a future only if she becomes unveiled or shows her conformity to the Fundamental British Values.2 This takes us back to Farah’s stance mentioned earlier where she states, “you have to be careful with who you are now.” For Farah, the transformation into a deradicalized, transparent, and nonthreatening Muslim implies what Coleman (2012) calls “lived imperative.” Unlike the old rhetoric of colonial gaze on Muslim, Black, and non-White bodies, within the new post-terrorist era, Muslims as phantomatized risky fgures not only become targeted through the objects of gaze but also by the affect of threat through phantomatically vague not visible but felt qualities. Prevent policy and phantom assemblages of threat are not just about terror threats but play a key part in managing our relation to corporeal and affective incorporeal boundaries, our openness, vulnerability, our response-ability, and responsiveness to threat and Muslim bodies. Farah reflects on her feelings about her body after the racist incident at London Bridge; however, she avoids talking about it in detail. When I got home that day, I just felt really insecure about me wearing hijab and me being Muslim and me being Asian as well and looking different. (Farah, year 12) The phantomatized supposedly risky veiled body of Farah becomes separated as a lived body and turned into a threatening matter, at once abstract and very material, according to Sara Ahmed, a fetish object (2014) of fear. For Ahmed, an object, body, or concept becomes fetishized when it is distanced from the material contexts and histories, which give it depth and complexity, and then recycled as a simplifed, condensed sign of threat. Prevent policy and counterterrorism, by encompassing the “must

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security thinking” as the normative responsive-ness and response-ability to threat and danger, both phantomatize and fetishize threatening Muslim bodies. Then simply Muslim veiled supposedly threatening bodies become strange and phantom to us, regardless of who they are and what their backgrounds are. I feel I am being judged even wearing this long skirt right now, every morning I feel like when I go to school the teacher might judge me, be like oh she is become like, I know probably they don’t but sometimes I feel like, people think oh she has like less freedom now because she is wearing skirt or abaya which block the opportunities to me. (Farah, year 12) Prevent policy in schools and counterterrorism in general, with the compulsion to act preemptively about future threat that has not yet happened and to monitor supposedly potential terrorists and suspect communities, not only distort our relations with others, our feelings, and desires, but also “colonize our unconscious” (Mbembe, 2018). Threat as “racist affect” (Mbembe, 2018) lies below cognitive perception, a swarming political affect that passes between bodies but remains below and within surfaces. For Farah, the affective entanglement with threat micro-materially changes her relations to her body, other bodies, and her environment. She knows that her teachers will probably not judge her because of the way she dresses herself, but nonetheless, she feels they do. With these kinds of phantomatic feelings, it does not matter what they do or do not do. What matters is Farah’s feeling that they are going to do something. The agendas of counterterrorism and Prevent policy are created by the paranoid and phantomatic feelings and knowings of “what if.” With phantomatic affect—in this case, threat—our feelings as ways of knowing (Manning, 2007), attach us to the events, Muslim bodies, terrorism, and threat. Both Farah and her teachers enter into the terroristassemblage/event through the unconscious (Szymanski, 2015).

The Phantom of the Classroom, Threat The phantom implies an enduring icon that encompasses and embodies our political and social fears and moral panics about the threat of terrorism in the education system. Threat as the phantom in the classroom, as a new genre of an undead and not-yet-come figure, becomes the new partner of the pedagogy of fear—that we live and are schooled next to a potential terrorist and a risky other who has “an always could be identity” (Zarabadi and Ringrose, 2018b) and can turn out to be the next threatening jihadi bride. Phantoms’ ambiguous claims to humanity, to be not-quite human and more-than-human (Schrader, 2010), can be understood as a racialized

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threatening figure, a posthuman figure of liminality between the potential threat to become a terrorist and actually becoming a terrorist. As for Hadil and Inas, they are phantomatically labeled as the next jihadi bride and ISIS. Phantom threat as an affective figure is neither human nor nonhuman; it is an in-between, thinking-feeling figure of threat. Phantomatic narratives, measurements, and strategies of Prevent policy dramatize non-White Muslim people living and being schooled in the wake of terrorist “apocalyptic scenarios” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 15). Such measurements, narratives, and surveillances are always about race, even when they simultaneously serve to erase race from Prevent policy by adding white extremism to the schema, which has been implemented recently (HM Government, 2015). This phantomatic relation to race, the unknown, and the felt unseen can be what Saldanha (2006) calls race as “machine assemblage” (p. 9), as an embodied and material event that carries different spatiality than the Hegelian self/other duality. For Puar and Rai (2004), this articulatedmachine organizes representations, temporalities, space and modulated intensities, the representations and discourses of civilizations, British values, sexuality, race, nation, terrorism, threat, democracy, security, good, evil, temporalities of present fear and future danger, securitized schooling spaces, and the modulated intensities of automatic media news loops and media moral panics. Prevent policy as a phantomatic assemblage and racializing apparatus deploys grammars of race without explicitly talking about race, yet the threat of terrorism is about racialization.3 The media moral panics and narratives remake the terror figures, living in and with terror in such a way that what passes for public discourse about terror recasts Muslim racialized bodies as carriers of terror, in other words “terror’s embodiment, and not the primary objects of terror’s multiple enactments but the ground of terror’s possibility” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 15) and potentiality. Prevent policy produces the phantomatic racial other in the classroom in and through fear. The designation of racial difference carries with it threat, raising fears of insecurity, contagion, toxicity, being overrun, and even extinction (Fishel and Wilcox, 2017). Prevent policy in schools creates various post-threat forms of “bare life” and “states of exception” (Agamben, 1998) when security and counterterrorism practices turn into a state of necessity and must-be-acted-upon exception. The exceptionalist politics of Prevent created in the post-9/11, war on terror era, and the “Jihadi Bridism paradigm” (Zarabadi and Ringrose, 2018a) have extended into our everyday ordinary relations and to the very ordinariness of the horror of schooling and enduring as a Muslim child. Hadil, Farah, and Inas’s thinking-feelings of their embodied and embedded self and others, affectively and materially emerge within the experiences of holding back, silencing, racist comments, and jokes that phantomatically act as a force that sometimes might be invisible, unconscious, or

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prepersonal for them but has the autonomy to affect their being and becoming.

Threat, Not Here But With You In this concluding section, I suggest that threat engendered by Prevent policy in schools as a new affective and material force not only maintains infrastructure for racist affects and encounters but also, as a pedagogy, it teaches fear, recasts human and more-than-human relations, students and teachers’ interactions, perceptions, thinkings, and feelings. For educational and pedagogical research, thinking through and with phantomatic relations as absent-present affective transactions can shed light on the unseen and unsaid but felt qualities that emerge in educational environments and practices. Prevent policy opens threat and terrorism to school’s atmosphere, transforming the experiences of schooling, teaching, and learning. Threat as a “political affect” (Protevi, 2009) in the classroom generates vague, affective, immaterial, and incorporeal relations to the self and others. The racial comments, such as “it’s gonna be you next” (Zarabadi and Ringrose, 2018a, p. 100), or being called “ISIS” by a schoolmate, are not an illusion or fantasy that can simply be dismissed by some rational arguments. Rather they affectively allow new and different material and immaterial capacities into classroom, subjectivity formations, and experiences. These affective and racial encounters sometimes lead to anger and group fights and sometimes to silence and disappointment with the victims’ bodies and self-image. The feeling of being judged as a terrorist is a phantom, something that is “not you but within you” (Ahmed, 2014, p. 27), something that is absent but present. I argued that threat as phantom carries the quality of affect; it moves diffractively, appears and disappears, affects and becomes affected, sticks, and slides. The classroom as one of “the affectual geographies” (Laketa, 2016, p. 666) of threat enables imaginary divisions to be reenacted in an extended contagious way, affectively drawing other humans and more-than-humans in, as highlighted by Inas’ and Farah’s encounters. Phantomatic speculations can help us to explore how threat and fear affect educational spaces and interactions, the phantomatic pedagogies that emerge otherwise in the posthuman space and time. Inas being called ISIS created a buzz in school; it affected her and “everyone” as it went around, generating at multiple dimensions the reinforcing of a collective always-present fear to a point that it becomes an almost real, tangible threat diffused by the school involvement and then letter of apology and now presented in this chapter. Attainment to the political and racist affect of threat not only shows us the ways in which pedagogical environments and practices becomes “ethnicized” (Zembylas, 2008), but also how they terrorized and phantomatized.

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Notes 1. Channel is a programme that focuses on providing support at an early stage to people who are identified as being vulnerable to being drawn into terrorism. The programme uses a multi-agency approach to protect vulnerable people (Channel Guidance, 2015). 2. The fundamental British values were first set out by the government in the “Prevent” strategy in 2011 aiming to actively promote British values in schools. www.gov.uk/ government/news/guidance-on-promoting-british-values-in-schools-published 3. From 3,994 people referred to Channel under the Prevent strategy, 1,394 were Muslim, 139 were Christian, and 12 were Sikh (The Guardian, 2016).

References Agamben, G. (1998). Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. (D. HellerRoazen, Trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ahmed, S. (2014). The cultural politics of emotion (Second edition). Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. Almost 4,000 people referred to UK deradicalisation scheme last year. Josh Halliday, Sunday 20 March 2016 13.56 GMT; https://www.theguardian.com/ uk-news/2016/mar/20/almost-4000-people-were-referred-to-uk-deradicalisa tion-scheme-channel-last-year Barad K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Blackman, L. (2017). Loving the alien: A post—post-human manifesto. Subjectivity, 10(1), 13–25. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-016-0022-6 Busher, J., Choudhury, T., Thomas, P. and Harris, G. (2017). What the Prevent duty means for schools and colleges in England: An analysis of educationalists’ experiences. UK: Aziz Foundation. Retrieved from http://eprints.hud. ac.uk/id/eprint/32349/1/The%20Prevent%20duty%20in%20Schools%20 and%20Colleges%20Report.pdf Channel Duty Guidance, protecting vulnerable people from being drawn into terrorism (2015): https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/ system/uploads/attachment_data/file/425189/Channel_Duty_Guidance_ April_2015.pdf (Retrieved 7 February 2020) Coleman, R. (2012). Transforming images: Screens, affect, futures. London and New York, NY: Routledge. Derrida, J. (1982). Margins of philosophy (pp. 3–27). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Fishel, S., and Wilcox, L. (2017). Politics of the living dead: Race and exceptionalism in the apocalypse. Journal of International Studies, 45(3), 335–355. Freeman, E. (2010). Time binds: Queer temporalities, queer histories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Heath-Kelly, C. (2012). Reinventing prevention or exposing the gap? False positives in UK terrorism governance and the quest for pre-emptio. Critical Studies on Terrorism, 5(1), 69–87. https://doi.org/10.1080/17539153.2012.659910 HM Government. (2015). Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015. Retrieved from www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/6/notes/ contents HM Government (2016), the Department for Education and the Home Office, what are the signs of radicalisation? Teachers’ Q &As; educate. against. hate (Retrieved 9 February 2020) https://educateagainsthate.com/radicalisation-and-extremism/

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HM Government. (2018). Keeping children safe in education, statutory guidance for schools and colleges, Part 1. Information for all school and college staff. Retrieved from www.gov.uk/government/publications/keeping-children-safe-ineducation-2 Kundnani, A. (2012). Radicalisation: The journey of a concept. Race & Class, 54(2), 3–25. Laketa, S. (2016). Between ‘‘this’’ side and ‘‘that’’ side: On performativity, youth identities and ‘‘sticky’’ spaces. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 36(1) 178–196. Lind, E., Kotov, C., Rice, C., Rinaldi, J., LaMarre, A., Friedman, M., and Tidgwell, T. (2018). Reconceptualizing temporality in and through multimedia storytelling: Making time with through thick and thin. Fat Studies, 7(2), 181–192. https://doi.org/10.1080/21604851.2017.1372998 Manning, E. (2007). Politics of touch: Sense, movement, sovereignty. Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press. Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Massumi, B. (2015). Politics of affect. Cambridge: Polity Press. Mbembe, A. (2018). The Holberg Debate 2018. Talk given at the Holberg Debate in Bergen, Norway. Retrieved from https://holbergprisen.no/en/news/ holberg-prize/prof-achille-mbembes-address-2018-holberg-debate McFarland, J. Slothouber, V., and Taylor, A. (2018). Temporarily fat: A queer exploration of fat time. Fat Studies, 7(2), 135–146. https://doi.org/10.1080/21 604851.2017.1376275 Miah, S. (2017). The Muslim problematic: Muslims, state schools and security. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 26(2), 138–150. Niccolini, A. D. (2016). Animate affects: Censorship, reckless pedagogies, and beautiful feelings. Gender and Education, 28(2), 230–249. https://doi.org/10.1 080/09540253.2015.1121205 Niccolini, A. D., and Pindyck, M. (2015). Classroom acts: New materialisms and haptic encounters in an urban classroom. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodologies, 6(2), 1–23. Nieuwenhuis, M. (2016). Breathing materiality: Aerial violence at a time of atmospheric politics. Critical Studies on Terrorism, 9(3), 499–521. https://doi.org/10. 1080/17539153.2016.1199420 Novelli, M. (2017). Education and countering violent extremism: Western logics from south to north? Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 47(6), 835–851. O’Donnell, A. (2016). Securitisation, counterterrorism and the silencing of dissent: The educational implications of prevent. British Journal of Educational Studies, 64(1), 53–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/00071005.2015.1121201 Powell, H. (25 May 2017). Temporality, Affect and Ebay: Challenging traditional models of emotion and consumption. Paper presented at the conference; Affect and Social Media 3.0: Experience, Entanglement, Engagement. The University of East London. Probyn, E. (2004). Thinking with gut feeling. Public, 30, 101–112. Protevi, J. (2009). Political affect: Connecting the social and the somatic. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

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Puar, J. K. (2017). The right to maim: Debility, capacity, disability. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Puar, J. K., and Rai, S. R. (2004). The remaking of a model minority. Perverse projectiles under the specter of (counter) terrorism. Social Text, 22(3), 75–104. Saeed, T. (2017). Muslim narratives of schooling in Britain: From “Paki” to the “would-be terrorist”. In M. Mac an Ghaill and C. Haywood (Eds.), Muslim students, education and neoliberalism: Schooling a “suspect community” (pp. 217–231). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Saldanha, A. (2006). Reontologising race: The machinic geography of phenotype. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2006, 24(1), 9–24. Schrader, A. (2010). Responding to Pfiesteria piscicida (the Fish Killer): Phantomatic ontologies, ondeterminacy, and responsibility in toxic microbiology. Social Studies of Science,40(2), 275–306.https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312709344902 Sedgwick, E. K. (1990). Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Shah, S. (2017). Education of Muslim students in turbulent times. In M. Mac an Ghaill and C. Haywood (Eds.), Muslim students, education and neoliberalism: Schooling a ‘suspect community’ (pp. 51–66). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Sharpe, C. (2016). In the wake: On blackness and being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sian, K. (2015). Spies, surveillance and stakeouts: Monitoring Muslim moves in British state schools. Race, Ethnicity, and Education, 18(2), 183–201. https:// doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2013.830099 Sjoberg, L. (2015). The terror of everyday counterterrorism. Critical Studies on Terrorism, 8(3), 383–400. https://doi.org/10.1080/17539153.2015.1081756 Spinoza, B. (2013). Ethics (R. H. M. Elwes, Trans.). Hollywood, FL: Simon and Brown. St. Pierre, J. (2015). Distending straight-masculine time: A phenomenology of the disabled speaking body. Hypatia, 30(1), 49–65. https://doi.org/.org/10.1111/ hypa.12128 Szymanski, A. (April 2015). Entering the Event, Through the Unconscious. Inflexions 8, Radical Pedagogies, 190–201. www.inflexions.org Tidgwell, T., Friedman, M., Rinaldi, J., Kotow, C., and Lind, E. R. M. (2018). Introduction to the special issue: Fatness and temporality. Fat Studies, 7(2), 115–123. https://doi.org/10.1080/21604851.2017.1375262 Zarabadi, S., and Ringrose, J. (2018a). Jihadi bridism and Muslim British schools girls: Affective media panic in an age of counter-terrorism. In S. Talburt (Ed.), Youth sexualities: Public feelings and contemporary cultural politics (pp. 83–107). New York, NY: Praeger. Zarabadi, S., and Ringrose, J. (2018b). Re-mattering media affects: Pedagogical interference into pre-emptive counter terrorism culture. In A. Baroutsis, S. Riddle, and P. Thomson (Eds.), Education research and the media, challenges and possibilities (pp. 66–80). New York, NY: Routledge. Zembylas, M. (2008). The politics of trauma in education. New York, NY: Palgrave/MacMillan.

Part II

Pedagogies

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Affect’s First Lesson An Interview with Gregory J. Seigworth

There has been quite a robust interest in affect from educational theorists, some of whom can be read in this edited collection and some of whom have attended the Capacious conferences that you’ve helped organize. Why do you think that is? For you, what is pedagogical about affect, or affective about pedagogy? GREGORY J. SEIGWORTH: Hmm. Well, I think pedagogy is affect’s first lesson, or maybe affect is pedagogy’s first lesson. Either way. Because, for me, “affect” is not some kind of unmarked naïveté of a body (any body)—as if one could isolate affect as independent variable of bare/barren corporeal existence (a body in a vacuum)—but, instead, affect emerges in zones of contact and atmospheres of intersection/ interference/contamination. I remember once asking Brian Massumi “what comes before affect?” and he said quite simply “everything.” Affect may not be the first condition of any form of existence, but it is the first lesson (hence, why pedagogy absolutely matters!). “What can a body do?” is fundamentally a pedagogic matter. Affect arrives at every moment of contact, of body-world encounter, and thus, “we” (to briefly reduce affect to “the human”) submit ourselves over and over again to experiential-experimental entanglements, habit formation, fleshy intuitions, and other sensorium trainings. Affect and pedagogy are inextricably inseparable. I am reminded of the concluding words in their introduction to What is Philosophy? where Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1996, p.  12) are talking about the importance of concepts and conceptcreation (as their claim for what philosophy must be). They write that there have been three ages of the concept: 1) the encyclopedia (as a post-Kantian project staked on universal claims attributed to pure subjectivity), 2) the “more modest task of a pedagogy of the concept,” and 3) the contemporary usurping of “the concept” as a thing to be spun by marketers, brand managers, computer scientists, designers, advertisers, or, in sum, ideas men! (p.  10). And Deleuze and Guattari say that “only the second [pedagogy] can safeguard EDS.:

88 Bessie P. Dernikos et al. us from falling from the heights of the first into the disaster of the third—an absolute disaster for thought whatever its benefits might be, of course, from the viewpoint of universal capitalism” (p. 12). So educational theorists have their work cut out—school the rest of us on the “modesty” of pedagogic invention (please) and then also save us from the disaster of worldwide capitalist domination.1 Of course, the task of pedagogy-making doesn’t only belong to education. Pedagogy is part and parcel of any and every mode of instruction and learning, of affecting and being affected, and so the pedagogic (as an ontology) also emerges in the midst of other manifestations of affective encounter. Yet I really do want to hold on the pragmatics of disciplinary boundaries (albeit somewhat wavy and porous borders). Disciplines—like education or, say, theology—have a role as historically derived, distinctly contoured planes of composition that produce specifically framed sets of procedures, new concepts, and provocations that can, under the right/ripe conditions, resonate in ways that leak into or otherwise ripple across (often nonadjacent) areas of academic specialization. So maybe here is the point where I should admit that I have been surprised by the uptake of affect theories into the field of education . . . but in hindsight now, it makes complete sense. EDS.: How do you teach affect? What are some of the affects that circulate for you in that endeavor? GJS: Ha! I usually begin by blindfolding my students (well, a couple of them at first anyway) and growing their noses. Really. I do this little exercise (see V.S. Ramachandran and S. Blakeslee’s book Phantoms in the Brain, 1998, p. 59) where you blindfold one person and have them sit directly behind another individual who is facing in the same direction. I stroke and tap the nose of the blindfolded student with my index finger while guiding their own index finger to the nose of student number two and match the stroke-and-tap rhythmic patternings of each finger on their respective noses. Usually within about thirty seconds, the blindfolded student feels “their” nose elongate to about two or three feet in front of their face. It doesn’t work for everyone, but about two-thirds of the time it does. And then most of the students want to grow someone else’s nose on their face too. It can be a nice little icebreaker on the first day of class—you get to be blindfolded and then touch or be touched (and, yes, anyone can opt out without explanation). But it is also an effective way of getting students to reconsider the supposed boundedness of a body, their body: the surety by which they understood where their body begins and ends is unsettled in less than a minute. So we’ll talk about phantom limbs, the somatosensory cortex, how bodies extend themselves and incorporate other bodies, objects, worlds, and rhythms—continually expanding and contracting. Once their bodies are rendered slightly

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less stable, quite a few other bodily matterings and atmospherics can start to go down conceptually-corporeally in our class. This term I am teaching a senior-level undergraduate class (8:00 a.m. on Tuesday and Thursday) called “The Body in Communication.” I had the classroom switched to our department’s theatre rehearsal space (nobody is there at eight in the morning, trust me). I wanted to have the students in a space that lent itself to pedagogical improv and slack performativity, and so we can rearrange the class space using odds and ends of theatrical props and old furniture and big gym mats that some students like to sprawl out on (it is 8:00 a.m. remember). Mostly and modestly, I just want the students to see what happens if we let things become a little loose, and throughout the semester, we continue to tweak how bodies arrange themselves in our classroom space. It doesn’t have to be anything all that much, but it can make a big difference in the atmospheres of pedagogic encounter: how we interact with each other, with bodies of knowledge, with walls and floors, with the ways that conversations, flashes of insight and frustration, and moments of lecture can unspool, etc. I’m trying to mix the rigors and vibrancies of affective scholarship with embodied transduction of our course material. I assign a fair amount of reading—this semester it is mostly affect studies-affiliated work that emerges from and/or intersects with feminist theories of corporeality, trans* studies, disabilities studies/ crip theory, Freudian psychoanalysis, a fair amount of Foucault and Deleuze, etc. Everyone takes turns leading discussion, which requires them to integrate two outside sources connected to the day’s reading, share their own perspective/experiences, and have two questions ready to ask to spark off the classroom to-and-fro. Beyond the nose (so important on multiple levels) and phantom limbs, I tend to use our [extra-]ordinary experiences with babies, music, and the workings of memory to get students to see how affect is integral to how they go about their daily lives, and then we gradually and collectively work our way toward a diverse array of encounters. EDS.: As social scientists, we often find affect an unwieldy object of study. How do you go about researching, theorizing, and writing affect? GJS: Here is my top-secret shorthand map for getting at affect’s doing. To be honest, it is basically a simplified modelling of what Gilles Deleuze makes of the geometry of Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics. In this version, affect has three registers: point, line, and plane. These are not separable states, but movements of topological modulation, as each of the three is inhabited by and can morph into the other. And, yes, this probably seems quite abstract already—but think of it like this: point is “point of contact” (the moment of encounter, of touch, of impingement—what Spinoza called affectio—what was initially understood as affection and mistranslated as emotion); line is the

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Bessie P. Dernikos et al. shifting relationality of point/s and impingement/s and their ongoingness (this is the processual aspect of affect: what Deleuze calls “the continuous line of variation” or, in Spinoza’s term, affectus); plane is the infinite stretch of capacity/pure potential for connective composition that saturates (subtends and exceeds) each and every point-line (what Deleuze calls Spinoza’s plane of immanence, or, the One-All). So whatever the unwieldiness of affect, I tend to think that it comes down to recognizing which one of these three mobile registers you are engaging as you initiate your investigative entry (although, if you are doing it “right” [whatever that means], eventually all three will come into play). If you are taking up affect study as, first and fundamentally, an impingement upon a body (as “point”), then one’s approach to affect tends to focus upon (or dilate around) the leakiness of bodily contours and contacts (affectio), a kind of post-phenomenology of the extra-/other-than- and nonhuman intersections that come to stick and/or unfasten bodies with worlds. Second, if you pursue affect as something to be grasped in the middle, in the midst of relationalities always constituted and continually reconstituted from moment to moment (rather than beginning at the more contracted point of a leaky body), then one’s work is quite attuned to the event-structure of affective formations, to historical moments, to constellations of intensities (that may come to sort out as discrete points and bodies or unfold as planes), to tensions and tendings toward futures-in-themaking (process philosophies, becomings-, continuous variations of affect, i.e, affectus). And if you take up affect as a plane of immanence, then affect is primarily understood as an open fielding of capacities or potentials always to be made. This is affect study often at its most speculative (as writing practice and/or pedagogy, it can operate through various experimental modes of engagement) because it is interested in transducing and relaying the affective resonances of worldly textures, not especially interested in engaging with more straightforwardly representationalist modes of discourse. For purposes of quick readerly reference, we could provisionally affix different writers on affect to these registers (acknowledging again that they almost inevitably traverse all three despite any initiating posture): the works of Sara Ahmed for affectio/point, Lauren Berlant for affectus/ line, and Patricia Clough for immanence/plane. Of course, I have not really answered your question about “how” I go about researching, theorizing, and writing affect. I have just provided an outline or map (and it’s only one of many possible maps! it is just shorthand) for getting at “what” affect does—it’s a point! it’s a line! it’s a plane! The “how” bit can be trickier than the “what.” Because really the only way that I feel adequate to answer the “how” question is to say: it all (always) depends. But then that’s exactly

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what affect study can sometimes finesse so well—the utterly unique “this-ness” of each and every circumstance, event, and worlding. That is, the “how” of affect begins in singularity, in the irreducibility of a particular “agencement” of bodies, atmospheres, and capacities/ incapacities that avail themselves across and hover about the scene of one’s study. Thus, among the task(s) of the researcher/theorizer/ writer—to attune to what the singular nature of this singular affective configuration teaches, to puzzle out the (multiple) lessons on offer, and then to convey—in writing, in dance, in song, in paint or chalk (or . . .), in a mix of whatever works—one’s pedagogic encounter (attuning to a world that teaches!) with this affective scene. Affect studies makes its home or finds home’s unheimlich-ness in the knots and tangles and incoherences and ambivalences that aren’t to be straightened or resolved as much as they are evidence that a world has never been all straight lines or tidy points or organized planes. And because I feel suddenly like I am having a déjà vu experience, I will just reproduce the words that conclude my “Capacious-ness” piece here: Recognizing that untangling or separating-out and critical distancing are not always the only or best available options, affect study frequently chooses to ‘middle out’ by wading into the ambient overdeterminations of existence and the energies that move (or impede, swerve, etc.) bodies (of all kinds) in the very midst of their activity. Yes, this middling-out of affect study can often feel like a muddling-through (‘That’s it?! But where is, um, agency? We want theories that jump up, assert themselves, and knock things over.’). But why shouldn’t one modest aim of affect study be: to make or foster along, even if the barest ripple across the surface, a more expansive ongoing-ness (which is not to ignore those visceral moments in the present that need expansive resistance too). And while that is never enough (when it is ever enough?), it can be a start, this making room. This capacious-ness. (Seigworth, 2017, p. v) So, yeah, that. But not only. The Capacious conferences and #SSASS (Society for the Study of Affect Summer School) seem to be unique spaces for people to come together and dwell with questions and ideas. Do you see these spaces as alternative models of pedagogy, community, and world-building within the neoliberal academy? What prompted you to set them in motion? GJS: I wish I could claim that I had some kind of grand design from the get-go, like I had a distinct mission or vision for how an alternative model of the academy should shake up the existing structures and practices (through open access publishing, conferences, seminars, EDS.:

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Bessie P. Dernikos et al. social media, infrastructures of feeling, mentorship, and the rest). But I have been (and still am) pretty much making it up as I go along, and really it was assembling the team that have become my fellow editors at Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry—Mathew Arthur, Wendy Truran, and Bryan Behrenshausen—that helped make more than a few matters begin to snap into focus for me. They are brilliant young scholars (Bryan finished his PhD just a couple of years ago while Wendy and Mathew are still graduate students [although Wendy will have finished her PhD by the time this is published]), and together we have been feeling our way forward into and through/ around a whole slew of academic entanglements. For me, maybe the big turning point (although at the time it felt like a tiny and very practical matter) was drafting the reviewers’ guidelines for Capacious and realizing that this was—as one of our authors put it once she’d been through the whole process from submission to publication—about creating a “journal of care.” And indeed, more than a few journals have contacted us over the last year or two and asked permission to adapt our orientation for reviews to their journal’s guidelines as well. So, here are the opening words: Because Capacious is a journal primarily oriented to publishing work by graduate students, reviewers are expected to frame their reviews from a perspective of mentorship and with an ethos of community building. As the journal is especially interested in essays that might unsettle rather than reinforce the status quo of scholarship in affect study, the expectation is that our journal reviewers will respond to such challenges and differences, as they might arise, in a collegial spirit that is generous and rigorous at the same time. When composing one’s editorial feedback on submissions, reviewers should always take into account (and be reminded of their own feelings of being in) the position of a fresh-faced scholar venturing into what might be one of their first opportunities for publication. The managing editor reserves the right to sand off the rough edges of any review that displays an abundance of sharp elbows before passing such reviews along to authors. We also will appreciate those reviewers who feel able to sign their reviews and, thus, perhaps open a relationship with the authors extending through and beyond this Capacious encounter. In the best of all worlds, reviewers will find a way to strike a balance between hard-won advice and focused critique, between commentary that points out, say, a glaring theoretical blindspot and commentary that provides supple guidance through critical-conceptual minefields. We cannot overemphasize how important a gracious and considerate etiquette of refereeing means to the convivial atmospheres of Capacious! (http://capaciousjournal.com/submit/reviewer-guidelines/)

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The guiding principle behind my own ethos for affect study is the notion that the study of affect should never settle (like dust), resolve (like precipitate in a solution), or establish some kind of boundary or border for what counts as “in” and “out.” When we started Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry about a year after the Affect Theory: Worldings/Tensions/Futures conference in October 2015, we wanted a place for graduate students and early career scholars (working alongside a loosely defined but fully engaged community of more established affect-oriented practitioners serving as reviewers and mentors) to push-and-pull and challenge any explicit or implicit orthodoxies in existing approaches to affect. I want the study of affect to always work against its own operational and theoretical closure, to be unsettled and unsettling, and to be able to deftly engage with its inevitable frenemies and haterz. I want an affect studies that feels in its bones the very moment when a certain set of procedures, objects-of-analysis, or conceptual voicings becomes restrictive and/or repetitive and is ready to toss itself back out in an always renewed demand for openness toward its myriad disciplinary and undisciplined intersections. And I would like to believe that the journal Capacious, along with our conferences and seminars and social media presence, are modest attempts at enacting such a thing: testing out other—more welcoming—ways to enter into scholarship, to build empathetic intellectual communities, to live an academic life that is not about claims to mastery and hypercompetitive onedown-manship but rather looks for the means to produce affective encounters and generative relations that will need to do something more-than-merely-sustain us through the ethno-nationalisms, kleptocracies, and climate catastrophes that shape our existence in the present, for the future.

Note 1. I have more than a few friends on the progressive left who are largely convinced, as am I, that the current spate of teachers strikes across the United States—often in the reddest of red states—could prove to be, in the historical rearview mirror, a vital moment in the unraveling of neoliberalist worldly assumptions.

References Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1996). What is philosophy? (Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell III, Trans.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Ramachandran, V. S., and Blakeslee, S. (1998). Phantoms in the brain: Probing the mysteries of the human mind. New York, NY: William Morrow. Seigworth, G. J. (2017). Capaciousness. Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, 1(1), i–v.

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Resistance Is Useful Social Justice Teacher Education as an Affective Craft Lee Airton

Introduction Across North America, university-based teacher education programs make space in their curricula for what is variably referred to as diversity, equity, or social justice content. At work here are teacher educators: faculty, both tenure-stream and adjunct, many of whom connect their work to the broader field of social justice teacher education, or SJTE. In the introduction to their 2012 edited book Cultivating Social Justice Teachers: How Teacher Educators Have Helped Students Overcome Cognitive Bottlenecks and Learn Critical Social Justice Concepts, noted SJTE scholars Paul C. Gorski, Zenkov, Osei-Kofi, and Sapp (2012) include a second-person address. They effectively tell the reader—tell you, presumably an SJTE practitioner—about your own experience. The book’s title emphasizes the cognitive in a conciliatory reframing of student resistance to SJTE as learning-related and not necessarily “political.” However, the “cognitive bottleneck” they speak of is unfailingly, excessively affecting. Here is their address: Making matters all the more challenging, every semester some of your students resist outright any conversation suggesting that [for example] lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer people experience bias or oppression, at all, or that their experiences belong in a conversation about “diversity,” “multiculturalism,” or “social justice.” Others argue on misinformed scientific or even religious grounds that heterosexuality is normal, so it only makes sense that anything other than heterosexuality would be deemed abnormal, if not deviant. And every week you fight the temptation to interpret these responses as hostile or judgmental. You have turned to colleagues in search of pedagogical strategies only to learn that the challenge you face is a common one; you turn to the research literature and find, in fact, that the challenge is well-documented there. (pp. 1–2)

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Although the last sentence lends a universal quality to these experiences, the “you” address does most of the heavy lifting. In other words, student resistance is so universal in SJTE that it can be said of people whom the editors have never met, in places they have never been. It is produced here as seemingly quintessential, as is the desire to fnd the means of preventing this problem. In this chapter, I argue that, in SJTE, resistance might be thought and narrated as a problem, but it is more than that: it is the field’s affective genre (Berlant, 2011). Rather than just something to be feared, student resistance is paradoxically comfortable. The “resisting student’s” utterances—the things to be anticipated and prevented—are canonical: “I treat everyone the same,” “I didn’t own slaves,” “I don’t understand how two people of the same sex could have well-adjusted kids,” “They should just get a job,” etc. Choruses of eye-rolling and head-shaking greet these familiar refrains in any gathering of SJTE practitioners sharing our war stories of meeting and handling this genre of resistance from beginning teachers, the obstacle thrown up by our students in their privilege or their ignorance (or both). Cultivating Social Justice Teachers and many other resources offer tactics for stopping the resistance: the bad thing that gets in the way of our good work. In this chapter, I will suggest that such tactics focus on the terrain of what I am calling depth in SJTE: the intentional, conscious, personal, and sovereign. Instead I suggest that SJTE and other related efforts toward social justice education begin to work the surface of social life: the affective, implicit, prepersonal, and nonsovereign. Furthermore, while there is indeed something about this affective genre of resistance that social justice teacher education carries with it across the many contexts in which it plays out, it is not the imperative of snuffing out student resistance altogether. Rather, I argue that SJTE practitioners use affect to track and even produce resistance in real time. This is what I am calling the affective craft particular to social justice teacher education.

What Is SJTE? As expressed in its literature, the end goal of SJTE is, boldly, changing the world. In 20 years of writing by SJTE field leaders, world changing is ontologically constructed in relation to two long-standing demographic divides in North American public schools (see Airton, 2014). First, students of color are becoming the majority in many school districts but are overwhelmingly taught by White, monocultural, monolingual, middleclass women. Second, White students consistently receive higher scores than racialized students on standardized literacy and numeracy tests. SJTE is teacher education that aims to “change the world” by narrowing these divides: by increasing the enrollment and retention of people

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from underrepresented groups in the teaching profession and by preparing “social justice teachers” whose classroom practice is thought to yield more equitable outcomes. The demographic divides are, however, far removed in space, time, and scale from the sites in which SJTE actually takes place. Following Wiegman (2012), we might ask how SJTE sutures the gap between its everyday doings in university classrooms among teacher educators and teacher candidates and the “social justice” it situates as beyond, outside, or to come and yet still connected to its doings. With no access to the outcomes (varieties of divide-narrowing) nominally uniting this branch of teacher education, how can SJTE practitioners know if our work is going well or going badly in its everyday unfolding? Furthermore, how can we know whether our work is SJTE at all and not something else? This question salts an old wound. SJTE field leaders (e.g., CochranSmith, Davis, and Fries, 2004; Grant and Secada, 1990; Hollins and Guzman, 2005; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Zeichner, 2009) have long lamented the field’s inability to connect what happens in particular SJTE courses or programs to the “social justice” teaching of its graduates, let alone connect this teaching to any narrowing of the demographic divides. An apparent failure within neoliberal and positivist accountability culture, SJTE is at risk, haunted by the specter of the “SJTE impostor”: a person, course, or program patting itself on the back for preparing teachers to enact “social justice” while not actually doing so and perhaps even doing the opposite (see Airton, 2014). There is a palpable need to definitively name and pin down whatever it is that holds SJTE together and sets it apart from other kinds of teacher education. In the field’s literature, language is offered as an inoculation against impostors, particularly clarity in the language used to define “social justice” within and across programs. Without clarity, so it goes,“social justice” may be mistakenly applied or may proliferate too freely. McDonald and Zeichner (2009) warn that “the lack of clarity . . . [makes] it possible for institutions with differing perspectives, political agendas, and strategies to lay claim to the same vision of teacher preparation” (p. 595; see also Cochran-Smith, 2009). Too many applications of “social justice teacher education” may empty out the signifier of its significance such that it no longer serves to set SJTE apart from other things ongoing in teacher education programs. Sleeter (2009) warns that, without greater clarity, “the likelihood is heightened that newcomers to the field will conceptualize it in a way that falls short of major change in schools or society” (p. 218). As such, SJTE literature bristles with logocentric strategies of impostor detection: typologies, definitions, and attributes of teachers who “teach for social justice” and the programs held to prepare them to join in the work of narrowing the demographic divides. And yet the gap remains between what SJTE says about itself and what of its “impact” can be ascertained through conventional means (Wiegman, 2012).

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Thinking SJTE Through Affect and Assemblage Theory Within a neoliberal and positivist frame, it can be said that there is “no evidence” for SJTE’s difference from business-as-usual in teacher education. But this is not the only frame. Between 2011 and 2013, within a new materialist frame and via post-qualitative inquiry (Lather and St. Pierre, 2013), I sought to account for SJTE’s difference without relying on language as a means of drawing lines and separating “real SJTE” from SJTE impostors. I approached SJTE as an assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, 1996, 2004) or an ever-changing network of relations among human and nonhuman components. Assemblages contain human subjects (e.g., teacher educators and beginning teachers) each with our own agency, but assemblages have an agency of their own that acts on and through their components. Caught up in assemblages, “my responses” to emerging events are never solely attributable to my own sovereign intent. Rather, my body-as-assemblage-component, its material capacities of movement and its expressive capacities of speech and nonverbal communication, are activated in service of the assemblage as it responds. I pause, move, speed up, slow down, blurt, speak, or fall silent, reacting to emergence and only rarely deliberating about how to react before I do. Many scholars have elaborated on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987, 1996, 2004) assemblages, but few accounts are as friendly to thinking about what they do in real time than that of Jeffrey Bell (2006). Bell terms assemblages “dynamic systems on the edge of chaos,” which indicates how Deleuzian metaphysics depart from traditional Western metaphysics. Within the latter, something reaches its fullest expression—is most itself—when it ceases to change or reaches the pinnacle of development. Its completion is judged against images of perfection, often of the divine. Here, things are either complete and perfect or they are not. In Deleuzian metaphysics, however, things are both complete and in process. There is something eternal against which we can judge the goodness of things, but it is not a static image of perfection (like “real social justice” or “real SJTE”). The yardstick of what is good, for Deleuze, is the continual backand-forth of becoming, which Bell (2006) calls chaosmos. At one end of this process is the assemblage as cosmos, or “stable, structured strata that are in some sense complete.” At the other end is the assemblage as chaos, or “unstable, unstructured, deterritorializing flows” (p.  4). If an assemblage is complete, good, and productive, this means it is consistently moving on a plateau in between the two poles of chaosmos without succumbing to an excess of order and suffocation or to meaningless proliferation and collapse. What makes an assemblage itself is not reaching the pinnacle of development (e.g., the very best possible SJTE program according to field-leading criteria) and ceasing to change; rather, an assemblage is itself because of how it becomes: per Bell, how it wavers

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between the two poles of cosmos and chaos without succumbing fully to either one, both of which are a death by extremes. Thought as an assemblage, a social justice teacher education approach, practice, class, or conversation is SJTE because of how its components respond together to what emerges and not because, for example, the humans involved participate in exercises, hold intentions, or use terms (e.g., privilege or oppression) that correspond with the SJTE archive. I wanted to think otherwise about SJTE’s difference in real time and its particular contribution to a world more viscerally welcoming of difference, which has proven to be unavailable to positivist ways of knowing that look for significance away from the unfolding present. My inquiry took place at what DeLanda (2006) would call the “lower” level of the SJTEassemblage, or what I am calling the “surface” of social life: in encounters among less-than-sovereign subjects—myself included—caught up in this larger network of relations moving along between two extremes (order and chaos), whether in larger SJTE gatherings or in encounters between two or three practitioners (myself being one). I mobilized affect theory as an archive of writings on the everyday, uncanny experience of being caught up in things far exceeding ourselves, our intentions, our consciousness, and our reasoning: assemblages. Even at the surface or the lower level of an assemblage, it can intensively destabilize into meaningless proliferation or overcorrect into suffocation, silence, and stasis. SJTE’s ordinary is where the sensation of its movement toward either pole can make affective contact, “[catching] people up in something that feels like something” (Stewart, 2007, p. 2; original emphasis), even if we know not at the time. By tracking ordinary affects, “the varied, surging capacities to affect and be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences” (pp. 1–2), one can track assemblage becoming in real time. Being caught up in an assemblage is “directly compelling” (p.  3); it is to be carried along by swells of intensity, only narrated (if ever) as “my emotions” once the intensity has subsided and I can make sense from receding sensation (Massumi, 2002). Tracking affect as sensations of unqualified intensity (Massumi, 2002) then is a way to stay alive to what happens and what can happen at the thresholds of assemblage-becoming in everyday life, even belatedly. Caught up, we resonate with intensities that rise and fall in relation to how close the assemblage has come to a threshold of suffocation or meaningless proliferation where it threatens to come apart. In order to track how SJTE emerges in real time (see Airton, 2014), then, I directly “poked the wounds” of impostors, evidence, and what is knowable about “good” or “bad” SJTE as it unfolds in our work with beginning teachers, both in multisensory fieldwork amidst critical masses of SJTE practitioners at education conferences and in experimental encounters with other SJTE practitioners. Using an affective barometer of rises and falls in intensity, coupled with an attention to speech and

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silence, I studied SJTE by studying how its components exercise their (and our) capacities in real time.

Dynamic Resistance as a Tool of SJTE Practitioners What I found in my conference fieldwork and encounters with other SJTE practitioners is that the SJTE assemblage is capacious, elastic, and responsive to emerging local conditions; SJTE can tolerate wild deviation from the stated objectives and priorities in its field literature without rupture. By contrast, the SJTE constructed in the literature is heavily coded, stabilized, and even juridical (Wiegman, 2012) in its definition of social justice and what it will take to get us there. For example, and returning to how I began the chapter, the resisting student is a staple concern of the field (e.g., Lowenstein, 2009; McFalls and Cobb-Roberts, 2001; St. Denis and Schick, 2003). Combating resistance is essential, and its emergence is a sign of badness, perhaps even indexing an SJTE impostor if the resistance runs unchecked or is handled incorrectly: a teacher educator “not really” doing SJTE because they “can’t handle” resistance. And yet my inquiry suggests that the actual (in the Deleuzian sense of the emerging present; see Massumi, 2002) as opposed to the a priori (stated) “goal” of SJTE practitioners is not to shut down or preempt student resistance. Although a whole class of entirely “won over” new teachers would seem an ideal scenario or even a goal of selective admissions for urban (see Haberman, 1991) or social justice-focused teacher education programs, resistance instead emerged in the course of my inquiry as a tool for doing this work. Emerging within my fieldwork and encounters with other SJTE practitioners was a continuum of student resistance undergirding SJTE classroom practice. At one end is what I term stifling resistance, which suffocates the classroom equilibrium by shutting down movement, lowering volume, or bringing things to a standstill. At the other end is flowing resistance, which ruptures the classroom equilibrium with a proliferation of speed, sound, and movement. What makes these resistances different is not their content, such as a quintessentially resistant statement or action, but rather their form: stifling or flowing. Conceptualizing resistance as content in SJTE is a logocentric practice of privileging depth (what is intentional, meant, conscious, and sovereign). Instead I noted how SJTE practitioners orient our pedagogies toward resistance as form, often privileging surface: the affective, implicit, prepersonal, and non-sovereign. This orientation to surface is absent from the field’s defining literature and the written record of conversations among practitioners. Although it is not made explicit, however, I will now illustrate how it emerges in other ways by sharing data from my study. Below, I share an example (MacLure, 2010) from one experimental encounter with another SJTE practitioner (Professor A) in which an

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account of “SJTE going well” is produced and gradually stabilizes. This is one account among many in my inquiry that defied the field’s literature by producing “good SJTE” as on a scale nowhere near changing the world in ways available to language and accountability regimes (see Airton, 2014). In these encounters, I worked to materially and discursively provoke the emergence of thresholds: moments where we would play with the boundaries between, for example, “good” and “bad” SJTE or what SJTE feels like in practice when it is “going well or badly.” I asked questions about the outcomes that participants work toward in their practice and the degree to which these evoke the sense of a “job well done,” or coalesce with the broader outcomes put forward by SJTE field leaders. In the ensuing intensive exchanges of words (questions, exploratory statements, interjections, and explanations), sounds (um, uh, sighs, coughs, chuckles, giggles, laughs, rises and falls in tone, etc.), and silences (including the absence of sound and silences of other kinds; see Mazzei, 2008, 2011), we would feel our way toward an account of SJTE practice that could stabilize as “SJTE going well” such that we could move on in our conversation. Across my conference fieldwork and practitioner encounters, what stabilized, uncontested, as “SJTE going well” was not the absence of quintessential student resistance, but successfully practicing an affective craft: gauging and producing degrees of stifling or flowing resistance in order to produce a sustainable, dynamic, and therefore stable-enough classroom. In the example that follows, two SJTE practitioners—myself and Prof. A—demonstrate our affective craft while also producing an account together of “SJTE going well” that will stand in our conversation without requiring the excessive force of flowing resistance: abrupt shifts in pitch, tone, speed, volume, and movement; interruptions too fast for conscious deliberation; eruptions of laughter; and compulsive repetition. I have bolded instances of force below; note how they rise and fall in concert with the content of our speech and the form of the encounter: . . . like when it’s going really well for you . . . what does that look like and feel like? PROF. A: Um, it looks like the students are engaged. LEE: What does that look like? A: It looks like they’re not silent or with a very flat and apathetic affect.  .  .  . And they’re actually willing to take risks and ask their questions and speak. Um, and it looks like they’re humbly wrestling with things that challenge them rather than kind of doing that refusal to know or willful ignorance or just rejection, um, that, you know, it’s hard and you don’t even, whether or not you agree or disagree is not really relevant. Are you willing to grapple with . . . a different pair of glasses? Will you put these on and see what you can see? You can LEE:

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take them off when we’re done. Rather than “I, you know, I disagree, I refuse, this is . . . ” LEE: [softly] Right. PROF. A: Or that just total silence. “I’ll never take a risk, I won’t show myself.” Um, because if they’re not, if they’re not speaking up in the one class they have that grapples with these issues, they’re not going to speak up in the faculty lounge. LEE: [softly] Mmm. PROF. A: [suddenly loud] Right? I mean, I don’t believe they will. LEE: [louder] No, I’m, I doubt they will either. A: So that’s what it looks like, that’s all. It’s not like we’re all in agreement but the willingness to grapple and the engagement and the coming alive kind of. Um, it also looks like “you’re ruining my life, you ruined my life.” LEE: [softly] Right. PROF. A: [suddenly loud] In a good way, right? Like . . . LEE: [softly] Yeah. PROF. A: [shouting] . . . you wanna see somebody going like [high-pitched, enthusiastic voice] “you ruined my life!” LEE: [laughs loudly and claps] PROF. A: “I can, I see different now! I can’t not see it!” And I’m always like “yay!” LEE: [laughing, mirroring A’s volume] My students are like “I can’t go on the bus anymore without looking around me,” you know? PROF. A: [softer now] Yeah, yeah. Here, Prof. A begins by stating that SJTE going well is not the absence of resistance; it is not seamless agreement with the instructor, the course content, or one’s social justice-minded peers. It is a humble wrestling: a willingness to try on the “social justice glasses” for a time, here and now, even if they come off. Even temporary glasses-wearing or grappling is offered as a way to grow the capacity to “speak up in the faculty lounge” down the road, long after the SJTE course in question is over. The gap between the glasses-wearing here and “doing justice” as speaking up in a future faculty lounge is provisionally sutured (Wiegman, 2012). But I am not moving, responding, yelling, or laughing along with Prof. A. Rather, I am noncommittal, passive, and quiet. In all of my practitioner encounters, any production of student resistance—not acceptance, acquiescence—as “SJTE going well” looked and felt like a back-andforth struggle between flowing and stifling resistance: excesses of motion and rest. Prof. A labors to bring me on board with the notion of “you ruined my life!” as indicative of “good SJTE.” The dialogue lurches along in fits and starts: Prof. A speaks, I softly vocalize, Prof. A erupts in more strident rephrasings of what they just uttered, I am compelled to (weakly)

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agree. Prof. A is compelled to compel me, finally provoking the flow: volume (laughter) and movement (clapping) in order to produce a kind of student resistance—giving fake thanks for a ruined life—as “SJTE going well.” Finally, I am on board and produce a complementary example, implicating myself and co-producing students’ gratitude for a “ruined life” as a “good SJTE outcome.” Prof. A can now dial down, stifled, and the encounter returns to an even keel: humming along, no longer stuck. Consider the laboriousness of this example. Prof. A must labor to produce the humble wrestling—a kind of student resistance—as a “good SJTE outcome” against all that is said and sayable as “good SJTE” in our field’s literature centered on resistances that are always a bad thing, a bad sign: to be prevented at all costs for the good work to carry on. Why does it take such force to produce a student humbly wrestling with and even resenting SJTE (for life-ruining) as good? Isn’t wholehearted student buy-in what “we” (SJTE) are after? It is only with some degree of a flowing eruption of silliness that we can produce something else as a “good outcome” of SJTE. It is little wonder that Prof. A and I work so hard to stabilize a version of student resistance as “SJTE going well.” Can this resistance express a teacher candidate’s readiness to do the work of teaching for social justice? In the field’s literature (see Airton, 2014), the answer is no. Rather, preventing teacher candidate resistance altogether is a field-defining SJTE concern. To sum up, in this and my other practitioner encounters, SJTE’s singular contribution across the diverse contexts where it plays out is practitioners’ affective craft: tracking and channeling affective intensity to create a plateau, or a stable, gradual, back-and-forth dynamic of flowing and stifling resistance. At the emerging plateau, things are going well in the unfolding present, but nowhere near SJTE’s goal of changing the world by narrowing statistically significant demographic divides in educational outcomes. SJTE practitioners viscerally know about our craft; it lends form to our conversations as well as our work, but it is inadmissible in the neoliberal arenas wherein SJTE’s “failure” is repeatedly constructed as indisputable fact. Most importantly, SJTE practitioners’ affective craft expresses the sense that forceful, loud, vociferous, and strident agreement from our students is not the best thing we can hope for, or a sign of things going well. In fact, practicing our affective craft means recognizing and engaging such agreement as (flowing) resistance: meaningless proliferation that could rupture the plateau with its excessive form. Put simply, “teaching the diversity course” in teacher education—as SJTE is often colloquially referred to—sometimes means provoking (flowing) resistance even if the content resembles canonical student resistance from the field literature. While provoking (flowing) resistance in our classrooms might postpone student “buy-in” to discussions of privilege, white supremacy, and settler colonialism, among other things, this postponement can be key to

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our work going well. Without it, our capacity for moment-to-moment assessment of our practice, in real time, is hampered.

Doing Things with Resistance in SJTE Practice Regardless of what it looks or feels like in a particular context, exercising our affective craft—gradually ruining our students’ lives, perhaps— involves something other than creating a space for intercultural exchange or dialogue, using culturally responsive curriculum resources, describing contemporary in/equity issues, encouraging students to explicitly acknowledge their privilege, or developing new teachers’ discourse-based critical thinking skills. Instead of centering depth—anticipating and preventing canonical performances and utterances of the resisting student— doing SJTE with a surface orientation and owning our craft involves becoming attuned to affect in one’s own classroom and laboring in the moment to increase or decrease intensity in order to keep things on a sustainable plateau, including by sometimes provoking something that echoes the affective genre of resistance feared in the field’s literature. Flowing resistance might have to be provoked, produced, or allowed to actualize and run its course until it is once again in balance with stifling resistance. The same is true in reverse, but the objective is never to preempt resistance altogether. We need it to do this work and gauge whether the work is good: sustainably productive of the new. From my fieldwork and practitioner encounters, I have pulled out some examples: highly provisional “tactics” for sustaining the SJTE “sweet spot” or plateau where difference (of self and other) can sustainably emerge and be encountered without veering all the way to shutdown (via unchecked stifling resistance) or rupture (via unchecked flowing resistance). Consider their material form and their discursive content. For example, a swift or sudden (form) intervention in one instance might be an utterance, and its swiftness or timing might function in other contexts, if not its semantic content. In a field so devoted to language as a proxy for things like consciousness, awareness, and other sovereign signs of individualized change—which is offered as a means of creating and sustaining its difference from other aspects of teacher education—these tactics are experimental: provisional means to fully embrace our affective craft in SJTE and, with modification, in other domains like the K-12 classroom. Each tactic is an example of how one might nudge the SJTE assemblage toward a dynamic plateau by provoking either flowing or stifling resistance. It is admittedly unusual to seem prescriptive when working within a new materialist frame and with assemblage and affect theories. In sharing these “tactics,” I appear to perform a very humanist and “highlysovereign teacher” who is outside of the classroom’s affective barometer, somehow transcending the assemblage to look down from above. Rather,

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these are not straightforward tips or best practices that I am recommending; my staging aims to provoke the feeling of exercising SJTE’s affective craft for the reader. In offering tactics, I am also interested in working through what I experience as an impasse in thinking pedagogy through affect. The not-fully-sovereign subject is sometimes also a teacher, and the teacher is mandated to perform a high sovereignty in the course of daily teacher (and teacher educator) life. I sometimes wonder whether new materialist theories of affect can think teachers doing things at all. What might it mean to perform the teacher’s high sovereignty—i.e., to do things with intent and attribute what happens, at least in part, to one’s doings—but orient one’s performance toward the failure of depth approaches to take into account what matters and is ongoing in classroom life? And so, the “tactics” below are ways of teacher-doing from and with the only-ever illusionary sovereignty that structures their role. It is in this spirit that I offer the following, which harness the material and also the expressive qualities of the assemblage but only as means to an emergent end. To provoke flowing resistance, try . . . . . . to avoid pushing or leading in a particular direction. Rather, ask a simple yes/no question, sit back, and let students carry the conversation for as long as possible. Harness this energy in a redirection toward the place you got stuck—be it material (a configuration of human or nonhuman bodies or an orientation within or toward) or discursive (a statement or a silence) and use the movement to “grease the wheels” and propel you through. It might not have been the content (what was “being talked about”) that got you into trouble. . . . behaving and speaking as if students are already “on board” with the concepts and commitments underpinning the course or with the focus of the content with which you and your students are presently engaged. You can generate and catch students up in your own momentum. .  .  . using a plant. Engage someone who can pass as a student enrolled in your program (perhaps a former student). Their task is to perform a degree of flowing resistance. Allow your students to engage the plant as long as necessary to build the required momentum. It would be a good idea to develop a subtle signal that you could use to ask the plant to desist. To provoke stifling resistance, try . . . .  .  . using the classroom, the school, or education writ large as an “easy out.” One might say, “I understand that you don’t agree, etc. It isn’t necessary that you agree in order to recognize that you have a responsibility in this area as a teacher. What is that responsibility,

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in this case?” This may harness new teachers’ habitual desire for the practical and their budding sense of professionalism, prompting the kind of conversation that makes them want to take notes instead of play verbal ping-pong (flowing resistance). .  .  . invoking their own sense of being “scholars in a scholarly profession.” Further remind them of the considerable research on the topic with which they are (too) freely engaging (in some way). Hopefully you can refer them to a course reading. Failing that, use any available in-room technology to run a quick Google search for “hard data” or a Google Scholar search, together consulting the abstract of the most widely cited source in the results list. You might also prepare in advance (like a fire extinguisher) a list of Google/Google Scholar searches that can serve in this regard. . . . using a plant. This is similar to the above use of a plant, except this plant would respond to ongoing student resistance in a manner consistent with your course concepts and goals and which furthers the conversation you are hoping to have without overplaying your own hand and so remaining a facilitator.

Conclusion: From Depth to Surface in Social Justice Teacher Education My work in this chapter rattles tradition and common sense in SJTE on two fronts: first, that everything we do must be explicitly relevant to “social justice” as it is currently articulated in language; and second, that teacher educator intent to do explicit “social justice teacher education” is the vehicle of justice in and from the classroom. Here we see an inherent valuing of authenticity, or the “realness” of one’s connection (in the first instance) and commitment (in the second) to “the struggle” outside (Wiegman, 2012). This value ascribed to authenticity animates SJTE’s impostor anxiety, which plays out on an empiricist and logocentric plane where the field’s affective craft is unthinkable as a contribution of any kind. If, via affect theory, language and representation are latecomers to the scene where affect has already had a tangible impact, so too, then, are authenticity, intentionality, consciousness, sovereignty, and the narration that they rely on for their articulation by the human subject. I have grouped these together under the term depth because they presume the significance of what happens away from the immediacy of the unfolding and affecting present in a particular, local context. I refer to what is affective, implicit, prepersonal, and non-sovereign as surface. Surface is a terrain rarely broached in SJTE. This is an ethical problem because harm on the basis of social difference does not begin and end with depth; this echoes a familiar refrain in social justice education circles that good intentions do not guarantee good impact. We who seek to change the world via teacher education must begin to reckon, as a field of

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practitioners, with the vulnerability of depth to what erupts at the surface of social life. There is an unstable connection between what I hold myself to be doing (and the language I use to narrate what I hold myself to be doing) and what actually (in the Massumian sense—see Massumi, 2002) happens. In other words, our efforts to coax beginning teachers into a new consciously ethical and critical relationship with, for example, privilege and oppression, may bank too much on depth (authenticity, intentionality, consciousness, and sovereignty), although life at the surface of the unfolding present can easily override depth’s significance. What are the unintended consequences of pedagogies that aim to “empower teachers to be agents of social change” if sustainable change requires a surface sense of one’s impact as only ever contingent, partial, and non-sovereign? “Social justice teachers” might need to be watchers-and-waiters rather than movers-and-shakers. Recalling my conversation with Prof. A, they might need to be humble wrestlers. In order to foster teachers who can facilitate the emergence of the difference-to-come and not only draw from an archive of what social difference and in/justice have meant, looked, and sounded like before, SJTE should avow our affective craft and also find ways to share it—as an avowed craft—with our beginning teachers.

References Airton, L. (2014). Be(coming) the change you want to see in the world: Social justice teacher education as affective craft, Unpublished doctoral dissertation. York University, Toronto, ON. Bell, J. A. (2006). Philosophy at the edge of chaos: Gilles Deleuze and the philosophy of difference. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press. Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cochran-Smith, M. (2009). Toward a theory of teacher education for social justice. In A. Hargreaves, A. Lieberman, M. Fullan, and D. Hopkins (Eds.), Second international handbook of educational change (pp. 445–467). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer Netherlands. Cochran-Smith, M., Davis, D., and Fries, K. (2004). Multicultural teacher education: Research, practice, and policy. In J. A. Banks and C. A. M. Banks (Eds.), Handbook of research on multicultural education (2nd ed., pp. 931–975). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. DeLanda, M. (2006). A new philosophy of society: Assemblage theory and social complexity. London: Continuum. Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (1st ed., B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1996). What is philosophy? (H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell, Trans.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (2004). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H. R. Lane, Trans.). London: Continuum. Gorski, P. C., Zenkov, K., Osei-Kofi, N., and Sapp, J. (Eds.). (2012). Cultivating social justice teachers: How teacher educators have helped students overcome

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cognitive bottlenecks and learn critical social justice concepts. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing. Grant, C. A., and Secada, W. (1990). Preparing teachers for diversity. In W. Houston, M. Haberman, and J. Sikula (Eds.), Handbook of research on teacher education (pp. 403–422). New York, NY: Macmillan. Haberman, M. (1991). Can cultural awareness be taught in teacher education programs? Teaching Education, 4(1), 25–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 1047621910040104 Hollins, E. R., and Guzman, M. T. (2005). Research on preparing teachers for diverse populations. In M. Cochran-Smith and K. M. Zeichner (Eds.), Studying teacher education: The report of the AERA Panel on research and teacher education (pp. 477–541). New York, NY: Routledge. Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Multicultural teacher education: Research, practice, and policy. In J. Banks and C. A. McGee Banks (Eds.), Handbook of research on multicultural education (pp. 747–759). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Lather, P., and St. Pierre, E. A. (2013). Post-qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 629–633. https://doi.org/10. 1080/09518398.2013.788752 Lowenstein, K. L. (2009). The work of multicultural teacher education: Reconceptualizing white teacher candidates as learners. Review of Educational Research, 79(1), 163–196. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654308326161 MacLure, M. (2010). The offence of theory. Journal of Education Policy, 25(2), 277–286. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680930903462316 Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mazzei, L. A. (2008). Silence speaks: Whiteness revealed in the absence of voice. Teaching and Teacher Education, 24(5), 1125–1136. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. tate.2007.02.009 Mazzei, L. A. (2011). Desiring silence: Gender, race and pedagogy in education. British Educational Research Journal, 37(4), 657–669. https://doi.org/10.1080 /01411926.2010.487934 McDonald, M., and Zeichner, K. (2009). Social justice teacher education. In W. Ayers, T. Quinn, and D. Stovall (Eds.), Handbook of social justice in education (pp. 595–610). New York, NY: Routledge. McFalls, E. L., and Cobb-Roberts, D. (2001). Reducing resistance to diversity through cognitive dissonance instruction: Implications for teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 52(2), 164–172. Sleeter, C. E. (2009). Teacher education, neoliberalism, and social justice. In W. Ayers, T. Quinn, and D. Stovall (Eds.), Handbook of social justice in education (pp. 611–624). New York, NY: Routledge. St. Denis, V., and Schick, C. (2003). What makes anti-racist pedagogy in teacher education difficult? Three popular ideological assumptions. Alberta Journal of Educational Research, 49(1), 55–69. Stewart, K. (2007). Ordinary affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wiegman, R. (2012). Object lessons. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Zeichner, K. M. (2009). Teacher education and the struggle for social justice. New York, NY: Routledge.

8

Love and Bewilderment On Education as Affective Encounter Nathan Snaza

Two Classes A few years ago, I taught a course on education of “minority groups” in America (a phrase that wasn’t of my choosing). My sense was that students would expect a course about the present moment and what is often called “achievement gaps.” By this time, I’d already been writing about what I call “bewildering education”: educational situations that can unstick us from our present ways of thinking and being, leading us to become lost (Snaza, 2013). My hope—which was, and continues to be, animated by feminist, queer, antiracist, and decolonial struggle—is that such bewilderment may create conditions for the emergence of unanticipated confluences of thoughts, affects, and collectivities. As I planned the class, I wanted to immediately swerve away from asking about differences in educational outcomes as captured by standardized metrics and instead look at the forces—colonialism, slavery, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy—that structured the emergence and maintenance of schools in the United States. I decided to begin the class with The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, followed by Brenda Child’s Boarding School Seasons. I wanted students to consider how settler colonialism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade were inseparable from the “whitenizing” projects of US public schools and to think about how the humanization of some US residents was structurally conjoined with dehumanization. The students in the class, who were fairly “diverse” compared to others on campus, responded to these readings with silence. Given that many courses on campus have substantial requirements for “class participation,” this was surprising. During my office hours, students came individually to express frustration. For many of them, the existence of boarding schools for Indigenous students was previously unknown to them, and they had never been asked to think about how policies stretching from the antebellum moment through Brown vs. Board of Education, which in effect made schooling illegal for enslaved people and their descendants, were continuing to shape schools in the United States. Many of these students openly expressed fear that their grades were going to suffer in

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the class as a result of their unwillingness or inability to speak in class. They were overwhelmed and certainly bewildered, but instead of allowing them to unlearn whitewashed history and think through the ongoing violence of settler coloniality and forms of racialized state violence, the class just shut them down. They didn’t feel safe enough to get lost. We never recovered, and even as some of the later readings—such as Elizabeth Meyer’s book on bullying—enabled some interesting discussions, the class felt unengaged until the end. I’m not sure I ever taught a more disappointing class. The following semester, I taught a philosophy of education course. Again, the reading list was primarily feminist, queer, anti-racist, and decolonial scholarship, although we also read hypercanonical texts by Plato, Rousseau, and Dewey. This time, I asked students to read bell hooks’ “Engaged Pedagogy” (1994) for the first class. Many of the students from the previous class were again enrolled, and I entered the first day with trepidation. But somehow everything was different. Zeroing in on what hooks calls “a holistic model of learning” (p. 21), which “emphasized well being” (p. 15), we discussed how class might be felt as ritual, one with spiritual and embodied dimensions that stretch far beyond narrowly rational goals about content and concepts. We read difficult texts that semester—by hooks, Sandy Grande, Paulo Freire, Deborah Britzman, and Donna Haraway—but the students always came engaged, even passionate about discussing them. This time the classroom was a space where everyone felt like they could be vulnerable, ask questions, and offer uncertain formulations. While some of this was undoubtedly about curriculum (what is read and in what order), my sense was that the difference had to do with something else, maybe something like mood, and I didn’t feel like I had the vocabulary to frame the problem. Trying to make sense of the differences between these two classes and how the bad feelings of the first might have set up the generativity of the second sent me back to affect theory. Up until that moment, when I’d engaged affect theory in my scholarship, it was mostly in the impersonal, post-Spinozist mode (Massumi, 2002; Protevi, 2009), and I wrote about it as a subset of a wider scholarly current that was seeking to challenge and move beyond humanist thought and even beyond the human. At that moment, I started turning more toward the work in affect studies that focuses on emotion, or “feelings” (Ahmed, 2015; Boler, 1999; Brennan, 2004), and for the rest of this chapter, I’m going to dwell on a few of the lessons I’ve learned from this study, especially as bringing these two senses of affect together capaciously has helped me to clarify and shift my commitment to bewildering education. Because this study has taken place at a moment when questions about how and if classrooms can be “safe spaces” have polarized public discourse in the United States, I’m going to begin with a brief excursus on those debates, which have the important virtue of conceptualizing education as inescapably affective. Thinking through what

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often gets forgotten in these debates allows me to come back to bewildering education, clarifying this concept in two important ways. First, we have to attune to all the ways that impersonal affects circulate in situations that extend far beyond the human, but we need to attend to affects in the sense of emotions to understand classroom encounters. And second, pedagogies oriented toward bewilderment have to simultaneously critique the (de)humanizing violence of Man and lovingly affirm non-Man ways of performing the human (Wynter, 2003).

Feeling the Classroom: Safety and Bewilderment In the last few years, at least in the United States, there has been a great deal of discussion, some of it happening far beyond the university, of the relation between classroom practices and safety. Tracing these debates from 1960s radical student activism through the University of Chicago’s recent policy banning “safe spaces” on its campus, Zöe Brigley Thompson (2018) writes, The tension in Western free speech debates lies between two schools of thought; the first suggests that any political idea, however extreme, should be expressed without fear of reprisal, while the second warns of the possible detrimental consequences of speech that targets minority groups, or even hate speech. Mainstream conservatism tends to pursue unfettered free speech, while the view from the left sometimes, but not always, demands limits. (p. 3) The position that opposes safe spaces and “trigger warnings” has won a great deal of support among contemporary conservative and “alt-right” commentators in the United States (including Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, authors of The Coddling of the American Mind), and it often presents itself as a position that seeks to ensure the vivacity of First Amendment protections on “free speech.” It can only do this, however, by splitting out affect from rational discourse and assailing affect as a detriment to rigorous, intellectual, rational debate of ideas. That is, as with the alt-right epithet “snowfake” thrown at people who raise questions about the violence of certain kinds of literacy events, such commentators see affect as getting in the way of thinking. They therefore champion “exposure” to diffcult and violent ideas as a means of strengthening resiliency, grit, and askesis propelled by a narrow sense of rationality. Tracing the history of content and trigger warnings (they are different things!), Jack Halberstam underscores how the critique of safe spaces espoused by Haidt and Lukianoff et al. has a kernel of truth but also displays an almost-studied avoidance to the material, historical, and affective conditions of contemporary education. He writes, “Lukianoff and Haidt hit some of the important markers of this new terrain of student

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vulnerability, but they also fail to see the complexity of contemporary student bodies, never mind their diversity” (2017, n.p.). Noting that differences—especially race and gender—don’t figure into their account, Halberstam also worries that “trigger refuseniks” risk homogenizing or universalizing accounts of harm. Halberstam (2017) goes on to note that “Both sides ignore the differences between and among students, and all fail to account for the differences that race and class make to experiences with trauma, expectations around protection, and exposure to troubling materials” (n.p.). Halberstam rightly worries about the ways that “the new sensitivity” props up a model of the student as a “defenseless, passive, and inert spectator who has no barriers between herself and the flow of images that populate her world” (n.p.). Beyond the ways that this demand on educational practice risks articulating such a passive self, Halberstam’s analysis foregrounds without making it quite explicit how safety is an entirely relational affective situation. Put plainly, the safety of some students is almost always articulated in direct and antagonistic relation to other students. The conservative student who wants to jettison “safe spaces” to be able to say racist, sexist, homophobic, ableist, etc. things seems to forget that his safety to say these things comes at the expense of other students feeling assaulted by such speech. And conversely, disenabling such speech through policies designed to create “safe spaces” actually do make those conservative students feel “unsafe” to articulate their (sometimes assaulting) ideas, which may need to happen before they can learn to think otherwise. In other words, safety is a relational affective milieu that is structurally uneven. The students who demand trigger warnings and safe spaces are rightly calling attention to how certain modes of negative affect—fear and intimidation—can appear in and around pedagogical encounters in ways that do make intellectual and political engagement difficult or impossible for some students. But blanket calls for trigger warnings disavow precisely this specificity, positing predictable relations between content and affects that are almost never really predictable, and that may end up being used to limit engagement with texts that play important roles in feminist, queer, and anti-racist pedagogies. As Alyssa Niccolini (2016) aptly puts it, “Trigger warnings ultimately reveal anxieties over the animating capacities of pedagogies: what they might trigger, or using another lexicon, enliven, make alive, energise, set off, or animate” (p. 15). This anxiety about the unpredictable ways that affects animate us and our relations can lead some students, faculty, and administrators to demand a kind of safety that, in the end, can translate into a kind of buffer zone against politically radical engagement. One of the most interesting things about the contemporary public disputes about safe spaces is how they reprise debates around pedagogy in Women’s Studies classes in the 1980s. As student protests of the 1960s and 70s led to shifts in university demographics and curriculum,

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including the formation of Women’s Studies and ethnic studies programs (see Ferguson, 2012), feminist pedagogy often turned on creating spaces where women could feel safe to come to “voice” concerns that many spaces in the university (and in the world more broadly) made difficult to enunciate. In this sense, they sought pedagogies that resonated with the axiom that “the personal is the political” and that had ties to the extra-institutional procedures of consciousness-raising groups. The difficulty here is that the abstract goal of creating safe classroom spaces for women to voice concerns as women amongst women turned on an essentialist conception of “woman” that synecdochally defined woman as White, able-bodied, educated, Western, and middle class (Boler, 1999, pp. 120–122; Fuss, 1989). It is on these grounds that queer folks and feminists of color challenged pedagogies of abstract safety. bell hooks (1989), for example, wrote, “Unlike the stereotypical feminist model that suggests women best come to voice in an atmosphere of safety (one in which we are all going to be kind and nurturing), I encourage students to work at coming to voice in an atmosphere where they may be afraid or see themselves at risk” (p. 53). hooks is underscoring how feminist and liberatory education cannot just take place in Women’s Studies classrooms, and students who desire “education as the practice of freedom” (hooks, 1994) will need to “come to voice” in spaces that lack even such abstract commitments to the safety of women raising their consciousness. But also hooks is attentive—like many other feminists of color—to how that abstract notion of woman is structured by racialized, sexualized, and ableist violence. Put differently, the safety secured in these classrooms was not the safety of the Black feminist, the queer feminist, the Third World feminist. And for these feminists to transform those classrooms into places of possible safety, they had to call into question the abstract universality of “woman” and the kinds of disavowal it requires. I think it’s productive to hold this earlier debate in tension with our current one because despite the apparent redistribution of roles (queer folks and feminists of color went from critiquing safe spaces to demanding them), the general structure of the dispute hasn’t shifted much. Acknowledging this continuity requires of us something quite different than simply an affirmation of safe spaces or a denunciation of them. In fact, both of those positions have to ignore precisely the architectural and affective situations that subtend pedagogical encounters, including the ways that the spaces of classrooms, campuses, and cities participate in affective circulation. The point is not to take sides then, but to see how the endurance of this set of concerns must move us toward a different understanding of education itself. Instead of a model of education that sees it as primarily a matter of rational cognition and intellectual agonism (whether that be of the sort imagined by contemporary conservatives and their “marketplace of ideas”

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or the kind espoused by critical pedagogues [see Ellsworth, 1989]), thinking through the problem of safety requires that we understand that affect and thought are inextricable, that learning is always already as much about feelings as it is about thinking. Classrooms are not just spaces where ideas are aired, shared, critiqued, and debated; they are sites where affects emerge, circulate, and enter into conflict. (And this circulation far exceeds the human.) Pedagogy is therefore at least as much a matter of affect modulation as it as a question of theories, evidence, argument, and genealogies. This means, in the first instance, that we have to give up on the idea that feeling safe in the classroom is something that can be produced by policy or fiat (Ellsworth, 1989). But it also means that championing a pedagogy of discomfort as an abstract goal is similarly impossible. What a conception of education as primarily affective—and a matter of an affective situation—allows is a way of thinking about affects that unevenly circulate among differently positioned bodies with different kinds of force or intensity. As Boler (1999) insists, “feminist politics of emotions recognize emotions not only as sites of social control, but of political resistance” (p. 113). This circulation cannot be understood only within the space of the classroom because, as Ahmed (2015) reminds us, everyone enters that space from elsewhere and carries with them histories of affective accumulation. These accumulations are records of the ways that race, gender, class, sexuality, ability, and other vectors of social stratification shape the bodyminds of students and teachers, but that doesn’t mean students or teachers can know or predict how those accumulations have taken place or what kinds of effects they will have in the classroom. The pedagogical encounter is, at the affective level of the situation, unknowable and unpredictable. As a way of affirming this unpredictability, I try to practice what I call “bewildering education.” In an essay by that name, I write, “I propose that education be reconceived as a process that leads us … away from the stable, predictable, and cultured world of civilization, of cities, of routine, of politics as we have known it. Whither it should lead us is—and must be—unknown” (Snaza 2013, p. 49). One of the difficulties of enacting pedagogies that open onto the affective intensities of bewilderment is that it requires a sensitivity to relationality and the unevenness of our encounters. In Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant (2011) asks, “why do some people have the chops for improvising the state of being unknowing while others run out of breath…?” (p. 37), which gets directly at how uneven and unpredictable pedagogies of discomfort, unsettling, and bewilderment are. And indeed this was precisely the question I had been trying to ask after teaching the two courses I described at the beginning of this chapter. Not everyone is in the same place even when they’re in the same space, and so what bewilders some may not bewilder others, what makes one feel safe may generate feelings of fear or anxiety in another. Bewildering education is, perhaps more

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than anything else, about the cultivation of attunement to how affects circulate, how they are distributed, and how they both open up and shut down possibilities in highly unstable ways. It is an educational practice that takes shape only on the condition that education is reconceived less as a matter of abstract rationality and more as a matrix of affective circulation.

From Event to Situation I skipped this at the beginning, but I teach at an extremely wealthy private liberal arts college in Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy. We occupy Powhatan land. Our buildings are constructed in a studiously homogenous style to evoke the money and privileges of the nineteenth century, calling to mind the founding of the institution in 1832. Of course, at that time, the settler colonial project was still aspirational. Virginia was a slave state, and Richmond had a thriving slave market. At its moment of institutionalization and for a long time afterwards, the college was restricted to male students. I evoke this history, however briefly, to underscore how the physicality of the campus and its classrooms are structured by this history: racial and gendered forms of segregation and violence are literally, materially built into the rooms. While the university has become, especially in the last ten years, a much more “diverse” place (and I pause here to say that one could and should consider how “diversity” is here a logic of marketing more than of social justice, even if it can also be that), I am always interested in what this means for what happens when we “walk into the room.” I myself come from a working-class family and was the first of them to go to college. I attended a large state institution for my degrees, and to this day I find the highly classed atmosphere of my classrooms off-putting. I never enter the room as a professor without an awareness, however minor, that I would not have come here as an undergraduate, would never have felt comfortable in this space. And I think about my students. For some, this space is roughly contiguous with their private high schools. The wealth and architectural decisions that evoke that wealth (and its ties to whiteness) are, for some of them, familiar and comfortable. For other students, the space is far more likely to feel disorienting, unfamiliar, and even, in some cases, unwelcoming. The first and, at least for me, most crucial axiom of affect studies is that affects cannot be understood as merely individual. Megan Boler (1999) puts this best, “I understand emotions as neither entirely ‘public’ nor entirely ‘private,’ but rather representative of a social and collaboratively constructed psychic terrain” (p. xxi). I would like to add to this Sara Ahmed’s (2015) insistence that emotions “accumulate over time” (p. 11) in ways that shape bodies and selves and—perhaps even more importantly— the ways that those bodies are oriented in physical and psychic space. She

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writes, “Emotions shape the very surfaces of bodies, which take shape through repetition of actions over time, as well as through orientations toward and away from others” (p. 4). This means, and this is my second claim, that every encounter among bodies produces affects and is shaped by the affects that circulate. Sometimes this happens at the level of the event, and we are, or can become, consciously aware of what’s happening. But not always. Maybe not even most of the time. I have recently begun to use the idea of the educational situation to signal this.1 In Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant (2011) writes, “A situation is a state of things in which something that will perhaps matter is unfolding amid the usual activity of life. It is a state of animated and animating suspension that forces itself on consciousness, that produces a sense of the emergence of something in the present that may become an event” (p. 5). Educational events—scenes of conscious learning—only come into existence then because of their emergence from educational situations, or what Erin Manning (2013) calls “associated milieux of relation” (p. 77). These situations, which are very seldom part of our conscious attention even as they are in intimate, nonstop contact with our perception, form the conditions—political, social, affective, and always more-than-human—within which events take place. To use Brian Massumi’s (2015) apt term, educational situations prime actants for events. They make some events more or less likely; they inform tendencies for movement and action. I think moving from educational events to educational situations gives us a more interesting, if messy, picture of learning and bewilderment. I’d like to start by recalling Teresa Brennan’s (2004) opening move in The Transmission of Affect. “Is there anyone who has not, at least once, walked into a room and ‘felt the atmosphere’” (p. 1)? Atmosphere, here, names precisely the affective situation of a particular space. Each room has a particular architecture, smell, and lighting, a kind of tonal mood. This affective tonality (to use a phrase of Erin Manning’s) may make some students more comfortable than others in a classroom. Part of this has to do with movement and accumulation, or as Ahmed says, with orientation. One walks into a room. Rooms are porous: bounded but open. To walk into a room, one must come from elsewhere. In Queer Phenomenology, Ahmed (2006) focuses on “conditions of arrival” as part of the affective accumulation of orientation. How do people and things arrive? Whence do they come? These conditions of arrival shape the class, gender, sexuality, ability, and racial politics of classroom encounters and the literacies that take shape there. These feelings—which may or not become conscious to the students or to me, which may not take on the form of an event—constitute part of the situation of the classroom. It is about affects circulating among bodies as students see, smell, hear, and feel each other. (And by feeling each other feel all those social hierarchies, we have developed literacies

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to understand, often purely as means to survive.) It is also about how the nonhuman participants—lights, desks, windows, chairs, wooden paneling, particular carpets, air-conditioning systems, chalk or marker boards, etc.—affect the humans and other nonhuman actants. (The AC system, for example, sometimes malfunctions, causing moisture to accumulate in the carpet, which then becomes hospitable to mold cultures.) While many of us teachers come into class having asked our students to “read” the assigned text and then we discuss it in formal, aesthetic, conceptual, and rational language, I think the concept of the educational situation gives us a way of thinking about how these encounters are affective to a much greater degree than they are conceptual or narrowly “intellectual.” Students can and do express their feelings about what we read. Some have a more developed vocabulary for this because of uneven access to what Boler (1999) calls “emotional literacies” (p. 139). But even before this, students’ affective attunement to the space, to the other human bodies, and to the histories that materialize in the classroom shapes what they feel in ways that determine how they can listen, how they can respond, and how they can engage. Not everyone’s conditions of arrival prime them for collective reading as the rearrangement of desire. Not everyone feels safe enough to be open to the generation of collectivities. Bodies in the room vibrate differently, feel differently, and attune differently. And these differences have everything to do with the ways those bodies moved through other spaces (institutional, intellectual, geographic, and psychic) before they walked in or were brought in. In 1989, Elizabeth Ellsworth noted that “acting as if our classroom were a safe space in which democratic dialogue was possible and happening did not make it so” (p. 315). This is so because, as Jen Gilbert (2014) argues, “safety is not something one does or achieves, nor is it an a priori state of being; rather it is something one feels” (p. 38). In other words, what Gilbert calls “the emotional structure of pedagogy” (p. 49) signals the appearance, at the level of event, of what I might recast as the politics of affect that structure the situation. Before anyone speaks, before texts are interpreted, or before ideas take shape, we are—and “we” here is never simply a human collective—suspended in the situation where affects swirl, collide, coalesce, and diverge. If we shift away from the event toward the situation, a much more complex and messy sense of learning and literacies can be felt, and I think it gives us a very different field from which to imagine the politics of education, including today, the question of how education relates to the politics of safety, safe spaces, and pedagogies of disorientation and bewilderment that might, to paraphrase Spivak (2003), rearrange our desires and our experiences of collectivity. The situation is never simply human; it happens largely outside of any human’s conscious attention, and it is precisely where each participant is “primed” by historical forces that stick to and shape bodyminds.

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Feeling (Beyond) the Human In the classroom then, we are suspended in the flux of (more-than-human) affect. This suspension means that whatever else learning is, it is irreducibly affective. I have been arguing that connecting contemporary disputes about safe spaces with debates about feminist pedagogy from the 1980s can convey us toward this affective understanding of education. I’d like to end now by insisting that the affective milieu of the classroom is also directly political because what is at stake is precisely the articulation of the human in relation to its constitutive outsides: the inhuman, nonhuman, and less-than-human (Butler, 1993; Weheliye, 2014). Education has, since Plato, been understood as an assemblage that humanizes (some) students. Feminist, queer, decolonial, and anti-racist critics have long argued that this humanizing mission is structurally coupled with dehumanization (Snaza, 2013, 2019). That is, the particular conception of the human that has been articulated in such humanizing assemblages requires dehumanization to simultaneously produce the constitutive outsides it needs to be recognized as “human.” Sylvia Wynter (2003) calls this particular conception of the human “Man,” and her work offers an extended genealogy of the emergence of Man as the “overrepresentation of the human” in the crucible of Western coloniality, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, heteropatriarchal relations, and the development of secular or modern science. In Wynter’s account, assemblages of humanization are connected via a diagram that orients social and psychic space around Man and works to discipline or eradicate non-Man ways of performing the human. Against Man, Wynter “advocates the radical reconstruction and decolonization of what it means to be human” (Weheliye 2014, p. 4). Since the educational institutions we move in and through have been shaped by the overrepresentation of Man as the human, Wynter’s formulation allows me to say underlying the problem of safe spaces is a larger, more diffuse, and potentially more explosive struggle over the meaning of the human. The advocates of banning safe spaces and critical pedagogues that want to work through feelings to get to rational political agonism ultimately both share a conception of the human as Man, and both similarly see student demands to take affect seriously as getting in the way of a pedagogical project of inclusion where students shed their non-Man habits as part of their in-duction into Man. In this way, seeing education as rational as opposed to affective is a way of keeping education geared toward humanization and its inescapable dehumanizing effects. Wynter draws on Frantz Fanon’s (1967) idea of “sociogeny” to argue that this overrepresentation of Man as the human works only because at any given historical moment, the human becomes human in relation to scripts or narratives of what it means to be human, scripts that become part of

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the “hybrid nature/culture” of a human being (Wynter, 2001, p. 32). She notes that this sociogenesis shapes our sense of what it is to be and to feel like a human (2001, p. 31). Put differently, processes of humanization and dehumanization are affective, operating to condition our senses of ourselves and our relations with others. In our present conditions, the ability for some to feel human is possible only on the condition that others have to feel their inhumanity. The affective politics of the classroom are thus always already about a struggle over what the human is and how it is affectively policed. In a social formation like the United States—a profoundly racist and heterosexist settler colony—this struggle is directly related to racialized and gendered state violence. Rebeca Wanzo (2015) has recently called this “the deadly fight over feelings” in her analysis of how affect structure debates in the United States surrounding the state murder of Black and Brown people as well as the Black Lives Matter movement that challenges such violence. This violence operates in part because of the ways that dehumanization authorizes such violence as necessary, inevitable, or simply unremarkable. What I learned in the wake of my two classes is that this project necessarily has two sides: a critical project of calling Man into question and an affirmative and experimental project of generating loving modalities of collectivity that flee Man. When education foregrounds the former and focuses on events, students might come to feel unloved, and their discomfort becomes what Sara Ahmed (2016) might call a wall. But when the situation is saturated with love, bewilderment enables an attentive and affective shift from analyzing Man’s horrors to affirming ways of becoming otherwise together. Bewildering education reorients us away from pedagogies that prop up Man via demands for inclusion, instead taking up what Weheliye (2014) calls the project of the “the abolition of Man” (p. 4). It requires a sensitivity to the inescapably affective relations that take place in the classroom, one which affirms the necessity of disorientation away from Man, but it does so precisely out of a love for what escapes and exceeds Man. This is love as abolitionist, decolonizing force. Let me return to Gayatri Spivak. She writes that “this is the effortful task: to displace the fear of our faceless students” (2003, p. 23). The double genitive here signals how this “fear of our students” is theirs and ours, or as I would prefer to put it, it circulates in the situation. Displacing this affective milieu towards an abolitionist, decolonial one requires love, but not a simple love for what is, for what we are. Instead it is a love of what exceeds us, a love for the potential that informs our selves and relations, but which is often violently shut down by assemblages of humanization. As hooks (2000) insists in All About Love, love is “the will to nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth” (p. 6). Simply put, it is feeling loved that generates the conditions for bewilderment, discomfort, and unsettling as a generative, queer, decolonial, and feminist possibility. Chela Sandoval (2000), at exactly the same moment, wove together Third-World feminist thought

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and postmodern theory in order to argue that “these writers who theorize social change understand ‘love’ as a hermeneutic, as a set of practices and procedures that can transit all citizen-subjects, regardless of social class, toward a differential mode of consciousness and its accompanying technologies of method and social movement” (p. 140). More pointedly, she calls this “de-colonial love” (p. 144). In “Bewildering Education,” I said that the task was to “open up love beyond the limits of the human” (2013, p. 51). I want to underscore that this moves in two distinct but entwined directions. First, Wynter’s work allows me to recast my earlier use of “human” as “Man”: We have to love non-Man ways of performing the human. And second, this love also returns us to the ways that affect always exceeds the merely human toward non-human animals, objects, things, ecologies, and a whole host of participants in the situation that aren’t human. Taking into account only the humans in the room—even if we understand them to be complex subjects shaped by accumulation of affects preceding their entrance—doesn’t go far enough to dislodge Man as the telos of education. We have to let our love extend through each other and toward the space itself as well as the spaces connected to the space and all those entities (human and not) whose being is tied to those spaces. We might then pick up hooks’ (1995) call for us to practice “beloved community”—“where loving ties of care and knowing bind us together in our differences” (pp. 263–64)—and extend that community beyond the human. In other words, the necessity of focusing on affect in the educational encounter is not an end in itself, but a means toward a larger project of abolishing Man, which is impossible without a dismantling of the structures—architectural, social, economic, political, legal, agricultural, and residential—that prop up Man. Love in this sense is nothing but a collective affective commitment to decolonization, to a world where a multiplicity of ways of performing the human can flourish in relation to more-than-human socialities. This is a world only legible outside of humanist, Man-centered literacies, but its taking-place always shapes the situations in which we find ourselves. Bewildering education turns toward this situation, finding there all kinds of possibilities for reorienting ourselves and our relations.

Note 1. See my (2019) book, Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Humanism.

References Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer phenomenology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ahmed, S. (2015). The cultural politics of emotion (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.

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Ahmed, S. (2016). Living a feminist life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Boler, M. (1999). Feeling power: Emotions and education. New York, NY: Routledge. Brennan, T. (2004). The transmission of affect. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of “sex.” New York, NY: Routledge. Ellsworth, E. (1989). “Why doesn’t this feel empowering?” Harvard Educational Review, 59(3), 297–234. Fanon, F. (1967). Black skin, white masks (C. L. Markmann, Trans.). New York, NY: Grove. Ferguson, R. (2012). The reorder of things: The university and its pedagogies of minority difference. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Continuum. Fuss, D. (1989). Essentially speaking: Feminism, nature, & difference. New York, NY: Routledge. Gilbert, J. (2014). Sexuality in school: The limits of education. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Halberstam, J. (2017). “Trigger happy: From content warning to censorship.” Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Retrieved from: http://signs journal.org/currents-trigger-warnings/halberstam/. hooks, b. (1989). Talking back: Thinking feminist * thinking Black. Boston, MA: South End Press. hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York, NY: Routledge. hooks, b. (1995). Killing rage: Ending racism. New York, NY: Henry Holt. hooks, b. (2000). All about love. New York, NY: William Morrow and Company. Manning, E. (2013). Always more than one. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Massumi, B. (2015). Ontopower: War, powers, and the state of perception. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Niccolini, A. (2016). Animate affects: Censorship, reckless pedagogies, and beautiful feelings. Gender and Education. doi: 10.1080/09540253.2015.1121205. Protevi, J. (2009). Political affect: Connecting the social and the somatic. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Sandoval, C. (2000). Methodology of the oppressed. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Snaza, N. (2013). Bewildering education. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 10(2), 38–54. Snaza, N. (2019). Animate literacies: Literature, affect, and the politics of humanism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Spivak, G.C. (2003). Death of a discipline. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Thompson, Z.B. (2018). “From safe spaces to precarious moments: Teaching sexuality and violence in the American higher education classroom.” Gender and Education, 1–17. DOI: 10.1080/09540253.2018.1458077.

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Wanzo, R. (2015). The deadly fight over feelings. Feminist Studies, 41(1), 226–231. Weheliye, A. (2014). Habeas viscus: Racializing assemblages, biopolitics, and Black feminist theories of the human. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wynter, S. (2001). Towards the sociogenic principle: Fanon, identity, the puzzle of conscious experience, and what it is like to be “Black.” In M. Duran-Cogan and A. Gomez-Moriana (Eds.), National identities and socio-political changes in Latin America (pp. 30–66). New York, NY: Routledge. Wynter, S. (2003). “Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after Man, its overrepresentation—an Aagument.” CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337.

9

Art Encounters, Racism, and Teacher Education Asilia Franklin-Phipps

Affect and Antiracism in Teacher Education Affect arises in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon . . . That is, affect is found in those intensities that pass body to body (human, nonhuman, part-body, and otherwise), in those resonances that circulate about, between and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds. (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010, p. 1)

In my work with future teachers, I have worried over what sticks, what lasts, and for how long. I have worried over how bodily shifts can change worlds—both small and large, connecting and reconnecting to other bodies, both mine and theirs, in the context of the teacher education classroom. I wonder how they will go on to teach and how they will go on to learn. This worry is ongoing and incites an urgency to pedagogically experiment and reimagine what counts as teacher education, but always with the desire for a kind of stickiness that is difficult to both name and imagine. Many teacher educators write about the complexity of this kind of work with future teachers from a variety of angles, in terms of the common resistance to learning about racism and its ongoing implications (Ringrose, 2007), silence (Mazzei, 2011), and the role of language (Castagno, 2014; DiAngelo, 2018). Many others have written about the place of feeling, emotion, and affect in the teacher education classroom space concerned with antiracism and education (Ahmed, 2010a; Matias and Zembylas, 2014; Ohito, 2016). Esther Ohito (2016) writes that in much discussion of resistance, “the multidimensional qualities of affects are flattened when the behaviors they influence are interpreted as evidence of White preservice teachers’ emotional resistance to critical inquiry about race, racism, and white supremacy” (p.  457). Ohito attends to affect through pedagogies of discomfort, which is to intentionally encourage the kind of reflection that comes from discomfort. This is an attempt to challenge and undermine the norm of engaging race through “intellectual

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understandings of white supremacy” (p. 456) common in preparing preservice White teachers to work in schools with a growing number of racialized students. Following Ellsworth (1989), Ohito writes: Ironically, even with a genesis in critical theory, it has been my experience that these pedagogies reinforce the Eurocentric, Cartesian mind-body dualism residing at the center of white supremacy by privileging cognitive comprehension over embodied knowing. As such, they prove limited in their capacities to deepen preservice teachers’ awareness of how their bodily feelings may conspire with their actions to uphold white supremacy in spite of their anti-racist beliefs. (p. 456) It is understandable why the norm is an intellectualization of white supremacy. It is uncomfortable and emotional, but also a topic that (because of white supremacy) is thought to be a matter of personal opinion. It is also a topic that is still taboo in teacher education (Ohito, 2016). This, and the structure and manner of teacher education, makes thinking with the feeling, sense, and emotion of teaching and learning about white supremacy risky. Zembylas (2012) also writes about the limits of critical theory, arguing that “there needs to be an explicit pedagogic attention to students’ emotional response during classroom discussions of racism, social justice, and critical pedagogy” (p. 113; see also Zembylas, 2007). Zembylas (2012) writes, “the emotional aspects of students’ resistance . . . implies that pedagogies of mere critique are perhaps not adequate to address the varied emotional manifestations of this resistance” (p.  114). Toward greater attention to the emotional dimensions of learning, Ohito (2019) approaches her teaching with White preservice teachers as “the undertaking of embodied pedagogy” (p. 263). Embodied pedagogy “begins with conceptualizing the body as enfleshed—that is, by factoring the flesh as the location upon which a person’s positionality meets her body’s materiality” (p. 263). This named attention to embodiment in the teacher education classroom is rarer than it should be, but Ohito recognizes that intellectual understandings absent of embodiment do not stick. I take up this thinking about the affective experience of teaching and learning about race in White institutions with White preservice teachers. In my own work with preservice teachers, I have also thought about (and felt) the limits of intellectual approaches to antiracism because the work has always felt so affective—both for me and for students. Although, the work was often less concerned with accruing knowledge than developing the facility around antiracist language. I recall a student exasperatingly saying, “Can you just tell us what to say?” As if saying or not saying this thing or that would result in meaningful antiracism.

124 Asilia Franklin-Phipps It suggested a focus on the intellectual performance of antiracism rather than the embodied shifts that might occur from antiracism. As though knowing the facts and statistics is enough to produce different thinking/ knowing/being in relation to violent racial hierarchies that have become home. It is from this tense space, resisting the assumptions about knowledge and language, to think with affect in the teacher education course. Anna Hickey-Moody (2013) describes the pedagogy of affect as a rhythmic trace of the world incorporated into a body-becoming, an expression of an encounter between a corporeal form and forces that are not necessarily “human.” Literature, sound, and dance are creative media that prompt affective responses and generate affectus . . . The enmeshment of individual, ‘human’ subjective traits with a non-human medium (word-sound-movement) is affectus, and it is this enmeshment that is a kind of pedagogy: a rhythmic trace of sensation incorporated into the body-becoming. (p. 274) This enmeshment, which is another way of describing the pedagogical stickiness that I hoped for and imagined prior to even having the words, became a guide for different approaches to teaching race in the fall of 2016—a time period characterized by discussions of post-Truth, which made more visible the constraints of critical theory. The prior summer, Courtney Rath and I, both working with future teachers, were dissatisfied with the intellectual approaches to antiracism and reflected on the use of collage to experiment with thinking/rethinking race and racism in another space made up of preservice teachers to consider, “how collage works as a sustained practice of standing in uncertainty and ambiguity, toward new ways of thinking and doing in relation to race and racism” (Franklin-Phipps and Rath, 2018, p.  144). In this writing, we used the word “unstick” to describe the experience of moving away from takenfor-granted beliefs about the world—however temporary—as a route to new kinds of engagement and being. Further, we wanted to do this with art experiences, broadly conceived. For my purposes here, I use the term “stick” to describe experiences with art encounters and collage-making, a stickiness that leaves traces, in order to know and become anew.

Affective Art Encounters and Learning Race Differently We filed into the museum in small clusters talking about our day, not knowing what would resonate and what would not; the unpredictability was part of the fun. The course was an experiment in everything I had wanted to do in a course with preservice teachers but had not yet had the opportunity. Some of these things were: approach teaching with a clear, articulated focus on race without apology with a group of students

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convinced of the relevance of race in a course structure that emphasized process rather than production and guided by embodied experience with race and thinking/feeling/becoming differently in relation to race. The combination of these things in the context of teacher education is unusual, but full of potential. Our class took place in the evening, so the campus was quieter and emptier in the dimming fall light. We were anxious about immersing ourselves in the study of racism past and present while feeling the direct effect of the awareness of how it was already with us and around us all the time. Because part of our work together involved collecting images and texts, making collages, and then posting on a shared digital space, we collectively learned to differently pay attention to even the smallest things. Like detectives, we followed racism around the digital and IRL cultural and textual space, collecting artifacts and thinking with them as clues, data, and insights to differently know this made-up, but real, thing of race. In class, we read and discussed articles theorizing race and racism, watched films (narrative and documentary), and became accustomed to thinking and speaking with the assumption that racism was historical, but also present, and had ongoing violent effects, both in and out of school (Sharpe, 2016). When we were not in class together, we were inundated with images of racial violence—both sought and imposed. We used the classroom space to come together again and again, in an ongoing attempt to process these individual experiences collectively but also in order to attempt to make temporary and uneasy sense of these things that were overwhelmingly present and newly experienced. This was both jarring and clarifying for many of us, as we (the class and I) struggled to hold both the conceptual and concrete together in our tentative and temporary sensemaking. We did not have the luxury of distance or even intellectualization, as the 2016 US presidential election happened alongside our class. Our bodies hurt, and our eyes burned. We made art by juxtaposing and pasting in order to pause in what often felt like chaos, a chaos that is always there (Grosz, 2008). Feeling the literal stickiness of the work, but also the affective stickiness of teaching and learning unpredictably and urgently. Art and art-making provided a way to process, to slow down—resting temporarily to take a breath, often to a destabilizing and dizzying stopping point. This could be described as micro or mini steps toward rethinking what is possible in our bodies entangled in a world alongside “histories that hurt” (Ahmed, 2010a). O’ Sullivan (2006) writes, “Art is less involved in knowledge and more involved in experience—in pushing forward the boundaries of what can be experienced. And finally, it is less involved with shielding us from death, than in actualizing the possibilities of life” (p.  52). In a teacher education course, actualizing the possibilities of life can mean finding routes toward those possibilities of life, connected but divergent from

126 Asilia Franklin-Phipps classroom practice, even when those possibilities can only be affectively experienced, sensed, and cannot yet be spoken.

A Trip to the Museum The campus shared reading was Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me (2015), and there was a small exhibit at the campus museum, curated in response to the text. Prior to visiting the museum, I asked students to take photos, hashtag those photos during the visit, and then post to our course page. I lingered on the edges of the space as they wandered around, enjoying being out of the classroom and in an atmosphere so different. Although they were seniors, few had ever been to the museum and had not known it existed, at least not enough to visit the space. In the small exhibit, there was a large piece that seemed and felt to many of us to be at the center, an affective draw—literally glowing in the darkened room. The word “America” was written in neon lights, the kind of lights that one might find on a sign against the night in a city, but not a current city, as the style of the font reminded me of keys on an old typewriter. Right beneath the flickering lights, the word is written again, only upside down—a mirroring effect. Brian Massumi (2002) writes, “The primacy of the affective is marked by a gap between content and effect: it would appear that the strength or duration of an image’s effect is not logically connected to the content in a straightforward way. This is not to say that there is no connection and no logic” (p. 24). While the effect of such art encounters is unpredictable, I assert that there was an effect. The piece by Glenn Ligon (2014) is arresting in its simplicity. It is a neon sign without being a neon sign. This neon sign prompts reflection and reconsideration rather than action, as most neon signs do. This neon sign describes and names something that is rarely named and even not often described with a single word. This neon sign challenges the takenfor-granted discourse that circulates all of us who are born and/or have lived in the United States for a time. The piece seems to ask a series of questions, “just who do you think you are? And if you think you are an American, what is that? Finally, what is America?” In small groups, we take turns gathering around the flashing lights, hearing the faint hum of the lights flickering on and off. We are momentarily arrested, held, and then released, and again. The gathered attention is held by the combination of the light and dark letters in a visual encounter of something that is at once familiar and unfamiliar—America and a questioning of what an America is or could become. Anna HickeyMoody (2009) describes affect as, “a taking on of something on, of changing in relation to an experience or an encounter” (p. 274). Without being able to quite articulate this at the time, I wanted them to take on the art, not attempt to interpret, evaluate, or analyze—which is always

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a distraction from the experience. As I watched them, watching the flickering lights of the piece, I wondered what they were taking on, but also what I was taking on—all of us teaching and learning together. Many of them could not help describing and analyzing the exhibit on the course discussion board; other people made scattered lists of words, and others posted selfies. I encouraged all ways of engaging with the art and did not evaluate them in any way, often having to remind them of this fact. I hoped that their conversations would chafe, swirl, and caress like the flickering white light of the Ligon piece. Additionally, I hoped that they would take Ligon’s art and reconsider all of the stories that they have heard about America, who is American, and what “America” means, and not take for granted that the meaning is stable, true, honest, or reflective of the broad experience of the people that make up America, past and present. It is difficult to say what the effect of this might be or become, but the affective encounters undermine the stuck knowledge that disallows for orientations in the world that are not disciplined norms, norms that widely go unthought. If the Ligon piece tickled and poked at the normative imagining of America and being American, much else becomes possible in thinking about race and racism’s relation to Americanness. An encounter with this piece might make this contradiction become more felt than known. Art engenders becomings, not imaginative becomings—the elaboration of images and narratives in which a subject might recognize itself, not self-representations, narratives, confessions, testimonies of what is and has been—but material becomings, in which these imponderable universal forces touch and become enveloped in life. (Grosz, 2008, p. 23) These becomings happened again and again in the weeks that followed our trip to the museum. Many students frequently referred to the Lignon piece. They did so, entangling the piece with other affective experiences that so many were newly attuned. They posted the photos they took at the exhibit onto the course discussion board, commenting on each other’s posts. Some of them returned to the exhibit on their own, maybe attracted to the neon glow. The students in the class often forgot the artist’s name but referred to the affective experience of standing in the darkened museum space and looking at the mirrored neon image. It seemed that many of them had “taken on” (Hickey-Moody, 2009) the piece in a way that imbued the world with new angles and shadows. They wrote and spoke about the piece in terms of Black Lives Matter protests, Donald Trump’s rally speeches, the rhetoric about immigrants, graffiti scrawled on bathroom stalls, current events, and Claudia Rankine’s book Citizen. “The visual arts render visible forces that are themselves

128 Asilia Franklin-Phipps invisible” (Grosz, 2008, p. 22). They were sensing and thinking and sensing anew, not because of the Ligon piece, but in relation to other resonant encounters with art, sound, and image.

“Just Who Do You Think You Are?” This world of affects, this universe of forces, is our own world seen without the spectacles of habitual subjectivity. But how to remove these spectacles, which are not really spectacles at all but the very condition of our subjectivity? How, indeed, to sidestep ourselves? (O’Sullivan, 2006, p. 50)

Following O’ Sullivan, how might experiences teaching and learning about race with future teachers be different if part of the goal were figuring out ways to “sidestep ourselves” in lieu of understanding racial hierarchies and structures? We regularly ask future teachers to reflect on their observation sites and on their own education toward deeper and better understanding about themselves, hopefully in relation to the world of their classroom and beyond. We might imagine that such practices provide insight, and I believe that this is accurate on some level. At the same time, such work in the process of becoming a teacher in the future might benefit from a willful moving away from the self and toward a being with others in the present. Put differently, the dominant discourse in teacher education is future-oriented. This future-orientation is also tied up in affirming and reproducing ones’ goodness and happiness in relation to that goodness. The willingness to enter this field is both gendered and raced while entangled in particular notions of the self as good (FranklinPhipps and Rath, 2018). Teaching is something that good people do (but, more often than not, good women) in order to make the world a better place. For future teachers, the goodness of the work permeates every aspect of the path to become a teacher—which is difficult, long, and expensive. And that goodness, and the reproduction of that goodness, makes the effort to become a teacher worthwhile. The currency of goodness does a lot of important work in the process of becoming a teacher and undermining the assumed goodness can be dangerous work (Matias, 2014). For people entering the teaching profession in the precarity of late-stage, extractive, capitalism, the goodness, and the feelings associated with such goodness does a lot of work to encourage continued commitment. Goodness is a well that can be drawn on when navigating perplexed questions from family members and peers about why one would become a teacher. Goodness encourages persistence through a process that can be stressful and demoralizing. While this need for goodness is understandable,

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it can be a challenge for the teacher educator concerned with interrupting notions of the self in order to facilitate becoming better in relation to social hierarchies and oppressive structures. This kind of work with future teachers should not be a process of breaking down, but instead should be about providing practice and opportunity reimaging the self in relation to the broader world and the people and things that make up that world.

Becoming Less Good and the Potential of Unhappiness Many people have written thoughtfully and importantly about the role of resistance in this kind of teaching work (Evans-Winter and Hoff, 2011; Matias, 2016; Rodriguez, 2009), especially as it relates to instructors of color requiring students to think and be very differently about race. In response to new knowledge, assembled students might ask, just who do you think you are? This might bring up questions about ability to teach, authority to knowledge, and other challenges that faculty teaching topics of race might face. This important work informs much of my current thinking about teacher education. After struggling against resistance to learning about race and racism, this struggle became a catalyst to reimagine what counted as college instruction, moving toward art encounters, subjectivity, and affect. I came to think of that resistance in relation to encountering new images of the world challenging us to ask ourselves, just who do you think you are? But in a different tone and tenor than this question is often ungenerously and unkindly asked. Instead I imagine a pedagogical space that asks this question in a way that facilitates a generous and exploratory consideration, just who do you think you are? The response might be an ongoing consideration—open and inconclusive, with no answer that is stable or safe from disruption or interruption. This should be a loop, a broken record, as we are becoming anew, which is a useful way think about learning.

Resistance to Embodied Knowing-Otherwise Teaching practice is always entangled with the bodies assembled—human and nonhuman. Teaching future teachers about racism as it relates to their future teaching lives is a challenge to particular notions of goodness and the happiness that comes from imagining becoming and being elementary school teachers. For some, this challenge is welcomed—they sensed that something was not right and are grateful for a new way to engage that feeling. But for others, it can be experienced as a refusal to “get along” (Ahmed, 2010b) by accepting dominant discourses about justice and fairness. This refusal is often met with resistance and resentment;

130 Asilia Franklin-Phipps bad feelings can accrue and double-back on one another. “Some bodies are presumed to be the origin of bad feeling insofar as they disturb the promise of happiness, which I would re-describe as the social pressure to maintain the signs of getting along. Some bodies become blockage points where smooth communication stops” (Ahmed, 2010, p. 39). Sometimes the words I say in the classroom cannot be heard; the tension and anger threaten to effectively end the class. This is both a challenge, but it is also an opportunity to reimagine the learning space. Refusing to accept the version of events about education that have circulated in dominant discourse is a denial of the easy happiness that is associated with becoming an elementary school teacher, particularly from a position of relative power. This can be jarring for students who had never before associated the ugliness of racial violence with becoming a teacher. With very little practice, it is no surprise when some people become uncomfortable—stammering in their response, countering the points that they “disagree” with, or refusing to look up from laptops or phones for the entire course. They might make noises that sound like snorts, guffaws, or cries or abruptly leave in the middle of class. Some write papers accusing the course of being biased against White people, wondering why we must focus so much on race, or asserting that they won’t be working with those kinds of kids anyway, suggesting that such learning is irrelevant to their future teaching life. They can feel anxious, confused, duped, guilty, and depressed. These bad feelings can disrupt the pleasure of becoming a teacher, the pleasure of whiteness, the pleasure of belonging, and the pleasure of never having to think about certain things and move in ways that are always already validating. This moment, which for some might feel like gasping for air, also provides an opportunity to become an affect alien (Ahmed, 2010)—with different, unanticipated possibility for a different kind of pleasure—one that is moving toward justice. Ahmed (2010) writes, I think it is the very exposure of these unhappy effects that is affirmative, that gives us an alternative set of imaginings of what might count as a good or better life. If injustice does have unhappy effects, then the story does not end there. Unhappiness is not our endpoint. If anything, the experience of being alienated from the affective promise of happy objects gets us somewhere. Affect aliens can do things, for sure, by refusing to put bad feelings to one side in the hope that we can ‘just get long’. (p. 50) Puncturing or outright denying this racial comfort, even for a moment, can draw one’s attention and sensitize one to the ubiquitous construction of whiteness. Films, music, books, relationships, and art encounters is

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more likely to resonate in ways that the instructor cannot predict. I will count all of these as potential pedagogical encounters. This is not to say that these encounters automatically result in a new sense of racial awareness, and it is unlikely that one encounter will be sufficient to undermine a lifetime of quiet acceptance and repeated integration of the logic of whiteness.

Becoming With Racism In another attempt to make space to “sidestep” ourselves, I lugged magazines, glue sticks, and pens from my house, to the car, and to the classroom in several canvas tote bags. In the fall of 2016, as a class we had been completely immersed in reading, thinking, and discussing racism both in-person and online. I wondered if a break, a reflective space, was needed as November 7 loomed. I had been impressed with their ability to navigate and engage this level of immersion in the topic of racism and its intersections. At the beginning of class, I pulled out the stacks of old magazines, circulars, photos, pamphlets, scraps of construction paper, gold and silver markers, and glue sticks that I had been hoarding, along with black-and-white boards that would be used to affix and detach images and words. We had been collaging at home for several weeks, documenting our work by posting photos to the course discussion board, so no one was surprised by the bags full of materials rarely found in a university classroom. Students talked as they worked, some gingerly cutting along the edges of photos of Colin Kaepernick, Black Lives Matter protests, White girls with cornrows, unflattering pictures of Donald Trump, or Buzzfeed quizzes with titles like “Are You Racist?” Others ripped paper with their hands and squished glue on their boards, haphazardly placing images, texts, and photos. Others traced borders of photos they wanted to cut out and carefully arranged them, looking on with wrinkled brows before committing to gluing it down. “The aesthetics of everyday life choreograph connections and resistances to people situations and events” (Hickey-Moody, 2013, p. 83). This work, done collectively, allowed them time and space to think about what they had already learned and think about those images in connection to those encounters with text, images, and the stuff that makes up “everyday life.” Our hands were sticky, covered with marker and bits of glitter from the silver and gold pens that I had purchased on sale at the craft store. With only a bit more time left in class, we cleaned everything up as best as we could and talked about their field experiences, their classroom placements, memes, and the latest police shooting. A small group of young women were eager to talk about different things that they had read in the news. They were outraged, confused, and newly sensitized to issues

132 Asilia Franklin-Phipps of race and racism, wondering how they could have previously missed that which was always already all around them. They moved in different ways, speaking and noticing differently, reacting to things that would have previously not registered at all. They moved at different paces to different effects, but they moved. This movement was reflected in their engagement in the class, the things they posted, and the collages they made, but also on the course discussion board where they would have thoughtful back-and-forth discussions time-stamped at all hours of the night. We had been working individually with collages for weeks. Instead of writing reflections, I asked them to respond to the following question through collage: how are you currently thinking about race and racism? They responded to this prompt through collage, every other week, until the end of the term. They posted photos of their work onto the course discussion board and commented on each other’s posts. In their collages, some took historical images of protests and juxtaposed them with contemporary images of scenes that looked much the same—tense police officers with batons and shields. Although not required, they often wrote an explanation of how the collages reflected some new insight, understanding, or stubborn confusion. The collages were not a representation of settled knowledge, but were a temporary placeholder across an ongoing process of learning. One person collaged on a head that is used to display wigs, focused on knowing and seeing in ways that prompt different kinds of knowing. In later iterations, she covered the entire head with a white wax that dripped down the sides. One of her colleagues excitedly commented on the message board, “Your collages always blow me away!” The image was striking because it was a version of something familiar, but also something that none of us had ever seen before. In a later conversation, the person who made the collage said that she was thinking about how whiteness is a veil that obscures the world, preventing access to knowledge. In terms of thinking about collage as a site of ongoing practice, I suggest that the work—the collaging, the conversations, attending events, and reading challenging texts—was demanding, but those most engaged met those demands, absent of the requirement to perform under the narrowparameters of schooling. This allowed them to spend their energy building up their tolerance for an embodied learning that was often draining and difficult.

The Interruption: Affective Classroom Events The intensity of erupting events draws attention to the more ordinary disturbances of everyday life. Or it distracts us from them. Or both. (Stewart, 2007, p. 76)

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Whiteness is the taken-for-granted way of doing, imagining, and being, which many do not stop to consider until things have gotten dire or there has been some interruption, some impetus, to draw the attention to that which had gone unnoticed. This does not mean that anything will change, but the noticing is only the first act, a drawing out of potential. The habit might be replaced with another habit, like the cigarette habit that replaces the drinking habit, or the behavior, belief, or niggling desire may remain, but with a looser hold. While noticing is never enough, it is the only way that something can be done. “Racism can be a live texture in the composition of a subject. So, can dreams of racial utopia” (Stewart, 2007, p. 107). Racism is always there, but rarely named or lingered on in mixed company. In some spaces, race goes unnamed because racism is always right there next to race, conjoined twins. In response to racism, and the durability of racism, race pedagogy and race education happen, willed and without anyone’s consent. All of us learn race every day we exist in the world, whether we desire it or not. Much of race pedagogy and race education happens without one opting into deeper insight, awareness, or understanding about racial realities or historical racial hierarchies. A required course to graduate, an uncomfortable conversation with a friend, colleague, or an intimate partner that suggests two (or more) very different racial experiences in the same space of the world. The sinking feeling when a friend of a racialized group suggests or asserts that something that was said or done was racially insensitive. The pounding in one’s chest that might come from a disrupted hope of race and racism being historical rather than of the present and future. This anxiety might also come from the recognition that some thing must be done or, at the very least, said in response to an event, experience, or interaction, as such moments are heavy with potential effects. Or the discomfort in a realization that a personal drama, interpersonal rivalries, or life difficulty cannot be separate from race and racial imaginaries. This kind of education on race prompts another kind of looking and being in the world that does not use energy disarticulating racial histories from the present; rather it prompts a thinking of how racial histories and presents produce particular effects across bodies and spaces. These are among some of the more obvious examples of how we learn about race. Some of us learn about race by beginning to notice the absence of particular bodies in particular spaces, others by receiving withering and fearful looks from early on in life, feeling a shift in the atmosphere (the proverbial record scratch and the abrupt silence that follows), the callback after a successful interview that never happens, the higher (or lower) interest rates, or the geographical spaces that are ostensibly open to the public, but the instinctive knowledge that this is not actually the case. And the effort required to ignore this once learned becomes a strain, so something else must be imagined.

Image 9.1 Head Collage #1, right side

Image 9.2 Head Collage #2, left side

Image 9.3 Three-dimensional Head, with a thick, white substance dripped over the top and over the eyes

Image 9.4 Many collages juxtaposed, past and present images

Image 9.5 2016 presidential election

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References Ahmed, S. (2007). A phenomenology of whiteness. Feminist Theory, 8(2), 149–168. Ahmed, S. (2010a). Happy objects. In M. Gregg and G. Seigworth (Eds.), The affect theory reader (pp. 29–51). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ahmed, S. (2010b). The promise of happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Castagno, A. (2014). Educated in whiteness: Good intentions and diversity in schools. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Coates, T. (2015). Between the world and me. New York, NY: Spiegel & Grau. DiAngelo, R. (2018). White fragility: Why it’s so hard for White people to talk about racism. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Ellsworth, E. (1989). Why doesn’t this feel empowering?: Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy. Harvard Educational Review, 59(3), 297–324. Evans-Winters, V., and Hoff, P. (2011). The aesthetics of white racism in preservice teacher education: A critical race theory perspective. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 14(4), 461–479. Franklin-Phipps, A., and Rath, C. (2018). How to become less deadly: A provocation to the fields of teacher education and educational research, Parallax, 24(3), 268–272. Franklin-Phipps, A., and Rath, C. (2019). Collage pedagogy: Toward a posthumans racial literacy. In C. Kuby, K. Spector, and J. Thiel (Eds.), Posthumanism and literacy education: Knowing/becoming/doing literacies (pp. 142–155). New York, NY: Routledge. Grosz, E. (2008). Chaos, territory, art: Deleuze and the framing of the earth. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Hickey-Moody, A. (2009). Little war machines: Posthuman pedagogy and its media. Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 3(3), 273–280. Hickey-Moody, A. (2013). Affect as method: Feelings, aesthetics, and affective pedagogy. In R. Coleman and J. Ringrose (Eds.), Deleuze and research methodologies (pp. 79–95). Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press. Lignon, G. (2014). Double America 2. Jordan Schnitzer Museum. University of Oregon, Eugene, OR. Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation (Postcontemporary interventions). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Matias, C. (2016). Feeling white: Whiteness, emotionality, and education. Boston, MA: Sense. Matias, C., and Zembylas, M. (2014). “When saying you care is not really caring”: Emotions of disgust, whiteness ideology, and teacher education. Critical Studies in Education, 55(3), 319–337. Mazzei, L. (2011). Desiring silence: Gender, race and pedagogy in education. British Educational Research Journal, 37(4), 657–669. Ohito, E. (2016). Making the emperor’s new clothes visible in anti-racist teacher education: Enacting a pedagogy of discomfort with white preservice teachers. Equity & Excellence in Education, 49(4), 454–467. Ohito, E. (2019). Thinking through the flesh: A critical autoethnography of racial body politics in urban teacher education. Race Ethnicity and Education, 22(2), 250–268.

140 Asilia Franklin-Phipps O’Sullivan, S. (2006). Art encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought beyond representation. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Rankine, C. (2014). Citizen: An American lyric. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press. Ringrose, J. (2007). Rethinking white resistance: Exploring the discursive practices and psychical negotiations of “whiteness” in feminist, anti-racist education. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 10(3), 323–344. Rodriguez, D. (2009). The usual suspect: Negotiating white student resistance and teacher authority in a predominantly white classroom. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 9(4), 483–508. Seigworth, G. J., and Gregg, M. (2010). An inventory of shimmers. In M. Gregg and G. J. Seigworth (Eds.), The affect theory reader (pp. 1–25). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sharpe, C. (2016). In the wake: On Blackness and being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stewart, K. (2007). Ordinary affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Zembylas, M. (2007). Emotional ecology: The intersection of emotional knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge in teaching. Teaching and Teacher Education, 23(4), 355–367. Zembylas, M. (2012). Pedagogies of strategic empathy: Navigating through the emotional complexities of anti-racism in higher education. Teaching in Higher Education, 17(2), 113–125.

Part III

Materials/Bodies

10 Thinking through the Body An Interview with Anna Hickey Moody

We consider you a leading voice in bringing affect into the fold of educational theory and research. Can you tell us a bit about how you came into affect theory? ANNA HICKEY MOODY: For me, the journey to affect really happened through the body: my body and thinking about bodies. So not just through thinking about the body, but through my experience of being a body. I did a Social Anthropology and Performing Arts degree, and the performance major was audition-based admission but also looked to understand theory. It was a degree at the University of Adelaide that has since closed. My relationship to my body as a young woman growing up was something that I had begun to think critically about and had been very aware of, as it had had to carry a lot. And I had a range of other experiences of caring for unwell bodies—most specifically, my father’s disintegrating body—that had made me think about the body. And my relationship with my own body had been very fraught. About a year into my degree, I started working with a dance company called Restless Dance Theatre. They are based in Adelaide in Australia. As this working relationship moved from performance and devising in the youth performance ensemble to teaching community development programs, by the time I came to the end of my honors year, I wanted to write my PhD about the company’s work. I wanted to talk about embodied knowledge and the embodied knowledge of people with disabilities. The very corporeal, visceral process of rehearsing and sharing dance moves that are really specific to a particular body, which is a method for devising dance performance the company utilized, led me to start reading theories of embodiment that by and large, seemed so infuriatingly disembodied. That there were Merleau-Ponty’s discussions of the “transcendental field,” which seemed to be some kind of horizon of consciousness and his ways of talking about the body and consciousness to me, seemed so disembodied. EDS.:

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It was while reading Elizabeth Grosz’s book Volatile Bodies, her now, I think, very key feminist theory work, that something inside me clicked. She suggested that Deleuze and Guattari offered a really useful way into thinking about the body. I started reading Deleuze and Guattari after reading Volatile Bodies, and through my love of their work, I came to write about affect—I mean, I find Deleuze and Guattari very funny and very engaging writers. So I really spent three years of my PhD reading everything they’d written alongside devising and performing five full-length dance texts. That was my grounding in the work on affect that I’ve come to use. I went on to read Spinoza’s Ethics. And I am very much a Spinozist-Deleuzian affect theorist. I’m less interested in some of the other work on affect that has come about, even though I’ve used Eve Sedgwick’s work a lot in my teaching. I like her Touching, Feeling book, and I think her work on reparative and paranoid reading is really important. I think that affect is a very important concept because it is practical. Affect is the primary media of all communication, as everything has an affect, and this unconsciousness is what is so significant about it. Certainly I’ve used the idea of affect a lot through the work of Deleuze and Guattari and feminist theorists who draw on their work. EDS.: What do you think affect theory offers educational researchers specifically? AHM: I think affect is a really important concept for educational researchers to think with. Education in any social context, whether it’s in school or whether it’s in public spaces, is primarily affective. Whether through the delivery of curriculum or learning through means other than curriculum, such as popular culture, learning is always an affective experience. And whether it’s about interpersonal relationships or materiality and what material forms communicate, affect is core. So I think that all education research needs to have a frame of reference in relation to affect and affective communication, which is another way of saying that affect is absolutely key to all forms of educational research, whether or not it’s looking at something that’s quite other than affect, the affective mode through which things are communicated still needs to be considered. My first book about disability tried to interrupt the production of sad affect in relation to bodies with disabilities. By sad affect, I mean the fact that often representations of disability—especially in the media and in literature—have traditionally been of a kind that, we could say, decrease a body’s capacity to act. In other words, such representations close off connections between consumers of textual forms and the capacity to connect with a person with a disability. Sad affect is reduction of a capacity to act; it is a closing down rather than opening up of a body. Many representations of disability close down a consumer’s capacity to

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relate to bodies with disability, and I felt like Restless really opened up the ways in which people with disabilities were portrayed, and this opened up, rather than shut down, capacities for connection. To draw on Deleuze’s work, Restless has a positive affect rather than a negative affect. At the moment, I’m running a large project, which is an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship, which is about arts practices and affective modes of understanding. It’s trying to critique or problematize the broader anxiety around Muslim culture and both right-wing and religious radicalization that has become very popular in Australian, UK, and North American media and is addressed in very problematic terms through what is often called “the counterradicalization agenda.” I try to radically resituate the ways in which issues of religion, culture, identity, hybridity, and belonging are discussed, and this is my Interfaith Childhoods project, in which affective methods bring different worlds of faith and culture together. Affect theory is the methodology through which this project has run for nearly five years now. It’s mobilized in very different ways in the project. So some of the project uses art practices to communicate nonverbally how children feel and have affective attachments to places, visual, or material cultures and really just everyday life practices. I also affectively read spaces of worship, educational spaces, so schools, community centers, and mosque or church spaces alongside government-funded service provision sites. So the reading of how governmental discourses position people, how institutions position people, and also the aesthetic messages that are communicated through daily lives are really at the core of the analytic for this project, and these modalities all mobilize different affective registers. I think affect is central methodologically to the Interfaith Childhoods project, both in terms of what I’m looking at and also what I do. By “what I do,” I’m referring to the art-making with young people and children and the ways in which I read conversations with their parents and the spaces they inhabit. In What Is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari talk about aesthetic affect quite a lot. So they’re talking about how a work of art will contain a universe made up of “percepts” and “affects,” of ways of feeling and thinking in parts of the world that are invented within the artwork itself. Art can be a way of reimagining the world. By this, I mean that art creates its own kind of affect that is different from the sort of affective vernacular sense of a place that you get when you enter a community center or a school. The affective communication that is in the world at-large is part of what Deleuze discusses at length in his Spinoza books and what Deleuze and Guattari frame in their Capitalism and Schizophrenia books. This idea of affect as a change in a body’s capacity to

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act, both in positive and negative ways, is a very important part of Deleuze’s philosophy and also of Spinoza’s philosophy. My research methods of making art with children and then discussing belonging, community, and faith with their parents, are ways of inventing new affective vocabularies that are much needed as a means of shifting dominant affective registers. There is a direct link here to my earlier work on disability; again I am looking to open up closed circuits of affect. Sometimes one set of feelings or affects keeps circulating, as if on loop, in global discourses, and other options need to be made available. This is what I did, or attempted to do, with my PhD and first book, Unimaginable Bodies, which really tried to posit new ways of feeling about people that are labelled as having a disability. I then extended this method in Youth, Arts and Education to show how arts-based work becomes racialized and gendered in ways that lead young people to desire to learn the capacity to reproduce dominant tropes. I further explore the politics of affect in my books, The Politics of Widening Participation and Deleuze and Masculinity. In my contemporary project around interfaith and intercultural understanding, affect has been and is core to how young people have communicated very complex stories of migration and belonging and have shared cultural frames of reference with each other. Affect is communicated through tone, volume (loudness/quietness), body language, color choice, or texture: things that extend beyond words. EDS.: If affect is a process working in large part outside of language, how might researchers work through the difficulty of attempting to “capture” affect in their work? In what ways has attending to affect shifted your research practice? AHM: My first point in response to this question is that affect is not something that needs to be captured. I think that affect, or the ways affect works, is something that can certainly be mapped or measured in terms of seeing how changes happen. But I think that when a change happens, this change is a registering of affect. There’s not much point in freezing or photographing a change, affect scholars are better off thinking about how the change came to be. If it’s a change of thinking or a change of feeling, we can say that an affect has been registered. In some ways, the idea of capturing affect is slightly alarming. Affect is not a “rogue” element of society on the loose that needs to be retained, something that is anxiety-provoking in a research process, or even something rare: everything has affective aspects. I think affect is a philosophy for understanding change. When we see, experience, or feel change, we can talk about registering affect. The lovely quote from What Is Philosophy? that “the flesh is the thermometer of the becoming” is a way of understanding that the politics of feeling are enmeshed with affect. (I think it’s page 176 of my copy What

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Is Philosophy? where Deleuze and Guattari say that the flesh is just the “thermometer of the becoming”—it’s the Verso edition published in 1996.) So change happens, and it’s registered in an affect. We don’t need to worry about capturing affect, but it’s certainly interesting to write about change, and social change, certainly social justice work, is a field of research that is core to educational studies and can be usefully understood through thinking about the politics of affect. A lot of theorists interested in the sociology of education are actually writing about affect already, even if we’re not talking in those terms. I think that attending to affect has necessarily shifted my research practice simply because my career began with my PhD, which was completely informed by my dance practice. My work was already about the body and embodied communication, and so this of course led me to thinking about affect. I’m an affective practitioner that has come to know fields of work that are concerned with the empirical projects on which I work. I am led by things, not ideas. Within that, I’ve become quite particular about the politics of Affect Studies as a field and have tastes in the theoretical forms that I find most interesting or most desirable. So I would say that my research practice would be the same without the field of Affect Studies, and there is certainly a politics to my scholarship of Affect Studies. EDS.: Can you tell us a bit about your work thinking through the feminist lineages of affect theory? AHM: So as I’ve said, I have worked a lot with Deleuze and Guattari and also Spinoza’s theories of affect, which I continue to find very engaging. I found the field of Affect Studies very problematic in the same ways that Ann Cvetkovich has noted in the start of her work on depression, explaining the fact that a lot of affect theory deals with the kinds of emotional and corporeal labor that is central to feminist thought and feminist politics, and through male scholarship, by and large, this has become a field, or scholars pick up the idea once it is “en vogue.” Affect has been diversified through scholarly politics that have at times been very problematic, that have been largely patriarchal and about citational practices that have been quite wanting in a lot of cases, I think. So I was young and was enamored by Deleuze and Guattari and Spinoza’s philosophy, as, you know, young people fall in love with philosophical theories. I spent a lot of my life reading those works. I know them quite intimately. My PhD was, to the best of my knowledge, the first Australian PhD working with disability and Deleuze in the youth studies and sociology of education space. As Affect Studies became a field that had its own politics, initially it was one with which I was not overly engaged partly because of a couple of Australian authors who looked to internationalize their

148 Bessie P. Dernikos et al. careers through claiming these ideas without citing their Australian peers. I have particular feminist affect theorist colleagues who I read or with whom I collaborate, such as Jessica Ringrose, Emma Renold, Rebecca Coleman, Carolyn Pedwell, Beatrice Revelles, Rosi Braidotti, and Felicity Colman. For me, Moira Gatens and Elizabeth Grosz were core to my work on affect starting, and also Elspeth Probyn is internationally respected in this space. But Affect Studies in Australia more broadly progressed in a way that I was shut out of early on by an immediate colleague at the time, which was very surprising to me. The field also has a lot of citational practices that weren’t necessarily taking up a feminist politics, and I think that a lot of people that do affective work were excluded from how Affect Studies developed. So I think we can say that, as a field, I found the development of Affect Studies problematic because it did not have a particularly feminist politic in light of the fact that it was really discussing forms of feminized labor and that it had a very patriarchal attitude toward citational practice, which I found problematic. And as I became a more mature scholar, I realized that these were issues that I wanted to address in the academy. And recently I’ve written quite explicitly about early feminist theorists of the sociology of education and gone back to classic texts that feminist sociologists became famous for in the 1970s or 1980s and have read these “for” affect theory and have considered what these might be in light of a field of Affect Studies, how they might be seen as precursors to or part of the field of Affect Studies, as a way of trying to respond to some of the problematic, often patriarchal, politics of the field. That said, I still think through and weave in a lot of Deleuzo-Guattarian Spinozist Affect Theory. And I am a dance theatre practitioner in many respects still, concerned with embodied relationships between bodies. I don’t think that will ever change. Thinking with a feminist politics, indeed a feminist decolonial politics when working in colonized places, thinking grounded in the empirical world, remains what I see as the most important project for scholars today.

11 The Fecundity of Poo Working with Children as Pedagogies of Refusal Stephanie Springgay

Anytime you work with mounds of melted chocolate and elementaryschool students, you are bound to go down the rabbit hole of poo humor. Crushed cocoa beans being squeezed and pressed out of a Molino ooze with direct and indirect connotations, sending everyone into peals of laughter and feelings of shame. In Hannah Jickling and Helen Reed’s Ask Me Chocolates, part of the larger project, The Pedagogical Impulse, the leakiness and unruliness of poo announced itself as an affective pedagogy of willful failure. Institutions, particularly elementary public schools, pride themselves on containment, sanitation, order, and regulation, dispositions that support the rhetoric of success, mastery, and progress. Poo simply won’t do! I argue that Jickling and Reed engender a practice of failure as affective and as pedagogies of refusal and, in so doing, reimagine ways in which we might think, write, and work with children. In the chapter, I introduce the larger project and the methodology of research-creation. Working with different theories of failure and affect, I argue for failure as a form of performative disengagement, as pedagogies of refusal. By disengagement, I don’t mean the typical use of the term in education, whereby students become disinterested or lack attention. If failure is typically understood as the opposite of success, through pedagogies of refusal—or a kind of willfulness—failure becomes a means for artists and children to resist normativity.

The Pedagogical Impulse: A Research-Creation Event The Pedagogical Impulse is a research-creation project that events a line of inquiry regarding the intersections between contemporary art, particularly social practice art and pedagogy. The larger research-creation event created a series of artist-residencies that took place across a number of educational sites in Toronto, Canada in order to examine how artists are engaging with pedagogy as spaces for the development of new critical practices and the potential critical and imaginative engagements that occur when such art practices are located in collaboration with

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schools, teachers, and learners. The Pedagogical Impulse also created a living archive of interviews about art, pedagogy, and knowing with artists, curators, and educators and developed an online curricular resource on themes that emerged from the residencies. All of the research-creation activities are documented at www.thepedagogicalimpulse.com. Additionally, The Pedagogical Impulse research-creation project is conducting archival research into the curricular materials/documents from 1960s conceptual artists whose practices included an explicit focus on education, even going so far as to design curriculum reform proposals. These curricular art objects took the form of art books, fold-out posters, experimental workshops, board games, and even tarot cards. Evidence suggests that these conceptual artists were making the biggest inroads into radical pedagogy and curricular reform at the time. In tandem, we are working with contemporary artists who teach in postsecondary institutions and whose practice and pedagogy are informed by the 1960s conceptual artists. Analyzing their syllabi, curriculum materials, teaching philosophies, and pedagogical practices, the research-creation project aims to understand and document the historical and contemporary impact artists make to “school.” Each artist-residency was developed by an artist (or, in some cases, two artists) in collaboration with a classroom teacher, participating students, and my research team. Each residency was unique to a classroom and varied in duration and execution. The residencies took as a starting place social practice artwork that is non-object based; embedded in artistic-research facilitated by artists in collaboration with participants; and concerned with advancing pedagogy and/or knowledge production. In social practice art, the coming together of artists and participants produces infinite variations. As this work proliferates, it does not tie back together into one particular form. In opposition to art that is brought into a classroom from the outside, as a concrete form, social practice art resides in the speculative middle (Springgay and Truman, 2017a). Following social art practices, the artists did not approach the residencies with preestablished art projects in mind nor a set of technical skills they wanted the students to master. In the case of Ask Me Chocolates, the beginning proposition was “trade,” and a series of micro researchcreation projects emerged in the class as artists and students inquired into concepts such as value, trade, studio production, multiples, the history of bathroom humor in art, child slaves in the cacao industry, labor, and artists’ interventions into the world of commerce. Trade is a component of the grade-six Social Studies curriculum, primarily focused on learning about Canada’s international trade policies and practices. Ask Me Chocolates is a series of limited-edition artist multiples, made with both milk and dark chocolate. An artist multiple is an artwork conceived of in an edition. In the case of Ask Me Chocolates, each student produced an edition of ten. Like chocolate bars, these multiples are

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designed for movement and distribution. These chocolate multiples were subsequently traded with other students in the school, and with parents and artists from the community for songs, services, and objects such as books, a lightsaber, a can of tuna, an autographed baseball, a serenade, dancing, and a headstand. Reed and Jickling have been working together since 2007, and many of their collaborative projects explore questions about where, with whom, and at what age contemporary art is created, curated, and experienced. Their practice conceives of children as co-producers. Reed and Jickling insist that the work they do should not be interpreted as teaching or art education, both of which are typically understood as existing outside of or separate from an art practice. Instead their work takes up questions, challenges, and concepts about art as pedagogy. Research-creation as a methodology is critically distinguished from the otherwise known area of arts-based research (Rotas and Springgay, 2014; Springgay, 2008, 2011, 2013a, 2013b, 2014, 2015, 2016a, 2016b; Springgay and Truman, 2017b, 2017c; Springgay and Zaliwska, 2015; Truman and Springgay, 2015). Research-creation draws attention to the conjunctive at work in its process. Instead of perpetuating an idea of art as separate from thinking, the hyphenation of research-creation engenders “concepts in-the-making,” which is a process of “thinkingwith and across techniques of creative practice” (Manning and Massumi, 2014, pp. 88–89). Research-creation can be thought of as “the complex intersection of art, theory, and research” (Truman and Springgay, 2015, p. 152). Research-creation moves away from procedural-driven methods that assume that data can be mined, collected, or known in advance. Rather, research-creation is propositional, demanding that researchers become accountable to speculative middles and (in)tensions during the research process (Springgay and Truman, 2017a). Erin Manning (2016) notes that, unlike normative practices in educational research that search for answers, research-creation is “problem-making” (p. 11). The event of research-creation makes felt the emergence, the opening, and the excess of thinking-in-movement.

The Failure of Poo Failure, like poo, gets a bad rap. Failure is commonly understood as the opposite of growth, improvement, development, advancement, and accomplishment. Jack Halberstam (2011) contends that failure goes hand in hand with capitalism. For there to be winners, there must be losers. In this regard, failure is threatening. Failure is lack, a breakdown, deficient, or ineffective and does not fit anywhere, especially in schools. When failure is attached to bodies, failure is about not fitting it, not conforming to heternormative standards, or not cohering to the status quo (Edelman, 2004). Failure is shame, fear, or even disgust.

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Attached to learning, failure is the stage of development one moves through toward success—testing, trial, and practice. In education, failure, we are told, needs to be overcome. There are even research centers that help students learn to fail well. The association between failure and affect is instructive. It is a reminder of how affect, or feelings, have been understood as a failure of reason and thinking. In opposition to thinking and the mind, feelings are governed by intuition, the body, and as such inferior (Springgay, 2008). To be emotional is to be gendered, queered—a failure. Paradoxically, failure can be also be commodified and easily romanticized for being experimental, risky, and innovative. For example, in art school, failure is not simply a stage-one moves through toward success, but becomes a process of innovation and newness. Failure in the arts has often been affiliated with discontentment and/or a way to challenge the work of previous artists. In this sense, social practice art, like other forms of live art, could be described as an inherently failing practice because it embraces improvisation and experimentation and engenders accidents, surprises, dead-ends, interruptions, collapses, and breaks. In their writing about performance, Roisin O’Gorman and Margaret Werry (2012) note that failure is live art’s “innate ontological condition: its defining liveness and ephemerality marks its ultimate failure to perpetuate itself” (p. 2). However, this conceptualization of failure is still tethered to success. One must, through trial and error, creative experimentation, and innovation, fail in order to succeed. This is similarly reflected in public schools. Schools cater to the paradoxical nature of failing. In order to succeed, one must first fail through practice and hard work. Failure leads to success, where success is something that can be measured, has direct outputs, and advances student learning. Western education systems maintain what Jack Halberstam (2011), in The Queer Art of Failure, calls “the toxic positivity of contemporary life,” where success and progress continue to marginalize students labeled as at-risk, urban, and outside of mainstream culture (p. 3). Schools reify knowledge, memory, and skill over stupidity, failure, and forgetfulness. Knowledge, argues Halberstam, must be legible and disciplinary. Following the work of Stephano Harney and Fred Moten (2013), Halberstam (2011) wonders what it might be like to become fugitive knowers, modes of thinking not allied with governmentality, disciplines, legibility, and order. Halberstam writes, We may in fact want to think about how to see unlike a state; we may want new rationales for knowledge production, different aesthetic standards for ordering or disordering space, other modes of political engagement than those conjured by the liberal imagination. We may, ultimately, want more undisciplined knowledge, more questions and fewer answers. (italics in original, p. 10)

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If the successful outcome of learning is knowledge, then failure becomes the manifestation of not-knowing yet, but where one anticipates a differently knowledgeable future. What if failure was not a stopgap between experimentation and success? How might we think of not-knowing, not as a lack, but as affective potential: as a refusal? What might it mean to consider an art practice with children as pedagogies of refusal? What might be failure’s political potential? How might failure and refusal help us rethink the place of social practice art in schools? What does this mean for artists working with children? One of the first research-creation events guided by Jickling and Reed was the creation and sale of snowballs. This took place on an exceptionally mild winter day, when snow was scarce in the city of Toronto. Lugging mounds of snow that can always be found outside of indoor ice rinks to the school grounds, the artists led the students through a series of exercises where they made different types of snowballs. Some groups of students made tightly packed snowballs, valued for their use in an eventual snowball fight. Others made loosely shaped snowballs that could be amassed quickly. One student shaped their “ball” into a heart. These snowballs were then sold and/or traded along a busy urban street in the city, depending on the value students assigned to their snowballs, and ranged from exchanges for chewing gum and $40 for a snowball fight. And the heart-shaped snowball claimed $25. Through snowball sales, subway studios, chocolates, and artists’ multiples, Jickling and Reed worked with the students and the teacher over many months to think about trade beyond neoliberal, Euro-Western, and settler-colonial narratives of conquest and progress. As the researchcreation events shifted to focus on the chocolate trade, students visited a Cadbury chocolate factory and the horizontally traded social enterprise ChocoSol. It was here that the students witnessed (and helped create) the chocolate ooze out of a pedal-powered Molino. This was followed by uncontrollable giggles and some bathroom humor, feelings of pleasure and delight, coupled with disgust and shame; such affects coursed through the classroom over the remaining months of the project (and stuck to different bodies differently). Jickling and Reed responded to the students’ affective reactions affirmatively and introduced them to a number of contemporary artists who work with chocolate, feces, or other unusual materials. These included Janine Antoni’s Gnaw and Lick and Lather made from lard and chocolate; Sweet Ass, a chocolate toilet by Art Domantay; and Dieter Roth’s multiples including a recognizable bunny made out of rabbit shit. When introducing artists and artworks to the students, Jickling and Reed were mindful of who is typically represented in the art world (and in the art school curriculum) and who isn’t. Similarly, they recognized the entrenched power dynamics and structures that govern schools and students, stating, The collaborations (we hesitate to even use the term “collaboration”) that we are engaged in are messy, shifting, and complicated. They

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Bringing poo into an elementary classroom, where bodily excess is normatively maintained and controlled, is risky. Some of this is what Sara Ahmed (2004) refers to as the “stickiness” of affect, where sensations and feelings stick “as an effect of the histories of contact between bodies, objects, and signs” (p. 90). The political potential of failure as affective lies in intensities—the power to be affected and to affect. There is a danger, however, in delimiting affect and emotion where affect is autonomous and emotion subjective because, as Ahmed (2010) argues, this recolonizes the body. Similarly, avoiding the messiness of identity and structural and material oppression when talking about affect neglects the ways that affect and feeling participate in the formation of subjects. Yet, affect is useful because it engenders a politics and bodies as “processes of circulation, engagement, and assemblage rather than as originating from the position of a sovereign subject” (Lara et al., 2017, p. 34). Scholars who articulate the relationship between affect and politics attend to the ways that power circulates and fows (Bertelsen and Murphie, 2010; Clough, 2008; Puar, 2012) and categories of animacy that condition corporeal hierarchies (Chen, 2012). Affecting subjectivities, which brings affect theory into assemblages with intersectional theories, focus on the ways that disability, class, race, and other sites of oppression are affectively produced (Ahmed, 2004; Blackman, 2017; Nishida, 2017). What affect theory helps us do is rethink the assumption that agency and politics begins with the human subject and that the human is the only animate agent. As Puar (2012) argues, “affect entails not only a dissolution of the subject but, more significantly, a dissolution of the stable contours of the organic body, as forces of energy are transmitted, shared, circulated” (p. 154). These are important contributions to affect theory, particularly in thinking with poo and when working with children. Affect as sticky reminds us that the material and intensive feelings that accompany poo and failure are not housed in an individual body, nor autonomous and disassociated from subjectivity and identity, but rather emerge as an assemblage of conscious and nonconscious matterings (Lara et al., 2017). When divorced from a defeatist, disappointed, or unsuccessful position, negative affect—shame and failure—can be shifted away from being merely a category of judgement to a potent form of critique. The radical potential of negative affect, argues Lisa Blackman (2015), enables alternative worldings to emerge, other ways of living, being, knowing, and

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making beyond conventional arrangements of progress. Writing about their chocolate multiple, Ding Dong, one student states, I was inspired by the artist Hazel Meyer or her creation of a Ding Dong. I did the Ding Dong because I liked it. And also it was an activity we did in class. There were two different colors of Ding Dongs. The colors were only pink and green. I also did the Ding Dong because they were nice and squishy. I liked pouring Milk chocolate into my mold. Meyer’s Ding Dongs are colorful, foppy, tensile constructions made of knit bikini fabric. Along with the Ding Dongs were two squishy fabric sausages, made from pink and green fabric. What wasn’t captured in the chocolates, but is hinted at in the student’s narrative, is the playful way the students engaged with these materials in the class—fashioning poo, penis, and a breast. Uncontrollable laughter erupted, and for a moment, failure’s affects slid, stuck, and circulated—dislodging the norms of discipline and control so central to classroom life. Halberstam (2011) writes that so often students are not asked to author their own lives, or to theorize it. The chocolates, although a collaborative and much negotiated project between artists and children, certainly foregrounded their affective assemblages. Here the unruliness of bodies ruptured the doctrines of classroom management and censored body parts. Queer tassels twirled repeatedly as pedagogies of refusal—experimentation, pleasure, force, and intensity. Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman (2014) note that failure becomes “the condition for the survival of relation” (p. 37). Failure— the laughter, shame, and affects of poo and Ding Dongs—held the students, teachers, artists, and research team together apart. The affective created a kind of pedagogical intimacy that was feeting, like the burning and unbearable kiss of an embarrassed cheek. And while Ding Dongs and artwork made from rabbit shit might not be everyday curricula in an elementary classroom, I would argue that failure’s affects are reminiscent of what Kathleen Stewart (2007) calls ordinary affects. As ordinary, failure “passes through the body and lingers for a little while as an irritation, confusion, judgment, thrill, or musing. However it strikes us, its signifcance jumps” (p. 39). It is this force that propels us to make sense of it, to incorporate it into our world-making. Or in the words of one of the students, I created an intestine chocolate. The intestine is a machine [Cloaca] created by [artist] Wim Delvoye. It makes poop and shows how our intestine is important because if you didn’t have an intestine the digested thing wouldn’t properly come out. So, if it didn’t come out you would have pain by getting constipation and other painful

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Illegible Knowledge The rhetoric of social justice education is too often fueled by well-meaning savior narratives that position the Western liberal subject as enlightened and full of agency. Social justice knowledge and its accompanying actions are based on a logics of legibility and knowability. Injustices are identified, and then curriculum and pedagogy are mobilized to overcome these shortcomings. Ruben Gaztambide-Fernandez (2013) contends that the arts are often used to justify such social justice aims. Many arts advocates, he argues, are trapped in what he calls a “rhetoric of effects” (p. 215), which focuses on demonstrating how the arts can transform students or society. The arts, when reduced to advocacy statements, “typically evoke the arts as a substance with the power to influence any number of educational outcomes and individual experiences, or even to transform the consciousness of individuals. Instrumentalist approaches assert that injecting the arts can improve academic achievement; intrinsic arguments assert that the presence of the arts enhances individual experiences and perceptions of the world” (p. 212). Extending Gaztambide-Fernandez’s assertions, Sarah E. Truman and I, in our book (Springgay and Truman, 2018), take up the logics of inclusion that participatory arts rely on. Participatory work, like the collaborative projects developed throughout The Pedagogical Impulse, are commonly framed as democratic and inclusive. Inclusion, we maintain, operates as a symbolic gesture that fails to undo the structural logics of racism, ableism, homophobia, and settler colonialism. If participation as inclusion closes things in on itself, keeping things tidy, cohesive, and comfortable, then we need a way to think about participation that “keeps things unsettled, a push that ungrounds, unmoors, even as it propels” (Manning, 2016, p. 202). Against such instrumentalist logics, Jickling and Reed rejected a falsely optimistic rhetoric about the global chocolate trade and resisted heteropatriarchal social justice narratives of success that position the Other as disenfranchised and deprived. Failure materialized in various ways throughout the project, including some of the chocolates produced by the students—a dead bunny, a hand grenade, and a poo intestine. These (in)edible artworks expose the contradictory logic of neoliberalism, fairtrade, and global capitalism. Wrapped in cellophane packaging with metallic-embossed labels and the students writing on the paper portion of the packaging, the chocolates shifted from being edible treats consumed at recess time to artists multiples that eventually entered into a trade economy in the school and community (see Image 11.1). Jickling and Reed never demanded students become better or more knowledgeable (chocolate) consumers. In fact, Jickling and Reed had

Image 11.1 Ask Me Chocolates (2013) by Helen Reed, Hannah Jickling, and grade-six students from “Multiple Elementary”

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planned to create the chocolates using locally sourced, laterally traded dark chocolate, but the students refused. Dark chocolate, they contended, was an adult taste, elite, and did not reflect their own social-capital location. And when the trade event commenced in the school for other classes to attend, students exchanged their multiples for lightsabers, cans of tuna, social services such as carrying bags to and from school, and even a love ballad. A limited-edition birthday party hat (purchased on eBay for the event) was offered by a local artist in the community trade, but was rejected. My headstand procured two chocolate packages! Jickling and Reed’s practice of failure enabled the students to imagine economies of refusal, a disengagement from the norm, from adult-centric values and meanings. This refusal emerged in the students’ chocolates. Resisting hopeful narratives about global fair trade and urban schooling, they created chocolate multiples of toilet paper rolls, potato chips, intestines, a grenade, and a work dress—ideas, objects, and themes that had emerged during the course of the semester but were not directly related to more conventional understandings of chocolate, social justice, or trade. While chocolates might infer habitual and recognizable practices and are thus knowable, when we encounter them differently, when they refuse to confer expectations, they become more than what we assume their functionality to be. As reflected in the words of Manning (2012), “they extend beyond their objectness to become ecologies for complex environments” (p. 92). The chocolate multiples engender a “refusal of legibility and an art of unbecoming” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 88). Despite the tacit institutional desire for the students to craft tidy narratives empathizing with the child victims of the slave trade, the chocolates’ affective forces shake our relationship to totalizing narratives. This is not to suggest that the horrors of the chocolate industry be forgiven or ignored, but that in place of a curricular approach that assumes we can digest the pain of the other, the multiples “keep us from taking the stance of the dispassionate observer, that keep us from falling into our selves . . . and so we become responsible before the event, in the face of it, in its incessant coming-to-act” (Manning, 2012, p. 68). The toilet paper roll, dead bunny, intestine, house, snap hat, and others do not attempt to represent trade and its politics, as if the events of trade could be bounded and delimited; rather, through their refusal to confer, they shape counterintuitive modes of knowing. One of the students created a “chocolate chip” in the shape of a potato chip, playing with the concept of chips, hunger, and pleasure.

Pedagogies of Refusal As a practice of refusal, disengagement is an act of unwillingness or, in fact, a willfulness according to Ahmed (2010). Refusal, or willfulness, exceeds the limits of success and ruptures the status quo. Ahmed (2014) describes the willful subject as one who fails to fit in, refusing to “comply

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with those whose authority is given” (p. 1). To be willful is to be disobedient. Like failure, willfulness compromises success, survival, and good choice. To claim willfulness is an act of refusal. It is to be audacious, creative, and resistant. Ahmed (2014) notes that flow and fluidity are used to describe normativity, “an effect of bodies that are going the same way” (p. 50). In pedagogy, going with the flow, or describing the class as fluid, are qualifiers of success, where students and teachers are working together toward a desired end. Willfulness, Ahmed argues, is the consequence of blocking or refusing the flow. It marks a differentiation. If you flow against or rupture the flow, you become a feminist killjoy, or the willful subject who is “reluctant to yield” (Ahmed, 2104, p.  153). Moreover, willfulness pedagogy inhabits negative affects of anger, fear, disgust, and contempt. But Ahmed reminds us that a refusal or willfulness is not simply about “reclaiming negative terms” (p. 157), but about “insisting on retaining that negativity” (p.  158). In this sense, a pedagogy of refusal is replete with affective potential, where affect as force or intensity engenders the capacity for the not-yet-of-never-quite-knowing. This is failure’s political potential. Counter to success models where the subject overcomes negativity, the negative affect of refusal becomes the site of rupture, resistance, and transformation. Here, I draw on Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson’s (2014) articulation of refusal. Writing about the ways that the state recognizes Indigeneity, DNA being one example, Simpson argues that such recognition works to manage and control. Instead Simpson posits a politics of refusal as “a wilful distancing from state-driven forms of recognition and sociability in favour of others” (p. 16). Jickling and Reed, as feminist killjoys, refused to go with the planned curriculum, the neoliberal models of social justice, and the typical normalized rhythms and structures of institutional schooling. The students also refused the planned curriculum, disrupting the use of dark chocolate. Moreover, negative affect played a central role in many of the projects and in Jickling and Reed’s practice of working with students. From the disgust of poo to the repulsion of neighborhood garbage, Jickling and Reed’s practice produced negative affects. In another project, entitled Your Lupines or Your Life, which was coproduced with a different class of grade-six students in Toronto, during a separate residency, Jickling and Reed organized a series of events around negative affects—anger, fear, anxiety, contempt, and disgust—not with the aim of modifying the negative affects into something good, but as a kind of obstruction. They had students create lost-and-found posters for garbage collected in the neighborhood, create intricate packaging for garbage, and use discarded funeral flowers to create bouquets (see Image 11.2). These micro-projects appeared at times frivolous, silly, stupid, and unworthy to the teachers and students, and produced feelings of anger and distrust, but their failure enacted an obstacle, a limit, or a detour to the otherwise normative desires of the institutional space of school. As Ahmed

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Image 11.2 Your Lupines or Your Life (2013) by Helen Reed, Hannah Jickling, and grade-six students

(2010) notes, “to experience an object as being affective or sensational is to be directed not only toward an object, but to ‘whatever’ is around that object, which includes what is behind the object, the conditions of its arrival” (p.  33). The negative affect didn’t just arrive with the dead

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flowers, but was already sticking to particular ways of being and knowing predicated in education. What Jickling and Reed offer pedagogy as a practice of failure is a refusal to make things tidy, knowable, and sterile. Feminist killjoys working with children through social practice obstruct the reproductive model of schooling where one moves from ignorance to knowledge. Instead, negative affect, refusal, and willfulness demand what Halberstam, drawing on the work of Kathryn Stockton (2009), calls “‘sideways’ relations, relations that grow along parallel lines rather than upward and onward” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 74). These sideways relations tangle, snare, block, and thwart the flow of progress—not as stalemate but in processes where counter-knowledges, unknowing, and new ontologies unravel. In the negative realm of refusal and disavowal, failure enhances, intensifies, varies, and differentiates the pedagogical relation. In closing, I want to offer one last narrative written by one of the students, for his chocolate called Burr. Burrs are very sticky seeds that grow together on plants. They have sticky points which when touched attach to things. Burrs help Common Burdock spread because when the burrs have seeds in them, when they blow away wherever the burrs land and the plant grows. Because there are so many in the woods you can end up in a “sticky situation.” Mutable forms, sticky affects, circulation, and fow—transcorporeal, affective work with children. Failure has become commodified in education as a productive and moral developmental stage that one must go through on the road to success. In this sense, failure builds character through perseverance and hard work. However, this understanding of failure, I contend, is tethered to the violence of progress, neoliberalism, and settler colonization. Further, failure’s affects, like shame, embarrassment, and disgust, are regulated and governed in schooling, in an attempt to create docile and sanitized bodies. Instead, in The Pedagogical Impulse residencies, the fecundity of poo and its concomitant affects touched, titillated, and aroused. Affect threatens bodily boundaries opening up different corporeal ontologies. As such, pedagogies of refusal are immediate, proximal, and bodily and open up the classroom space to affective relations. * Funding for this research came from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

References Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. New York, NY: Routledge. Ahmed, S. (2010). Happy objects. In M. Gregg and G. Seigworth (Eds.), The affect theory reader (pp. 29–51). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Ahmed, S. (2014). Willful subjects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Berlant, L., and Edelman, L. (2014). Sex, or the unbearable. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bertelsen, L., and Murphie, A. (2010). An ethics of everyday infinities and powers: Felix Guattari on affect and the refrain. In M. Gregg and G. J. Seigworth (Eds.), The affect theory reader (pp. 138–157). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Blackman, L. (2015). Affective politics, debility and hearing voices: Towards a feminist politics of ordinary suffering. Feminist Review, 3(1), 25–41. Blackman, L. (2017). “Loving the alien”: A post-post-human manifesto. Subjectivity, 10(1), 13–25. Chen, M. Y. (2012). Animacies: Biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Clough, P. (2008). The affective turn: Political economy, biomedia, and bodies. Theory, Culture, Society, 25(1), 1–22. Edelman, L. (2004). No future: Queer theory and the death drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gaztambide-Fernández, R. A. (2013). Why the arts don’t do anything: Toward a new vision for cultural production in education. Harvard Educational Review, 83(1), 211–236. Halberstam, J. (2011). The queer art of failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Harney, S., and Moten, F. (2013). The undercommons: Fugitive planning & black study. New York, NY: Minor Compositions. Lara, A., Liu, W., Ashley, C. P., Nishida, A., Leibert, R., and Billies, M. (2017). Affect and subjectivity. Subjectivity, 10(1), 30–43. Manning, E. (2012). Always more than pne: Individuation’s dance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Manning, E. (2016). The minor gesture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Manning, E., and Massumi, B. (2014). Thought in the act: Passages in the ecology of experience. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Nishida, A. (2017). Relationality through differences: Disability, affective relationality, and the U.S. public healthcare assemblage. Subjectivities, 10(1), 89–103. O’Gorman, R., and Werry, M. (2012). On failure (On pedagogy). Performance Research, 7(1), 1–8. Puar, J. (2012). “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess:” Becoming-intersectional in assemblage theory. Philosophia, 2(1), 49–66. Rotas, N., and Springgay, S. (2014). How do you make a classroom operate like a work of art? Deleuzeguattarian methodologies of research-creation. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 28(5), 552–572. Simpson, A. (2014). Mohawk interruptus: Political life across the borders of settler states. London: Duke University Press. Springgay, S. (2008). Body knowledge and curriculum: Pedagogies of touch in youth and visual culture. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Springgay, S. (2011). “The Chinatown foray” as sensational pedagogy. Curriculum Inquiry, 41, 636–656. Springgay, S. (2013a). How to be an artist by night: Critical public pedagogy and double ontology. In J. Sandlin, M. O’Malley, and J. Burdick (Eds.),

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Problematizing public pedagogy handbook (pp.  133–148). New York, NY: Routledge. Springgay, S. (2013b). The pedagogical impulse: Aberrant residencies and classroom ecologies. C Magazine for Art and Culture. Springgay, S. (2014). Approximate-rigorous-abstractions: Propositions of activation for posthumanist research. In N. Snaza and J. Weaver (Eds.), Posthumanism and educational research (pp. 76–90). New York, NY: Routledge. Springgay, S. (2015). Working with children as pedagogies of refusal. Toronto: YYZ Books. Springgay, S. (2016a). Towards a rhythmic account of working together and taking part. Research in Education, 96(1), 71–77. Springgay, S. (2016b). Meditating with bees: Weather bodies and a pedagogy of movement. In N. Snaza, D. Sonu, S. E. Truman, and Z. Zaliwska (Eds.), Pedagogical matters: New materialism and curriculum studies (pp.  59–74). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Springgay, S., and Truman, S. E. (2017a). On the need for methods beyond proceduralism: Speculative middles, (in)tensions, and response-ability in research, 24(3), 203–214. Qualitative Inquiry. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800417704464 Springgay, S., and Truman, S. E. (2017b). A transmaterial approach to walking methodologies: Embodiment, affect, and a sonic art performance. Body & Society, 24(4), 27–58. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X17732626. Springgay, S., and Truman, S. E. (2017c). Stone Walks: Inhuman animacies and queer archives of feeling. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 38(6), 851–863. http://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2016.1226777 Springgay, S., and Truman, S. E. (2018). Walking methodologies in a more-thanhuman world. London: Routledge. Springgay, S., and Zaliwska, Z. (2015). Diagrams and cuts: A materialist approach to research-creation. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 15(2), 136–144. Stewart, K. (2007). Ordinary affect. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stockton, K. B. (2009). The queer child, or growing sideways in the twentieth century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Truman, S. E., and Springgay, S. (2015). The primacy of movement in researchcreation: New materialist approaches to art research and pedagogy. In M. Laverty and T. Lewis (Eds.), Art’s teachings, teaching’s art: Philosophical, critical, and educational musings (pp. 151–164). New York, NY: Springer.

12 Machinic Affects Education Data Infrastructure and the Pedagogy of Objects Sam Sellar

Introduction This chapter examines the affects produced within and through encounters with the data infrastructures that are emerging in schools and school systems. The term data infrastructure describes increasingly integrated information systems that are used to collect, analyze, and act upon data for organizational purposes (Sellar, 2015a). While having a material substrate in the form of computer hardware, this infrastructure is primarily a “medium of information” that can be likened to an “operating system” or “an updating platform unfolding in time” (Easterling, 2014, p.  14). Over the past few decades, school systems in many Anglophone nations have been fragmented by policies that have promoted market dynamics (e.g., school choice) and management logics imported from the private sector (e.g., devolution). As a result, the coherence of these systems is increasingly constituted by the connectedness of data infrastructures and the synoptic view of schools provided by data. As Lawn (2013) has argued in relation to English schooling, “the system is held together, and re-imagined, through data” (p. 232). This shift has included the implementation of data-driven, performative accountability as an instrument for managing teachers and schools (Anagnostopoulos, Rutledge, and Jacobsen, 2013), and as Ball (2003) has shown, “these technologies have an emotional status dimension . . . responses to the flow of performance information can engender individual feelings of pride, guilt, shame and envy” (p. 221). Elsewhere, I have analyzed the affective atmospheres produced by the educational data that are mobilized as part of new accountability regimes (Sellar, 2015b). My aim in this chapter is to consider the affects that circulate within data infrastructure separately from these human affections. However, I will begin with the interface between humans and data infrastructure, which increasingly takes the form of various kinds of data visualizations. Data visualizations involve the “mapping of digital data onto a visual image” and are “created for people rather than for machines” (Wright, 2008, pp. 78–79). Data visualizations are interfaces

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that are designed to “make software accessible to users” (Cramer and Fuller, 2008, p. 149). Analyzing the affects produced by data visualizations holds interesting possibilities for understanding how educational data are connected to the subjectivities of teachers and educational leaders and how these data become folded into policy and practice. Deleuze and Guattari (1994) argue that “affects are no longer feelings or affections; they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them. . . . affects are beings whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds any lived” (p. 164). It ought to be possible, then, to conceive of affects circulating in educational data infrastructures beyond the processes through which they register as human affections. Can affects produced by data infrastructures be understood as going beyond the user? How can we conceive of these affects? Data infrastructures include a number of other interfaces, including application programming interfaces (APIs), which are the “specifications and protocols that determine relations between software and software” (Cramer and Fuller, 2008, p. 149). Drawing on Alt (2011), I will argue that APIs create conditions for software objects to affect one another and thus open up a perspective on the autonomy of affect within the medium of infrastructure. The chapter takes up a line of inquiry mapped out by Colebrook (2014) in her book, The Death of the PostHuman. Colebrook revisits the question of the autonomy of affect, which Massumi (1995) addressed in his definitive essay for the field. Much of the work on affect pursued in the two decades since the publication of Massumi’s article has, in one way or another, attended to the feeling human body. Reading back through the major coordinates in debates about affect, Colebrook asks, “What if the concept of affect were potentially a formation that would shatter the organism’s emotive enclosure?” Can we think affect as distinct from emotion and the lived? Colebrook revisits the problematic of two seemingly contradictory tendencies in contemporary culture that have been identified by many analysts: on the one hand, contemporary life has become saturated with affection, and yet on the other hand, we are frequently left feeling flat, or as Frederic Jameson has suggested, we live in a time of waning affect. Colebrook labels this condition “hyper-hypo-affective disorder,” a condition in which there is an overabundance of affection, feeling, emotion, and sentiment, but relatively little affect or intensity. In this context, Colebrook asks whether “there might be something like affect that would not be feeling, and that would not be reducible to the organism’s stimulation” (p. 79). Following Deleuze (1988), whose reading of Spinoza is a key reference point for this line of thought about affect, we can distinguish affects (affectus) from affections (affectio). The latter are feelings—perceived states of bodies—while affects are forces, which Colebrook describes as “a whole domain of pulsations and fluxes beyond the perceptions of the organism” (p. 89). Much attention has been given recently to the morethan-human world, particularly in relation to predictions about climate

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change and technological development. Colebrook argues that we frequently consume this idea of a world without us as fear, horror, or morbid fascination with our extinction as a species, but the challenge remains to “think affects beyond the lived world of the bounded organism” (p. 94). At stake here is a distinction between what Thacker (2011) characterizes as the “world-for-us,” which refers to our access to the world beyond us from a human perspective, and the “world-without-us,” which entails thinking the subtraction of the human from the world. As Thacker argues, “the real challenge today is not finding a new or improved version of the world-for-us . . . [t]he real challenge lies in confronting this enigmatic concept of the world-without-us” (p. 6). This challenge entails thinking about affects beyond our affections, following horror writer Thomas Ligotti’s (2010) proposition that “[w]hatever may be really ‘out there’ cannot project itself as an affective experience” (p. 116). There are two interrelated reasons why schooling, and formal education more generally, is an important site for pursuing this line of inquiry. First, schooling is a key locus of systematic human learning, or pedagogy, that has created important enabling conditions for the emergence of new datadriven analytics and machine learning. Schooling is a key site in the capitalist knowledge economy that has unfolded “a digital environment which has increasingly begun to constitute a kind of ‘second nature’” through which capitalism monitors and modulates its practices and blurs the lines between nature and culture (Thrift, 2005, p. 12). However, educational thought tends to be limited by a conservative politics of reproduction in which, as Edelman (1998) argues, the figure of the child has become a “repository for sentimentalized cultural identifications” (p. 21) and “privileged ensign of the future” (p. 19). The field of education is a fertile ground for a particular variant of hyper-hypo-affective disorder. This chapter begins from the assumption that, in a historical moment when machine learning is opening new possibilities for thinking the relation between humans and machines, it is important to think about learning beyond the human and about the technical systems that now modulate human learning. The chapter is divided into four remaining sections. The following section draws on literature from software studies and philosophy of technology to theorize the human-machine relations and data visualization as a user interface. An empirical example is then introduced, and some brief interview excerpts from a study of new modes of accountability in Australian schooling are used to illustrate the affective atmospheres produced by data in schools. The third section then extends the analysis beyond the user interface to the software interfaces within data infrastructures. This section develops the argument that the architecture of data infrastructures permits a theorization of affective encounters between software objects, and these affects go beyond the perception of human users. A brief conclusion summarizes the discussion and points to possibilities for developing this speculative line of inquiry further.

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Theoretical Framework Data Visualizations as Human-Machine Interfaces In an influential early discussion of the “big data” phenomenon, Cukier and Mayer-Schoenberger (2013) defined datafication as the “ability to render into data many aspects of the world that have never been quantified before.” The term is now commonly used to describe the translation of various things and activities into digital data that can be analyzed using powerful computational methods. There are many instruments of datafication in education, from attendance records to standardized tests to software applications that track students’ activity as they engage in computer-based learning tasks. The joining up of these instruments and the systems that manage the data these instruments generate is now enabled by increasingly large-scale infrastructures. However, the growing datafication of education has quickly given rise to a new problem: how to make sense of all the data that is now routinely collected. Data visualization is one response to this problem and is becoming an increasingly prevalent tool of education policy and governance (Williamson, 2016). According to Wright (2008), “[t]he need for visualization was first recognized in the sciences during the 1980s as the increasing power of computing and the decreasing cost of digital storage created a surge in the amount and complexity of data needing to be managed and processed” (p. 78). Data visualizations provide an interface between human and machine, enabling data to be rendered perceptible for human evaluation and action. A data visualization is thus “distinguished by its algorithmic dependence on its source data and its perceptual independence from it” (Wright, 2008, p. 79). This definition draws attention to the perceptions and affections produced by data as they are rendered available to the user. However, this perspective can also encourage a view that data infrastructures are machines that are used by humans as tools, with the interface as a key locus of human agency. I will take a different approach here, influenced by the concept of the machine developed in the work of Simondon (2017) and Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 1987). For Simondon (2017), “[t]he opposition drawn between culture and technics, between man [sic] and machine, is false and has no foundation . . . Behind a facile humanism, it masks a reality rich in human efforts and natural forces” (p. 16). Simondon argues that there is a reciprocal relationship between human inventors of machines and machines as a materialization of human culture, and this relationship creates new conditions for both technical and cultural evolution. Man .  .  . has the function of being the permanent coordinator and inventor of the machines that surround him. He is among the machines that operate with him. Man’s presence to machines is a

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Influenced by this approach, Deleuze and Guattari also conceive of machines as assemblages that cut across and connect human culture and technical objects. They write that “there is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines together” (1983, p. 2). Machines are here conceived as circuits of desire that traverse and connect humans and technical objects in increasingly complex cybernetic systems rather than as technical objects that can be readily separated, conceptually or empirically, from human users. This conception of machines troubles any clear demarcation between a digital, inhuman domain of calculation, on the one hand, and an analogue domain of embodied human feeling, on the other. Massumi (2002) has argued that “[t]he analog and the digital must be thought together”, albeit asymmetrically, because “there is always an excess of the analog over the digital” (p.  143). This is another way to express Simondon’s point that the (analog) human is the mediator of (digital) machines and the source of creative force within technical ensembles. Lury, Parisi and Terranova (2012) also argue for the need to see computational culture and embodied sensation as thoroughly intertwined, even if we are also witnessing an intensification of both the formalism of algorithmic processes and the sensuous experience of the human body (hyper-hypoaffective disorder). They propose that “in today’s topological forms of culture rationalism is no longer a limited form of language, but is rather an implementation of an infinity of reason that precludes any contagion with sensuality, the visceral or feeling” (p. 28). However, while there is now a domain of disembodied logical reasoning that operates as a pervasive infrastructure for our technologically mediated societies, “the rise of topological culture is not only about more and more efficacious abstraction, more calculation and control”. They continue: insofar as the indices, meta-models, networks and experiments of topology are not detached from the material, from the body, language or the senses, but rather work in and through them, topological rationality participates in and renews the specificity of the material and the sensuous. (Lury & Parisi, 2012, p. 28) The interface is a key site demanding analytical attention, and data visualizations, for example, are one interface through which the formal languages of digital systems pass into analog sensation.

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Whether or not contemporary culture is becoming more coldly rational, on the one hand, or more hyper-hypo-affective, on the other, depends on our point of view. As Colebrook (2014) writes, “[d]igital culture could . . . be either purely formal and cognitive, with the manipulation of digits and empty variables, or predominantly affective with digital technologies enabling the simulation of stimulating matters” (p. 77). In educational research, some attention has been paid to the latter, particularly the use of data to stimulate feelings that are intended to drive performance improvements. But what about the new formalism beyond sensation? Can we conceive of affects circulating autonomously in this domain? Writing in the mid-twentieth century, Simondon was highly critical of the view that machines can have autonomy from humans—a view captured in the idea of the robot that poses an existential threat to the human—and he reserves an important ongoing function for human thought and creativity in his philosophy of technology. From this perspective, the analog tends to be privileged as the domain of creative potential while the digital is considered to be determinately preprogrammed (Massumi, 2002). However, this privileging of human creative sovereignty is not essential to, and can arguably be undermined by, an understanding of the human and the machine as integrated within broader cybernetic systems. For example, Land (2011) argues that if the machine is understood as “integrated imminently as cybernetic technics it redesigns all oppositionality as nonlinear flow. There is no dialectic between social and technical relations, but only a machinisim that dissolves society into the machines whilst deterritorializing the machines across the ruins of society . . .” (p. 294). Any successful theoretical effort to overcome the opposition between the human and machine can just as easily emphasize the modelling and modulation of human behavior by computer systems as it does the agency of the human within these systems. Indeed, the field of data visualization now aims at producing a nonconscious entrainment of human users that is oriented toward more efficient operation of data systems rather than incorporating human evaluation and creativity in ways that exceed the operations imagined by the designers of these systems. The Science and Art of Data Dashboards A data dashboard is a form of data visualization in which data is represented in charts and tables or use the types of gauges found on vehicle dashboards to enable efficient appraisal of multiple data sources. Color coding is often used to direct attention to particular data points and speed up the evaluative process. Anyone familiar with these dashboards will have noticed certain aesthetic consistencies, particularly the widespread use of “traffic light” color schemes that map a perceptual schema onto a normative one: green is generally used to signify good and red, bad.

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The colors used in data dashboards are increasingly designed to act directly upon human perception with minimal mediation by conscious, culturally inflected interpretation. In his scientific treatment of information visualization, Ware (2000) explains that these visualizations employ sensory symbols that “derive their expressive power from their ability to use the perceptual processing power of the brain without learning” (p. 12). He contrasts these symbols with arbitrary ones, which he defines as those “aspects of representation that must be learned, because the representations have no perceptual basis” (p. 10). Sensory symbols (e.g., colors) connect directly with perception as a physiological system, while arbitrary symbols must also connect with cultural systems (e.g., values and beliefs). Consider the use of the color red in a data dashboard. The most likely explanation for why red was selected to signal stop when traffic lights were developed in the early decades of the twentieth century was the cultural association of this color with warning or danger. However, red does not have this connotation in all cultures, and thus “the use of color codes to indicate meaning is highly culture-specific” (Ware, 2000, p. 16). But the contrast between the red and green colors used in data visualizations does have a physiological basis. New world primates, including humans, have trichromatic vision that evolved 40 million years ago to help distinguish ripe from unripe fruits and to distinguish this fruit from green foliage. After black and white, red is the third color identified across many languages. While red may mean warning only in some cultures, the visual attunement to red and to red-green as an opponent pair appears to have some consistency across cultures (Ware, 2008, pp.  110–113). Moreover, the contrast between red and green color patches creates a patch of intensity. This sensory symbolism is important for what Wright (2008) describes as the push “to streamline visualization by designing it for the faster ‘automatic processing’ stage of human vision that deals with the unconscious detection of light, pattern, orientation, and movement” (p. 82). This enables the designer of data visualizations to harness visual perception and human cognition as a resource within a broader set of algorithmic processes. This scientific perspective on the design of data visualization resonates with recent aesthetic theory that has sought to think art as a category that is not specific to human culture. As Wright (2008, p. 81) notes, data visualization has only quite recently been seen as science rather than art, but even as art these visualizations can be understood as primarily connecting with base perceptual capabilities. In her development of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994) theory of art, Grosz (2008) argues that [a]rt is of the animal. It comes, not from reason, recognition, intelligence, not from uniquely human sensibility, or from any of man’s

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higher accomplishments, but from something excessive, unpredictable, lowly. What is artistic in us is that which is most bestial. . . . Art is the consequence of that excess, that energy or force, that puts life at risk for the sake of intensification, for the sake of sensation itself. (p. 63) Here we can discern a point of connection between art and data visualization as operating at the level of sensory symbolism. For Grosz, art is grounded in the energies of life; it is biological before it is cultural. Colebrook (2014) also draws attention to how Deleuze and Guattari conceive of an “art that occurs outside the human and beyond the organism: affects stand alone, exist in themselves and cannot be reduced to the lived” (p. 91). Colebrook recalls their example of the stagemaker bird— which creates a territory by organizing colored leaves—to illustrate the point that the color of the leaves precedes the bird and percepts can be understood to have autonomy within an assemblage of which the bird is a functional part. Colebrook then asks whether the same can be said of affects. When art captures sensations that stand alone—as though the perceptions of organisms would only be possible because of these autonomous potentialities of percepts—then this is relatively easy to understand, as though a Mondrian or Cezanne drew upon, rather than produced, the vibrations of color. But how could we say the same of affects, render them autonomous, inhuman and inorganic, in a way that would render them distinct from affections? (p. 92) In the following sections, I take up this question to sketch out a theorization of the autonomy of affects within data infrastructures, beginning with an empirical example in which they are still linked to human affections and then working back into the domain of software.

Encounters with Data Dashboards in Australian Schools In 2008, the Australian government introduced a set of education reforms that included the establishment of a national Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), which oversees three main areas: development of a national curriculum; annual national literacy and numeracy assessments for all students in years three, five, seven, and nine; and a national reporting mechanism in the form of the My School website. My School provides data on every school that receives federal funding, which is most schools across the country (approximately 10,000). A range of data is provided on this website, but the visualizations

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of performance on literacy and numeracy assessments have had a significant impact on conversations within and about schools. Charts are used to represent the performance of the different year-level cohorts in each school for each year. One particular chart shows the performance for each cohort within a given school in comparison with the same cohort in up to 60 similar schools (Image 12.1). This table uses red and pink to signify comparatively poor performance and light and dark green to signify comparatively good performance. Other charts have used slightly different color schemes, and the color schemes have changed across different versions of the website. In a study of new modes of accountability across a cluster of Australian schools,1 we interviewed principals and teachers about the impact in their schools of the introduction of national literacy and numeracy testing and the reporting of performance using My School. Interviewees often made reference to the colors used by the data visualizations presented on the website. For example, one primary school principal explained that [O]ur results go up and down like a yoyo and last year’s results, the Year 7s were all blue, so that says comparable to national [average]—we’re great. The [year] threes and the fives, however, were multicolored—bits of red, bits of this, bits of that, and overall the threes and fives were pretty dismal.

Image 12.1 Composite image of data dashboard from the My School website (school anonymized)

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What is important in this description is the relation between color and judgments about performance—the jump is quickly made from “all blue” to “we’re great” and from “bits of red” to “pretty dismal.” The judgment formed here is quite impressionistic rather than being justifed in terms of a detailed analysis and account of the underlying data. A high school principal in our study gave a similar account, including a description of the forces produced by these visualizations. All of the staff feel the pressure, because my message to them is, how are we going to improve our data? That’s the message that comes from those on high. You know, well, have a look at your data, it’s all red or pink. We say, yes, but you know, guess what, we’ve got a yellow bit there. You know, we’re not doing too badly, it’s better than last year. Again, the discussion about performance is shaped by the presence of, and contrast between, different kinds and amounts of color. Of course, this is to be expected insofar as the function of such visualizations is to facilitate quick processing of visual patterns. However, what we can see is the contrast between the abstract calculation at the level of the algorithms used to process and compare the assessment data, which were absent from our discussions with educators, and the affections produced by the perceptual interface, which featured strongly in the interview data. Here we can see how data visualizations are designed to harness perception and efficiently communicate a large amount of information quickly, with an orientation toward action. (“How are we going to improve your data?”) We can also see how the perception of data is accompanied by affections that are felt as pressure to improve or anxiety about poor results when data are rendered as sensory symbols that are inserted into cultural and professional contexts that have become highly attuned to them. At the level of the user interface, the affects of data infrastructure can be discerned from the perspective of their human affections. But how can these affects be understood to go beyond those who undergo them?

The Affects of Software Objects As mentioned above, data infrastructures are built upon a substrate of computer hardware but are largely constituted by software that manages data and communications among various information systems. The challenge is to conceive of software code as a medium in which affects circulate. As Parikka (2010) has observed, this is a complicated theoretical ambition from a Deleuzian perspective, in which there is a tendency to view “code as a formalization and standardization of the relationality

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of the analogue” (p. 121). In order to think affect at the level of code, it is necessary to go beyond a view of computation as linear processing (e.g., a line of code executed in the clock time of the processor) to a view of computation as a medium in which there is movement and indeterminacy. The latter entails a different spatio-temporality of software and a point where Massumi (2002) acknowledges that the analog could lose its superiority because “the digital may succeed in integrating analogic process ability into its own operations” when “the running of code induces qualitative transformation in its own loopy operation” (p. 142). This point is likely being (or has already been) reached with recent developments in neural networks that underpin machine learning. However, a much less recent development in software architecture—object orientation—may have already produced a spatio-temporality of code in which affects can circulate. In the mid-twentieth century, the field of computer science was focused on increasing the speed at which information was processed. As Crutzen and Kotkamp (2008) explain, “great efforts went into developing the architectures of logic-based subsystems” and the “(inter) action in these subsystems [was] always structured and planned” (p. 200). Early programming languages provided a linear sequence of instructions for the computer processor. However, Alt (2011) shows how computers shifted from increasingly fast calculators to become a medium, which he defines as “a malleable material stratum for accommodating an incredibly diverse array of communications, expressions, and affects” (p. 279). This occurred with the emergence of object-oriented programming. Object orientation “is a design strategy for modeling highly complex systems as smaller interacting elements that are finitely computable” (p. 280). Alt traces the transition from machine and assembly languages, which involve a process of delineation, to object-oriented approaches that brought about a fundamental conceptual change by introducing the idea of encapsulation. Encapsulation is . . . an act of differentiation that breaks the unified linear representation of the program into a diversity of several autonomous, parallel, and entirely self-sufficient computational entities, each of which is separately compiled as its own distinct object. . . . encapsulation requires the programmer to conceive the space of the program as embodied, three-dimensional space containing multiple individual subjectivities. (p. 292) Put simply, each software object acts as its own computer and coordinates its actions with other objects by sending and receiving requests. This approach creates a medium that involves real-time interactivity between

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objects as they await messages from other objects (a feature made possible by “late binding’) rather than following a step-by-step sequence of operations that are always executed according to a predetermined logic. Alt (2011) argues that software objects can be understood to operate analogously with the sensory and motor systems of living organisms because objects can evaluate requests according to their internal context and exercise a degree of autonomy with regard to how the request is executed (a characteristic known as “polymorphism”). Drawing on Deleuze’s theorization of affect, Alt suggests that [M]essage receipt can be understood as perception, and the corresponding method of execution can be considered an action. Yet late binding opens up an interval in the duration of the object, an interval that is filled by the indetermination and evaluation of polymorphism. It is through this movement that polymorphism opens up the ability for programmers to infuse their programming objects with affect. (pp. 295–296) In his commentary on Spinoza’s concept of affect, Deleuze (1988) distinguishes between affection (affectio) and affects (affectus), defining the latter as referring “to the passage from one state to another, taking into account the correlative variation of the affecting bodies.” An affect is “purely transitive, and not indicative or representative, since it is experienced as a lived duration that involves the difference between two states” (p.  49). The important point made by Alt (2011), drawing on Bergson and Deleuze, is that object orientation produces a medium in which “time is experienced directly as a continuous global change within the relations and states of an entire field of objects” (p. 294). Object orientation transforms computation into a medium that is populated by objects that have the capacity to affect and be affected by other objects, opening the possibility for an ethology of software (Parikka, 2010).

Conclusion The aim of this chapter was to work toward a theorization of affects produced within the data infrastructures that are emerging across schools and school systems. According to a conception of the machine drawn from Simondon and Deleuze and Guattari, data visualizations were characterized as a user interface within broader cybernetic circuits rather than the point at which a distinct machine is rendered operable to the human user as a tool. This interface renders data capable of producing human affections, which were described by some school principals as a sense of pressure to improve test results felt from the color composition of data visualizations. The “body” affecting the human user is

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aesthetic (a bloc of sensation), and it is increasingly being engineered to operate upon human physiology at a nonconscious level, even if its effects also register consciously as new kinds of anxieties within professional subjectivities. Object orientation enables data infrastructure to function as a computational medium, at least where the underlying software was designed using object-oriented approaches, and thus creates the capacity for objects to affect and be affected. However, these affects are of a very different order to the blocs of sensation produced by data visualizations, even if these visualizations have some algorithmic dependence on data objects. From the perspective of the user interface, the analog may still appear superior and as a necessary creative mediating force in relation to the digital. But from the perspective of software to software interfaces, the user is now modelled as another object, albeit one with different capacities to affect and be affected (e.g., human visual perception). Alt’s (2011) discussion of object orientation focuses on the work of computer scientist Alan Kay, whose work in the 1960s and 1970s shaped computational culture over subsequent generations. Alt notes that Kay became quite concerned by the “all-consuming logic” of object orientation that is spread by our deep immersion in media that operate according to this approach, reshaping culture in the process. While object orientation opens the capacity for computation to become a medium capable of encompassing virtually every aspect of contemporary lived reality, it can do so only by reordering culture according to its own specific logic and enforcing this logic upon anyone wishing to access it. Thus the culture that exists in objectoriented media is a recoded culture that is not restricted to computational spaces. Rather, as computation grows increasingly pervasive in all areas of culture, object orientation recodes all aspects of the noncomputational world in very real ways. (p. 298) The term for a set of ideas that are passed on from generation to generation, shaping and reshaping culture in the process, is pedagogy. We must consider the possibility that object orientation has produced a hidden pedagogy of objects. Much attention to the datafication of education assumes an ontological gap between humans and technics, with the latter often presented as a maligning force acting on human pedagogical relations (e.g., the view that what is most important about education cannot, or should not, be standardized, measured, or automated). This politics of reproductive futurity is shaped by an overly sentimentalized view of the role that education ought to play in relation to the human child. The dominance of this view in thought and debate about educational technology distracts attention

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from the subtle recoding of the noncomputational world according to a strange ethology and pedagogy of objects. From the perspective of object orientation, computer scientists and programmers may now be performing one of the most important, and underanalyzed, pedagogical functions in highly mediatized societies. There is a need to consider the implications of this growing computational medium of affects that, as Ligotti (2010) observes, cannot be projected as affective experience, even if it is pedagogically reshaping the conditions for this experience.

Note 1. This example is drawn from the findings of an Australian Research Council Linkage Project (LP100200841) titled “Pursuing Equity in High Poverty Rural Schools: Improving Learning through Rich Accountabilities.” The project was a collaboration between The University of Queensland, Victoria University, and the Queensland Department of Education and Training. The chief investigators were Professor Bob Lingard, Professor Martin Mills, and Professor Peter Renshaw, with Dr. Sam Sellar, as project manager, from The University of Queensland, and Professor Marie Brennan and Dr. Lew Zipin from Victoria University.

References Alt, C. (2011). Objects of our affection: How object orientation made computers a medium. In E. Huhtamo and J. Parrika (Eds.), Media archeology: Approaches, applications and implications (pp. 278–301). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Anagnostopoulos, D., Rutledge, S. A., and Jacobsen, R. (2013). The infrastructure of accountability: Data use and the transformation of American education. Harvard, MA: Harvard Education Press. Ball, S. J. (2003). The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity. Journal of Education Policy, 18(2), 215–228. Colebrook, C. (2014). Death of the posthuman: Essays on extinction (Vol. 1). Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Retrieved from openhumanitiespress. org/essays-on-extinction-vol1.html Cramer, F., and Fuller, M. (2008). Interface. In M. Fuller (Ed.), Software studies: A lexicon (pp. 149–155). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Crutzen, C., and Kotkamp, E. (2008). Object orientation. In M. Fuller (Ed.), Software studies: A lexicon (pp. 200–206). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cukier, K., and Mayer-Schoenberger, V. (2013). The rise of big data: How it’s changing the way we think about the world. Foreign Affairs, 92, 28. Deleuze, G. (1988). Spinoza: Practical philosophy. San Francisco, CA: City Lights. Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

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Easterling, K. (2014). Extrastatecraft: The power of infrastructure space. Brooklyn, NY: Verso Books. Edelman, L. (1998). The future is kid stuff: Queer theory, disidentification, and the death drive. Narrative, 6(1), 18–30. Grosz, E. (2008). Chaos, territory, art: Deleuze and the framing of the earth. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Land, N. (2011). Fanged Noumena: Collected writings 1987–2007. Falmouth: Urbanomic. Lawn, M. (2013). A systemless system: Designing the disarticulation of English state education. European Educational Research Journal, 12, 231–241. Ligotti, T. (2010). The conspiracy against the human race: A contrivance of horror. New York, NY: Hippocampus Press. Lury, C., Parisi, L., and Terranova, T. (2012). Introduction: The becoming topological of culture. Theory, Culture & Society, 29(4–5), 3–35. Massumi, B. (1995). The autonomy of affect. Cultural Critique, 31, 83–109. Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Parikka, J. (2010). Ethologies of software art: What can a digital body of code do? In S. Zepke and S. O’Sullivan (Eds.), Deleuze and contemporary art (pp. 116– 132). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sellar, S. (2015a). Data infrastructure: A review of expanding accountability systems and large-scale assessments in education. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 36(5), 765–777. Sellar, S. (2015b). A feel for numbers: Affect, data and education policy. Critical Studies in Education, 56(1), 131–146. Simondon, G. (2017). On the modes of existence of the technical objects. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal. Thacker, E. (2011). In the dust of this planet: Horror of philosophy (Vol. 1). Winchester and Washington, DC: Zero Books. Thrift, N. (2005). Knowing capitalism. London: Sage. Ware, C. (2000). Information visualization: Perception for design. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. Williamson, B. (2016). Digital education governance: Data visualization, predictive analytics, and ‘real-time’ policy instruments. Journal of Education Policy, 31(2), 123–141. Wright, R. (2008). Data visualization. In M. Fuller (Ed.), Software studies: A lexicon (pp. 78–86). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

13 The Affective Matter of (Australian) School Uniforms The School-Dress That Is and Does Melissa Joy Wolfe and Mary Lou Rasmussen

Preface: Situating the Australian School Uniform In Australia, school uniforms are prevalent in both government and private schools. Uniforms as measurements of power are hotly contested, and gendered uniforms are of educational interest and concern. The pervasiveness of gendered uniforms has sparked ongoing campaigns such as Girls Uniform Agenda,1 a movement to ensure that female students identifying as girls have options to wear trousers and shorts. Campaigns related to gendered uniform assume a binary gender and have focused on the growing demand for girls to be allowed to wear trousers and shorts. Rarely is the notion of boys in dresses raised, except where it is produced as some humorous hijinks2 or a monstrous transgression. The school-dress recently became highly politicized via public outcry over a campaign entitled Gender Is Not Uniform.3 The campaign, which is aimed at creating safer environments for gender-diverse students,4 recognizes the capacity of uniforms to impact on young trans and gender diverse peoples’ sense of self and identity; it educates schools about how uniforms can play a part in making schools welcoming to trans and gender-diverse students. Such public campaigns demonstrate explicitly how gender, bodies, and uniforms are entangled with the material discursive practices that enforce dress-wearing for cis-gendered girls only. They are entangled with power that privileges binary bodies in more than their clothes. We discuss events of dress-wearing as “intra-action”5 (Barad, 2007, p. 33) from where bodies and uniforms emerge in a nation where gendered school uniforms continue to matter.

Introduction The school-dress is a site of power struggle within education. We circle the dress, using a series of vignettes to illustrate the dress’s multiple becomings as a situated object of knowledge (Buhlmann, Colman, and van der Tuin, 2017). Prior research on school uniforms (Happel, 2013; Meadmore and Symes, 1997) has focused on the ways in which uniforms

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regulate subjects in relation to class and gender binaries that often simply reiterate these binaries. Uniforms have been regarded as improving safety, grades, and discipline at school (Raby, 2005), and how girls (assumed as cisgender) dress at school has been the focus of much interrogation regarding normalized sexist double standards and feminine regulation relating to girlhood and sexuality (Raby, 2010; Ringrose and Rawlings, 2015). The school-dress materializes as an appropriate wear for girls reinforcing tropes of self-respectability and reputation that incite reductive ways to be girl (Raby, 2010). This debate, however, draws attention away from the materialization of gender and sex and actually reiterates that underneath the dress there exists a girl (who is almost always imagined as cisgender) and thus reinscribes the heterosexual matrix. It is this determinism that is reiterated in campaigns like Girls Uniform Agenda.6 The dress in these campaigns is nominated as the problematic object due to its determined attributes—and the phenomena that created the dress as the problem for girls (always assumed as cisgender) is left unscrutinised. This thinking only recreates the “problem” of materializing students reductively as first and foremost girls (distinguished by their dress-wearing) and boys. It is this assumption that we unpick. We frame a different conversation around uniforms using affect and the school-dress to rupture this thinking: by noticing and by feelingthinking.7 Attending to feelingthinking not only allows us to notice absurdities associated with gender that appear as common sense but also draws attention to the reductive and dangerous hierarchies reproduced in schools. We notice that the school-dress uncritically materializes with cisgendered girls. We are not interested in the attributes of school-dresses but how they emerge in relation with the world and in this case with the dress-wearing student body. Utilizing Barad (2007), we question how things materialize through one another in relation, through phenomena, in the present. We investigate material discursive boundary making practices (dress-wearing) that produce the object (the dress) and the subject (cisgendered girl) and other differences within a changing relationality. We share a series of vignettes in order to explore the material discursive phenomenon that is dress-wearing. We explicitly seek to interrupt assumptions reiterated every day throughout our lives—from baby-wear, toilet doors, and school uniform policy—that only girls—assumed as cisgender—wear dresses. We begin by considering patterns of mattering relating to the materialization of dress such as the equation that dress = girl. Dresses cannot be understood as separate from bodies, people, places, and feelings. Rather, we perceive dress-wearing as part of what we call an “event assemblage” (see Image 13.1 below): circuits that incorporate affective affiliations (Rasmussen, 2014) and affective consequences. We go on to consider the concepts of affect (feelingthinking) and spacetimemattering—concepts that (as their rendering suggests) are sutured together. The relationality of these concepts is conveyed in all the vignettes.

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Image 13.1 The event assemblage

“Re-membering” (Barad, 2015, p. 407) and the continuous materialization of the dress are foregrounded in the second vignette. Methodologically, this is significant in understanding how stories matter in the present and in the future that is to come. We are creating affective relations anew in our recollection and retelling. In the third vignette, Melissa re-feel-thinks entangled affections and affiliations associated with the assumed benign, very short netball skirt required in the girls-only “noncontact” sport of netball. This example demonstrates the affective patterns determining often uncomfortable differences on her body in the encounter—past-present-future (see Image 13.1). Our discussion section points to how the political manifests when one attends to the event assemblage. We explore what is gained by turning away from thinking about the school-dress (or dresses at school) as problematic objects and turning toward dress-wearing as a thing that needs to be noticed in the event and how this comes to matter.

Patterns of Mattering Through this analysis, we encourage educators “to be open to the possibility of rethinking the world as literally made of feelings” (Massumi, 2011, p. 85). We highlight the importance of the sensory (material) and relational (discursive) within experience, as an emerging encounter that produces meaning. It is a mode of becoming that we attempt to make visible through the affective re/encounters with the dress depicted in the following vignettes. We are interested in ways encounters of affection, as

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intra-action (Barad, 2007) affects what materially may come to be (see Image 13.1). Barad (2007) argues that it is phenomena—such as dress-wearing— that is constitutive of reality. School-dress wearing materializes meanings in things, making itself intelligible to other parts of the world. We attempt to illustrate ways that differing patterns of mattering8 (in this instance, school dress-wearing) materialize different realities. Noticing differing patterns enables a “diffractive methodology” (Barad, 2007, p. 30) where what is observed and the investigation itself are recognized as entangled with the researcher. You cannot subtract the investigation out of what is detected. We present the following vignettes to offer an elucidation of ways “different differences get made, what gets excluded, and how those exclusions matter” (Barad, 2007, p.  30) and, most importantly, how things may come to matter differently. Vignette 1 # Erin, Affect and Spacetimemattering I didn’t mind wearing the summer dress, but I could see why a lot of girls did have problems with it . . . everyone would wear their skirts very short . . . a lot of girls would tie it up at the back to make it, to give you a little bit more shape. . . . So for me I had no problem with the shorter skirt and tighter dress, but they were very see-through and I know that caused a lot of insecurities for a lot of girls . . . the dress didn’t make me feel you know all that insecure about it or I wasn’t uncomfortable about it but I know that quite a few of my friends were uncomfortable. (Transcript, Wolfe, 2015)9 Utilizing Vignette 1, we see how the attributes of the dress are noted by Erin as see-through, short, and tied up to give the bodies underneath “shape.” We realize the dress does with bodies. We think through entanglements of affective relations emerging in encounter as illustrated (Image 13.1). The dress, in this event, affectively becomes intra-actively (Barad, 2007) entangled with student bodies. Some emerging bodies happen to easily “fit” dominant affiliations, and others are incited to fit; others cannot—can never—fit. They are queer bodies within this particular encounter. What we bring attention to here is the affective consequences of the everyday practices of dress-wearing that impact students’ capacity in more than their appearance. For cis girls and trans girls in school-dresses, the violence and valences of dress-wearing, the felt affects, are palpable, unpredictable, and critically deserving of our attention. The need for educators to notice these affections to make them matter differently (Wolfe, 2017a) is articulated by Ricky Gutierrez-Maldonado (2018) in his discussion of Larry King’s “too-muchness.” Larry, a Black,

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trans, junior high-school student in California was murdered on Valentine’s Day. She was murdered by a boy with whom she flirted. Larry attended a suburban public school where the uniform policy could never have hoped to contain the excess in which she revelled. Gutierriez-Maldonado discerns how Larry’s excessive ornamentations pressured administrators to familiarize themselves with school dress codes and the legal protections of gender expression and identity. Larry engaged in a deliberate and pleasurable excess of affect: relishing the ways she interrupted and disturbed students and teachers by wearing high heels, makeup, and earrings and refusing to minimize her black femininity and flirtations. Telling Larry’s story, Gutierrez-Maldonado at once draws our attention to “the beauty [and joy] of queer and trans life” (p.  60) and the stark limitations of inclusion. Entanglements, despite appearances, are not sedimentary, and we are “attentive to and responsive/responsible to, the specificity of material entanglements in their agential becoming” (Barad, 2007, p. 91). Affective encounters are both transient and in perpetual motion. We draw attention to affective encounters with dresses within and outside education— we aspire to encourage our readers to recreate/renegotiate their own affective encounters in order to make them matter differently. We recognize constraints mediate these affective entanglements in ways we cannot predict or foresee. Our methodology is an attempt to interfere in the practices of knowing (dress-wearing as “specific material engagements” (Barad, 2007, p. 91, original emphasis)) in order to participate in “(re) configuring the world” (Barad, 2007 , p. 91, original emphasis) as an account allowing for new materializations of personal affirmative and even joyful dress-wearing.

Affect The term affect, in this account, is not interchangeable with the term emotion. Affect, drawing on Spinoza (1994), Deleuze (1988), and Massumi (2011, 2015), is an unqualified intensity within event. Emotion, although integral within the concept of affect, is a fluid expression of the affective event. Emotion is the feelingthinking response of the force of affection (intensities), intra-actively (Barad, 2007) emerging. We promote an ethics that engages material affect, noting affective power transmissions within schooling as places and spaces of becoming with, as situational intraaction (Barad, 2007) in the present. Erin and Larry understand affections as political—they are attentive to the nuances of dress-wearing. The relationships between the length, shape, and style of dress and the performance of femininity are apparent in their observations and performances. Affective entanglements matter or come to matter because our entanglements diffract, through feelingthinking. We invest and affiliate

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along affective lines of becoming, creating boundaries in encounter with our world. Recognizing this need to notice affections is fundamental to our argument because a lack of notice compromises what Barad (2015) terms “response-ability.” “[e]ach bit of matter is constituted in responseability; each is constituted as responsible for the other, as being in touch with the other” (p. 402). Matter evolves through a relational response. In this way, time, space, and matter collide with the data (Image 13.1). Intra-action is unstable but materializes what comes to matter. Meaning as matter is created not just in performance but as reception, one movement in encounter that allows for action as capacity to respond. Within the present research encounter the (school) dress becomes as materially discursive and cannot be removed from agencies of observation (Barad, 2007). The apparatus of measurement (this paper, Melissa’s and Mary Lou’s feelingthinking) are entangled with the object of study (the dress) and interfere in the possibilities of the thesis we put forward. In the following sections, we playfully assemble a series of personal vignettes. These are a feelingthinking through, a becoming with the dress. These affective encounters illustrate how the dress, and the school-dress in particular, is co-constituted as a direct gendering practice of Australian schools that materializes some bodies at the expense of othered bodies. Bodies refract in encounter and re/produce capacities of performance in a variety of ways. The personal vignettes recounted hereafter allow a consideration of relationality with the re/emerging dress, illustrating the capacity of thinking with Barad’s concept of “spacetimematter” (2007, p. 142). As we re/materialize relations with this thing (the dress) in the here and now, entangled in a Baradian spacetimemattering (2007), we diffractively remake meaning, past and present and future.

Spacetimemattering We apply Barad’s (2007) notion of the iterative enfolding and reworking of past and future within the present. Barad’s notion of spacetimemattering purports “the past was never simply there to begin with and the future is not simply what will unfold” (2007, p. 315). This does not mean that the past does not exist and does not matter. What it does do is question the linearity and sedimentary nature of time. Melissa’s personal vignettes, from five-year-old to schoolgirl, to fifty-something researcher, are testimony to agential cuts (Barad, 2007) originally enacted within an assumed linear time that matters history into existence as if it were always there prior. What we do here is examine these “past” events as otherwise, mattering them in the here and now as other—enhancing a capacity to respond by making the past matter differently.

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Vignette #2 emerged as a generative research event, a re-membering (Barad, 2015) whilst writing this chapter, explicitly implicating Melissa10 with measuring and bringing into being the object of shameful-interest (see Mayes and Wolfe, 2018), the dress. The remeasuring continues in Vignette #3, using Melissa’s recollections as a co-participant from a recent research project (Wolfe, 2016) investigating school-girling processes, entangled in the affections of the here and now of the changing measuring apparatus. Vignette # 2 A Re-membering (Barad, 2015) Becoming Girl Child I looked up through five-year-old eyes at the towering formidable Aunt holding out the dress. I screamed loudly as she pushed it down over my head. I bit. I kicked. I was in big trouble. I knew I was bad. I wanted to disappear. I couldn’t and wouldn’t put it on. I was not. Tears poured down my swollen red cheeks and I sobbed loudly for my mother, clinging to my scruffy overalls. She gave in, shaking her head and whistling, sucking in air disapprovingly. Gruffly she presented me with my male cousin’s pressed trousers and shirt. I awkwardly put these starchy items on, wiped the tears away, snot dribbling down the white shirt front, and went to church. The distress was not caused by the dress (or the aunt, the house, or the mother). The affect sticks to the dress, in remembering, as the disapproval of who the child is (in her own body-mind (Pitts-Taylor, 2016)). The child negotiates affective relations: then refusing the alien dress (that is unfamiliar) and choosing the wrong object (trousers, familiar); now shame is the affect that sticks (negotiated onto the dress that belongs to her as categorized girl child). This traumatic event stays with Melissa not as a factual event, but as a felt re-encounter in the present, as spacetimemattering (Barad, 2007) that is remembering. Barad states that remembering “is not a process of recollection, of the reproduction of what was .  .  . it is a matter of re-membering” (2015, pp.  406–407). Thus, Melissa does not remember the event as it was [as such]—she becomes within the phenomena of the event, in the here and now (Image 13.1) in new affective relation. Melissa previously understood that she was objecting to wearing the dress, and the dress was an alien object and the source of her trauma. This conception denotes the dress, and the gendered and sexed girl child as preexisting the event relies on the notion that bodies and things have preexisting attributes. However, as Barad states, “diffraction patterns depend on the details of the apparatus” (2007, p.  91), and when the apparatus changes, so do the objects of measurement. As Melissa changes, so does the

186 Melissa Joy Wolfe and Mary Lou Rasmussen measure of this event. Thus, she remembers this scenario and creates diffractive patterns anew from the ever-materializing dress (and the ever-materializing girl child). Melissa remembers; she feel-thinks with the event in the now. Remembering is considering the “nature of entanglements” (Barad, 2007, p.  74) with the dress where “entanglements are highly specific configurations” (Barad, 2007, p. 74) that change in every intra-action. Becoming girl child (being marked as cisgender female) is something to which Melissa responds in the event. The dress, as a determinate thing, did not cause Melissa’s affective response described above; the phenomenon, the re/encounter of the event, and the affection was what was felt, and Melissa’s violent response was causally attached to the emerging dress. Mary Lou similarly remembers being dressed for church—being reluctantly placed into a tartan dress—being made to perform proper girl— the only girl—finally a girl—an unplanned girl who arrives after the emergence of four brothers. The dress itself cannot capture the entanglements. The hated dress becomes determinate only through intra-action (Barad, 2007) and relational performance of encounter-making reality with the mother (Mary Lou) or with the motherless child (Melissa). The child negotiates her existence within relations. Melissa feels that she does not belong—the abhorrent dress only exists in relation to the abandoned five-year-old with the scary aunt (Melissa is responding to the absence of her parent; the aunt herself is not essentialized as scary) and a foreboding visit to church (where she was sure she did not belong). Mary Lou, in retrospect, feels her mother willing a long-imagined girl into existence—an imagining of girl at odds with Mary Lou’s unarticulated desire to mimic her older brothers. The importance of encounter is that feelings of joy or, as in these examples, pain create affective value onto entities as abstractly good or bad, and this attribute remains long after the entity has gone. It is not that the child did or did not belong prior to the encounter, but that the distinction of belonging or not is produced within encounter and often attached to the thing from then on. In this case, the dress. Vignette #3—Diffracting Girl—Short-short Skirts and Netball11 I’d never wear dresses, apart from that school-dress . . . I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the only dress I owned, I can’t remember actually wearing dresses at all, I mean we lived on a farm and yeah it was just, wouldn’t be caught dead in dresses, so that was quite a new thing . . . . . . in school we were expected to play netball and of course then you’d have to wear a skirt, so I wasn’t too keen on that, because in basketball we got to wear shorts and jersey so that was cool, and that

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was great fun, but yeah all the sissy girls, all the girlie girls played netball and I wasn’t going to be associated with them. (Transcript, Wolfe, 2015) Melissa’s words, spoken during a filmed interview regarding what she wore to school (Wolfe, 2015, 2016), begin to reveal the multiple patterning of her becoming a girl with dress. These affective patterns continue today. In the here and now, she still envisages the netball girls in those short-short skirts and long legs, darting around the court, ponytails swinging. She remembered how she would sit in refusal on the hot, black, tarred court, cross-legged in her scruffy jeans, picking at the loose gravel, and squinting up at them—the hot, sticky days watching the girly girls. People loved them. She didn’t love them. Melissa was uncomfortable but not because she did not or could not perform girl appropriately. She was ashamed because she distinctly did not want to perform girl. For us, the binary gendering process is an assemblage that is alive and well within and outside schools—it is both the cause and also the effect of being girl or boy. It excludes trans and/or gender-diverse bodies as they cannot exist within this conception and thus must be ousted. While bodies are identified as being gendered and named according to binary notions—these processes effectively re/establish a regime of truth. The body in the dress is identified as sexed (named female) and then uncritically gendered (named girl), and this excludes other possibilities as well as producing affective affiliations and consequences. Prior to the measurement that materializes her sex and gender, Barad would argue there are only indeterminate entities. If we alter the measuring apparatus, other bodies, inclusive of gender-diverse and trans bodies can be welcomed into schools, with or without a dress. The questions we raise are: in what ways is the co-constituted dress produced as dis/enabling in capacity and for which bodies? In what ways can the dress become with students’ own gendered self-creation? We attempt to consider the school-dress not as a reiteration of girlhood, intrinsically tied to the cisgendered female body but as phenomenon: plastic and co-constructed. Not plastic in the way where change manifests as girls wearing boys’ uniforms, if they so desire. This cannot be so because school is a key site for the production of compulsory heterosexuality (Youdell, 2006). This is reflected in Erin’s and Melissa’s observations and in Larry’s story. People become in reiterated arrangements with “identity arising from ongoing activities” (Bryant, 2016, p. 33) such as dress-wearing. Inspired by Barad, schooling practices associated with uniforms can be understood as particular apparatuses of measurement that materialize the bounded things they measure. We consider, with Berlant (1997), ways educators and students can bring new things into being. In order to do this, it is first necessary to view the school-dress anew as “unfamiliar and uninevitable” (p. 14) to diffract the

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dress. Today, in the here and now, Melissa continues to associate the netball dress with girlie girls, as “a system of ordered performances and repetitions of normative gender and (hetero)sexual discourses, centred on enacting complex inclusions and exclusions” (Ringrose and Rawlings, 2015, p. 83, original emphasis). The feminine conception of girl was something that was not Melissa—she did not fit netball, and netball did not fit her. Netball was the appropriate sport for girls. It was noncontact. She felt the affective patterns of difference on her body in encounter. She was uncomfortable. She did not fit the netball-skirt, and the skirt did not fit her—the material discursive practice (skirt-wearing and playing netball) differentiated her in her refusal, as other than the quintessential girlie girl. Melissa liked basketball. She liked contact. She liked running in and pushing against girls twice her size. It felt good to be knocked to the ground. This once shameful admission was her desire for the feminine excluded other, masculinity—the wrong choice. Once more [as with the five-year-old self] it was the affective affiliations in encounter with the world refracting her body to become a cisgender girl child that is remembered, not the alien dress. The dress/skirt did not cause her affective response—the phenomenon of skirt wearing, its affective affiliations, and the consequences it materialized with—this is what was felt. Melissa was ashamed. Choosing the wrong objects again. While she was never going to be the good girl at school, whilst pushing the codes of conduct in her refusals, she was always a good student (preferably without a dress). She was serious and found this seriousness difficult to reconcile in a dress. She did eventually begin to wear the noncompulsory school-dress and became . . . noticeably girl (and noticeably other the kind of girl who might wear a school uniform). The schooldress intra-action (Barad, 2007) was a significant encounter—a pedagogical encounter in Melissa’s becoming (Wolfe, 2017b). She was incited toward the right choices, affectively feeling affirmations as a girl in her school-dress, and she became someone who mattered. To be good student and good girl was doubly affirming.

Discussion The school-dress has been popularly viewed and critiqued as a cause of a simple material precariousness that limits the body of the wearer within a physical boundary.12 But viewing the dress in this manner as determinate binds the wearer to be appropriately not boy. The dress-wearer may be ashamed to run, jump, leap, swing, somersault, or even sit in particular ways—but this is not the property of the dress. The dress is not determinate; it is only a thing that emerges from the affective intra-action (Barad, 2007). We understand affectively that when wearing a dress, a material discursive practice, we should cross our legs, preserving our modesty and guarding our respectability. By utilizing how the “dress” becomes within

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encounter, we highlight ways that the personal, as an apparent individual choosing to wear the dress (or not), is profoundly relational. This political act of writing attempts to feel power and acknowledge indeterminacies prior to events in order to enhance capacity for feelingthinking/being other. The encounters with the (school) dress and their relation to theory are affective in both form and force (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010). These relations may have once induced shame, but now this shame may be re/ encountered as productive and affirmative, as interesting (see Mayes and Wolfe, 2018). The affective mattering of the dress matters; as Larry demonstrates, it can be a matter of life and death. The wearing of the school-dress in Australian schools is an “ordinary concrete practice” (Berlant, 1997, p.  8) that cannot be divorced from affect. To be a girl is to be cisgendered female and become with/in a dress: to frock up, to distinguish girls from what they are not, namely, boys. The dress is a source of powerful relational links with others and the world. This is what we have attempted to illustrate with our vignettes. We think with affect, feelingthinking with the “body-mind” (Pitts-Taylor, 2016, p. 13). The shift Barad gives us is that measurement matters, and it is the activity of taking specific measures (such as the dress = girl) that make a difference. Barad insists that the measuring apparatus, including the agencies of observation, must be accounted for in the making of matter. This then accounts for ways we are response-able for the measures we make—as a co-production in action, as intra-action (Barad, 2007). The entanglement of bodies, including the researcher and reader, enact a mattering—this is a boundary-making process. By noticing how affections (on bodies simultaneously in encounter) matter, they may come to matter differently.

Conclusion: The Researcher and the Dress Our focus has been on how feelingthinking is co-created differentially with the dress, as entanglement, of the student body/researcher/world becoming within events. The dress is infused with unspoken power relations that evoke shame/interest and in/exclusion—as inequity or bodies that do matter. We recognize that there are multiple affective entanglements, not accounted for here, that may adhere to the school-dress. The dress here is a thing that materializes. We argue, with Barad, that we can never fully know a thing—as things emerge from phenomena in encounter, where different contexts equal different qualities. In Barad’s concept of intra-action, the dress is never self-evident, but always enacted within the event. This is why personal vignettes are useful. We do not claim to be accounting for all experiences with the dress but to specific encounters that have been sensed. As researchers, we make assumptions about things through

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personally negotiated experience, but we admit that we can never know the full story, not even our own fluxing stories. Our stories are multiple, reiterating, and unstable, as is the dress, actualizing differently with every event. Indeterminate qualities materialize through an ongoing relational becoming, as affections with the dress. The dress itself is not a problematic object to be solved, but how we think, conceptualize, and understand things matters. We are interested in becomings constituting the dress, with the girl, boy, trans, genderdiverse body, and researcher, as a field of affectability. In this way, we take response-ability. Drawing principally from Barad, we consider that bodies are not determined by properties but by their fluxing capacities of affections within intra-actions (Barad, 2007). Bryant (2016) refers to this as a “dynamic genesis, a becoming, in tandem with the world” (para 23). In order to allow unthought capacities to come into view we scrutinize productive phenomena that present “things” as if they always existed before the encounter. In our assemblage play (see Image 13.1), there is no certainty, only infinite virtuality. We flatten and focus on the everyday relational bodily events of living in the world. We are concerned with ways bodies simultaneously affect and are affected within emerging relations that enable or limit capacity for living well. We recognize that these bodily events are continuously mediated and infiltrated with power. Theorizing bodily affect is increasingly being utilized as a strategy in educational research. We contend that exploring affective relationality has creative potential. The data we have presented illustrates how relations with dresses matter—how the dress evolves through diffractive patterns, responses, and entanglements. We have shared recollections related to the dress: encounters that depict how time, space, and matter collide with the data. How these intra-actions (Barad, 2007) matter is left open and thus generative. Therein lies an opening up—allowing readers, researchers, students, and teachers to reimagine their own and others’ encounters with the dress, feelingthinking anew. We promote rethinking school uniform policy—as well as what teachers might choose to wear to school—to allow more than binary bodies to materialize with the dress in educational contexts. This aesthetic politic might enable policies and cultural practices that are nonconforming to flourish. We are working against policies and practices that act as an impediment to dress-wearing and/or enforce dress-wearing as a gendering of bodies. We don’t want schools to be determinate on the subject and subjects of dress-wearing, refusing aspirations to determine in advance what types of affective entanglements with dresses can be countenanced. We are not naïve and recognize that such an approach cannot shift dynamics in the educational assemblage overnight. However, we think that teachers’ and schools’ orientations to dresses, codes of dress-wearing, and their enforcement of policies related to those codes matter a lot. If we are able

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to think and enact the dress otherwise, we re-envisage the dress not as a limiter but an opener of possibility. We have tried to think creatively with the school uniform and the gendering of the dress at school through our own experience. To do this entails thinking through the school-dress not by conceptually troubling the school-dress as a problematic object but by understanding it as some-thing (Grosz, 2017) materializing through situated feelingthinking, intra-actions (Barad, 2007) of events. We think through the dress not as interference on the body, but where the dress is refracted with the body, becoming with; the dress did not preexist as determinate; nor did the body. We draw attention and notice what is materializing in these temporal encounters and notice the effects of difference materializing through the shifting dynamics of the educational assemblage. We move the focus from the predetermined concerns of what a body is (as measured through dress-wearing) to what ways a body can be as dependent on the relationship to other bodies and matter they encounter. This is how affect matters.

Notes 1. See http://girlsuniformagenda.org/about-us. 2. www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/year-12-dress-down-bentleighsecondary-uniform-swap-turns-sour-20171024-gz78u9.html 3. In August 2017, The Coalition for Marriage released an advertisement in support of the vote no to marriage equality campaign. In this advertisement, one of three concerned “mothers” claims that “School told my son he can wear a dress next year if he felt like it.” See www.pinknews.co.uk/2017/10/19/ australia-no-camp-claims-boys-will-be-forced-to-wear-dresses-to-schoolafter-equal-marriage-vote. We take this concern about dresses seriously; we don’t dismiss it, but reorient it. 4. See www.rainbownetwork.com.au/index.php/resources/resources 5. The notion of intra-action “signifies the mutual constitution of entangled agencies” (Barad, 2007, p. 33) in contrast to the term interaction when objects/ subjects are considered autonomous prior to the event. Intra-action states that distinct agencies (as properties and meaning) only “emerge through, their intraaction” (Barad, 2007, p. 33) as their doing in relation within phenomenon. 6. See Preface. 7. Massumi (2015) employs the term thinkingfeeling, but we prefer to change the emphasis, troubling hierarchies of the brain, to feelingthinking. 8. Barad’s (2007) agential realist account is where “matter is a substance in its intra-active becoming-not a thing but a doing, a congealing of agency” (p. 151), where things come to matter through intra-activity, as phenomenon, and where “matter and meaning are mutually articulated” (p. 152). 9. Erin is a former schoolgirl (Chinese-Australian) who attended a government co-educational school. 10. Melissa is a former schoolgirl (White) who attended an Australian government co-educational school. 11. Netball is a noncontact ball sport played by two teams of seven players. It began in England in the 1890s. It was known as Women’s Basketball in Australia until 1970. 12. See http://girlsuniformagenda.org/about-us.

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References Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2015). Transmaterialities. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21(1–2), 387–422. Berlant, L. (1997). The queen of America goes to Washington city: Essays on sex and citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bryant, L. R. (2016). Phenomenon and thing: Barad’s performative ontology. Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, 30, 133–144. https://doi. org/10.20415/rhiz/030.e11 Buhlmann, V., Colman, F., and Van der Tuin, I. (2017). Introduction to new materialist genealogies: New materialisms, novel mentalities, quantum literacy. Minnesota Review, 88, 47–58. Deleuze, G. (1988). Spinoza, practical philosophy. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books. Gregg, M., and Seigworth, G. J. (2010). The affect theory reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Grosz, E. (2017). The incorporeal: Ontology, ethics, and the limits of materialism. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Gutierrez-Maldonado, R. (2018). Lawrence “Larry” King and too muchess: Complicating sexual citizenship through the embodied practices of a queer/ trans student of color. In P. Aggleton, R. Cover, D. Leahy, D. Marshall, and M. L. Rasmussen (Eds.), Youth, sexuality and sexual citizenship (Ch 4). London: Routledge. Happel, A. (2013). Ritualized girling: School uniforms and the compulsory performance of gender. Journal of Gender Studies, 22(1), 92–96. Massumi, B. (2011). Semblance and event. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Massumi, B. (2015). Politics of affect. Cambridge: Polity. Mayes, E., and Wolfe, M. (2018). Shameful interest in educational research. Critical Studies in Education, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2018.1489 871 Meadmore, D., and Symes, C. (1997). Keeping up appearances: Uniform policy for school diversity? British Journal of Educational Studies, 45(2), 174–186. Pitts-Taylor, V. (2016). The brain’s body: Neuroscience and corporeal politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Raby, R. (2005). Polite, well-dressed and on time: Secondary school conduct codes and the production of docile citizens*. The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, 42(1), 71–91. Raby, R. (2010). “Tank tops are ok but I don”t want to see her thong”: Girls’ engagements with secondary school dress codes. Youth and Society, 41(3), 333–356. Rasmussen, M. (2014). Affecting affiliations: Queer relationality and the boy in the dress. Methodological Affects: Considering Research Emotion in Qualitative Research. Symposium—American Educational Research Association. Ringrose, J., and Rawlings, V. (2015). Posthuman performativity, gender and “school bullying”: Exploring the material-discursive intra-actions of skirts, hair, sluts, and poofs. Confero, 3(2), 80–119.

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Spinoza, B. D. (1994). The Ethics. In E. M. Curley (Ed.), A Spinoza reader: The ethics and other works. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wolfe, M. J. (Writer). (2015). Girls’ tales: Experiences of schooling [DVD]. In M. Wolfe (Producer). ACT Australia: Ronin Films. Wolfe, M. J. (2016). Girls’ tales: Experiences of schooling, Unpublished Thesis. Monash University. Wolfe, M. J. (2017a). Affective schoolgirl assemblages making school spaces of non/belonging. Emotion, Space and Society, 25, 63–70. http://doi.org/10.1016/j. emospa.2017.05.010 Wolfe, M. J. (2017b). Refracting schoolgirls: Pedagogical intra-actions producing shame. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 38(5), 727– 739. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2016.1143451 Youdell, D. (2006). Sex-gender-sexuality: How sex, gender and sexuality constellations are constituted in secondary schools. Gender and Education, 17(3), 249–270.

Part IV

Spaces

14 Student Viscosities: A Conversation about the Micropolitics of Race An Interview with Arun Saldanha

You have stated that Beverly Tatum’s book, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria, sparked ideas about how your work on race, viscosity, and bodies might be useful in education. Can you describe the connections between your work on race, bodies, and viscosity in Goa trance events and in educational contexts, such as school classrooms and cafeterias? ARUN SALDANHA: I should first like to say that I talk of education in the US context as a relative outsider, having grown up in the Netherlands, India, and Belgium and being what is called “mixed-race.” For foreigners, the segregation visible in the cities and media landscapes of the United States are jarring, even if they have an inkling of this de facto apartheid thanks to the global presence of Hollywood and music videos. We should remember how unique US society is as a society in the post-slavery Americas in being so binarized into black and white. And in particular, what should be analyzed is how it is possible that decades after Martin Luther King’s dream of multiracial democracy, cliché though it has become in the self-representation of the United States, school segregation lives on almost as strongly as it did then. So without having much firsthand experience of school cafeterias, Beverly Tatum’s title immediately struck a cord because I could guess that even in schools which are supposed to be “mixed” there would be little mixing of the various racialized groups (and of course all groups are racialized). If it is true university students, as a rule, become conscious about the politics of race, even on a large and diverse campus such as that of the University of Minnesota, there is more clustering by nationality, language, and skin tone than there is friendly intermixture. Many decades after the civil rights movement managed to persuade a white-supremacist society and legal regime to honor its professed democratic principles, it is a glaring fact that segregation continues not just in myriad institutional ways. There is, first of all, the blatant racism of school funding and tax regimes, which combines with white flight and television reporting about inner-city crime. But then EDS.:

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Bessie P. Dernikos et al. there is the fact students segregate themselves on the scale of intercorporeal interaction. Minnesota is a case in point because despite its relatively progressive policies, it has one of the highest achievement gaps between White and African American students in the country, and part of the problem is definitely that minority groups “stick together” in certain classes, habits, and avenues to work, thereby not imagining going to university, for example, or studying subjects deemed irrelevant. It is essential for antiracist pedagogy to address this multiscalar segregation, and it can only be done, I think, by way of a sophisticated materialist analysis that can speak simultaneously to the institutional ways and economic structures, as well as the group dynamics that emanate from them, in particular, schools, rooms, churches, and playgrounds. It is not surprising Tatum’s book has been so much discussed, I think, as it points out an everyday phenomenon that sticks out from the ordinary, something depressingly familiar yet also regularly ignored and hence traumatic. In particular, when Black kids keep sitting together in supposedly desegregated spaces, there is a problem for a liberal-democratic body politic priding itself on having overcome a racialized division of labor and legal apartheid. Well-meaning educators and policy-makers, eager to complete the grand American narrative of desegregation, turn to titles like this in order to find out what the pernicious mechanisms are that continue to prevent formal equality from shaping itself. Clearly legal reform and goodwill from officials, philanthropists, and teachers are inadequate in the face of the centuries-old practices around race. Education is an institutional assemblage held together by deep-seated feelings and beliefs about place at various levels (home, neighborhood, district, and nation), about taxation regimes, and about equal opportunity—feelings and beliefs as basic to the US racial fabric as police brutality against young Black men, the maniacal adherence amongst White populations to gun “rights,” the catastrophic disparities in incarceration rates, and the systematic suppression of the right to vote. Segregation in schools, whether imposed by tax structures and law or allegedly voluntary (aren’t the Black kids choosing to sit together?), can’t be understood without the institutional racism of housing, work, policing, elections, and so on. With so much weight of society outside schools being dragged into the cafeteria, it is no wonder minorities feel more comfortable amongst (what they consider to be) their own, whether Black, working class, immigrant, or Indigenous. The clustering of minority students in schools is symptomatic, I would say, of a monumental hypocrisy of democratic pretensions under racial capitalism. But unfortunately, while Tatum alerts us to a typical phenomenon that requires sophisticated conceptualizations of embodiment and spatiality to examine, as a social psychologist she largely misses these

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material dimensions. Perhaps social psychology is an inherently conservative discipline, but in any case, there is a very strong tendency to divide mental processes from the physical realities they “represent.” As we know well in the social sciences and humanities, since the 1950s psychological research became ever more obsessively quantitative and theory-averse, ever more scripted beforehand by funding regimes that favor confirming models of human behavior as driven by quasi-rational computing processes and engendered by the struggle to survive. Tatum’s social psychology is not as smoothly an apology for dominant visions of Homo sapiens, but what is common to most psychology—though not to psychoanalysis, which I will defend strongly against the long-standing attacks from the mainstream—is a deliberate dematerialization of the body-milieu nexus. We hear of how society’s “values” and “roles” are “interiorized,” but not about the concrete gestures and rituals and their attendant feelings through which this interiorization occurs, neither whether this process encompasses any difficulties, gaps, or ambivalences, nor why the resulting interiority maintains itself across times and different spaces, nor how to interpret the obvious fact there are conflicting feelings and scripts, not just amidst groups, but within the same institution, and— crucially in psychoanalysis—the same body. In short, social psychology paints a model of society that functions despite its antagonisms of class, gender, race, and (dis)ability, whereas what I find interesting and necessary are theories that are sharp and courageous enough to confront society as always already dysfunctional because of those antagonisms. No wonder policy-makers seldom turn to theories that put the premises of their very institutions in question. My broadly Deleuzian-Marxist perspective holds the clustering of students, this sticking-together of racialized bodies in material spaces of social interaction—what I call viscosity—will ensue if broader institutional arrangements are basically set up to segregate populations. As Bourdieu and his team (1970/1990) demonstrated long ago, the professed principles of educational equality are in practice made impossible by the class inequalities they are supposed to soften, and I don’t need to add the United States and the United Kingdom fare much worse than France here. One also remembers the classic ethnography in British cultural studies, Paul Willis’s (1977) Learning to Labor: economic inequality and masculinity (just like, and intersecting with, Midlands whiteness) is reproduced because working-class school boys for their own youthful reasons resist state efforts to stipulate middle-class careers for them. Since the 1970s, the instrumentalist obsession with career at the expense of discovery and collaboration has only become worse in education systems the world over, with its own racializing effects. Any realistic analysis of why kids should feel more comfortable together without looking first at the dispositifs

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or basic “diagrams” (Deleuze and Guattari) of state power as precipitated by capitalism’s persistent inequalities is going to exacerbate, like mainstream psychology, the problem of self-segregation. The sites of rave tourism in Goa as described in my book Psychedelic White (2007) and US schools are vastly different, but I think theorizing how racializing viscosity emerges from an interplay of institutional mechanisms, differential mobility, and cultural habits can be done from attending carefully to the particularities of any site in modern society. In rave tourism in a poor country, bodies cluster into racial factions primarily by way of pleasure and the setting up of a service sector for that pleasure. As raves are supposed to be post-hippie spaces of cosmic togetherness, the racialization happens without much of a script. In individual cafeterias, by contrast, racial viscosity emerges because students are acutely aware of the hurdles broader society erects against them, from generations before their parents were born. Whether through pleasure or policy, viscosity, the way I see it, can only be appreciated ethnographically by attending to everyday materialities of bodies interacting, that is, only through a surprising encounter outside of what is usually available to the public sphere (or a fortiori to language itself). The social science Tatum cites is correct in explaining the feelings of nonbelonging and resentment amongst African American students in and about school qua institution, its whiteness thick in everything from the curriculum to its teachers to its approach to music and sports, as a condensation of broader affects and stereotypes pertaining to Black bodies. What segregation boils down to, but remains outside the social-psychological framing, is a racialized division of labor and racial state violence first instituted in the sixteenth-century Atlantic world and still reverberating today. To conclude, we need ethnographies of the cafeteria scenes in order to get at the unspoken nitty-gritty of their stickiness— clothing, glances, jokes, slang, music, Instagram, hand movements, sitting styles, and a particular way of handling snacks—but we need to situate these in a longer history of the US division of labor. EDS.: How and why do you think that retheorizing race with bodies, spaces, and affects is important now? AS: There is a particular theoretical agenda here when it comes to race— making its affects, temporalities, and spatialities discernible—but this emphatically does not mean that other and older accounts have become useless. For example, I have been reading a classic on the racial capitalism of this country, W. E. B. Du Bois’s (1935/1998) Black Reconstruction in America, and it is helping me a lot in mapping the tense dynamics of employment, migration, and violence in the aftermath of slavery. I am struck, by the way, by how important class is for Du Bois and how close he is to Marxism, a fact that I feel requires renewed attention in an era wherein antiracist politics

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and the academic study of race have become strongly tethered to the individual and to rights discourse. Du Bois, of course, does not focus on emotions, which I think only became a topic in Black studies with the influence of existentialism after World War II, but as a Deleuzian Marxist I read into the text, or at least try to imagine, the embodied practices buttressing the social and economic struggles chronicled by Du Bois. In the chapter on the founding of public schools in the South, for example, it is clear just how strong a political role racist affects around the education of African Americans played. Du Bois (1935/1998) cites a Southerner claiming “[t]he Negroes were disliked and feared almost in exact proportion to their manifestation of intelligence and capacity” (p. 645). That is, as African Americans mustered courage to challenge the racist status quo, the status quo struck back, based not on any reason, because what African Americans were demanding was perfectly reasonable, but on paranoia. Meanwhile some Northern newspapers enthusiastically reported on the mixing of Black and White bodies in places like Charleston, a mixing they already correctly saw as logically quite inevitable given generations of miscegenation: “in the play-grounds, white and black boys joined in the same sports as they do in the public streets; and there can be no doubt that now that this great step has been made, all the prejudice against equal educational advantages will speedily vanish, and indeed, it is the veriest hypocrisy in the city where very old families have aided in obliterating all the complexional distinctions by mingling their blood with that of their slaves” (the New York Tribune in 1865, cited in Du Bois, p.  643). Encouraged by Emancipation and in defiance of the laws that made schooling them a crime, African Americans were demanding to be treated as beings with a mind, not just beings with muscle, to be educated just like White kids. With moral and financial help of Northern philanthropists, they managed to change the nature of education itself. In this historic struggle, the “prejudice” (as Du Bois calls it throughout) of White racists is a collective affect worth examining in depth, especially insofar as it is buttressed by the materialities of property and policing. But equally fascinating to analyze from within affect theory is the eagerness of a desperately poor and increasingly terrorized minority (this is the time groups like the Ku Klux Klan emerged) to claim the citizenship promised to them by the Constitution and the recent peace they had themselves fought for. Retheorizing race as collective embodied process never means losing sight of broader structures and historical conditions—a fact sometimes forgotten. The best in affect theory are dedicated to theorizing affect and biopower as two sides of the same coin. The “now” in your question refers to a particularly fraught moment in US history. With the election of Donald Trump, the white

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supremacy that Du Bois showed has shaped this society so definitively but that he was hopeful would soon make room for more democracy has resurfaced with a vengeance, threatening to delegitimate hard-won rights and democratic political culture itself. With Trump, the misplaced liberal optimism about a “postracial” America at the time of Obama has been brutally shown its own naïveté and even inadvertent complicity. On the other hand, the Movement for Black Lives has successfully brought corporeality—in particular the young, Black male body as constantly surveilled by the carceral state and the media—into political purview. What I see as urgent for antiracist pedagogy in the United States is therefore an analysis of how the weight of centuries of institutionalized racism is expressed across and into concrete situations of the classroom and the nonprofit sector. It is not just person A’s feelings of being scared of going downtown or person B’s feelings of being wronged, and it is not just noticing, and explaining, how spaces are racialized and discourage the intermingling of phenotypes. It is theorizing race as an ecosystem coterminous with the nation-state, an assemblage of many layers, simultaneously an accumulation of capital and histories of violence and something that can shift quite suddenly when a new ruler arrives in the White House (first Obama and then Trump). And it is about working on a vision for dismantling the structures of racial capitalism that hold bodies so much in their respective places. EDS.: In a 2009 research paper for Durham University’s Institute of Advanced Study, “So What Is Race?” (later reworked into the online piece “The Reality of Race”), you write, “Race is mostly constituted of racializing effects of processes that far exceed people and meanings. Getting real about race means understanding race perhaps above all as irreducible. Race is always more than mental categories, genotype, phenotype, or socio-economic inequality.” Can you elaborate on “getting real about race” and moving beyond the conventions of thinking with “social construction” and “prejudice”? What might “getting real about race” entail in school contexts? AS: I would like to point out that the realism-antirealism debate and the question of what “reality” is have recently resurfaced in theoretical research, especially with the flurry around speculative realism and Žižek’s (2006) popularization of the Lacanian notion of the real. In the postwar period, realism went on the retreat in the humanities, whether in mainstream philosophy, literary studies, or cultural anthropology, even while positivism became hegemonic in the social sciences. After social constructionism and semiotics, it became an unmistakable sign of naïveté if you claimed you were interested in thinking or describing “reality”—the reality of crime, sex, or microbes. Derrida’s and Foucault’s influence, repurposed in British cultural and media studies, was to further rethink cultural identities

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and social relations as so many signs, discourses, and other manners of representation. (If you’ve never read Stuart Hall’s [1997] classic textbook Representation for The Open University, you should!) For me, of all societal processes, it is especially race that came to be understood as an abstracted raster of differences that maintained itself solely in the cultural, linguistic, or psychical realm. Race was often written with inverted commas (“race”), especially in the United Kingdom, because not only was it understood that dividing populations according to visible traits was arbitrary but the need to divide populations at all was fundamentally based on prejudice. If you still thought race was lodged in the body, in phenotype, you were seen to reproduce the same epistemic fallacy that had led to the Holocaust and countless other forms of violence. Whereas cultural anthropologists like Ashley Montagu (1942) had famously called the belief that race determines cultural traits “man’s most dangerous myth,” now race qua phenotype was itself considered a myth. While it cannot be doubted that understandings of human phenotype are thoroughly and inexorably ideological, I refuse to locate race in prejudice alone. My call for a realism of race has to be seen in the light of a more general return to not just materiality against representation, but to realism against antirealism. In cultural geography, for example, we had a “material turn” in the early 2000s, and soon after, a turn to the nonhuman or more-than-human, a turn to affect, and a turn to assemblage. Over a decade or more a lot of interesting work was done under the rubric of so-called nonrepresentational theory (see the definitive collection edited by Ben Anderson and Paul Harrison [2010], Taking-Place). We understood there had been an overemphasis on the “meaning” of places and landscapes, on how they are represented in discourses and in the mind, at the expense of how they were sensed, practiced, and enfolded by and through living bodies. But there were also others quietly chipping away at the idea that poststructuralism was either anti-empirical or against the belief in human access to a preexisting reality independent of them. The prolific work of Christopher Norris is especially interesting because he arrives at a strong defense of realism starting out from literary criticism, never completely abandoning Derrida, who is habitually but wrongly vilified as the philosopher who thinks there are only texts. Someone who has a lot of influence in geography is Manuel DeLanda, who rereads Deleuze as a philosopher of science and a newly realist and empiricist thinker, leading to what DeLanda names assemblage theory. Though I disagree with DeLanda’s version of empiricism and get annoyed with his systematic and blatant excising of Deleuze and Guattari’s indebtedness to Marxism, psychoanalysis, and May 1968, I often recommend graduate students read his “flat ontology” to quickly get a sense of how social practices, cities,

204 Bessie P. Dernikos et al. globalization, and institutional arrangements like education can be reconceptualized in more ecological and infra-human ways, as assemblages and not discourses. In the quote you pick, I am indirectly referring to Irreductions, a mid-1980s manifesto by another theorist prominent in the general turn toward materiality, Bruno Latour (1984/1988, in The Pasteurization of France). I am a little ambivalent about Latour because I think that despite his professed affinity to Deleuze and Guattari, he does not really wish to embrace the modern materialist tradition of Spinoza, Marx, and Nietzsche and ends up offering a more sophisticated—albeit perhaps the most sophisticated—version of social constructionism. As with DeLanda, Latour has an allergy to the Kantian critical tradition, which stands in the way of building frameworks for studying and changing problems like racial segregation. But when it comes to unpacking how the humanities and social sciences tend to essentialize complex social phenomena and proposing instead a radically open approach to the description of elements, forces, and trends, the manifesto’s poetico-anarchist attack on convention remains helpful. Race has for some 250 years been thought of in an essentialized framework as “the races of man,” and Montagu is right that this is the most pernicious myth in modernity. Racial difference is reduced to phenotypical differences, ostensibly measurable and identifiable across a bewildering array of bodily features. While genetics has soared ahead, mainstream presuppositions around racial difference became somewhat less essentialist and more statistical and probabilistic. But as many critiques show—that of fellow cultural geographer Catherine Nash (2015), for example—typology continues to be the be-all and end-all of human genetics because commercial and biopolitical applications prescribe the research, while reductionism continues to be the premise. Instead, an “irreductionist” approach loosely based on Latour maintains that we cannot beforehand posit what the key factors or key forces of racial difference are. In my contribution to theorizing race, I emphasize the ontological importance of embodiment as a sensuous, existential, and collective process. Embodiment is obscured by biologists if they limit themselves (if they reduce the body) to the physiological and the genetic. Phenotype is not a rigid table, but a multilayered play of differences wherein similitude is only local and temporary. And as is increasingly realized against the genetic reductionism of the second half of the twentieth century, genotype is an open set of building instructions entirely dependent on the cellular, behavioral, and social settings in which it is activated. For a materialist theorization of race, a reappraisal of evolutionary theory becomes necessary following the legacy of Marxist biologists like Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin (1985). (This is something

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I am working on for my coming book.) But social constructionists should not fear a slippery slope back toward reductionism because in my framework human phenotypical variation cannot but be studied as expressed through geohistorical contingency, specifically through racial capitalism and heteropatriarchy. Since writing the paper you cite, I have furthermore come to understand that class, uneven development, access to state mechanisms, and the movements of money are too often ignored in the recent turn to bodies and to life. It is very true there have been Marxists who “reduce race to class,” but again, it is possible to take economic process seriously and still be rigorous on the front of irreducibility. If we want to understand racism, we need to treat it as a multifarious and dynamic assemblage. Sometimes one component is clearly dominant, like income, law, health, or violence, sometimes another. But it is always the interactions and the versatility of the components that makes race cohere as a social phenomenon intrinsic to modernity and globalization. Lastly, for me there is an ethical commitment to expose institutionalized racism in all its dimensions where public opinion and common sense understand it badly or do not even register it. Against Latour, I think “getting real” and the concept of irreducibility only make theoretical sense if they encompass a critical role in society. Here, I need to tell you about a complicated factor and offer a word of caution. When some US conservatives would read that I want to “get real” about race, they might rejoice. There is a well-funded movement of White right-wingers in this country, which after Trump’s election increasingly openly continue the pre-United Nations project of racist science and eugenics. They claim “races” are “real” and should be treated as unequal (see a book with the same title as my own essay, The Reality of Race). These men find the statement “race is a social construction” not only preposterously at odds with reality, but a clear sign that a liberal elite is out to create a miscegenated future. We have colleagues at our universities both private and public who continue conducting or citing study after study to prove that Africans are less capable in intellectual pursuits but better at sports, Asians more meticulous, White people harder-working because they come from temperate climes, and so on and so forth. These men succeed in convincing millions of avid White Americans affirmative action is not just wasted public money and legally dubious, but immoral because it forces bodies to do things they have not evolved to do. It is extremely important for me to be aware of this perverse claim to “realist” epistemology, which is foundational to the rightwing attack on diversity in the Trump era. But insofar as they clearly reduce racial difference to imagined genetic predispositions, these pseudoscientists know nothing about the reality of race. True

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realism is anti-essentialist, irreductionist, and critical of hegemony. The resurgence of white supremacy in science and the public sphere should be analyzed as part of the ideological matrix of institutional racisms, which, as I was saying before, have their roots in slavery, genocide, and industrialization. In the US school context, getting real about race therefore includes confronting the pseudoscience spreading again in favor of “man’s most dangerous myth,” as Montagu identified it when Hitler was in power. The struggle over race’s reality has resurfaced. EDS.: How do you approach teaching and/or engaging with affect, viscosity, bodies, and race in your courses? AS: I’m not an affect theorist per se, and to be fair, I don’t often directly address the concept in the classroom. Rather, I have in graduate seminars and talks been calling for a “new old materialism,” that is, a “return to” historical materialism with and through the lessons from the anticolonial, Black, feminist, deconstructionist, Lacanian, and ecological engagements with the Marxist legacy. Affect theory is necessary to me for countering the continuing prevalence of the mind/body, reason/feeling, individual/society, and human/nonhuman dichotomies in the social sciences, but we should also investigate how that hegemonic episteme reproduces a system ever more disastrously ego-centered. It is often said affect is a Deleuze-Guattarian concept. Well, Deleuze and Guattari never wrote about affect (and related concepts like desire, bodies-without-organs, sense, and schizophrenia) outside of the systems of oppression and unequal flows that affects glue. However, Deleuze and Guattari also systematically retained a place for affects capable of subverting those systems, especially in and of the arts. This dedication to situating affects within “machinic enslavement” and to revolutionary politics is often missing in the Anglophone work on affect. In short, along with my thinking about race, my pedagogy has become more radicalized in recent years and more deliberate in pitching itself against related intellectual currents. Of course, simply being “against” is a recipe for failure, so the pragmatic question becomes how to develop pedagogical tools with students, which empower them to recontextualize their own lives as racialized subjects in increasingly tense times. In recent years in the public sphere, thanks to the exposure of the (micro)aggressions of misogyny, white supremacy, and a resurgent nationalism, it has become better understood how gestures and slurs matter as sites for both intense personalized feeling and for social change. This is a good thing, and it is spreading to other countries than the United States. In some countries, especially probably France, there remains a disdain on the left for talking about affect like this, as if they automatically reduce politics to the personal, to

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the consolidation of identities. In my teaching, I insist that affects— local situations imbued with mostly ineffable feelings—are prisms of broader inequalities that, precisely, cannot sustain themselves without the multiplication of affect. If its provenance in biopower is properly understood, affect is no touchy-feely topic! Rather, touching and feeling are always already charged by power. So if I continually ask students to narrate their own experiences and memories (“who has an anecdote about this? maybe something you saw in a movie?”), it is to demonstrate that life happens at various scales at once, and all theory, however abstract, is better understood through example. Minnesota is, as is well known, a pretty White state, but its racial makeup has been changing rapidly and irrevocably. Unfortunately, for a number of reasons to do with its imperial history and enormous reach, geography classes do not attract as diverse a student body as one would hope. Our state has an additional cultural idiosyncrasy you might have heard of, Minnesota nice, probably the strongest instance of Midwestern passive-aggression and a strong affective aspect of its middle-class whiteness, a general ressentiment directed to Black and Indigenous Minnesotans, any immigrants (even from elsewhere in the United States), and anyone smart, rebellious, or just a bit weird. Minnesota nice is the psychocultural investment in Minnesotan viscosity: let’s keep Minnesota provincial, Lutheran, and ice-fishing. Though Minnesota nice is something that becomes prevalent amongst White Minnesotans only in their forties and fifties, it can already be sensed circulating in the classroom, as I have often discussed with colleagues. Especially challenging for both student and teacher are classes about whiteness and patriarchy, and conducting these as Brown, Black, young, woman, queer, or left-wing has even more potential to make the situation difficult. Instead of during class discussion—how rashly yet deferentially we as Belgian undergraduates challenged our professors!—disgruntled students have chastised me on RateMyProfessor.com (“Arun is a racist and a sexist,” one student once offered), a machine for student resentment, and the reproduction of traditional racial, gender, and class identities if there ever were one. These bitter rebuttals hurt more than I would admit because they positioned me again as someone who did not belong but who had in addition made themselves unpopular (to some) by not conforming to expectations. In short, the pedagogy of racialized affect has to appreciate how a student body remains sticky in its reliance on conservative affects, but negotiates how much students can be stirred out of their comfort zone without lashing back at the professor, only to remain more entrenched in their feelings than before.

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Bibliography Anderson, B., and Harrison, P. (Eds.). (2010). Taking-place: Non-representational theories and human geography. Aldershot: Ashgate. Bourdieu, P., and Passeron, J.-C. (1990). Reproduction in education, society and culture (2nd ed.). (Richard Nice, Trans.). London: Sage (Original work published 1970). Bryant, L., and Srnicek, N. (Eds.). (2011). The speculative turn: Continental materialism and realism. Prahran, Victoria, Australia: re.press. DeLanda, M. (2016). Assemblage theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (Brian Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press (Original work published 1980). Du Bois, W. E. B. (1998). Black reconstruction in America 1860–1880. New York, NY: Free Press (Original work published 1935). Hall, S. (Ed.). (1997). Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices. London: Sage. Latour, B. (1988). The pasteurization of France (John Law, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (Original work published 1984). Levins, R., and Lewontin, R. (1985). The dialectical biologist. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Montagu, A. (1942). Man’s most dangerous myth: The fallacy of race. London: Rowman and Littlefield. Nash, C. (2015). Genetic geographies: The trouble with ancestry. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Norris, C. (1997). New idols of the cave: On the limits of anti-realism. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Saldanha, A. (2007). Psychedelic white: Goa trance and the viscosity of race. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Saldanha, A. (2009/2016). The reality of race. The Learned Pig. Retrieved from www.thelearnedpig.org/the-reality-of-race/3144 Saldanha, A. (2010). Politics and difference. In B. Anderson and P. Harrison, (Eds.), Taking-place: Non-representational theories and human geography (pp. 283–302). Aldershot: Ashgate. Willis, P. (1977). Learning to labor: How working class kids get working class jobs. Farnborough: Saxon House. Žižek, S. (2006). How to read Lacan. London: Granta.

15 (Re)storying Water Decolonial Pedagogies of Relational Affect with Young Children Fikile Nxumalo with Marleen Tepeyolotl Villanueva Yana yana yo yana yo yo yo; Yana yana yo yana yo yo yo; Yana yana yo yana yo yo yo; Yana Yana yo yana yo yo yo; Yana wana yo yana yohui no Eya na ei nei yo way.1

Introduction This chapter is part of an ongoing effort to unsettle the dominance of cognitive developmental and individual humanist perspectives in understanding young children’s learning, particularly in relation to the natural world. Alongside a paucity of environmental education for young children that is responsive to current times of ecological precarity, several problematic framings of children and nature persist in popular forms of early childhood education in North America. These include reinforcements of colonial human-centric dualistic approaches to “nature” that maintain or reinforce extractivist relationships to the more-than-human world. For example, nature is commonly framed as a “pure romantic nature” separate from children and as a resource for children’s development, including improving test scores (Cairns, 2017; Taylor, 2017; Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015). These orientations not only reinforce anthropocentrism, settler colonial emplacement, and Indigenous erasure, they also reinforce racist and classist tropes through assumptions of what counts as “normal” relations with nature (Nxumalo, 2015, 2018; Nxumalo and Rubin, 2018; Nxumalo and Ross, 2019). Challenging questions emerge from these aforementioned critiques of normative orientations to children and nature. One question, which has been the focus of much of our work with young children and early childhood educators, is what are some pedagogical and curricular shifts that might bring forth anti-colonial and non-anthropocentric modes of learning with the more-than-human world in early childhood environmental education? In other words, what kinds of practices might be enacted that unsettle instrumentalist, colonizing, and individualist human-centered ways of learning about the more-than-human world? Our intent is not to engage with these questions to prescribe universalist prescriptive pedagogy and curriculum, but rather to “stay with trouble”

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(Haraway, 2016) of inhabiting these questions within the everyday, mundane, and situated places and spaces of environmental early childhood education. In this focus on the mundane and “minor” practices (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) of children and educators, we join others who have argued that the vast scale of the current epoch of environmental damage does not require only similarly large-scale approaches (Danowski and Viviero de Castro, 2018; Haraway, 2015). That it is to say, while it is important to complicate individualist responses to the environmental crisis and their underlying modes of neoliberal governance, it is also important not to dismiss the ways in which small shifts toward relational practices matter for livability and hope within increasingly unlivable worlds (Murris, Reynolds, and Peers, 2018; Nxumalo, 2018; Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015). Donna Haraway (2015) refers to such practices as “partial and robust biological-cultural-political-technological recuperation” (p. 160). These are challenging practices to enact in early childhood education. How might pedagogical and curricular practices materialize partial recuperation that enacts hope and helps create more livable human and more-than-human worlds? An added challenge is how to do this while also unsettling individualist, human-centered ways of knowing. We discuss these normative responses in the next section. As mentioned previously, there are no prescriptive “solutions” or answers to these pedagogical challenges. Nonetheless, one orientation that we have found useful is to adapt a transdisciplinary approach that learns from perspectives such as feminist environmental humanities, Indigenous knowledges, and Black feminist geographies (Nxumalo and Cedillo, 2017; Nxumalo and Rotas, 2018; Nxumalo and Villanueva, forthcoming). These perspectives have been particularly compelling in arguing for the necessity of less human-centric, more relational ways of noticing and responding to the more-than-human world in current times of unprecedented environmental damage, while insisting on attention to human inequalities within particular places and spaces (Collard, Dempsey, and Sundberg, 2015; Haraway, 2016; McKittrick, 2011; Tuck, Guess, and Sultan, 2014). For instance, we are interested in picking up on Tsing, Swanson, Gan, and Bubandt’s (2017) suggestion that “to survive, we need to learn new forms of curiosity. Curiosity is an attunement to multispecies entanglement [and] complexity .  .  .” (p. G11). In this article, our interest is in considering the potential of relational affect as one such mode of curiosity toward more-than-human complexity that might bring forth new worldings that disrupt anthropocentric, colonial, and universalizing relations to the more-than-human world. Intentionally troubling dominant romanticized couplings of children and nature, we are particularly inspired by the different affective possibilities that might be activated when young children are positioned within their situated inheritances of settler colonial and anthropogenically damaged worlds (Nxumalo,

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2015; Taylor, 2017). Pedagogical attunement to these inheritances does not erase the risk of individualist and cognitive developmental teaching and learning approaches. However, our premise is that working within children’s asymmetrical geographies to bring attention to human/morethan-human relationalities, including the affects therein, is a significant movement away from normative approaches. In what follows, we begin by introducing the focus on water pedagogies and providing an overview of the research project from which this chapter is drawn. We then articulate why and how we draw on relational affect in making meaning of the children’s encounters. We make connections between relational affect and the non-anthropocentric and anticolonial modes of attunement that we are suggesting are an important response to children’s learning to learn within environmentally damaged and settler colonial worlds. We then present examples of affective attunements that emerged from (re)storying place through Indigenous song and storytelling at a creek in Austin, Texas. Guided by Indigenous feminisms, we interpret these affective encounters in relation to their decolonial resonances.

Why Water Pedagogies? In North American early childhood classrooms, water is ubiquitous as a foundational exploration, play, and learning material. In these settings, water pedagogies remain tethered to human-centered perspectives centered on Western scientific modes of learning about water and on individualist pedagogies that construct water as simply a human resource. Individualism is supported by a dominant focus in early childhood education more broadly, on the individual developing child. For water, this means that teaching and learning centers water as an instrument for the individual child’s physical/sensory, socio-emotional, and cognitive development (Gross, 2012; Havu-Nuutinen, 2005). One example is the water table, a common part of North American early childhood classrooms. In these classrooms, the water table is typically set up for activities such as sink-or-float experiments that are intended to foster the child’s development such as fine motor skill and sensory development and cognitive knowledge (Pacini-Ketchabaw and Clarke, 2016). These pedagogical approaches focus on what water can do for children’s learning and development. They are marked by their disconnect to the fact that water, amidst several other climate-change–related effects, is central to current and future environmental precarities brought by rampant extractivist global capitalism (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018). We see the pedagogical approaches described above as insufficient for cultivating the kinds of shifts that we think are needed for children inheriting ecologically damaged worlds such as those related to water vulnerabilities. In other words, such pedagogies reinscribe colonialist,

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extractivist, and instrumentalist ways of knowing water rather than reimagining the kinds of pedagogies that can unsettle normative water relations and that situate children within the actual real-world watery precarities in which they are living. Our particular interest is in investigating possibilities for “otherwise” curriculum and pedagogy that can shift children’s curiosities toward more-than-human relationality and anti-colonial ways of knowing and becoming with the watery worlds that they co-inhabit. Feminist environmental humanities scholars and multiply situated Indigenous knowledges have already pointed to the need for attending to water in ways that are less human-centered and that consider the ways in which “we” are always already in relationship with water, including through uneven inheritances of anthropogenic impacts on water (Neimanis, 2017; Yazzie and Baldy, 2018). These shifts feel particularly urgent in our current context of Texas, which is already facing the impacts of climate change, such as through both severe prolonged drought and extreme flooding events (Planet Texas 2050, 2018). As we write this, the city is in the midst of a boil-water advisory due to impacts of flooding on silt levels in the water supply.

Why Affect? In turning toward the generative and interruptive potentials of affect in doing water pedagogies differently, we draw inspiration from early childhood scholars who have shown how affect has potential as a mode of decentering human-centered modes of learning. This might at first seem to be contradictory, if affect is considered simply as human sensemaking. However, affect understood as inherently relational brings forth a myriad of possibilities with regards to the who, what, and where of being affected and affecting others. For instance, Hickey-Moody (2018) describes affect as the changes in capacity to act that emerge when bodies encounter “contexts, including policies, institutions, beliefs” (para. 9). Similarly, the relational potentials of affect are captured by Seigworth and Gregg (2010) as forces that circulate between human and more-thanhuman bodies, whereby affect is found in those intensities that pass body to body (human, non-human, part-body and otherwise), in those resonances that circulate about, between and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds, and in the very passages or variations between these intensities and resonances themselves. (p. 1) Understood in these ways then, affect is inherently shared or social, where this sociality is not limited to human bodies. Brought to our context of early childhood education, the work of Pacini-Ketchabaw, Taylor, and Blaise (2016) on young children’s relations with animals is particularly

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helpful in conceptualizing affective pedagogies. They discuss how part of decentering the human involves children “learning to be affected” in multiple ways by multispecies encounters. They describe certain practices that might increase the propensity to learn to be affected. For instance, in nurturing multisensory awareness, they pay close attention to what is activated differently by visceral child-animal encounters that include smell, slow walking, and stillness. In troubling romanticized children’s multispecies relations, they also attend to awkward encounters and their accompanying mixed affects. Importantly in this work, they follow multispecies relations rather than simply following the child. This is an important shift away from the child-centered approach to pedagogy that remains foundational to early childhood education and its developmental logics (Nxumalo, Delgado, and Nelson, 2018). The authors demonstrate the ways in which affect can be profoundly pedagogical. At the same time, the authors are careful to underline that an important part of this work is the recognition that learning to be affected by entanglements with the more-than-human world, including human/more-than-human mutual vulnerabilities, does not presume an ability to control or predict what it is that will affect us. Tonya Rooney’s (2018) work is also insightful in making visible the impacts of affective pedagogies on children’s ecological relations. Through everyday walking experiences with children, she makes visible the ways in which the affects of weather impact children’s place relations. Like Pacini-Ketchabaw and colleagues (2016), for Rooney, working with affect pedagogically includes slowing down and attending to multisensory affects. In this slowing down to attend to the affects of weather on children, Rooney also highlights the impacts of multisensory embodied connections that encourage children to attune to the weather with “smell, sound, touch, taste and other modes of relating or being affected that are more difficult to name” (p. 7). These practices of learning to be affected by the weather are also pedagogical; as Rooney explains, children, through these everyday slow-walking practices, are learning with the weather rather than about the weather. Rooney eloquently describes the affective registers that emerge as children attune their bodies to the weather as elemental affect that may at times be puzzling or barely imperceptible, [but] nonetheless is part of the children’s bodily connection to and relationship with the world around them; a mode of ‘ becoming with’ the world that also seems to be open to times and scales in the lives of other creatures. (p. 8) Taken together, this important work from early childhood scholars highlights how affect can be a part of pedagogies that attend to the lively capacities of more-than-human others. These affective pedagogies decenter

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the human developing child; attend to children’s multispecies relations; nurture multisensorial engagements with the more-than-human world; and subvert linear predetermined modes of learning. Alongside the insights offered by the aforementioned modes of understanding and foregrounding affect, we are interested in building on this work to consider how engagements with affect might also connect to early childhood pedagogies that subvert colonial ways of being with and learning with the more-than-human world. Therefore, in bringing forward examples from our research with young children’s water relations, we will also bring these insights on affect into conversation with Indigenous feminist scholarship to tether affective pedagogies and curriculum-making to our anti-colonial concerns.

Situating Educator-Child-Creek Encounters Over the course of a year, we spent time with a group of kindergarten children and educators at a waste-filled creek that borders a suburban Austin independent school (Saint-Orens and Nxumalo, 2018). Fikile is the principal researcher in the project and works alongside teachers and educators as a pedagogista (Nxumalo et al., 2018). Marleen is Pame, an enrolled member of Mexica Kalpulli Tlatlpapaloti. She is also a member of the Miakan/Garza Coahuiltecan Band of Texas. Marleen also worked closely with the educators and children. The broader purpose of this ongoing project, which is part of a larger international project, is to develop pedagogies that are responsive to

Image 15.1 Creek-waste encounters

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children’s complex relations with their local environments, particularly with regards to possibilities for responding to climate change (Climate Action Childhood Network, 2018). In our particular location in Austin, Texas, we are interested in pedagogical and curricular attunements to children’s relations with water that emerge from embodied encounters with this watery place that children co-inhabit with human and morethan-human others. This ongoing work uses visual ethnography (Pink, 2013) and pedagogical documentation (Hodgins, 2012; Nxumalo, in press) as research methodologies that help us to closely attend to, critically reflect on, and revisit what emerges in our encounters. In these encounters, we attempt to inquire with water rather than on water as a passive object. One of the ways in which we do this is to seek ways to think with water in ways that move away from singular already-known answers (Pacini-Ketchabaw and Clark, 2016). Deborah Bird Rose (2016) captures this ethos of our inquiry of staying with challenging questions when she asks, “If water is living, can it also die? Is water caught up in precarity, is it vulnerable? Is water, like life, variable and diverse; in this time of ecological loss, is it threatened” (para 2)? An important part of our processes of relating to this creek is through repeated encounters over time; therefore, we spend time once a week at the creek with the children and educators over the course of the school year. While we are always open to what might beckon to children on a particular day, our pedagogical strategies are also often intentional as we want to complicate child-centered practices and accompanying practices of “following the child,” practices that remain prevalent in early childhood education (Nxumalo et al., 2018). As we discuss further below, this intentionality is seen in the stories, songs, things, and more-than-human others that we bring to children’s collective attention. Our intentions have enacted multiple unexpected effects and affects (Saint-Orens and Nxumalo, 2018; Nxumalo and Villanueva, forthcoming). Perhaps then intentionality is not an adequate word to describe the ways in which we are working with our desired shifts in children’s relations and environmental subjectivities. This is to say that we are interested in foregrounding curricular and pedagogical approaches that might orient toward learning with the more-than-human world in ways that include foregrounding marginalized ontologies and epistemologies. At the same time, we also want to unsettle progressive, linear, and prescriptive approaches to teaching and learning. This means we work with what is already there, what emerges, and what might be otherwise unnoticed, for instance, due to settler colonial modes of knowing a place (Nxumalo, 2015). This also means that our primary interest is not in mapping academic learning outcomes as they are understood within current narrow formations of what counts as learning for young children in standardized documents. Instead we are interested in what emerges in the entanglements of children-creekeducators and more in this particular place.

216 Fikile Nxumalo with Marleen Tepeyolotl Villanueva For the remainder of the paper, we present three of the orientations that have emerged in this work that we see as generating affirmative shifts in children’s water relations: decentering the developing child, activating decolonial cartographies, and refiguring Indigenous presences. We intentionally use the word orientation firstly to underline that we want to engage with the politics that underpins relational affect. This means explicitly recognizing that the ways in which human and more-thanhuman bodies affectively become oriented to each other, as well as to other things, ideas, and social formations, has consequence. These orientations can shift and change direction. They can also become sedimented, organized, and performative repetitions (Ahmed, 2006; Collard and Dempsey, 2017). In both cases, orientations have world-making effects on what kinds of life and modes of living are valued as mattering (Collard and Dempsey, 2017).

Relational Affect and Water Song Drawing: Decentering the Developing Child An important part of how we have engaged with the children with the creek and the surrounding area has been through drawing. Children regularly bring journals with them to the creek, which they call water journals. Drawing has been a way for us to slow down together and to carefully attune to the surroundings in multisensory ways. Drawing has also been a mode for the children to collectively and individually reflect on the pedagogical provocations that we (researchers and teachers) have brought to them. One particular day that continued to echo through children’s and educators’ rememberings long after it had passed was a day when Marleen decided to teach the children a Coahuiltecan song for the water Naham Kam Ajehuac Yana. Drawing from our field notes, we describe the moment below. The children gather on a grass mat alongside the creek. Marleen stories the song for the children; sharing the meanings that she sees as important for these children to learn. Her words embody: care, gratitude and reverence for water the liveliness of water water as human relation water as affected by positive and negative human actions . . . Coahuiltecan Yana Wana lands—water of the spirit/ spirit of the water The children and Marleen stand to face the creek. Marleen leads the children in asking the creek for permission to share the song. Their singing is

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accompanied by rattles that Marleen has brought, which the children take turns shaking. The song they sing is profoundly pedagogical. It teaches continual respect, love, remembrance, and responsibility for the waters of Central Texas. It teaches relational ontologies of water that include the capacities of water for emotional and physical healing; inseparability of water from human bodies; and the many places through which waters come together, including the rains and rivers (Villanueva, 2018). As we further discuss later in the chapter, this song is also a place story—that (re)maps and situates the waters of this place as Indigenous lands. Here we want to attend to the affective relationalities that emerged from children’s drawings, created after the water-singing encounter. The attachment of smiles and happiness to the water, which were in many of the children’s drawings (as illustrated in Image 15.2), might be read as anthropomorphizing the water and reproducing romanticized childwater relations. However, an alternative perspective suggests that multiple materialities and discourses assemble to influence the marks that emerge on the paper. In other words, the drawings are never “pure” and unmediated representations of what children see and hear; they are also much more than the physical images on the paper (Kind, 2010). As Sylvia Kind (2010) explains, “concept[s] . . . marks, gestures, colours, textures” and more come together in creative acts to actualize particular ideas through a process that is “dynamic, creative, productive, or generative as the art takes shape through movement, rhythm, intuition, reflection, constant judgments and considerations” (p. 115). Sylvia Kind’s work helps us to resist a literal interpretation of the children’s artwork that would simply inscribe humanlike emotions to the water. That is to say, even as children use emotions to describe their artworks (for instance referring to

Image 15.2 Water song drawings

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the water as “happy”), these drawings can be seen as collective affective relationalities toward water that shape and are shaped by .  .  . what children and teachers say (for example, “I’m the water spirit” “This is the water happy”), the creek, the waste scattered within and alongside the creek, Marleen’s words about the song, the song, the singing, children’s memories of other water stories we have told, and more . . . The art making is just one part of the affects, objects, human and morethan-human bodies, and discourses that come together to change how children act, feel, and do. Within this assemblage, art participates in changing what human and more-than-human bodies can do (Hickey-Moody, 2018). While the moments we have described here are small and minor events, we take them seriously as processes of children’s inquiries that are more than the representations drawn on the pages. Just as the affective relationalities that emerge from these moments are more than what children say and do, the learning that happens in these inquiries also cannot be adequately captured by individual developmental descriptors of each individual child’s art: children’s bodies, the pencils, crayons, the paper, the creek, and the song—which children hum while they draw—and the other “things, events, sounds, memories” are all active participants in this morethan-human place learning encounter (Kind, 2010; Nxumalo and Rubin, 2018). In addition to their potential for activating more reparative, less destructive relations with more-than-human worlds, these pedagogical encounters unsettle Euro-Western understandings of the individual autonomous child who is separate from the natural world, a world that they need to be “returned” to experience academic, socio-emotional, and physical developmental benefits (Taylor, 2017). We wonder what new kinds of collective relational subjectivities emerge from these affective pedagogies as children collectively create in emplaced material-discursive relationship with each other, the water song, and the creek. As our readings of these moments suggest, we are not concerned with the slippages between emotion and affect, particularly in our focus on relationality. We resonate with Sara Ahmed (2010) when she writes, While you can separate an affective response from an emotion that is attributed as such (the bodily sensations from the feeling of being afraid), this does not mean that in practice, or in everyday life, they are separate. In fact, they are contiguous; they slide into each other; they stick, and cohere, even when they are separated. (p. 231) We see noticing emotional responses as a part of paying attention to the ways in which affect is always distributed unequally: not all bodies are

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affected in the same way. This means that a turn to affective pedagogies also includes an analysis of power relations that shape the ways in which affects and their accompanying processes are always asymmetrically distributed within particular places and spaces. We want to avoid colonizing understandings of who and what is affected and who and what is deemed more easily as an “affectable other” (Ferreira Da Silva, 2007; Rowe and Tuck, 2017). Put another way, while we focus on the positive relational aspects of our pedagogies, we understand relational emotions as involving both “(re)actions or relations of ‘towardness’ or ‘awayness’” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 8). Brought to the encounters we have described, an attunement to the circulation of emotions and their entanglements with power relations helps us to notice that for Marleen, bringing forward Indigenous knowledges as an Indigenous person in this particular place is a complex moment—flled with emotion for its decolonial resonances and for the risks and vulnerabilities it brings as an “otherwise” way of being with this colonized place.

Relational Affect and a Water Song: Activating Decolonial Cartographies We have recently written about Marleen’s teaching and sharing of a Coahuiltecan song for the water, Naham Kam Ajehuac Yana2 (We will remember the sacred springs) and her teaching of children to ask the creek for permission to sing this song. In this writing, we have thought through how these pedagogies are enactments of Indigenous feminist praxis that have decolonial effects (Nxumalo and Villanueva, forthcoming). Here we want to extend this work to think specifically with the embodied reverberations of these pedagogical encounters, which were experienced as affecting moments by us and by the children and educators. In this reading of these moments, we turn again to Indigenous feminist theories. In particular, we want to consider how the sonic embodied movements that were a part of this singing can be thought of as relational affective gestures. These gestures activate decolonial cartographies or counter-mappings of this particular place that are an antidote to the “cartographies of dispossession” that are always a part of settler colonialism (Morrill, Tuck, and Super Futures Haunt Qollective, 2016, p. 4). Cree scholar Karyn Recollet (2015) helps bring forth an understanding of the mattering of the physical, embodied, sonic, and affective movements of Indigenous relational knowledges within urban spaces such as this Austin creek. Karyn Recollet (2015) works with the example of Indigenous peoples dancing with non-Indigenous allies in flash mob round dances in urban Toronto spaces during a period of Indigenous resistance called Idle No more. She discusses the affect produced during these moments as having pedagogical and decolonial resonances, where

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“circuitous motion enacts a radical pedagogy of love through the singing of love songs, which effectively embed between spaces for the wedging in of dancers, thoughts, reconceptualizations, and renegotiations of space” (p.  136). Perhaps then, Marleen-children-song-rattles-creektrees-educators and more could also be seen as collectively activating a radical pedagogy that enacts decolonial counter-mappings. These embodied and affective counter mappings are “geographies of resistance” (p. 135) that challenge the erasure of this urban creek space as Indigenous lands. Decolonial affects are made possible through the presence of Marleen as a member of a Coahuiltecan community with deep relations to this place, including through teachings from Coahuiltecan elders. They are also made possible by the relational affects activated through the assemblage of human and more-than-human movements, gestures, and sounds that circulate in this space during and after the singing. These moments, while they seem minor and insignificant within the ongoing violence of settler colonial erasure, matter for children learning to unsettle human-centered ways of knowing and learning to enact reciprocal relations. These unsettling movements can perhaps be thought of as a mode of relationality that is “based in reciprocity and obligation with the land and other-thanhumans” (Simmons, 2017, para. 3). We also take seriously the caution issued by Aimee Carrillo Rowe and Eve Tuck (2017) to be wary of the ways in which turns to affect, alongside other turns toward the “morethan-human,” can reinscribe universalisms that assume a subject devoid of geographic specificity and location, including complicit situatedness within settler colonial geographies. These scholars remind us to keep questions of emplacement, land, and settler colonial dispossession close in our engagements with affective pedagogies. Here land is understood to encompass all territories, including “land, water, air, and subterranean earth” (Tuck, McKenzie, and McCoy, 2014, p. 8). In these encounters, affective pedagogies are always already geographic; they are situated within a particular place—a place where affective intensities always involve human, material, and more-than-human bodies and a place where human differentials including Indigeneity and its erasures matter.

Relational Affect and a Creation Story: Refiguring Presences An important part of our collective slowing-down at the creek has been to read and discuss stories of water and water relations with the children. The stories that we bring to children are a part of our decolonizing praxis, a mode of what Nishnaabeg scholar Leeanne Simpson (2011) calls “storied presencing” (p.  96) or what has also been referred to by Fikile as refiguring presences (Nxumalo, 2015, in press). Refiguring presences in settler colonial early childhood education places and spaces means that

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some of the stories that we share with children are situated stories that are intended to foreground Indigenous presences and relations in this particular place. We also foreground Indigenous stories from multiple dispersed places to bring forward ways of knowing and becoming with water that disrupt the centrality of developmental and Western scientific epistemologies and ontologies (Nxumalo and Villanueva, forthcoming). Both of these storying practices are responses to the absenting of Indigenous peoples, relations, knowledges, and land in place-based encounters in early childhood education within settler colonial contexts (Nxumalo, 2018, in press). Put another way, refiguring presences is a practice of grappling with what it might look like pedagogically to affirm Indigenous life, land, and relations. Intrinsic to this pedagogical orientation is to affirm the co-constitutive entanglement of human and more-thanhuman life rather than perpetuate colonial nature/culture and human/ more-than-human bifurcations. In refiguring Indigenous presences through place stories that disrupt the material and discursive ways in which settler colonialism works to disappear or marginalize Indigenous presence, we are embracing, rather than turning away from the political nature of, curriculum-making (Nxumalo et al., 2018; Tuck and Yang, 2012). Storytelling might be seen as a relatively benign everyday early childhood literacy practice. However, the stories we choose to tell are framed by a consideration of place as storied within unevenly distributed power relations that shape what stories matter and what stories are told (Nxumalo, in press). In this conceptualization, humans, more-than-human things, plants, practices, and multiple knowledges are all participants in the storying of places. However, within the striations of settler colonialism and its anthropocentric assumptions, certain stories are disappeared altogether or dismissed as mythical rather than as a specific expression of “Place-Thought . . . the non-distinctive space where place and thought were never separated because they never could or can be separated” (Watts, 2013, p. 22). Given these understandings, there are multiple entry points toward considering what practices of (re)storying place might look like. For instance, our previous discussions of pedagogical encounters with water through drawing and Indigenous water songs in this chapter can also be seen as acts of (re)storying place in decolonizing ways. Here we want to focus on the impacts of materializing a place story focused on the Coahuiltecan people of Central Texas that was shared with the children. We discuss this pedagogical encounter as an illustrative example of how the mobilization of relational affects can be part of a decolonizing pedagogical practice of refiguring presences. As misty rain fell one morning, we gathered on the grass mat next to the creek, and Marleen told the creation story of the Indigenous Coahuiltecan people of central Texas, using visuals that she had drawn.

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Image 15.3 Sharing the Coahuiltecan creation story

The story tells of Coahuiltecan peoples beginning in the underworld as spirits. A deer appears, and the spirits begin to follow the deer. A water bird dives into the spring and pulls the deer out of the springs, and the spirits hold onto the deer’s leg. On emerging from the springs, the spirits take on a human form. These sacred springs in this story are named Yana wana.3 We call the Sacred Springs in San Marcos, which are an entity in our viewpoint, Ajehuac Yana. In Coahuiltecan, ajehuac means springs, and Yana means sacred or spirit; that which is sacred like a spirit. The San Antonio Coahuiltecan communities call the San Antonio River entity Yana Wana—wana meaning water—Sacred/Spirit Water. (Maria Rocha, Coahuiltecan elder) Marleen explains to the children that this story is not only a creation story, it is a teaching of gratitude for the sacred springs and of an ethics of respect and protection toward these waters for current and future generations. This story “refect[s] important relationships between the human and non-human . . . [and] have been formed by and participate with the creative forces of the universe (Cajete, 2000, p. 35). Coahuiltecan elder Maria Rocha explains that the creation story shows children their interconnectedness with the earth, including water and animals (personal communication, June 22, 2017). Yana wana is also the name for one of the sacred springs that the creation story refers to, Blue Hole headwaters of the San Antonio River. Other sacred spring sites, which are integral

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to the knowledge systems of the Indigenous peoples of Central Texas, are tza wan pupako—Barton Springs in Austin; ajehuac yana—Spring Lake in San Marcos; and saxōp wan pupako—Comal Springs in New Braunfels (Indigenous Cultures Institute, 2018). We name these places here because for most people in Central Texas, these are popular recreation sites. For Coahuiltecan peoples, they are sacred places of ceremony; they are relatives (Garza, 2018). Angie Morrill, Eve Tuck, and the Super Futures Haunt Qollective (2016) compellingly underline the necessity of practices such as the telling of this creation story in countering material, embodied and discursive dispossession. They say, In the sense of “being made” dispossessed: dispossession once referred only to land theft, but now attends to how human lives and bodies matter and don’t matter—through settler colonialism, chattel slavery, apartheid, making extra legal, immoral, alienated . . . The opposite, the endgame of opposing our dispossession is not possession—not haunting, though I’ll do it if I have to; it is mattering. (p. 5, emphasis added) Practices of refguring presences, such as the telling of the creation story, are orienting devices (Ahmed, 2004) that attempt to shift perceptions of who and what matters within settler colonial places and spaces. What we are suggesting here is that shifting perceptions of mattering and undoing practices of “forgetting to remember” require changes in capacities to be affected. In other words, refguring presences through the pedagogical presencing of human and more-than-human Indigenous life and water relations in Marleen’s telling of the Coahuiltecan creation story necessarily mobilizes relational affect in this particular place. From this perspective, the decolonizing orientations of sharing this creation story include the activation of affective relational responses and responsibilities toward water, water-as-life and lively, and water-animal-human relations. For example, we saw glimpses of the liveliness of water as children made connections with popular culture that also gestured to the liveliness of water in their aesthetic expressions. For instance, one child told and drew a story of water helping the Disney character Moana who had fallen into the ocean. Another child drew a person evacuating from a tsunami by singing to the water. Certainly, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what the sharing of this story enacts in children’s relational affective meaning making. While we make connections to relational affect in children’s body language, joyful expressions, and some of their art-making, we do not claim to know exactly what children think and how this story affects each child. This is not our primary interest. Our interest is in arguing that it matters for

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decolonizing place and place relations in early childhood education to enact affective pedagogies of refiguring presences. Refiguring presences require early childhood teachers to recognize that “sentiments can be mobilized in ways that challenge and extend the settler state” (Rowe and Tuck, 2017, p. 5). In early childhood education, sentiments that extend the settler state include impacts of child-as-steward discourses that mobilize children to relate to nature as something separate from them—as pure, pristine, empty landscapes awaiting their scientific learning, exploration, and “discoveries.” These sentiments reinforce places as devoid of Indigenous histories, relations, cultures, and knowledge (Nxumalo and Ross, 2019; Taylor, 2017). Such colonizing sentiments also enroll children into settler colonial nation-building, nurturing children’s love and connection to “wild” and “empty” nature. Colonizing sentiments related to children and nature also circulate more broadly in society. This includes the intensely racialized sentiments that construct predominantly White settler children as innocent children who need to be returned to “pure” nature (Nxumalo and ross, in press; Taylor, 2017). Pedagogies of refiguring presences, such as the telling of the creation story, while offering potential disruptions of colonial education, are not immune from the risk of extending the settler state. There remains a risk of metaphorizing decolonization and simplistic take-up of complex Indigenous knowledges. There is also a risk of appropriation, if non-Indigenous children and educators superficially consume and enact the place stories that we bring to them. However, amidst the risks of mobilizing feelings that extend the settler state, in the encounters described herein, we see possibilities for affective orientations that challenge the settler state. These (re) orientations are put into motion through Marleen’s emplaced storytelling that presences Indigenous Texas land, life, and water relations. Refiguring presences then is difficult, risky, yet necessary work within persistent conditions of settler colonialism that normalize Indigenous erasure. Our modest suggestion here is that these pedagogies are necessary political orientations for opening up more relational ways of becoming with the world. Such political mobilizations, however small and minor, feel particularly urgent as children’s inheritances of environmental precarity (and its entanglements with settler colonialism) underline the need for a radical shift away from the colonizing and human-centered practices that fueled extractive relations with the environment.

Toward Decolonial Early Childhood Water Pedagogies In this chapter, we have storied some of the ways in which activating relational affect between children, place stories, sacred songs, water’s liveliness, drawings .  .  . and more can work in ways that challenge settler colonial ways of relating to the more-than-human world. While we do

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not offer these imperfect, emergent, and ongoing practices as a recipe to be followed, we see them as providing insight into how these embodied practices might be an activating force for relational affects that have decolonial resonances and that unsettle anthropocentrism. Alongside the generative potentiality of these small moments in our practices, we have also inhabited the tensions and risks that also circulate within affective pedagogies that are always haunted by settler colonial dispossession. We nonetheless remain hopeful about what a turn to mobilizing relational affect with young children might do toward decolonizing childhood education that is concerned with issues of the environment.

Notes 1. This Coahuiltecan ceremonial song published by the Indigenous Cultures Institute in San Marcos, Texas—as part of Miakan-Garza Band elders Maria Rocha and Dr. Mario Garza’s efforts to revise the Coahuiltecan language— translates to Water is life, it is everything, everything, everything. Water Spirit forms living things. With all that there is. Retrieved from: www.indigenouscul tures.org/coahuiltecan-language 2. Na Ham Kam means “We will remember.” Ajehuac Yana refers to the sacred springs; Ajehuac means “springs.” Yana means “spirit, that which is sacred.” 3. This version of the creation story is a very simplified version that was tailored for the purposes of telling the story to the children that day. This story has many more details, including several important more-than-human beings that have important roles and bring important teachings.

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16 On Learning to Stay in the Room Notes from the Classroom and Clinic Gail Boldt

Two afternoons a week, I drive through twisting mountain roads in rural Appalachia to arrive at a community mental health agency that provides a variety of services to families living in poverty. For the past four years, I have worked part time at this agency doing play therapy with children ages three to thirteen years old, many of whom have experienced serious trauma or profound loss. As I work with these children in the playroom, I frequently have my own feelings of being lost and at a loss for how to understand what they need and how to help them. These oftendiscomfiting afternoons sit along my comfortable life as a professor of education at a large university, where I work as a curriculum theorist and provide classes to preservice teachers preparing for careers in early childhood and elementary classrooms. When I was a new therapist, I relied heavily on speech. I imagined my clients saying things like “My grandma is scary when she is mad” or “My dad is in jail, and I’m afraid.” Or more accurately, I believed my task was to get the children to speak my ideas about their realities. I saw the purpose of the play as bringing forth implicit content about their daily lives and imagined that I would then help the children translate that content into conscious language. The reality proved to be something different. No matter their age, my clients rarely talk about their lives, their circumstances, their families, or anything outside of the immediacy of the playroom. When the children come into my clinical space, they want to play, and their speech is almost entirely about directing me how to play or criticizing me for not playing right. In the first many months of my practice, I struggled to understand what to make of all that play. I was so preoccupied with questions of how to think about their play symbolically—possible implicit meanings of their play—and with what I should be saying and doing that I was largely unable to pay attention to the rich flow of affective intensities that were constantly happening in front of me, through me, and within me. Because of my work with children who almost never say the kinds of things I imagined they would, I have been forced to dramatically revise my thinking about the primacy of thought and speech as vehicles of change. In this chapter, my goal is twofold. First, I want to write my

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way into a better understanding of some of the implicit ways the children and I affect and are affected by one another that may have nothing to do with speech and that, in fact, are unlikely to ever come into consciousness or symbolization for either of us. These things may sometimes be accompanied by speech, but I want to think about how that speech functions not in relation to symbolic meaning so much as to arouse and feed intensities or, conversely, to fend off intensities, or in other words, as one kind of player in the ebbs and flows, the movement and speed, of fluctuating, bodily registered affect. Second, as a curriculum theorist and a professor in early childhood and elementary teacher education, I want to consider how these clinical lessons are causing me to rethink how I conceptualize teaching and learning with children. In particular, I want to call attention to the privileged and unproblematized attention we, as teachers, give to meaning-making, conscious thinking, and words. In what follows, I provide clinical vignettes of a fictional client named Alexi. I have invented Alexi in order to protect the privacy of my clients and their families. While there is no Alexi and the specific things I describe did not happen, the vignettes are true to the kinds of things that happen in a given clinical session. They represent, all compressed into a single, fictional child, the kinds of issues that regularly come up with my clients and the kinds of ways I respond. In this chapter, I analyze my Alexi stories through insights offered by researchers working in contemporary relational psychoanalysis, to highlight some of the implicit ways of affecting and being affected in the playroom. I have been greatly aided in conceptualizing and working with the idea of affective flows by bringing a Deleuzo-Guattarian theory of affect to my understanding of relational psychoanalysis.1 As I will describe below, Deleuze and Guattari’s writing about ebbs and flows of affect and intensities, movement and speed, and the decentering of the individual human help me to think about the constantly fluctuating, bodily registered affect I experience in the clinic. Considering flows of affect in real time in my clinical play with children has allowed me to imagine some of the things going on in the session that never come into speech and that do not require conscious symbolization to affect us. This, in turn, has caused me to focus new attention in my undergraduate teacher education courses on things that have previously seemed peripheral to or even distracting from curricular content: things like movement, rhythm, texture, pattern, and playing with sound and speed (see also Gershon, 2018), along with the importance of felt possibility in classrooms. Of course, it is not news to educators that there are multiple ways of learning and of knowing that are not primarily focused on words. Classroom practices making use of multiple modalities through which humans make and represent meaning in ways that do not privilege speech are common (e.g., New London Group, 1996; McArdle and Boldt, 2013), whether acknowledged or not. As one example, recent movements in literacy research, drawing from Deleuze and Guattari, posthuman theories,

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and new feminist materialisms have called for reconceptualizing curricular content (in this case, literacies) in relation to what content does— what it affects and makes happen—rather than what the content means (e.g., Ehret, Hollet, and Jocius, 2016; Kuby and Rucker Gutshall, 2016; Leander and Boldt, 2013; Sherbine and Boldt, 2013; Thiel, 2015). Nevertheless, we are in an education era dominated by demands for visible, identifiable, and quantifiable evidence of learning. For the past twenty years, in classrooms across America, walls that used to be covered with children’s artwork have been papered over with charts designed to make learning methods explicit and spell out learning standards. Teachers are told that it is not enough that children can read or write effectively, use math to solve problems, or engage in scientific inquiries; they must also be able to name and chart their strategies and exercise metacognition—new and elaborated forms of “show your work” (Salvio and Boldt, 2009). It is certainly the case that talking about how science, math, writing and reading are done can, at times, give students a greater understanding of how things work and a greater sense of mastery. At the same time, making practices visible, subject to conscious control, and measurable on rubrics, competes with or replaces doing or using content in ways that take account of affective flows and intensities—the very things that students (and teachers) often find powerful and enlivening. It also gives us the false sense that what we know and what we do are reducible to one another and to conscious awareness and words. Researchers and teachers who argue that we must challenge these ways of conceptualizing and enacting curriculum face an uphill battle. In this chapter, I will draw from what I have learned as a therapist about what one of my clinical supervisors called “staying in the room” to argue for the benefits of conceptualizing classrooms as spaces in which we may affect one another, initiating and supporting one another’s capacities and potentialities, in ways that never come into conscious representation, let alone register as quantifiable learning. I wish to highlight talking, meaning making, and naming as forms of doing—as tools or material in the unfolding flow of affect—rather than standing apart or above, on “some presumed higher ground from which to see and stabilize” (Boldt and Leander, 2017, p. 423), in order to consider what other kinds of important affecting and being affected—learning that is not in the conscious register—is going on in classrooms.

Affecting and Being Affected Brian Massumi, in “Notes on the Translation” in his introduction to A Thousand Plateaus (1987), provides perhaps the best-known definition of Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the term affect. AFFECT/AFFECTION. Neither word denotes a personal feeling (sentiment in Deleuze and Guattari). L’affect (Spinoza’s affectus) is

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I understand affect in Delueze and Guattari’s work as the prepersonal capacity to affect and be affected, as a prediscursive or unconscious affecting of a body (among other things), something that may or may not be brought to consciousness, but that is still registered, that may move the body to faster or slower, greater or lesser, old or new actions. This includes the ways human and nonhuman bodies are affected by movement, speed, properties, other living beings, objects, spaces, materials, ideas, fantasies, histories, and culture. And while I recognize that posthuman studies do not privilege the human in the flow of affect, as a therapist, my concern is both human experience—my clients’ and my own—and how we are affected by things that exceed the human. Relational psychoanalysis likewise posits affect as prepersonal and pre-experiential and subsequently shaped by and then shaping actual experiences and relationships. The relational school of psychoanalytic thought arose in the United States in the 1980s. Jay Greenberg and Stephen Mitchell named and gave form to what they considered a powerful paradigm shift from the founding model of psychoanalysis, which understood humans as responsive, above all, to biological drives. From a relational psychoanalytic perspective, humans are fundamentally relational, emergent, dynamic systems that construct and revise internal models of the interpersonal world from ongoing experiences (Mitchell, 1988; Boston Change Process Study Group, 2010). Flows of affect are conceptualized in relational psychoanalysis as arousal states that are initially mediated in relationships between infants and caregivers. These experiences structure the ego and how it anticipates and responds to flows of affect in other contexts. Humans are constantly affecting and being affected, much of it occurring at the level of the procedural unconscious—that part of the mind that processes mechanical, semantic, and structural information and generates, stores, and revises predictive schema. The procedural unconscious is, for example, how we know without thinking how to pitch our voices or pose our bodies in a given context.2 Philip Bromberg (2011), in describing the relationship between the mind and experience, provides a description of the flexible, context-specific organization of the procedural unconscious. He describes the mind as organized by multiple, shifting self-states that are responsive to the relational

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demands of a given context. Speaking of human interactions, he says, “Each partner, through his or her own way of being with the other, is affectively reacting to some part of what is taking place between them that lacks symbolic representation as an interpersonal event” (p. 70). In other words, although ideas may sometimes develop to symbolize and respond to felt or physically registered energy of having been affected, much of the action occurs in non-symbolized form in the procedural unconscious, out of the awareness of the involved parties. It is not noted or symbolized in speech. The Boston Change Process Study Group (2010, hereafter The Boston Change Group) describes this as “implicit relational knowing,” referring to the “patterns of unconscious expectations for how to conduct a relationship with others . . . which is registered in representations of interpersonal events in a non-symbolic form, beginning in the first year of life” (p. 5). Taking psychoanalytic treatment from this perspective, a central concern is with relational schema that have hardened into repetitive or territorialized responses that are alert to danger but not to context, that are not flexible, and that have little room for creativity, experimentation, or improvisation. Many of my clients have experienced long-term or persistent traumas that, in the service of self-defense, have prompted the development of relational schemas that constantly capture and organize potentialities into knowable versions of the same. This is understandable; based on their prior experiences, these schemas give the children some ability to predict what might happen or to have at least some sense of control in threatening or out-of-their-control situations. As I play with seven-year-old Alexi, she becomes more and more excited. Suddenly she picks up the paintbrush and splatters paint all over the wall. Then she turns to me with a look that is simultaneously defiant and fearful. She has expectations for what this act will prompt in me. I reach for the paintbrush, saying, “You know that one of the playroom rules is that neither of us can damage or break anything on purpose.” Alexi’s overwhelming excitement and fear transforms into rage. She knows rage and what to do with it, how it helps her to regain control of a situation. She picks up the toy knife, ramming into my leg with all her seven-year-old strength, screaming, “I didn’t do that! You did that! You’re stupid and fat and ugly! Everybody hates you!” In Parables for the Virtual (2002), Massumi describes that for Deleuze and Guattari, affect arises within and gives rise to movement that composes and decomposes, moves into and out of constantly emergent assemblages. Massumi describes affect, which he also names “intensity,” as potential or virtuality. Intensity (affect) is autonomous; it “escapes confinement in the particular body whose vitality or potential for interaction it is” (p. 35). In relational analysis, affect in the sense of unspoken transmission of intensities and qualities flowing through the bodies of the child and the therapist is central to the work. As I talk with my

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psychoanalytic supervisor about a session, he asks me questions about affective intensities. “When did she speed up? When did her movements become repetitive? What happened in the session before she used the knife? What happened after? What was going on in your body as this was happening?” He draws my attention to the emergent expressions of affective intensities as they are variously captured (although never contained) in the sense of aliveness or deadness, in eruptions or closures in the play, in speed or motion, or in the qualifications of affect expressed or enacted through emotions. This is about staying in the room. He is telling me how to stay in the room by staying present and attentive to the ways that both repetition and difference arise, move, and break apart in the context of our relationship with each other and with things, experiences, time, and place. Staying in the room is focusing on the flows of intensities and qualities emergent in our relationship in the present. When I was preoccupied with discovering secret content related to the children’s lives beyond the playroom, I was too anxiously distracted to feel and play with affective intensities, to move into, with, and step out of the reality of that lived moment. So now, focusing not on emotion or content but on intensities, I consider that when Alexi splattered the paint, she effectively brought an end to her rising giddiness by doing something she knew would force me to intervene. While she could never say this, she has repeatedly shown me that her excitement frightens her and gets her into bad places and that she feels relief when I help her slow down her play and experience her excitement and pleasure in ways that do not take her over. She prompts my reprimands, however light, which allow her to feel her anger that I have failed to contain her and also, based on the relational schema she brought into the therapy, signals danger and triggers her expectation that she is about to be attacked and punished. She needs to expel these unbearable feelings, and every week she passes them on to me—I’m destructive. I’m ugly, fat, and stupid. It is not she who breaks the rules, but me. Insofar as I fail to provide enough containment for her fears and rage, she is right. It is likely that in the early days of my practice, focused on speech, I would have floundered for ways to educate Alexi about her hatred, to direct her to understanding that her rage is really about things happening outside the playroom. I would have imagined the point of the play to be the words it could produce. But what I now understand is that the experiences we have in our relationship in the moment and how we then experience these as versions of the same or as different across time, matter. The histories and expectation, fears, and desires we each bring into the room create a beginning place that we then elaborate upon in the play. Alexi brings in the expectation that adults are dangerous and untrustworthy, and she brings in all the ways she has learned to protect herself. I bring in my briefly accumulated experience of working with other abused

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children, a lifetime of empathy and patience, and the tugs of my desire to be seen and experienced in certain ways by my clients and their families. What happens between us, while I can understand it as a transference of old schema into a new situation, is also real. Our feelings are real and in the present. For my own reasons, I do not contain Alexi sooner, although I can anticipate what will happen if I don’t. Her rage and loss of control affect both of us in profound ways. When we speak to one another— “You know I don’t allow that kind of thing,” I say, and she says, “You’re stupid and fat and ugly”—our words can carry affect forward, ignite one potential rather than another, helping to keep the event and the relationship in motion. Now the next thing will happen. What will it be? Drawing from relational analysis, my words are no longer seen as the thing that causes change, in the sense of bringing the repressed into consciousness. Bromberg (2011) distinguishes relational analysis by arguing that the analyst is not “looking for an unconscious fantasy” or “searching for hidden truth” (p. 5). I do not—at least not now and in some cases ever—say some form of “Your rage is a result of your previous experiences.” Instead I need to stay focused on the experience of being together. While the words transmit part of that experience, The Boston Change Group (2010) argues that the experience of being together is transmitted not primarily through words but in micro-encounters processed in the body, but not the brain. Words are important. They carry potential, but much change happens outside of conscious awareness or thought, and it happens as the body is affected through multiple registers. Still, I do not want to set up an either-or, as if the content of the words do not ever matter. Words can be innocuous, enabling, soothing, intrusive, or assaultive. At various times for most of my clients, I become too direct in my assessments of their feelings or their play or too insistent on my perspective. My words give rise to overwhelming, bodily felt responses, and they let me know by fending me off. “Shut up! Just shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” Alexi yells at me. “Close your eyes! Don’t look at me! Don’t talk to me! Stay in that corner!” She leaves little doubt that my words have affected her in ways that are not helpful. Or she pointedly ignores me, making it clear that my words are irritating or pointless or off-base. Words function as tools, in that they can be used to affect the client or the therapist by conveying information about where each stands in relation to the other and what new or unexpected ways of relating and being are possible (Mitchell, 1988). Alexi can use words to affect me, to get me to stop. She can also use words to make me laugh, to make me express concern for her, or to provide a response or narrative in our play that conveys that we are flowing together. And while this is not yet true for Alexi, across time and as my clients get older, words sometimes, for some of them, become things through which they begin to express curiosity, explore, and come to their own ideas about their lives and the world; words function more directly as I had originally imagined them, as tools

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in shaping a new self they are becoming. With some of my clients, as our time together unfolds, I can begin to speak directly. With one client I have been seeing since preschool, at age eight he was able to listen intently when I said, “You are doing all of this getting in trouble stuff because you want your parents to take care of you differently, but they just can’t do it. You just end up getting punished, not getting what you really want.” Other clients leave the therapy transformed in significant ways without us ever speaking directly to what has happened. Regardless, what I am working to emphasize in the larger chapter is that much of the change happens in indirect ways. It is most often the things that happen that may or may not use speech but are not about speech that create enabling conditions in the playroom.

Enabling Conditions Week after week, Alexi and I play out the roller coaster of her body’s domination by intense affective responses, both her own and the responses she prompts or attempts to prompt in me. As a young child, Alexi was subjected to ongoing physical and emotional abuse, and she constantly plays out—on me and through me—versions of being done to—working to turn me into the abuser—and in turn, of doing to me what she experienced through physical and verbal attacks (Benjamin, 2004). She is in an almost constant physiological state of hyper-arousal—her resting heart rate is high—and she responds to cues in ways that at one time helped her survive but now mostly get her in trouble and make it hard for her to prompt love and friendship from others. In our sessions, I don’t refer to what happened to her. Instead I pay attention to the peaks and valleys of her affective energy, mood, and bodily expression as well as my own. I use my own feelings, responses, and the affective charges in my body— speed, intensity, and direction—as raw data in the session (Bromberg, 2011). The Boston Change Group calls this “the improvisational field of therapy,” in which our responsiveness to what is present can become “the basis for an intersubjective relational unconscious . . .” (2010, pp. 6–7). Jessica Benjamin offers that, from infancy, the task in any relationship is to be able to engage “as both like and different subjects” (Yeatman, 2015, p.  12). Benjamin contends that this engagement allows each to “come together as different aspects of the same ontology” (p. 12). Benjamin calls this the “co-created rhythms of mutuality” (Yeatman, 2015, p. 16). Stern (1985) calls it “affect attunement,” which he carefully distinguishes from mirroring or imitation by describing that it is not the physical action that is at stake but rather that the behavior shows a matching of the feeling state of the other. He provides an example of how this works through sameness and difference: a nine-month-old girl lets out an excited “aaaah” and looks at her mother as she grabs a desired toy. The mother matches her feeling of excitement through performing a happy dance that lasts as long as the child’s excitement lasts (pp. 140–142). Stern describes this

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cross-modal attunement as a recurrent experience essential for developing a sense of a strong, subjective self. He notes that affective attunement occurs primarily in registers other than speech (p. 138). Adrienne Harris (2009) describes attunement as “interpersonal resonance.” Harris and Lew Aron (1997) describe resonance as occurring through “the material qualities, the prosody and rhythm, the sensuous materiality of signs” (p.  527) and of objects. Our play and our words are sometimes about their symbolic content, but are more often coded “as sound pattern, as image and as body movement and motor action” (p. 527). When I began to relax about what my clients were saying or were not saying, I began to notice what we were doing with language and sound. The children and I chant, count, sing, and pound out rhythms, loud and soft. As we are doing this, we often rock or sway or do impromptu dances. Alexi initiates a game in which she and I spend hours rhythmically massaging each other’s scalps with pretend hair oil. She pulls out the Hot Wheels and prompts me to chant over and over, “Alexi smashed Gail’s car, and Gail yelled ‘Oh no!’” She turns her diatribes against me into rhythmic songs, belting out with gusto, “You’re an elephant’s ass! You like to eat trash! And everybody hates, hates, hates, hates you!!!” I join in, my enthusiasm matching hers, but I add in clapping and swaying and change the words a bit. “I’m an elephant’s ass! I like to eat trash. And everybody hates, hates, hates, hates me!” We dissolve into shared laughter. Drawing from Harris (2009), I think of these as “deeply rhythmic and resonant ways of being together” (n.p.). Fast and slow, near and far, loud and quiet, hard and soft, chanted, sung, and shouted, these qualities all matter, are all material, and though they may use language as part of their conveyance, they are not about language. Although my ability to tolerate the messages without retaliation matters, what I want to draw attention to is the way my acceptance is experienced bodily, processed in the body without thought, working through resonance, prosody, or physically registered attunement. In the action of psychoanalytic treatment, Harris (2009) reminds us that “minds and psyches and body/minds are best thought of as transpersonal” (n.p.). I think about Alexi’s need to find different ways to experience the enormity of her wishes, hopes, needs, fears, loss, sadness, and rage, and I think about my own wishes for her. This is another way of staying in the room; it involves both of us developing a better capacity to experience the other as we are when we are together rather than as we exist as overwritten in our transferences onto one another or, in other words, in the relational expectations we each bring from other times and places. Harris says more, “Difference here is as crucial as resonance.  .  .  . The shared intermingling of two sensibilities will therefore always have the potential to operate as a site for movement” (n.p.). The tensions of

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difference between therapist and client create differentiated spaces for each to “have and explore her subjective experience” (Yeatman, 2015, p. 16). It is through our surprise, as we experience one another as different than what we expected, that we begin to find a shared reality that reflects our actual relationship rather than the patterns of expectation and reaction based upon the past experiences that we each bring into the room. In our clinical relationships, the children and I affect one another through our differences; we change each other in ways that can be registered, felt, and acted upon, but usually do not have to be spoken to; and we each find new ways that we are capable of being. Benjamin (cited in Yeatman, 2015) conceptualizes a successful analytic relationship as resulting in a client who learns to trust an object world as a series of opportunities for self-articulation [and] can trust also that she becomes more and more herself, as her idiom finds its way to expression . . . she does not need to hold onto specific identifications and past selfstates (p. 17). For the children I work with, this achievement of different or more varied and flexible self-articulations is rarely marked through self-reflexive proclamations but rather is demonstrated through new possibilities and new determinations in their play and in how they relate to me, the playroom, and its materials.

In the Classroom Can lines be drawn from the clinic to the classroom? Is there a classroom parallel to “staying in the room?” and to staying alive to affective flows? Clearly the kinds of learning and change that concern me in the clinic— the development of more flexible, creative, satisfying, and adaptive relations to self, other, and things—are not identical to what we prioritize in classrooms. I am not arguing that relationships and attunement replace curricula concerned with science, math, literacy, social studies, or the arts. At the university, I teach early childhood and elementary grades literacies methods courses in the undergraduate teacher education program. I still teach my students what they need to know about how children learn to read and what kinds of things are expected in a literacy curriculum. But equally now, I ask my students to think about classrooms as sites where things happen that we don’t have words for but that still profoundly matter. As a new therapist, I over-relied on the educative potential of words. I worried about whether all that singing and chanting and dancing was a waste of time. In the midst of a game, I would become anxious that we weren’t really doing therapy, and I would try to tell my clients what I thought they needed to hear, imagining that insight or revelation would create change. I became anxious about how to describe what recognizably therapeutic thing I did with the child when I wrote the required progress notes, reviewed by my supervisor. Sometimes I would find myself saying things that were more for the progress note I imagined

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writing than the child. My teacher education students have their own version of the same worries. What should they be doing with children that will count as recognizable and worthwhile teaching? How best do they spend the children’s time in the pursuit of subject matter content? If they allow for the children’s passions and pursuits, are they doing the right thing when it doesn’t look like a quantifiable form of learning? I tell my students how, over time, I have come to believe that a more powerful way of understanding learning demands that we pay close attention to what our ways of being together in the classroom enable. I call attention to what I call “education’s impoverished learning theory.” I caution them against a misplaced and limiting faith in that which can be said and represented as being identical to human learning, growth, or change; I try to think with them about the enabling ways that children and teachers learn and change together that have more to do with affect than with content. I call their attention to spontaneity and the affecting power of things like singing, chanting, movement, rhythm, texture, and playing with sound and speed. It is the case that working in these ways with language can be understood as ways to engage in literacies or, indeed, of many different kinds of content learning, and I don’t underestimate that as important to my students who are typically nervous about whether they will be seen as “good teachers” to those who will oversee them. Indeed, the recent move to shift the term “STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) to STEAM (a = arts) has been framed as a call to nurturing of curiosity and our love of life” in response to the constraints and deadnesses created by the dominance in education and in workplaces “of standards, evaluation, regulations and procedures” (Boy, 2013, p. 6). But I want them to know that these ways of being together can be profound and enabling in ways that are hard to account for. In an essay written shortly before her death, the French sociologist and early childhood researcher Liane Mozère (2014) reflected on how her long friendship and collaborations with Guattari and Deleuze impacted her thinking about learning. We would often share meals, picnics, rowing on ponds, listening to music, even indulging in fancy dress on some summer evenings. A lot of laughter and jokes, and no ‘theoretical’ discussions, since we all knew how Gilles hated them. But words floated around as if we were living in an aquarium, and paths were dis-covered as if we were in a jungle. Last but not least, for me, there was never the feeling that I was “learning” something, but rather, I felt as though something was coming towards me. (p. 101) Recall Massumi’s (2002) definition of affect in the work of Deleuze and Guattari as “an ability to affect and be affected . . . a prepersonal

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intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act” (p.  35). What Mozère is describing is a being together that provided the conditions that then pursues ideas, projects, and relationships in the powerfully enabling presence of one another, producing aliveness, vitality, and the feeding of one’s sense of potential. Mozère (2014) described their relationships as “read[ying] us for illuminations and intensities of experience” (p.  100) that were coming toward them, or in other words, as creating the conditions of potential that ignited desire and set the unique trajectories of learning into motion for each of them. In one of her most intriguing claims, Mozère writes, “If it was not a teaching, or a learning pattern, then it was obviously about another way of being in politics, and that is, in life” (p. 101). Thus, Mozère asserts that their ways of being together, ways that were about eating and rowing, dancing, and laughing, and decidedly not overt, quantifiable teaching and learning about theory, were themselves a politics; she insists, in other words, that the very conditions of life we create together is a politics. Learning, Mozère wrote, is what happens when something occurs that allows the children to snatch opportunities that link to their own potentialities and that empower their own “forces of life” (2014, p. 102). Drawing again from her relationships, she illustrated this. So Guattari “talked”, and we were not so much fascinated (although of course we were) as deeply, intensely, affected. It had nothing to do with learning; he drew new maps, created an atmosphere, perhaps through an incidental remark about a film . . . or a soothing, caring behavior (when we were all tough, revolutionary militants!), playing the piano (were poetry and music revolutionary?). We felt like explorers of new continents, of new oceans. Were we not also capable of seizing the opportunity to grasp these new tools for thinking and living? (p. 100) Speaking of early childhood education, Mozère (2012) argues that what we look for are those times when what happens is well-suited to those who are involved. I connect this idea to what it might mean to “stay in the room” as a teacher and as a stance toward curriculum. I ask the students to consider how our anxieties to prove we are effective teachers drive us to require the creation of products as representations of “spending time productively.” We think about how curriculum does or does not make space for children to adapt it to themselves, to make it well suited, to experience it as enabling, to keep their desire moving. These things happen in classrooms regardless of whether teachers have a way of recognizing them, but particularly as new teachers my students

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struggle—just as I struggled as a new therapist—with deep uncertainties about the value of things they cannot name or explain. I hope to give them a way to recognize and hold on to the creative potential and joy that can come about as the result of enabling relationships that work in ways that are ineffable. Through my clinical work, I have come to understand that life is lived in the present, in the relationships to people, ideas, and things that are happening in that moment, in that space. I have to reimagine the politics of my teaching and my clinical work as involving children’s unconscious, unformulated, affective experiences that have the potential to open new possibilities and create new desires. If I argue that children must produce a particular and expected form of speech or representation for the sake of their futures, I have to ask myself whether that is more for my sake than for theirs. When I am consumed by my worries about what should or must happen, I am taken away from my focus on what is already happening and, worse, from my ability to improvise and experiment, to engage deeply, or, in short, to stay in the room with my students and my clients.

Notes 1. While this might seem an odd choice, particularly given the vocal criticism of psychoanalysis present in their work, my work with Deluezo-Guattarian theory and especially my research into Guattari’s clinical practice (Boldt and Valente, 2016) have added richness and difference to the training and supervision I receive in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. From 1955 until his death in 1992, Felix Guattari practiced psychoanalysis at the La Borde Psychiatric Clinic where, among other things, he conducted individual and group therapy. Understanding Guattari’s single authored work (1995, 2015) and his work with Deleuze (2008) as participating vigorously in debates within psychoanalysis at that time not only allows for a deeper understanding of some of the nuances and stakes in this work, but also does justice to the fact that Guattari continued to work as an analyst, evolving and refining his practice through and against his psychoanalytic training, for his entire life. 2. Contemporary psychoanalysts are careful to distinguish the procedural unconscious from the dynamic unconscious, which, in the tradition of psychoanalysis, is understood as that which has been repressed because it involves conflicts threatening to the sense of self (Boston Change Group, 2010).

References Benjamin, J. (2004). Beyond doer and done to: An intersubjective view of thirdness. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 73(1), 5–46. Boldt, G. M., and Leander, K. (2017). Becoming through ‘the break’: A posthuman account of a child’s play. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 17(3), 409–425. Boldt, G. M., and Valente, J. M. (2016). L’école Gulliver and La Borde: An ethnographic account of collectivist integration and institutional psychotherapy. Curriculum Inquiry, 46(3), 321–341.

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Boston Change Process Study Group. (2010). Change in psychotherapy: A unifying paradigm. New York: WW Norton and Company. Boy, G. A. (2013). From STEM to STEAM: Toward a human-centred education, creativity & learning thinking. Published in Proceedings of the 31st European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics, Article No. 3. New York: ACM. Retrieved from https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2501934 Bromberg, P. M. (2011). The shadow of the tsunami and the growth of the relational mind. New York, NY: Routledge. Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (2008). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. R. Lane, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Ehret, C., Hollett, T., and Jocius, R. (2016). The matter of new media making: An intra-action analysis of adolescents making a digital book trailer. Journal of Literacy Research, 48, 346–377. Gershon, W. (2018). Sound curriculum: Sonic studies in educational theory, method, and practice. New York, NY: Routledge. Guattari, F. (1995). Chaosmosis: An ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University. Guattari, F. (2015). Psychoanalysis and transversality texts and interviews 1955– 1971. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Harris, A. (2009). You must remember this. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 19(1), 2–21. Harris, A., and Aron, L. (1997). Ferenczi’s semiotic theory: Previews of postmodernism. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 17(4), 522–534. Kuby, C., and Rucker Gutshall, T. (2016). Go be a writer!: Expanding the curricular boundaries of literacy learning with children. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Leander, K., and Boldt, G. (2013). Rereading “a pedagogy of multiliteracies” bodies, texts, and emergence. Journal of Literacy Research, 45(1), 22–46. Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McArdle, F., and Boldt, G. (Eds.). (2013). Young children, pedagogy, and the arts: Ways of seeing. New York, NY: Routledge. Mitchell, S. A. (1988). Relational concepts in psychoanalysis: An integration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mozère, L. (2012). Is experimenting on an immanent level possible in RECE (Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education)? Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, 12(1). Mozère, L. (2014). What about learning? In M. N. Bloch, B. B. Swadener, and G. S. Canella (Eds.), Reconceptualizing early childhood care and education: Critical questions, new imaginaries and social activism (pp.  99–105). New York, NY: Peter Lang. New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60–92. Salvio, P., and Boldt, G. (2009). ‘A democracy tempered by the rate of exchange’: Audit culture and the sell-out of progressive writing curriculum. English in Education, 43(2), 113–128.

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Sherbine, K., and Boldt, G. (2013). Becoming intense. In F. McArdle and G. Boldt (Eds.), Young children, pedagogy, and the arts: Ways of seeing (pp.  73–88). New York, NY: Routledge. Stern, D. (1985). The interpersonal world of the infant: A view from psychoanalysis and developmental psychology. London: Karnac Books. Thiel, J. (2015). Vibrant matter: The intra-active role of objects in the construction of young children’s literacies. Literacy Research: Theory, Method and Practice, 64(1), 112–131. Yeatman, A. (2015). A two-person conception of freedom: The significance of Jessica Benjamin’s idea of intersubjectivity. Journal of Classical Sociology, 15(1), 3–23.

Coda

17 Intimacy and Depletion in the Pedagogical Scene An Interview with Lauren Berlant

In Cruel Optimism, you say, “To be teachable is to be open for change. It is a tendency. It is to turn toward the story of what we have said in terms of phrases we hadn’t yet noticed” (p. 122). You frequently use the words education and pedagogy in your work, but cite a pedagogy almost exclusively happening outside of the formal classroom. How do you conceptualize pedagogy? LAUREN BERLANT: In 1997, I wrote, “Feminism and the Institutions of Intimacy,” which is about the classroom and the university as learning and laboring spaces: and the formal classroom comes up frequently in essays, interviews, and on my blog, “Supervalent Thought.” In these pieces, I come out fundamentally as a teacher. My teachers were the first adults who welcomed me without an ambivalence I could sense. They built my skills patiently but also—this was the 1960s and 1970s, mainly—didn’t see their function as information transition, or self-reproduction, but to cultivate the mind according to its strengths toward an end goal of critical reflection. They didn’t humiliate my mind for not wanting to reproduce tedious recapitulations. One outcome of this was an early attachment to the thought experiment and the story problem. These are classroom tactics but also inform my interest as a writer in the case, the example, the illustration, and the anecdote. Another outcome was an early attachment to utopian theory, particularly in the socialist-feminist and Marxist traditions: in fact, I assumed I’d go into education because in the sixties so much vitally transformative theory was around education as a vehicle for mobilizing class and population resistance. I read a lot of Freire and Boal in high school and college, for example. Yet another outcome was how to use the classroom to make something vital happen, where it matters who shows up. I learned lots of techniques from my teachers and then later learned lots from the modifications and refusals of students. I’ve also been lucky to teach students who knew how to make claims for themselves and create different experiments and protocols in the classroom: Beth Freeman of UC Davis, EDS.:

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Dana Luciano of Rutgers, Dana Seitler of Toronto, Romi Crawford of School of the Art Institute, and Mandy Berry of American University for starters. So feminism and socialist theatre and working with great students shaped me as a teacher: also the luck of going to Oberlin, which had an experimental college that gave students credit for teaching and taking courses from students, and in which I taught from the time I was learning there. EDS.: In the introduction to Cruel Optimism, you write, “The chapters that follow were written slowly, over the same seven-year period during which I began to teach courses on affect theory. They do not advance an orthodoxy about how the evidence and intelligence of affect should be derived—neurological, psychoanalytic, schizoanalytic, historical, or normative” (p.  12). How have you gone about teaching affect theory, and how has this teaching shifted over the years? Does teaching affect demand new genres of pedagogy? L.B.: I am so grateful for the granular attention you have paid to the parts of the work that are about process! The thing about affect is that there is no direct evidence of it: but there is no direct evidence of anything, as all processes require refraction in solidity-approximating forms. This forces us to think about mediation. As I argue in my forthcoming book, On the Inconvenience of Other People, “Mediation is not a stable thing but a way of seeing the unstable relations among dynamically related things.” It is in this sense that all formulations of mediation are heuristics. Things that hit one with force often put people in the mind of the literal, though, setting off a search for the source that “reduced” them to encountering themselves or the world specifically. But of course, the hit itself is a mediation, a thing that communicates proximity, atmosphere, mood, and intensity. That is to say, impacts communicate affect, both the affect in the world one walks through and the affect one brings to and generates in situations. So the way I teach affect, besides involving careful attention to how other people frame it—especially these days Brian Massumi, Katie Stewart, Greg Seigworth, Anna Gibbs, Teresa Brennan, Saidiya Hartman, Patricia Clough, Jose Muñoz, Eve Sedgwick, Fred Moten, and Ben Anderson—is to work with art and rhetoric and to do collective assessment of how we know what the tone is—what the percept is—of an encounter and an existence. The examples one encounters or mobilizes change the teaching of affect. EDS.: Intimacy, as you’ve noted, is unpredictable, where “school is a world in which intimacies are always betrayed” (Cruel Optimism, p. 130). Could you elaborate a bit more on how you see intimacy in relation to affects, love, and schooling? How might these relations figure in your own teaching? L.B.: I almost never know anything about my students, if I compare myself to my colleagues in Gender and Sexuality Studies who know

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all the gossip and/or who see themselves as responsible to individual life-repair. My undergrad theory co-teacher, for example, and I have a comedy routine, where I say, “I love office hours. It’s where we brainstorm and make thought neither of us can produce by ourselves, but they’re not really for hanging out, so please come with questions and projects to address. I don’t have time to hang out.” Then my co-teacher, who loves having student parties and happenings, says, “I love hanging out; you can come hang out with me.” I think students deserve protection from unwanted exposure, and to me that means protecting their privacy. I always ask how they are, of course, and if they say they’re not good, I’ll say, “Is there anything I can do to lighten your load? Do you have good support?” But I’ve had students attach and attack too strongly over the years, and while early on I tried to ride with that out of respect for where they were and also out of confusion, now I will say, once things become clearly stressful, “This is not working. We’re stuck in an impasse. Let’s try something else.” My job is to help them do their work, not to love them “as biographical individuals”. I love the process of being with other people’s minds, though. Intimacy can emerge from that focus, without being especially personal. So to a student I’ve had for a long time, I can say, “This is the kind of thing you do” and try to make it helpful that I pay attention to that specific habit. I care a lot about people doing the work they want to do, at whatever level. EDS.: Many of us working in education might describe a wear on our bodies, a sapping and exhaustion, not unakin to what you term “slow death” in Cruel Optimism. How might we, or how do you, sustain yourself as a teacher? Or is the project of education always undergirded by cruel optimism? L.B.: I don’t think your question couplet is one question, but two quite different ones. Education theorists have been using Cruel Optimism extensively to think about how postwar Western credentializing education has taxed severely the finances, bodies, and minds of students and teachers. The mental health pressures are predictable and exorbitant. For students, the critical focus has recently been on debt and also on exploitation by institutions and advisors. For faculty, both tenure-track and adjunct-structured, there’s the unending expansion of unremunerated accountability hours and responsibility for keeping ourselves and our students emotionally satisfied, while also teaching transformatively, in a live kinesics. I don’t think anyone really believes that a liberal education in itself is cruel to its participants except insofar as it makes them afraid of thinking against and not just outside the box, or makes them feel entitled to manage others because they have a degree. But seen as an “investment,” it can be. It is not right for the student to have to bear

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Bessie P. Dernikos et al. the invidious life burden of what is fundamentally a social good. I put myself through college and grad school and had significant debt to repay (fellowships helped a lot, and a few mentors did too, to be clear), and it worked out for me. But many students and their parents, wanting to have a shot at upward class mobility, go into these situations blind and suffer immense damage from their belief that the current economy will offer any good worker opportunities in tune with their ambitions. The capitalist model of self-exploitation is a terrible lure for people who don’t feel like they have permission to think about what they want to be doing every day, what activity feeds them genuinely so that work isn’t about the future but about an ongoing reason to show up to life. What is work for? We must ask that question and not presume its relation to education. As for faculty I have written often on my blog too about the depletion that hits not just students but people who get into the business to teach transformatively beyond the ambitions of the research impact they hope for. Depletion comes from the fueling desires that provoke us to give more than we have to the situation of research and teaching learning. My repeated phrase is, “I’ve broken my body for the job.” Many of us do; many of us live our desire as desperation. I did have a revelation this year though about my complicity in my own depletion, which was that one reason I can’t get on top of my teaching is that I don’t want to, because I want to be present to the ongoing discussion. So on top of all the institutional demand, there is a fraying and enriching desire that costs us too. I’m never burnt out from teaching; I do occasionally perceive impending infrastructural collapse from the relentlessness of it all, the lack of clear opportunity for regenerative breathing.

Reference Berlant, L. (2010). Cruel optimism. Raleigh, NC and London: Duke University Press.

Contributors

Lee Airton (they/them) is Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies in Education at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Their research brings affect, assemblage, and queer theory frameworks to bear on educational practices related to gender and sexuality in schooling and teacher education. Dr. Airton’s public scholarship includes the blog “They Is My Pronoun,” the No Big Deal social media initiative, and the book Gender—Your Guide (2018). Their articles appear in the journals Gender and Education, Sex Education, Curriculum Inquiry, Teachers College Record, and the Journal of Education Policy. Lauren Berlant teaches English at the University of Chicago, where her work has focused on the aesthetics of political emotion from the U.S. nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries. She writes on the affects associated with citizenship, gender, racism, class antagonism, sexuality, trauma, and comedy, for example. Recent books include Reading Sedgwick (2019); The Hundreds (2019), a book of collaborative poesis written with the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart; and Cruel Optimism (2011). Her current project is On the Inconvenience of Other People. She blogs at Supervalent Thought. Gail Boldt is Professor in Language and Literacy Education in the Elementary and Early Childhood Education Program at Penn State University. She is the program coordinator for the PhD emphasis in Language, Culture, and Society. She is the editor-in-chief of the Bank Street Occasional Paper Series. Since 2014, she has been a psychotherapist in practice with children and participates in the New Directions in Psychoanalytic Thinking program at the Washington/Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis. Rosi Braidotti is Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University. She has served as the founding Director of the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University, the inter-university SOCRATES network NOISE and the Thematic Network for Women’s Studies ATHENA. She holds honorary degrees from the Universities of Helsinki and

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Contributors

Linkoping and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Her books have been translated into multiple languages and include Patterns of Dissonance, Nomadic Subjects, Transpositions, Metamorphoses, Nomadic Theory, The Posthuman, and Posthuman Knowledge as well as a wide range of co-edited volumes. In 2005, Braidotti was honored with a Royal Knighthood in the Netherlands. Her website is rosibraidotti.com. Bessie P. Dernikos is Assistant Professor of Reading and Language Arts at Florida Atlantic University. Her research explores the affective forces that shape literacy learning for young children in order to rethink how the everyday embodied practices “we” engage in promote justice and/or violence. She has authored publications in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy and the Journal of Early Childhood Research. She is currently serving as guest editor to a forthcoming special issue of The International Journal of Early Childhood Environmental Education, “Living within Precarious Times: Posthumanist Possibilities for Early Childhood Environmental Education.” Asilia Franklin-Phipps is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Teaching and Learning Center at The Graduate Center and teaches Education Studies courses at Brooklyn College. Asilia received her PhD in Critical Sociocultural Studies in Education from the University of Oregon where she taught Education Foundations courses focused on culture, identity, media, and curriculum. Asilia also taught in the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Oregon. Asilia is a former high school and community college English instructor and received her M.A. in Teaching of English and Ed.M. in English Education from Teachers College. Asilia is currently thinking about the pedagogical possibility of art, film, digital media, and popular culture in teaching and learning about race and racism. Anna Hickey-Moody is Professor of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Australia, an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, and RMIT Senior Research Fellow 2017–2021. She is known for her empirical and theoretical work with marginalized youth. She is the author of six books and numerous articles and chapters. Anna holds visiting professor positions at Goldsmiths College, London, and the Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. Nancy Lesko teaches in the areas of curriculum, social theory, gender studies, and youth studies at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research interests include gender and sexualities in school, systems of reasoning about youth, and affective dimensions of school knowledge. Her current projects include an examination of public feelings toward teachers and a rethinking of the teaching of curriculum history.

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Stephanie D. McCall is Assistant Professor in the Professional and Secondary Education Program at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania. She teaches education foundations courses and graduate-level courses in curriculum theory, history, and design through a critical feminist framework. Her research interests include curriculum studies, gender and sexuality in school, and the education of girls in singlesex schools. Current projects with public all-girls schools include collaborations in curriculum design, teacher education, and school policy. Her recent book, Girls, Single-sex Schools and Postfeminist Fantasies (2020), explores some snags in the guarantees of “female success” in the distinct affective atmospheres of gender and knowledge in all-girls schools. Alyssa D. Niccolini received her doctorate from Columbia University’s Teachers College. Her research is multidisciplinary in nature with emphases on literacies, affect and posthuman theories, feminist theories, qualitative methodologies, and youth studies. Her work has been published in journals including Gender and Education, Parallax, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Qualitative Inquiry, Sex Education, English Education, and Journal of Gender Studies. Fikile Nxumalo is Assistant Professor of Diversity and Place in Teaching and Teacher Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto. Her work is centered on environmental and place-attuned early childhood education that is situated within and responsive to children’s inheritances of settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, and environmental precarity. Her most recent book, Decolonizing Place in Early Childhood Education (2019), examines the entanglements of place, environmental education, childhood, race, and settler colonialism in early learning contexts. Mary Lou Rasmussen is Professor in the School of Sociology at The Australian National University where she is convenor of the Gender, Sexuality, and Culture Major. She leads an ARC Discovery Project investigating worldviews of Australia’s Generation Z. She is co-editor of the Handbook of Sexuality Education (2017) and Youth, Sexuality and Sexual Citizenship (2018). Arun Saldanha is Professor in the Department of Geography, Environment, and Society at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Space After Deleuze (2017) and Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race (2007) and co-editor with Jason Michael Adams of Deleuze and Race (2013), with Hoon Song of Sexual Difference Between Psychoanalysis and Vitalism (2013), and with Rachel Slocum of Geographies of Race and Food: Fields Bodies Markets (2013). Arun is currently working on a theoretical monograph drawing on Marxism

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and feminist theory to engage debates about human evolutionary biology and to rethink race as planetary process, tentatively titled Phenotypically: A New Old Materialist Theory of Race. He was the main organizer of the symposium, “Prince from Minneapolis,” April 16–18, 2018. Gregory J. Seigworth is Professor of Communication Studies at Millersville University. Greg has published numerous chapters, essays, and reviews in a variety of venues, including Antithesis, Architectural Design, Cultural Studies, Culture Machine, Ephemera, M/C, Radical Philosophy, and Theory, Culture and Society. He is co-editor, with Melissa Gregg, of The Affect Theory Reader (2010) and co-editor of the open-access Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry with Mathew Arthur. Greg has also organized two international conferences that have reveled in the interdisciplinary nature of affect studies (in 2015 and 2018). Sam Sellar is Reader in Education Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. His current research focuses on large-scale assessments, data infrastructures, and artificial intelligence in education, and he has a longstanding interest in affective dimensions of contemporary education contexts. Sam works with teacher associations around the world to explore the effects of datafication for educators, schools, and communities. His recent books include The Global Education Race: Taking the Measure of PISA and International Testing (2017) and Globalizing Educational Accountabilities (2016). Nathan Snaza teaches English literature, gender studies, and educational foundations at the University of Richmond. He is the author of Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Humanism (2019) and co-editor of Pedagogical Matters: New Materialisms and Curriculum Studies (2016) and Posthumanism and Educational Research (2014). His articles have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Feminist Studies, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Angelaki, Symploke, Parallax, Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, and Curriculum Inquiry. Stephanie Springgay is Associate Professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning at the University of Toronto. She is a leading scholar in research-creation methodologies with a focus on walking, affect, new materialisms and posthumanisms, queer theory, and contemporary art and pedagogy. Her most recent research-creation projects are documented at www.thepedagogicalimpulse.com, www. walkinglab.org, and www.artistsoupkitchen.com. She has published widely in academic journals and is the co-author of the book Walking Methodologies in a More-than-Human-World: Walkinglab (2018) with Sarah E. Truman; co-editor of M/othering a Bodied Curriculum:

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Emplacement, Desire, Affect with Debra Freedman; co-editor of Curriculum and the Cultural Body (2007, with Peter Lang) with Debra Freedman; and author of Body Knowledge and Curriculum: Pedagogies of Touch in Youth and Visual Culture (2008, with Peter Lang). Kathleen Stewart writes ethnographic experiments to approach and theorize the composition and decomposition of emergent worldings or modes of living as they come into being. Her books include A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an ‘Other’ America (1996), Ordinary Affects (2007), The Hundreds co-authored with Lauren Berlant (2019), and Worlding (in preparation). She teaches anthropology and writing at the University of Texas, Austin. Marleen Tepeyolotl Villanueva is a first-year PhD student in the Social Justice Education Department at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto and a former elementary school teacher. She received her master’s degree from the University of Texas-Austin’s Cultural Studies in Education program, within the Curriculum and Instruction Department. She is a first-generation student raised in Texas, whose family is from Pame/Chichimeca lands in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, and is a member of the Miakan/Garza Band of Coahuiltecan people in Central Texas, as well as a representative for the International Indigenous Youth Council-Texas Chapter. Melissa Wolfe works at Monash University as a senior lecturer in Creative Methods, Visual Art, and Media education. She was awarded the International Visual Sociology Association Prosser ECR award (2016) and the Australian Association for Research in Education ECR Award (2016). Her doctoral dissertation entitled “Girls Tales: Experiences of Schooling” was awarded the Mollie Holman award for best education thesis (2016), Monash University and a commendation award from the Australian Association of Educational Research (2017). Melissa’s feminist research in high schools utilizes a creative filmic research methodology, engaging with theories of affect, that takes account of gender, socioeconomic status, public pedagogical practice, and participatory creative methods. She pragmatically thinks with Karen Barad’s (2007) theory of agential realism as a conceptual framework. Melissa’s film, Girls’ Tales: Experiences of Schooling, was developed as a preservice teaching aid and was released in December 2015 through Ronin Films. Shiva Zarabadi is a PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow on MA Sociology of Education and MA Gender, Sexuality, and Education at UCL Institute of Education. She is the co-editor of the book Feminist Posthumanisms/New Materialisms and Education (2019) and the lead author of the journal article “Feeling Medusa: Tentacular Troubling of Academic Positionality, Recognition and Respectability” (2019) in

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Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, chapters “Re-mattering Media Affects: Pedagogical Interference into Pre-emptive Counter-terrorism Culture” “Spinning Yarns: Affective Kinshipping as Posthuman Pedagogy” in Parallax (2018). Her research interests include feminist new materialism, posthumanism, intra-action of matter, time, affect, space, human, and more-than-human. Michalinos Zembylas is Professor of Educational Theory and Curriculum Studies at the Open University of Cyprus. He is also Honorary Professor at Nelson Mandela University in the Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation. He has written extensively on emotion and affect in relation to social justice pedagogies, intercultural and peace education, human rights education, and citizenship education. His recent books include Psychologized Language in Education: Denaturalizing a Regime of Truth (with Z. Bekerman) and Socially Just Pedagogies in Higher Education (co-edited with V. Bozalek, R. Braidotti, and T. Shefer). In 2016, he received the Distinguished Researcher Award in “Social Sciences and Humanities” from the Cyprus Research Promotion Foundation.

Index

Page numbers in italic indicate a figure and page numbers in bold indicate a table on the corresponding page. accountability 10, 14; Australian schools 172; regimes 164 achievement gaps 108; Black and White students 198 adolescent, angsty 12 affect 5–7, 18–20, 183–184; alien 4; and bodies (human and nonhuman) 7–8; in the classroom 33–34; educational futures and 12; first lessons of 87–93; good teaching practices and 13; neoliberalism 11; pedagogy and 15; theories of 10; theorization of 175–176; transmission of 12 affect and literacy 12, 17, 231, 238 affection (affectio) 175 affective amplification 7; appeals 11–12; atmospheres 164; in schools 16–18; barriers 74; circulation 114; craft 95, 100, 103; entanglement 73, 78, 183–184; event 8; feelings 5, 11; genre 95, 10–14; intensities 7–8; pedagogies 15; racist comment 75; scratchings 3–5; tonality 116; transactions 72, 74; turn 6, 11; understanding of education 117 affects (affectus) 175 affect scholars 5, 7–8, 146 Affect Studies 19, 89, 91, 93, 109, 114, 147, 148 affect theorists/affect theory 8, 12, 48, 101, 105, 109, 201, 206; in education 14–16; and girls in the Global South 14; and shame 56–58; and SJTE 97–99

affirmative action 205 African Americans 201; demanding to be educated 201; students 200 African continent, schooling in 14 after-affects of histories 11 Ahmed, Sara 9, 77, 114, 115, 130, 158–159; Queer Phenomenology 115 algorithmic processes 168 American teachers, changing views of 13 Anderson, Ben Taking-Place 203 Anglophone nations, school systems in 164 Anthropocene 9 Anti-Oedipus 42, 46 antiracism, and teacher education 122–125 antiracist pedagogy 198 antiracist politics 201 anti-racist thinkers 47 anti-radicalization duty, Prevent policy and 69 application programming interfaces (APIs) 165 Arendt, Hannah 64 art, and teacher education 124, 126–128 artist-residencies 149 aspirational hustle 12 assemblages 16, 168, 204, 205; social justice teacher education approach and 97–98 assemblage theory 97–99, 204 assessment practices 11 atmospheres 7, 9, 16, 18, 87, 89, 91, 93, 164, 166

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Index

Australia, Affect Studies in 148; national curriculum 171; government education reforms 17; schools, school uniforms 179–181 authoritarianism 11 Ball, Stephen 164 Barad, Karen 5, 14, 20, 69, 179, 180, 181–184, 186–191 Beauvoir, Simone 52 Bennett, Jane 6, 11, 19, 56 Bergson, Henri 175 Berlant, Lauren 8, 11–13, 19, 20, 65, 90, 95, 113, 115, 187, 189; Cruel Optimism 115 bewilderment 11, 109, 110, 113, 115, 116, 118 “big data” phenomenon 167 biopolitics biopower 201, 207 Black Lives Matter protests 131, 202 Blackman, Lisa 6, 8, 18, 19, 72, 74, 154 Boler, Megan 109, 112–114, 116 books, enchantment with 12 Bourdieu, Pierre 52, 199 Braidotti, Rosi 9, 10, 11, 148; interview with 39–53 Brennan, Teresa 177, 248; Transmission of Affect, The 115 British-Muslim schoolgirls 69 Britzman, Deborah 109 Brown vs. Board of Education 108 Butler, Judith 19, 52, 117 children, and resistance to normativity 149 Chinese education system 45 cisgendered female 187, 189; girls 180, 189 class readings, and student participation 108–109 classroom events, affective 132–133 classrooms 11; bodies 9; dynamics 13; humanizing mission of 117–119; safety in 110–114; social justice teacher education in 105; and threats 69–70, 78–80 Coates, Ta-Nehisi, Between the World and Me 126 Coetzee, J. M., Disgrace 54, 58–62 Colebrook, Claire 15, 165–166, 169, 171; Death of the Posthuman, The 165 Coleman, Rebecca 8, 14, 77, 148 Colman, Felicity 148

colonial gaze 77; power geometries 14 colonialism 14, 39, 61, 71, 76, 77, 108, 117, 210, 211, 214, 221, 224; see also settler colonialism colonization, historicist narratives of 62 Common Core State Standards 14 communities 15–16; diversity of 44–45 compassion 12 computational culture 168 computer science 174 contemporary art, and pedagogy 149 counterterrorism 77–78; politics 9; strategies 71 Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 70 datafication 167; of education 176 data infrastructure(s) 164, 173; and human interface 165; and object orientation 176; visualization 164, 168, 172–173; and data dashboard 169–172; and education policy and governance 167 DeLanda, Manuel 15–16, 98, 203–204 Deleuze, Gilles 5, 8, 14–15, 39, 73, 87, 97, 165, 175; 183; commentary on Spinoza 175; and machines 167– 168; and oppression 206; reading of by DeLanda 203–204; theorization of affect 175; theory of art and 171; What is Philosophy? 7, 87 depression 12 Derrida, Jacques 60, 69, 202 Descartes, René 40 desegregation 198 diffraction 185; diffractive methodology 182 disability 65, 143–147, 154; disability studies 89 discursive analyses 9 Donaldson, Ian 39 Douglass, Frederick, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, The 108 dress, the 186; and the researcher 189–191 Du Bois, W. E. B. 4, 200–201; Black Reconstruction in America 200 Dutch women, socioeconomic condition 44 dynamic resistance, and SJTE practitioners 99–103

Index early learners 12, 17 Edelman, Lee 155, 166 education affect theory in 14–16; and datafication 167; datafication of 176; state cuts to 13; techno-rational approaches to 14 Ellsworth, Elizabeth 116, 123 emotions 4, 73, 110, 114, 122, 154, 165, 234; affect and 5, 8, 183, 218–219; Du Bois and 201; feelings 5–7, 109; feminists and 113; humanlike 217; and imbue “places” 16; of trauma 65 empathy 64 empiricism 204 environmental education 209–212 ethics, affirmative 47, 48, 52–53; of otherness 61; shame as 58–61 ethno-nationalism, White 11, 93 Facebook assemblages 48 failure 10, 151–156, 159; affects and 12; willful 149 fear, fetish object of 77 feeling(s): brown 12; white 12 femininity 188; and dress-wearing 183; Black femininity 183; feminine regulation 180 feminism/feminist politics and theories 19, 43–48, 52, 89, 108, 109, 112–113, 117, 119, 144, 147–148, 206, 210; Black feminism 210; feminist environmental humanities 210, 212; feminist killjoy (Ahmed) 159, 161; feminists of color 112; feminist materialisms 231; Indigenous feminism/feminists 214, 219; socialist feminism 247 feminists: Dutch 45; European 44; politics 148; social justice 46; solidarity 52 Flatley, Jonathan 13; Affective Mapping 11 Ford, Christine Blasey 18 Foucault, Michel 39, 40–42, 53, 202 Freire, Paulo 47, 109 Gatens, Moira 148 Gaztambide-Fernandez, Ruben 156 gender, materialization of 180; genderdiverse students 179; male students 114; uniforms 179; violence 55, 62, 63, 64, 114, 118, 182 Gender Is Not Uniform campaign 179

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genre flailing 13, 14 Gilbert, Jen 116 Gilroy, Paul 45, 52 girls, Black girls 12; schooling and 14; Girls Uniform Agenda 179, 180; Muslim schoolgirls 9; schoolgirl, Muslim-veiled 73 global South, schooling in 14 Gorski, Paul C. et al, Cultivating Social Justice Teachers 94 Gould, Deborah 9 Grande, Sandy 109 groove, meanings of 4 Grosz, Elizabeth 19, 125, 127, 128, 144, 148, 170, 191; Volatile Bodies 144 Guattari, Felix 5, 14–15, 87, 97, 165; and machines 167–168; and oppression 206; reading of by DeLanda 204; theory of art and 170; What is Philosophy? 7 Gutierrez-Maldonado, Ricky 182–183 Halberstam, Jack 12, 151, 152, 155, 158, 161 Hall, Stuart, Representation 203 happiness 12 Haraway, Donna 109, 210 Harney, Maurita 39, 40 Harrison, Paul, Taking-Place 203 Hemmings, Clare 9 Henriques, Julian 8, 17 heteronormativity; (hetero)sexist rhetoric 10 Hickey-Moody, Anna 6, 9, 14, 15, 124, 126, 127, 131, 212, 218; interview with 143–148 hooks, bell 47, 109, 112, 199; “Engaged Pedagogy” 109 hope 14, 17, 19, 51–53, 210, 237; disrupted hope 133; hopeful narratives 158 humanism 10, 20, 49, 52–53, 119, 167 humanizing mission, of education 117–119 intensity/intensities 4, 5, 7, 8, 13, 15, 17, 46, 48, 49, 57, 71, 74, 79, 90, 98, 102, 103, 113, 114, 122, 132, 154, 155, 159, 165, 170, 183, 212, 230, 232, 233, 234, 236, 240, 248; affective intensities 69, 74, 75, 220, 229, 234 Irigaray, Luce 39

260

Index

ISIS, name-calling and 75–76, 80; terrorism 76 “Islamist” groups 71 Islamophobia 44 Jameson, Frederic 165 Jickling, Hannah 156–158; Ask Me Chocolates 149 Jihadi bride 72; Jihadi fighters 69 Kaepernick, Colin 131 Kantian critical tradition 204 Kay, Alan 176 Khoja-Moolji, Shenila 14 King, Larry 182–183, 188 Lacan, Jacques 202 Latour, Bruno, Irreductions 204, 205 LGBT+ community 44, 45 Levinas, Emmanuel 60 literacy/literacies 12, 17, 116, 119, 231, 238, 239; emotional literacies (Boler) 116 Lloyd, Genevieve 39–42 Lury, Celia 19, 168 machines 167–168; machine learning 166 Mandela, Nelson 47 Manning, Erin 115, 151 Marais, Mike 54, 59–61 Matias, Cheryl 12, 17, 122, 128, 129 Marx, Karl 204; Marxists 204; biologists 204; legacy 206 masculinity/masculinities 12, 146, 188, 199 Massumi, Brian 5, 8, 9, 69, 73, 115, 165, 168, 183; and affect 8 materialism(s) 206; feminist 231 matter, vibrancy of 11 Mbembe, Achille 53, 69, 72–73 McWilliam, Erica 13 media 73, 74, 79, 144, 145, 176, 202; media landscapes 197; media studies 203; see also social media mediation 9, 50–51, 170, 248; digital 49; technological 49 Meyer, Elizabeth 109 misogyny, (micro)aggressions 206 Montagu, Ashley 203, 204, 206 moods 11; optimism and 12 more-than- human world 166 multinational capital 11 multispecies (relationality) 20, 210, 213, 214

museum, visit to 126–128 Muslim bodies 7; child/children, conformity and 77; Muslim students 76; innocent 71; and Prevent policy 70; as suspects 71; Muslim-veiled body 74; schoolgirl 73 Muslimness, and threat-assemblages 74 national Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) 171 neoliberal/neoliberalism: and affect 11; positivist frame 97 No Child Left Behind 14 nonrepresentational theory 203 object orientation 174–176 Ohito, Esther 122–123 oppression 62, 65, 94, 98, 106, 154, 206; historicist narratives of 62 Osei-Kofi, Nana, Cultivating Social Justice Teachers 94 O’ Sullivan, Simon 125, 128 paranoid knowing 71; paranoidleaning critical theory 10 Parikka, Jussi 173 Parisi, Luciana 168 Pedagogical Impulse, The 149, 156, 161 pedagogy 45, 53, 87–88, 113; and affects 15; antiracist 198; art-based 146; artists and; decolonizing 221; emotional structure of 116–117; feminist 112; of objects 176; postterrorist/post-threat 73, 76, 78–80; and racialized affect 207; radicalized 206; pedagogies of shame 55, 64; stuttering 14; water 211 Pedwell, Carolyn 148 phantom 69–74 phenotype 204–205; phenotypical differences 204 pietas 47–48 Pinar, William 10 police brutality, and young Black men 198 politics 9, 53, 59, 79, 113, 154, 158; feminist politics 113, 147, 148, 207, 216, 240–241; identity politics 44–45, 48; politics of affect 117, 146–147; politics of affirmation 51; politics of alterity 59; politics of education 116; politics of location 44; politics of race/racial politics 116, 197, 201; politics of refusal

Index 159; politics of reproduction (Edelman) 166, 176; politics of safety 177; revolutionary politics 207; scholarly politics 147–148; see also biopolitics political affect, threat as a 80 post-apartheid period, in South Africa 61 postcolonial(ism) 19, 47, 56 posthuman 52, 79, 80; postposthuman manifesto 72 post-qualitative inquiry 97 “postracial” America 202 poststructuralism 19, 203 post-threat pedagogies 69, 76; environments 76; spaces 74 power dynamics/relations 9, 14, 16, 19, 41, 42, 44, 46, 57, 64, 130, 153–154, 179, 183, 189–190, 207, 219, 221 feeling power 189; state power 200; transformational power 58; see also biopower Prevent policy 71, 76; and phantomatic space 74; threats and 72, 74, 80; in the UK 69, 70, 73, 77–78 privilege 9, 20, 95, 98, 102, 103, 106, 114 Probyn, Elspeth 56, 60, 148 queer and trans identity 94, 112, 183, 207 queer theory/theorizing 19, 108, 118, 152, 155; queer bodies 182; queer critics 117; queer pedagogies 111; queer studies 43 race and racism 131–132, 203, 204; historicist narratives of 62; institutionalized 205; materialist theorization 205; retheorizing 201–202; and school funding 197; teaching about future teachers about 129–131; White women teachers and 13 Race to the Top 14 racial barriers 74; bodies 9; capitalism 198, 202; difference 204; harassment 70 racialization 200; segregation 204; violence 73 racialized affect, pedagogy of 20 racist affect 69; threat as a 78; racist and hateful comments 77; racist comment, affective 75; racist

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rhetoric 10; racist science and eugenics 205 radicalization 70, 72, 73; process of 70–71; risk measurements 71 radical pedagogies 47 Reed, Helen 156–158; Ask Me Chocolates 149 refusal, practice of 158–161 Renold, Emma 148 research-creation event 149–151 resistance: combating 99; dynamic 99–103; flowing 99; stifling 99; student 99 response-ability 184 resurgent nationalism 206–207 Revelles, Beatrice 148 right-wingers, White 205 Ringrose, Jessica 8, 14, 16, 17, 72, 78–80, 122, 148, 180, 188 risk measurements 71; radicalization 71 Saldanha, Arun 7, 18, 79; interview with 197–207; Psychedelic White 200; “So What Is Race?” 202 Sapp, Jeff, Cultivating Social Justice Teachers 94 school-dress 179–181; and power struggle 179 school funding, and racism 197 schools 166; affective atmospheres in 16–18; phantomatic threat relations in 73; Prevent policy in 76; statutory guideline for 70–71; and traumatic shame 55–56; in the United States 108; systems, Anglophone nations 164; uniforms 18; an Australian schools 179–181 scratch 10, 14, 15 scratchings, affective 3–5 Sedgwick, Eve 10–11, 19, 56–58, 71, 72, 144, 248 Seigworth, Greg 15; interview with 87–93 sensation 4, 6, 16, 98, 124 sense-event 73, 76 sentiments, and teacher education 12 settler colonialism 7, 102, 108, 109, 114, 153, 156, 209, 210, 215, 221, 223, 224; settler colonial erasure/ dispossession 200, 219, 225 shame: as an affect 54–55; Affect theory and 56–58; multiple 61, 65; pedagogies of 55, 63–65; in South Africa 61; traumatic 55; witnessing 64

262

Index

Simondon, Gilbert 167, 168, 169 Simpson, Audra 159 Sleeter, Christine 96 social constructionism/constructionists 19, 202, 204, 205 social justice 94, 96; the arts and 156; education 94–97, 99, 103, 105; feminist 46 social media 92, 93 sound 3–5, 8, 15, 17, 99–100, 124, 128, 130, 213, 230, 237, 239 South Africa 54, 55, 59; post-apartheid period in 61 spaces, racialized 114, 202 spacetimematter (spacetimemattering) 184–188 Spengler, Oswald, Decline of the West, The 51 Spinoza 40, 41, 46, 52, 89, 90, 144–147, 165, 175, 183, 204, 231, 232; Deleuze commentary on 175; Ethics 40, 89, 144 Spinozist-inspired philosophy 5, 73 Spivak, Gayatri 47, 59, 60, 65, 116, 118 standardization/standards 10, 14 Stewart, Kathleen 155 Stockton, Kathryn 161 student bodies, “proper” 12; participation, and class readings 108–109; student resistance 94–95, 99 subjectivity 19, 50, 55, 57, 80, 87, 128, 129, 154 Tatum, Beverly 198; Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria 197 teacher, as a “good” White woman 12; as motherly facilitator 12 teacher education, antiracism 122–125; and instructors of color 129; public feelings and 12; social justice, resistance to 12; university-based 94; teacher educators, and future teachers 122; university-based teacher education programs 94 teacher “revolts” 13 teaching 16; affectively 31; immanence and 15; stories about 13; teaching and learning, complexities of 11; moods,

influences on 11; teaching practice, and future teachers 129–131; teaching work, resistance and 129 Terranova, Tiziana 168 territorialize/territoralization 41, 50, 75, 76, 233 terrorism 74; 9/11 76, 79; knowledge production of 71; as a posthuman affect 73; threat of 69 terrorists, “would be” 71; students as potential 70 terror threats 77; see also threats thinking-feeling 9 threat, and phantomatic space 74 threat-assemblages 70, 72; and Muslimness 74; in schools 76 threatening bodies, of Muslims 72, 77–78 threats: affective intensity of 71; and classrooms 69–70; in classrooms 78–80; post-threat classrooms 77; phantom assemblages of 77; phantomatic 72; as political affect 80; as a posthuman affect 73; and Prevent policy 72; as racist affect 78; in schools 74 Tomkins, Silvan 56, 57, 62 trans* studies 89 trans-Atlantic slave trade 108, 117 trauma, emotions of 65 traumatic shame 55; lessons from Disgrace 61 Truman, Sarah E. 150, 151, 156 Trump, Donald 51, 125, 131, 138, 201; White right-wingers 205; Trump era, attack on diversity in the 205 Truth and Reconciliation Commission 54, 61 UK Prevent policy 10, 69, 70, 73; and Muslim students 70 underrepresented groups, in teacher education 96 uniforms Australian school 179; gendered 179 United States 206; classroom safety in 110–114; moving into a new era 11; schools in 108; teacher “revolts” 13 vibration(s) 4, 8, 171

Index “War on Terror” era 76 Weheliye, Alexander 3, 4, 17, 117, 118 Western coloniality 117; metaphysics 97; pedagogical intervention 14; schools, views of 14 whiteness and US public schools 108 114, 130–133, 199, 200; middleclass whiteness 207 white supremacy 122–123, 202; expressions of 10; institutional racisms and 206; intellectualization of 123; White right-wingers, and Trump’s election 205 White teacher savior 12; women teachers 13, 20; “good” White woman, teacher as 12; preservice teachers 122–124

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willful failure 149; willfulness 159 Willis, Paul, Learning to Labor 199 women 47–48; as refugees 47 Woodward, Kathleen 55, 58, 62 Woolf, Virginia 47 Wynter, Sylvia 110, 117–119 xenophobic rhetoric 7, 10 young Black men, and police brutality 198; young trans 179 Zeichner, Ken 96 Zembylas, Michalinos 5, 11, 12, 15, 65, 80, 122, 123 Zenkov, Kristien, Cultivating Social Justice Teachers 94