Theories of Affect and Concepts in Generic Skills Education : Adventurous Encounters [1 ed.] 9781527502628, 9781443895736

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Theories of Affect and Concepts in Generic Skills Education

Theories of Affect and Concepts in Generic Skills Education: Adventurous Encounters Edited by

Edyta Just and Wera Grahn

Theories of Affect and Concepts in Generic Skills Education: Adventurous Encounters Edited by Edyta Just and Wera Grahn This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Edyta Just, Wera Grahn and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-9573-3 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9573-6

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations .................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Theories of Affect and Concepts in Generic Skills Education: Adventurous Encounters Edyta Just Chapter One ................................................................................................. 9 Affect and Concept or Zero’Gravity Consciousness Edyta Just Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 29 Monster Pedagogy: A Failing Approach to Teaching and Learning in the University Line Henriksen, Erika Kvistad and Sara Orning Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 47 From DIRT to SECRETS: Trojan Horse Pedagogy and the Interdisciplinary Social Justice Classroom Sal Renshaw and Renée Valiquette Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 65 Atmospheric Encounters: Generic Competences in Light of Posthumanist Teaching Practices With/On Affectivity Malou Juelskjær Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 89 Governmentality In/Around the “Cologne” Events: Developing Generic Competences in Struggling with a Challenging Event Sigrid Schmitz Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 111 Critical Thinking in Gender Studies Education: Theory and Practice Anna Lundberg and Ann Werner

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Contents

Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 131 Affecting Feminist Pedagogies: Performing Critical Thinking in between Social Networking Sites and Contemporary Literature Beatriz Revelles-Benavente Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 151 “Let the thinking breathe.” Corporeal Thinking in Classroom Settings Olga CielemĊcka Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 171 “Safety” Under the Question: Contesting Competences and Affects in a Feminist Classroom Olga Plakhotnik Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 191 Imagining Professional Futures in Feminist Classrooms Nina Lykke Contributors ............................................................................................. 211 Index ........................................................................................................ 217

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 4-1. Examples of the interior layout of an education building. Images by Malou Juelskjær (2015) Fig. 4-2. Drawing by students13 (2015). The group made two, similar drawings one with a green light “inside” and one with red Fig. 4-3. Students’ PowerPoint (2015) Fig. 4-4. An image taken by the students (2015) Table 7-1. Feelings appearing in the FB page and in the novels (Colour Centrefold) Fig. 10-1. The triangle of activism-theory-professionalism

INTRODUCTION THEORIES OF AFFECT AND CONCEPTS IN GENERIC SKILLS EDUCATION: ADVENTUROUS ENCOUNTERS EDYTA JUST

Please bring strange things. Please come bringing new things. (Le Guin 2001, 404)

“Adventurous”—the meaning of this word has been evolving through the centuries. At present, one of the most common definitions that one can come across, is “willing to take risks or to try out new methods, ideas or experiences; involving new ideas or methods; full of excitement” (Google). If we agree on this significance of “adventurous” then “adventurous encounters” would stand for encounters that are daring, rejuvenating and exciting, and engender something new, something thrilling and stimulating. Yet, what does make encounters adventurous? Perhaps difference? Perhaps novelty? Perhaps surprise? Diverse ingredients when brought together in unexpected and unusual ways may not only seem appealing but also result in positive and affirmative un-thought-of ways of thinking, feeling and doing. They may. Thus, always, “[p]lease bring strange things. Please come bringing new things”. . . During the last few years, the concept of generic skills/competences has spread across universities. The introduction of generic competences, which students should achieve during their university education, is important because it enables the redefinition of educational goals. Education no longer means only a top-down and unquestionable transfer of knowledge; it aims to inspire students to develop and use critical and creative forms of thinking, feeling and doing. Generic skills demand changes in the design and delivery of the content, teaching methods and

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Introduction

learning activities, and they may positively rearrange forms of interaction in classes and their dynamics. On the one hand, the need to stimulate the development of generic competences among graduates might be perceived as motivated and fuelled by neoliberal desire. On the other hand, generic skills can enable students to comprehend their own complex layers of subjectivity and embodiment; perceive, think, feel, and act differently; go beyond the beaten track; escape easy interpretations; and welcome and comprehend the plenitude of various forms of life and ways of living. Being sensitive and responding to educational transformations, but also to the growing need to critically and creatively reflect upon generic competences and the ways in which they can be acquired, this collection aims to contribute to the ways of thinking about and discussing generic skills and the methods through which they might be achieved. Moreover, it brings attention to those concrete pedagogical practices that may facilitate the achievement of generic competences among graduates. Some of the authors in this volume address and problematize skills in a general and overall way, and some focus on particular competences. Universities tend to name or refer to generic skills/competences differently. In this volume, with regard to the particular competences, emphasis is put on the following skills: an ability for abstract thinking, analysis and synthesis; a capacity to generate new ideas (creativity); an ability to be critical and self-critical; an appreciation of and respect for difference (understood as an appreciation of and respect for not only cultural differences, but also multiple axes of differentiation such as: gender, sex, “race,” ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, class and religious beliefs); interpersonal and interaction skills; an ability to work in a team; an ability to work in an international context; an ability to adapt to and act in new situations; an ability to develop critically enabling and empowering social fantasy; and a commitment to safety. “Please bring strange things. Please come bringing new things” . . . Diverse ingredients, surprising configurations, invigorating experiences. This collection considers and reflects on theories of affect and concepts that complicate, problematize and contribute to the understanding of generic competences and to the comprehension of the processes in which they are or can be acquired. It explores, examines and discusses ways in which theories of affect and/or concepts might inspire and/or become applied in teaching practices for example, in the designing and delivery of content, teaching methods and learning activities that aim to result in generic skills among students. Furthermore, this volume brings to the fore

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new theories of affect and concepts, which can act as inspiration for generic skills-oriented education. Finally, it describes concrete examples of educational practices motivated by theories of affect and concepts; practices, which have already been applied or might be implemented. In doing so, this collection revitalises and rejuvenates the concept of generic skills/competences and the ways in which they might be achieved. It also advocates daring, refreshing and original pedagogical practices that renew and invigorate the meaning of and approach to teaching and learning in the context of the present landscapes of higher education. “Please bring strange things. Please come bringing new things” . . . Different ingredients, astonishing configurations, energising experiences. —Adventurous Encounters. In its considerations and reflections, this volume proceeds experimentally by engendering adventurous encounters and kaleidoscopic encounters between different theories that result in refreshing and appealing meanings of affect and concepts. These various theories—or “different ingredients” —originate from various fields of study, yet they predominantly come from the critically creative, anti-oppressive feminist conceptual framework that is committed to social and political change—a terrain of “adventurous encounters” itself. Furthermore, this volume also embodies appealing encounters between theories of affect and concepts—some born during theoretical encounters practised in this collection, some arriving directly from different academic fields, including Gender Studies—and generic skills/competences and teaching practices. These surprising and gleaming configurations bring to the fore the importance of constant productions of meaning, gestures and hiccups, multiple perspectives, relationality and affective capacity, failure and crisis, agency of the non-human, critical social fantasy, and affirmative and generative ways of thinking, feeling and acting in vast pedagogical environments and contemporary—Gender Studies, Educational Psychology, Social Justice, Literature, and any Other—classrooms. “Please bring strange things. Please come bringing new things” . . . Since creative theories concerning pedagogical undertakings in present-day classrooms are necessary, and since the Deleuzian/Guattarian philosophy might actualize its potential within the context of pedagogy, Edyta Just in the opening chapter tries to map to what extent in a snapshot of a class duration one can create a vortex composed of “planes of

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Introduction

composition” and “immanence” concomitantly negotiating between “chaos” and “opinion.” She poses questions regarding the possibility of engendering affective indetermination (“sensory becoming”/“affect”) and conceptual novelty (“conceptual becoming”/“concept”), and she questions the duration of affect’s indiscernibility, the sustainability of creation and further transformation and change, and the endurability of being. She also calls for a teacher to become at once an artist and a philosopher, or an artphil (a’p). In doing so, she complicates the meaning and understanding of generic competences along the lines of sensory and conceptual becomings and “strata,” and also highlights the possibilities of engendering pedagogical practices in contemporary classrooms that are inspired and motivated by theories of affect and concepts of “concept,” per se. Line Henriksen, Erika Kvistad and Sara Orning approach generic skills as not easily testable and propose to look at teaching and learning practices in academic education through the lens of what they call monster pedagogy. They contend that both teaching and learning are a collaborative, unruly, subjective, and relational process. Furthermore, they appealingly argue that learning is always a monster; pedagogy is the practice of daily failure and pedagogical practices are inherently unpredictable. Drawing on the emerging scholarly and artistic field of Monster Studies and strategies from feminist and norm-critical pedagogy, their chapter tells three stories about teaching and academic practices that all feature the monster in some form. They explore aspects of the experience of teaching and learning that are often seen as unproductive, excessive, unnecessary or wasteful: failures, emotional responses and even embodiment itself. In this way, Henriksen, Kvistad and Orning consider how monster pedagogy allows us to reimagine failure in university classrooms and to affirmatively challenge and positively transform the spaces of academic education. The chapter by Sal Renshaw and Renée Valiquette brings to the fore the insights from ethical pedagogy that aim at social and environmental transformations and rest on the recognition that knowledge and those who produce it are subjects in relation. Concomitantly, however, it argues that neoliberal logic—dominant in contemporary universities—promotes and fosters what is called a phenomenology of individualism and separation. Against this logic, the authors of the chapter have developed Trojan horse pedagogy, and the delivery of the Trojan horse model of course saturates classrooms with an epistemology of immanent and affective relationality. Trojan horse pedagogy has found its expression and actualization in innovative Interdisciplinary Concept classes taught at the Department of Gender Equality and Social Justice at Nipissing University, Canada. The

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course has centred on different themes such as DIRT, SLOTH, WATER, GENIUS, and SECRETS. Those titles, as the authors make clear, are intended to evoke the curiosity of a neoliberal consumer, whereas the structure of the course has promoted an immanent, affective and relational knowledge production that allows for social justice to thrive and social transformations to occur. In her chapter, Malou Juelskjær uses a posthuman framework that recognises the agency of the nonhuman and the import of space/time and affect to reconceptualise and rejuvenate the understanding of generic competences, and to recommend daring forms of teaching and learning. According to Juelskjær, sensuous, affective, material, and spatial qualities of pedagogical practices matter and should be taken under consideration in educational institutions. She suggests that we approach generic competences as emergent with and through content, and she defines them as more-thanhuman in order to be/come. She argues that both content and competences actualize as intra-active forces of materialization, and that competences are not something to acquire but rather they stand for an entangled becoming with no beginning or end. The posthuman framework inspires ways of thinking about both competences and pedagogical undertakings. In her chapter, Juelskjær proposes not only a highly creative take on competences but also on ways of teaching and learning. She advocates for atmospheric encounters to occur in present-day classrooms. Such encounters have already come into being during a course on Affect Theory and Contemporary Management: Psy-leadership in/of Organizations in Educational Psychology, which Juelskjær co-taught with Dorthe Staunæs at Aarhus University in Denmark. How do we talk about and understand complex “realities” and contemporary phenomena? How do we support students in developing generic competences that will allow them to articulate their own position and points of view? The probable answer would be to provide them with theoretical backgrounds and methodological tools for analyses—to provide guidance for students to gain knowledge and develop their own critical-reflexive standpoints. If the analyses concern structures of power, various forms of oppression and exclusion, then the feminist conceptual framework is indispensable. Those are the main conclusions of the chapter by Sigrid Schmitz. To support these claims, Schmitz brings an example from a seminar she conducted at Graz University, Austria, where she analysed together with her students the debates that followed the sexual harassment and the sexualized attacks of New Year’s Eve 2016 in Cologne, Germany. One of the main aims of the seminar was to support students in developing their own critical and creative reflections and

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Introduction

arguments. By grounding the analysis in Foucauldian concepts and conceptual insights from Feminist Studies, Feminist Science Studies, intersectionality, and Postcolonial Studies, and by using didactic concepts of feminist materialist pedagogies, the students were able to reflect on the entangled sexism and racism in the arguments and regulations following the “Cologne” event, simultaneously learning how to formulate and negotiate their individual standpoints. Anna Lundberg and Ann Werner in their text problematize and further advance the understanding of the generic skill/competence known as the ability to think critically. Even though, as they argue, critical thinking as a concept has been discussed and employed for many years, still what is actually meant by criticism remains problematic and ambivalent. To ease this ambivalence, Lundberg and Werner discuss the concept of critical thinking and try to reflect on how it is possible to engage in this activity in both theory and practice. They bring to the fore an interesting overview of the concept (critique and critical thinking as negative, aesthetic, philosophical, political, and finally communicative), but also focus on its various meanings (e.g., reactive and generative aspects of the concept of critique) and applications in the field of Gender Studies, where critical thinking is regarded as imperative. Their discussion adds to the comprehension of the concept and simultaneously the skill of critique and critical thinking, and it highlights the importance of conceptualizing and practising critical thinking as both reactive and generative. Beatriz Revelles-Benavente discusses critical thinking not as a skill/competence but as an affective capacity and ponders how this conceptual change alters the pedagogical approach to teaching and learning contemporary literature. She also connects literature and sociology in a tangible way. In her chapter, Revelles-Benavente transforms critical thinking from a generic skill to an affective capacity via Clough’s (2009) definition of affects as radical units of analysis. Furthermore, she suggests approaching critical thinking as affective critical thinking. According to the author, affective critical thinking (as an affective capacity) de-centralizes the hegemonic power of the literary critic in favour of an affective relational communicative process, allowing students to express their feelings and points of view in a less hierarchical and a more horizontal way, and creates spaces of resistance and social change. In her essay, Revelles-Benavente presents a Facebook page where Toni Morrison’s novels are collectively discussed to show how affective critical thinking can be practised and to argue that digital platforms can

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enable the teaching and learning of critical thinking as an affective capacity. . . . [T]he torment of getting up to speak. Her heart racing, at times entirely lost for words, ground and language slipping away—that’s how daring a feat, how great a transgression it is for a woman to speak—even just open her mouth—in public . . . (Cixous 1976, 880)

With this powerful quotation and by referring to different concepts and theories which predominantly come from a feminist conceptual framework, Olga CielemĊcka explores the idea of corporeal thinking as a collective, embodied, affective, material, and dynamic process situated in the context of a classroom setting. She argues that thinking and speaking are never innocent or isolated processes and that they stimulate bodily responses. Furthermore, she discusses, problematizes and complicates the importance of embodied performance and movement in the classroom. In doing so, CielemĊcka examines and explores how to comprehend and teach critical, creative and experimental thinking together with the body, and calls for “letting the thinking breathe” by opening spaces for wandering, creativity and experimentation in contemporary classrooms. The chapter by Olga Plakhotnik explores the concept of “safety” in the feminist classroom in relation to competences and affects. It starts with an examination of how a competence-based model of education works in Gender Studies teaching and the place of a “commitment to safety” in Gender Studies generic competences. Analysing debates in feminist, queer and other radical pedagogies, Plakhotnik explores the main arguments in the critique of the commitment to safety in the classroom and calls for replacing safety with semantically opposing notions such as “crisis.” Acknowledging and building on these discussions, she considers safety to be an affective contraposition to crisis, which is constituted through Gender Studies knowledge. She complicates her conclusion with the claim that in a feminist context, safety remains an explicitly political category often at risk of being misused in the neoliberal university. Therefore, Plakhotnik underlines that a commitment to safety remains an important mission in a feminist classroom and that both safety and crisis need to be carefully and critically tackled within responsible and effective feminist pedagogical praxis. Nina Lykke focuses on a generic skill defined as the ability to develop critically enabling and empowering social fantasy suitable for fostering more socially and environmentally just futures. She discusses how skills in critical social fantasy can help students to imagine alternative futures and how they can be applied to professional work. Given her immense

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Introduction

experience with teaching Gender and Intersectionality Studies, Lykke also reflects on teaching practices that can assist students in acquiring such skills. She demonstrates how feminist conceptual tools such as the concepts of “figurations” and “worlding” and feminist transgressive methods such as creative writing and theatrical acting can be used to prompt learning processes, building on embodied thinking-feeling, and fostering the development of the generic skill in question. To present how such teaching practices can be actualized, Lykke uses as an example the course Career Paths and Professional Communication taught in the international master’s programme Gender Studies—Intersectionality and Change at Linköping University, Sweden.

Bibliography Google. Search results for “adventurous.” Accessed February 20, 2017. https://www.google.se/search?q=adventurous&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&cli ent=firefox-b-ab&gfe_rd=cr&ei=U_aqWIzGCPTk8Afq4YHwDQ. Le Guin, K., Ursula. 2001. Always Coming Home. Berkeley. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

CHAPTER ONE AFFECT AND CONCEPT OR ZERO’GRAVITY CONSCIOUSNESS EDYTA JUST

I.1 At present academic courses, inspired by critical pedagogies, by creatively combining content, teaching methods and learning activities, but also by incorporating careful and critical reflections on the role and behaviour of a teacher, aim to create among its graduates, apart from other competences, certain generic skills such as an ability for abstract thinking, analysis and synthesis; the capacity to generate new ideas (creativity); an ability to be critical and self-critical; an appreciation of and respect for difference (understood as an appreciation of and respect for not only cultural differences, but also multiple axes of differentiation such as: gender, sex, “race,” ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, class and religious beliefs); interpersonal and interaction skills; an ability to work in a team; an ability to work in an international context; and an ability to adapt to and act in new situations. As those competences appear to be of vital import regarding graduates’ abilities to negotiate and navigate in the present neoliberal order and current, highly complex cultural, social, economic, and political climates and territories, there is a constant need to monitor, discuss and revisit forms of design and manners of delivery of academic courses that assist students in acquiring generic competences. As the most daring and creative epistemologies and practices seem to grow from the application of interdisciplinary approaches; it appears both advisable and necessary to search for inspiration outside the walls of one’s academic field. With regard to the theoretical and practical realms of pedagogy, the field of philosophy seems to be fecund in concepts and ideas that can be integrated into the conceptual framework of pedagogy and pedagogical practices.

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Chapter One

Despite the fact that theories intrinsic to one field cannot always find an easy way into the theories of yet another field, certain theories may indeed become an inspiration for or grow into other theories, affirmative actions and more than real undertakings and activities. It is enough to mention the philosophical concepts of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari that have become applied not only in various academic disciplines in order to problematize and creatively discuss certain phenomena, but also to initiate new forms of academic, cultural or political being and acting. Given the wide range of contexts hospitable to the Deleuzian/Guattarian philosophy, it is of no surprise that the field of pedagogy constitutes one of those aforementioned contexts. The adaptation and assimilation of the Deleuzian/Guattarian philosophy to the conceptual framework of pedagogy and its practice have significantly grown over the last years. It is enough to mention the remarkable scholarship created by scholars such as: Jason J. Wallin, Elspeth Probyn, Inna Semetsky, Mark Connell or David R. Colle with which the drilling of the well-established contours and “strata” of the pedagogical systems appears possible. Being aware of and facing the existing research and literature that search for and discover a productive inspiration in the Deleuzian/ Guattarian theories with regard to pedagogy, I do find myself wondering why I am still prone to experiment with and venture into the Deleuzian/Guattarian “milieus” concomitantly hoping to add to the affirmative and creative manners of knowledge production? Yet, Deleuze/ Guattari appear to inspire me every time we collide. It seems that after I lay their pages to rest, words, sentences and paragraphs rearrange themselves in such a way that when, after a pause, I plunge again into the “plateaus,” I cannot straightforwardly discover the old, the known, the comprehended, and the familiar. To the contrary, I seem to repeatedly wander through over and again differentiated, unknown and only recently formed “nonhuman landscapes;” undergo “nonhuman becomings;” form exciting, and sometimes creatively frustrating, “assemblages;” and search for the sense-territories marked by a simultaneous presence and absence of gravity. The Deleuzian/Guattarian “noumenos” and “phenomenons” appear to remain forever charged with nonhuman potentia and continue to launch ceaseless becomings within the “molar”/“striated” and “molecular”/“smooth” spaces of my corporeality and stubbornly embodied subjectivity not to mention my “unconscious.” As creative theories and practices concerning pedagogical ventures in academic classrooms are of vital importance; as the Deleuzian/Guattarian philosophy might apparently actualize its potential within the context of pedagogy; and as my becomings tend to be of a different kind each time I

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enter the plateaus, I dare to conclude that the Deleuzian/Guattarian theories and concepts, especially when intersecting with my own multiplicities, still carry a promise for affirmative and stimulating insights with regard to theories and practices concerning teaching and learning and as such the formation of generic competences among academic graduates.

II.2 Scholars motivated by critical pedagogies recognize the design and delivery of content, teaching methods and learning activities as important and influential with regard to generic competences that are expected to be acquired by students (Waaldijk and Just 2010). Next to that, undoubtedly a figure of a teacher and her/his/their roleplay a significant part in a given class assemblage. Thus, the frequently asked questions mainly and precisely concern content, teaching methods, learning activities, and the role of a teacher. Referring to the embodied experience, I tend to contend that only when all those elements become neatly woven and only when there is an awareness that students do form intrinsic elements of a class assemblage then one may hopefully anticipate that generic skills can possibly be obtained by students. As generic competences practically refer to the subject able to become an immanent expression of difference; perceive and think differently; reject representational manners of comprehension; go beyond the beaten track; resist timeworn customs, habits, beliefs, and opinions; escape easy interpretations and well-too-familiar doxa, and affirmatively welcome the novelty of being and acting, it seems that the Deleuzian/Guattarian insights, which assert novel and daring forms of both existence and existing, might be of assistance with regard to the manners of creating spaces and dimensions in academic classrooms.

III.3 (1–2) For Deleuze and Guattari embodied subjectivity, consciousness and the unconscious are always a crowd, a multiplicity. They state, There are no individual statements, there never are. Every statement is the product of a machinic assemblage, in other words, of collective agents of enunciation (take “collective agents” to mean not people or societies but multiplicities). (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 37)

Furthermore, subjectivity, consciousness and the unconscious are recurrently in the making thus they are prone to change and transformation at all

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Chapter One

times. Significantly, though consisting of multiplicities both subjectivity and consciousness also contain molar/striated formations next to the molecular/smooth. The same applies to the unconscious. Deleuze and Guattari argue that, it does not suffice to attribute molar multiplicities and mass machines to the pre-conscious, reserving another kind of machine or multiplicity for the unconscious. For it is the assemblage of both of these that is the province of the unconscious. (1987, 35)

This indicates, among others, that one can easily cross the well-known boundaries (become a molecule), but also stay within the frames and walls of the all-too-familiar borders (become a molar). According to this creative team of philosophers encounters bring about an actualization of a “virtual” concomitantly promising that whatever is produced stands for pure, immanent creation; becomes an expression of difference and is always new. Semetsky argues that Deleuze’s philosophy of the virtual frees thinking from common sense: for him, it is life, or experience, that activates thought, and it is thought that affirms life. (2009, 449)

Following the Deleuzian/Guattarian ways of arguing, I would contend that consciousness continually becomes a creative “possible” (where the possible is understood as a “sensory becoming,” “sensation”/“affect,” becoming other, an expression of otherness, suspension, and deterritorialization) and a novel “actual” (where the actual is compre-hended as a “conceptual becoming,” “concept,” “absolute form of hetero-geneity,” brave meanings, and new sense). The point, however, at least as I approach it, is that quite often those refreshing becomings are, so to say, simply not long and audible enough. Furthermore, I dare to argue; the results of the encounters with daring and untried elements and particles frequently get stratified and nicely covered with molar blankets not to mention encounters with the longstanding customs, habits and knowledges as those almost immediately become nothing more than the striated spaces. Ultimately then the best would be to capture a molecule in the molar and to undergo a molecularization once faced with both the surrounding “reality” and the uncanny and weird. Nevertheless, at times in order to become an embodiment of difference, a molecule, a deterritorialization, a novelty, one must undergo an experimental encounter, precisely as Semetsky argues,

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[E]xperiential and experimental encounter that would force us to think and learn, that is, to create a singular meaning for a particular experience (still un-thought-of and lacking sense). (2009, 444)

Striving to engender and promote new molecular and not molar manners of thinking, Deleuze together with Guattari in their book What is Philosophy? (2009) advocate daring and forever rejuvenating forms of thinking initiated by art and philosophy. Art’s “planes of composition,” “aesthetic figures” and sensations/affects and philosophy’s “planes of immanence,” “conceptual personae” and concepts are all meant to initiate embodiedbrain processes, which, so to speak, situate themselves between “chaos” and “opinion.” Interestingly, those new embodied-brain processes, which are possible/sensations/sensory becomings and actual/concepts/conceptual becomings, are approached as novel manners of thinking— Thinking is thought through concepts . . . or sensations and no one of these thoughts is better than another, or more fully, completely, or synthetically ‘thought’ . . . The [two] thoughts intersect and intertwine . . . (Deleuze and Guattari 2009, 198)

For those forms of thought to materialize an artist and a philosopher give a consistency to an infinite speed of appearing and disappearing of vital particles and elements, and they do it in such a way as to bring to the fore a pure embodiment of difference, vital deterritorializations and the novel and unexpected. — [A]rt, . . . and philosophy—is always confronting chaos, laying out a plane, throwing a plane over chaos. . . . philosophy wants to save the infinite by giving it consistency: it lays out the plane of immanence that, through the action of conceptual personae, takes events or consistent concepts to infinity. . . . Art wants to create the finite that restores the infinite: it lays out a plane of composition that, in turn, through the action of aesthetic figures, bears monuments or composite sensations. (Deleuze and Guattari 2009, 197)

Art and artists are supposed to launch sensory becomings that are “the action[s] by which something or someone is ceaselessly becoming-other. . . sensory becoming is otherness caught in a matter of expression” (Deleuze and Guattari 2009, 177). Sensory becoming or becoming-other signalizes a particular form of deterritorialization and an experimental state of imperceptibility. Becoming a sensation/affect indicates a certain form of suspension, hesitation, confusion, wonder, the collapse of a signifying system, disarticulation, intensity, possibility, irritation of organism,

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Chapter One

subjectification and signification, and an ultimate slide from the territory into a breathing yet formless universe. To be affected is to become affirmatively nothing thus everything. It means to reach the zone of indiscernibility and state of indetermination. [B]ecoming is an extreme contiguity within a coupling of two sensations without resemblance or, on the contrary, in the distance of a light that captures both of them in a single reflection. . . . this is not the transformation of one into other . . . but something passing from one to the other. This something can be specified only as sensation. It is a zone of indetermination, of indiscernibility, as if things, beasts, and persons . . . endlessly reach that point that immediately precedes their natural differentiation. This is what is called an affect. (Deleuze and Guattari 2009, 173)

To become an affect, a sensation, a-other is to have no contour, no trace, no recognition; it is to lose gravity at the crossroads; it is to plunge into the chaos, the universe, the infinite. Sensation is excitation itself, not insofar as it is gradually prolonged and passes into the reaction but insofar as it is preserved or preserves its vibrations. Sensation contracts the vibrations of the stimulant on a nervous surface or in a cerebral volume: what comes before has not yet disappeared when what follows appears. (Deleuze and Guattari 2009, 211)

Becoming affected and expressing vital otherness and affirmative deterritorialization indicate a possible and as such efface the strata; blur the belief in the unified and forever-the-same identity; undermine the ego; allow the ultimate empathy with all the possible others; question habits and opinions, and create or better prepare a spacious room for a new sense and new meaning. Sensation is pure contemplation, for it is through contemplation that one contracts, contemplating oneself to the extent that one contemplates the elements from which one originates. Contemplating is creating, the mystery of passive creation, sensation. Sensation fills out the plane of composition and is filled with itself by filling itself with what it contemplates: it is ‘enjoyment’ and ‘selfenjoyment.’ It is a subject, or rather an inject. (Deleuze and Guattari 2009, 212)

Philosophy and philosophers, on the other hand, are meant to initiate conceptual becomings comprehended as “the action[s] by which the common event eludes what is. Conceptual becoming is heterogeneity grasped in an absolute form” (Deleuze and Guattari 2009, 177). For

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conceptual becoming to occur, various molecules, particles and elements must come together in a sort of trembling manner. Vibrating, as they should, those intrinsic conceptual ingredients have to get a sort of a contour, an irregular fence preventing them from an all too quick disappearance and flight into chaos. Once brought together under the transparent and permeable umbrella, they allow new and unexpected meanings and novel senses to appear. Every concept has an irregular contour defined by the sum of its components, . . . the idea of the concept being a matter of articulation, of cutting and cross-cutting. The concept is a whole because it totalizes its components, but it is a fragmentary whole. . . . A concept is heterogenesis . . . an ordering of its components by zones of neighbourhood. It is ordinal, an intension present in all the features that make it up. The concept is in a state of survey . . . in relation to its components, endlessly traversing them according to an order without distance. (Deleuze and Guattari 2009, 16, 20)

However, to become a concept means to always expect new and unpredicted connections; it is to await new elements to enter or to abandon the scene; it is to be prepared to altogether leave the brief and provisional territory at any moment and form yet another dynamic structure that is never fixed, certain and finite but always prone to further movement ad infinitum. To undergo conceptual becoming indicates the ability to gather and temporarily hold heterogeneity in a porous embrace. It also means to ceaselessly connect or to form in a nomadic way another formless territory. To become a concept is to forever be able to think differently, anew and not to be afraid of the continual transformations of the consciousness. It equally means to constantly maintain the state of wonder and to pose critical and vital questions regarding the self and the other knowing that the ultimate answers will never be given. Conceptual becoming prevents an appearance of the final truth and as such opposes the definitive and fixed opinions and stubborn beliefs. It allows the shedding of a new creative light on the self, the other, but also on the given cultural, social or political landscapes. This fascinating heterogenesis does not support short-cuts of easy recognition, fast interpretation and feasible ultimate conclusions. On the contrary, it makes one persistently aware of and searching for a new sense and new meaning. Thought demands ‘only’ movement that can be carried to infinity. What thought claims by right, what it selects, is infinite movement or the movement of the infinite. (Deleuze and Guattari 2009, 37)

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IV.4 (1–2) I would argue that for students to achieve generic competences means in fact for them to be able to undergo sensory and conceptual becomings on their own that is, to repeat briefly, to be able to capture a molecule in the molar and to experience a molecularization when in an encounter with “reality” or eerieness. To affirmatively become other and to creatively fold heterogeneity on a daily basis without any preceding training are not at all that impossible. Nevertheless, as I have previously argued, sometimes certain efforts need to be undertaken in order to launch such vital becomings. As new manners of thinking, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, might be engendered by art and philosophy—is it then doable and likely for a teacher to become not only an artist or a philosopher but, as I tend to name it, an artphil (a’p)? As art and philosophy operate consecutively by planes of composition, aesthetic figures and sensations, and planes of immanence, conceptual personae and concepts—to what extent in a snapshot of a class duration can an educator create, using as intrinsic elements her/his/their own embodied presence, content, teaching methods, and learning activities, an indiscernible vortex composed of the entwined planes that will result in the sensory and conceptual becomings of students? However, it does not suffice to construct separate planes but in fact to cause them to intersect. Deleuze and Guattari respect the separateness of art and philosophy, and they explicitly emphasize that sensory becoming, initiated by art, differs from the conceptual one, engendered by philosophy (2009, 177). This reverence, however, does not prevent them from advocating the necessary “intrinsic interference” between them (Deleuze and Guattari 2009, 217). This interference is necessary because proximity, an entanglement between sensory and conceptual becoming, enables the first to charge the latter. It assists consciousness in becoming a plateau wherein unsteady territory, prone to connections and indeterminate nomadism, is frequently replaced by its productive absence which in return assists and helps to generate another vibrating landscape. Importantly, a zero gravity consciousness—experiencing an “unbearable lightness of being”— should always find its grounding moments. Yet, the landscapes of the magnetic attraction must be about the short-lived affinities with a robust capacity for ongoing and ceaseless gravity supply disruptions (zero’gravity). It is a matter of carefully tiptoeing in-between chaos and opinion. Neither infinite deterritorialization nor immeasurable doxa is what consciousness should become. Deleuze and Guattari both warn against the short-cuts of the habitual manners of thinking, but also against

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the all too wild and definite deterritorializations as they may simply result in a one-way journey to the void of the “black hole.” A possible, becoming-other, affective consciousness needs in the speed of light to equally become an actual, heterogenous, conceptual one, but a conceptual consciousness must always and already be on its way to infinity. It is, however, not only a question of creating and simultaneously inviting the planes for an experimental interference, but also of ensuring that they will result in competences and knowledges charged with the potentia of initiating necessary and vital changes and transformations on the personal, but also cultural, social and political levels. Therefore, it is crucial, apart from initiating sensory and conceptual becomings, to point to and address the existence of “strata”/molars. It is as Semetsky stresses, reading Deleuze and Guattari in the context of education, that powerful becomings are indeed about pure deterritorializations and an ultimate actualization of difference. Yet, for progress to happen attentiveness to and awareness of the strata are of the highest import (Semetsky 2009, 452). Furthermore, when becoming an artphil (a’p) one needs to be aware that embodied subjectivities have their highly diversified say with regard to the initiated degrees of the possible and the evoked contour lines of an actual. Ultimately, one has to bear in mind that a vortex created out of the entangled planes might be as alluring and productive as it is repulsing and deadly. Therefore, whenever one dares to navigate between chaos and opinion, one must pose questions regarding the possibility of engendering affective indetermination and conceptual novelty; the evoked duration of affect’s indiscernibility; a conjured conceptual freshness; the endurability of being (that is endurability of an embodied subjectivity/subject); and the sustainability of creation and further transformation and change.

V.5 (1–2; 3–4) The content of the class is usually conditioned by the overall thematic framework of the course. The teaching methods such as lectures, seminars, workshops, and tutorials, and the learning activities including discussions, active participation by students, work in groups, practical assignments, experimental approaches to text and data, creative writing, and artistic performances vary depending on the assessment of their utility or the possibility of their being applied in a given educational context. Suddenly, content, teaching methods, learning activities, and teacher form vast planes that challengingly balance between chaotic speed and head over heels doxa or do they? They should.

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A plane of composition stands for an in-the-middle snapshot of a universe—intense, diversified, formless, and possible. This vibrating snapshot contains aesthetic figures that are nothing more than pure sensations/affects. The quivering shot of the infinite means pure deterritorialization, an ambiguous zone of indetermination and an unknown space of indiscernibility. The frames and their joins hold the compounds of sensations, hold up figures, and intermingle with their upholding, with their own appearance. . . . Frames or sections . . . belong to compounds of sensations whose faces, whose interfaces, they constitute. But however extendable this system may be, it still needs a vast plane of composition that carries out a kind of deframing following lines of flight that pass through the territory only in order to open it onto the universe, that go from house-territory to towncosmos, . . . (Deleuze and Guattari 2009, 187)

There is a canvas of a classroom space, a sculpture of a teacher, a genuine book of content, a painting of teaching methods and yet another one of learning activities. Separately and consecutively, canvas, sculpture, book, and paintings become intense and imperceptible. They share no organism, no subjectification and no signification. They stand for an absence of strata and suspension; they mean disarticulation; they are differentiation and destratification; they have the temperature of absolute zero. Furthermore, in their necessary, constant and ongoing gallery-like entanglements they experience nothing more than persistent otherness/othering and embody nothing else but an uncontaminated difference. The daring and unexpected settings of a classroom space with a reverse linearity of time of the typical class-like proceedings—is this a classroom? An embodied sculpture of an aesthetic figure of a teacher who with an original posture/gestures/face/sounds passes into affects of imperceptibility and indetermination: is that person a teacher? Is this a classroom? A book of content in a close affinity with an embodied sculpture populated by an incommensurable crowd of letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, and theories disappearing with a “line of flight” into a charismatic infinite universe: [the book of content’s] writer uses words, but by creating a syntax that makes them pass into sensation that makes the standard language stammer, tremble, cry, or even sing: this is the style, the ‘tone,’ the language of sensations, or the foreign language within language that summons forth a people to come, . . . (Deleuze and Guattari 2009, 176)

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—a moment of suspension and—a-gain—beloved indetermination: what is this “reality”? What is this self? What is this other? What is this phenomenon? Is that person a teacher? Paintings of teaching methods and learning activities spread on a classroom’s canvas do not allow a signifying system to enter the scene; they refuse interpretation and in a rhizomatic way turn into a destratifying creation: “[t]he [rhizome] line no longer forms a contour, and instead passes between things, between points. It belongs to a smooth space” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 505)—a moment of wonder and of stopping short and—a-gain—the ultimate questions: what is this “reality”? What is this self? Is there a self? What is this other? Is there an other? What is this phenomenon? Phenomenon? Is this a classroom? Classroom? Inscribed on the plane . . . are haecceities, . . . continuums of intensities or continuous variations, . . . becomings, which have neither culmination nor subject, but draw one another into zones of proximity or undecidability; smooth spaces, composed from within striated space. . . . intensities beginning at a degree zero, in the matter of variation, in the medium of becoming or transformation, and in the smoothing of space. A powerful nonorganic life that escapes the strata, cuts across assemblages, and draws an abstract line without contour, a line of nomad art and itinerant metallurgy. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 507)

The plane of immanence is a vast landscape with a continually fleeing horizon line populated by feverish assemblages; it is a continuum; it goes on endlessly and so does an unexpected sense, and so does a rejuvenating meaning. The plane is like a desert that concepts populate without dividing it up. The only regions of the plane are concepts themselves, but the plane is all that holds them together. The plane has no other regions than the tribes populating and moving around on it. It is the plane that secures conceptual linkages with ever increasing connections, and it is concepts that secure the populating of the plane on an always renewed and variable curve. (Deleuze and Guattari 2009, 37)

A conceptual persona, that is a teacher in disguise or a simulacrum of the evoked “human” presence, carries concepts in her/his/their embrace and sets them loose like balloons on a run, crashes their china-like frames on the wooden floor or gladly transforms their internal chemistry. Sentences, words and letters—the whole beauty of linguistics—from a book’s pages challengingly mingle with a brief smile or taunting smirk of a teacher’s face; theories made audible with the volume of a smooth or

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scratchy teacher’s voice turn and twist surprised by their multiplicity and their trembling epistemological status. Uncanny interconnections formed in-between theories and empirical data appear and then alter their intensity, contours and genome when sieved through a performance, a piece of creative writing or the multiplicities intrinsic to group work. Using corporeal expressions of an unconventional origin; forming sentences that seem to grow on ground borrowed from outside the classroom’s walls; bringing a plenitude of empirical and theoretical connections-dis-connections and content-oxymoron(s); problematizing the unity of the self; “[t]he plane is like a row of doors” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 508); problematizing the unity of the other; becoming silent with an out-of-nowhere question; delaying the truth; not recognizing; postponing the answer; fuming the senses; not representing; breaking the genealogy of clashing vocal cords with a melody of a YouTube clip or a visual/sonic feast cooked by the selected movie or episode and as such giving a shortlived consistency that gives a new/daring sense and meaning to various chaotic phenomena, self and other, and concomitantly securing a ceaseless anti-opinion movement of this very sense and meaning of these various chaotic phenomena, self and other. The plane consists abstractly, but really, in relations of speed and slowness between unformed elements, . . . consistency concretely ties together heterogeneous, disparate elements as such: it assures the consolidation of fuzzy aggregates, in other words, multiplicities of the rhizome type. In effect, consistency, proceeding by consolidation, acts necessarily in the middle, by the middle, and stands opposed to all planes of principle or finality. . . . Never unifications, never totalizations, but rather consistencies or consolidations. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 507)

VI.6 (1–2; 3–4–5) [An I]ntrinsic type of interference [occurs] when concepts and conceptual personae seem to leave a plane of immanence that would correspond to them, as to slip in among . . . the sensations and aesthetic figures, on another plane; and similarly in the other cases. These slidings are so subtle, . . . that we find ourselves on complex planes that are difficult to qualify. (Deleuze and Guattari 2009, 217)

A plane of composition should form a unique assemblage with the plane of immanence. Aesthetic figures turn into conceptual personae and vice versa. They are fast and those transformations cannot be easily discerned. Concepts and affects intermingle in an intense embrace.

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The plane of composition of art and the plane of immanence of philosophy can slip into each other to the degree that parts of one may be occupied by entities of the other. (Deleuze and Guattari 2009, 66)

The canvas of a classroom space in a transparent manner encompasses a sculpture of a teacher through whom a book of content and a painting of teaching methods shine like a blue moon phenomenon. A painting of learning activities links with a sculpture; attaches itself to a canvas and sneaks into a book of content. Assemblages of moving contours and spaces of pure indiscernibility and deterritorialization—respecting each other due to a reciprocal etiquette—ensure a simultaneous disappearance and re-dis-appearance of the self, other and “reality.” Once the self, other and “reality” re-dis-appear they never become the same; they are never finished; never-stratified, and never fixed. However, to re-dis-appear they need to disappear, and they disappear so they may re-dis-appear again. Affects squeezed out of intersecting elements of a class assemblage make a spacious room for a new sense, and concepts formed due to corporeal entanglements with theories and empirical input fill the room with a redis-appearing, constantly becoming new meaning. Suspension and indetermination—what are these? What does this mean? Is there this? What is “a” this?—intersect with and support a voiceover of gravitational forces of conceptual contours that bring an answer by simultaneously extending its duration ad infinitum. Affective, zero gravity consciousness encompasses all the possible affinities and its vital processes of othering and deterritorializations promise a post-human salvation from the deadly representation-based customs, Symbolic and Real identifications, practised habits, stubborn and harmful egos, attachment to the identity of the self and the other, sympathy for norms and ultimate truth. Yet, a possible consciousness also needs to find its trembling territory to rest though only for a brief moment. Nevertheless, the territory must tremble and at times in order to cease to exist it requires an electric shock of affect supporting the constant movement far away from the possible petrification, laziness and security provided customarily by doxa. Therefore, the classroom questions concerning the “a” this? the “a” it?—and its meaning?—require a reply which by not being “the replay” supports and prevents the plane of immanence from a dangerous solidification. A new meaning, which the reply brings, must be equipped with open doors or “bridges”—“the concept also has an exconsistency with other concepts, when their respective creation implies the construction of a bridge on the same plane” (Deleuze and Guattari 2009, 20)—which promise ceaseless and unending connections, but sometimes a new sense must be also equipped with a

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senseless indetermination; with an affect that secures and ensures an existence and fluctuated breathing of infinity. [C]oncepts, sensations, . . . become undecidable, at the same time as philosophy, art, . . . become indiscernible, as if they shared the same shadow that extends itself across their different nature and constantly accompanies them. (Deleuze and Guattari 2009, 218)

The interference of the planes, that is the entanglements and forces of connections between teacher, content, teaching methods, and learning activities; between canvases, sculptures, paintings, and books; between various forms of corporealities, matters, particles, and intensive multiplicities not only secures an ongoing vital creation of an undetermined novelty, but also protects the consciousness. It safeguards its landscapes from a nonreturnable disappearing into chaos, simultaneously not allowing laziness and dangerous, a certain and convinced satisfaction to enter the scene. The enactment of sensory (a possible) and conceptual (an actual) becomings should happen simultaneously in a smooth indiscernible motion. That created on the classroom canvas that is self-less, other-less, “reality”-less consecutively turns into a-self, a-other, a-“reality” to a-gain become selfless, other-less, “reality”-less a-gain ad infinitum. In this sense, affective deterritorialization and conceptual novelty both constitute vital forces of creation. Apparently, the interference of the planes renegotiates the places of the consciousness’ in-between-ness by indicating that to be in-between does not only mean to touch upon chaos but to constantly challenge doxa by becoming a-opinion that is always already a-anti-opinion. However, the extent to which consciousness may become a possible and an actual can vary significantly. Even if the planes are created and even if the experiments that Semetsky talks about, do occur still it might happen that they will not “force us to think and learn, . . . to create a singular meaning (still un-thought-of and lacking sense)” (2009, 444). An unconscious is a vast territory inhabited by molecules and molars and it cannot be easily predicted what the encounters might result in and bring about. Furthermore, both consciousness and unconscious do not exist in a void but belong to embodied subjects. Life histories, former experiences, sensations, and thoughts are written into bodies, the embodied unconscious, and the embodied brain. Geo-political locations, cultures and multiple aspects of embodied identities such as gender, sexual orientation, “race,” ethnicity, age, dis/ability or religious views do matter. Similarly, manners and forms of interactions can differ considerably. Deleuze and Guattari, while referring to the work of art, stress that artists by casting vast planes of composition populated by affects not only “give them to

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us,” but also “make us become with them, [and] draw us into the compound” (2009, 175). Yet, when becoming an artphil (a’p) one must be aware that sometimes the drawing into the compound may simply fail. Recognizing in students various modes of individuation that nevertheless are prone to transformations, an artphil (a’p) may play with planes of composition and immanence trying to tune them and make them resonate with the singularities and individuations of the embodied subjects in process. This requires constant adjustments of the entanglements and interactions between a sculpture of a teacher, a book of content and paintings of teaching methods and learning activities. Simultaneously, however, in a sort of anti-neoliberal drive it would be advisable to realize that sometimes: “no, we cannot.” Undoubtedly, this realization should not stop and prevent one from initiating necessary and creative experimentations and daring undertakings in order to launch vital sensory and conceptual becomings. Yet, the recognition and acceptance of various, maybe at first, undesirable results of interactions, help an artphil (a’p) to become aware of the diverse genealogies of the embodied subjects and increase her/his/their empathy. Furthermore, it assists an artphil (a’p) to challengingly undermine the belief in the omnipotence of educational forces and to question the logic of unproblematic knowledge transferproduction. Importantly, when striving to launch vital sensory and conceptual becomings one needs to undertake efforts related to the supervision of a summoned conceptual newness and evoked duration of affective indiscernibility. Certainly, as previously argued, becomings cannot be a priori predicted and fully controlled. The territories formed out of the entanglements between “outside,” “inside,” consciousness, the unconscious, and diversified forms of embodiment will always be marked with a question mark and stand for a sort of terrae incognitae. Still, however, a conjured conceptual novelty should be carefully supervised and the duration of deterritorialization, indetermination and zero degree intensity should not be prolonged ad infinitum. It is a challenge to measure the temperature of all individuated embodied subjects who form the class assemblage and yet some prophecy work may come in handy. When casting the planes; when populating the classroom canvas with aesthetic figures and conceptual personae; when pushing affects out of paintings of teaching methods or learning activities and forming trembling concepts, become a visioneer and try to resonate with the “people to come.” Become an ethical visioneer who bears in mind the endurability of also being of your very own being. You will never know if you were able to engender vital becomings yet in case you were, preserve and shelter embodied

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subjects from too-wild deterritorializations or head-over-heels novelty. Yes, I dare to kindly suggest, sometimes you need to allow the strata to enter the scene. Staying stratified—organized, signified, subjected—is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, . . . (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 161)

VII.7 (1–2; 4; 6) The interference of the planes and as such reciprocal beatings of sensory and conceptual becomings can sustain and keep a becoming consciousness from floating either into chaos or into opinion. However, the introduction of the striated: “line . . . between two points, . . . closed intervals. . . . clos[ing] off a surface . . .” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 481)—might also be of import in the task of guarding embodied subjects’ consciousness. This is because strata ground and help when deterritorializations and novelty are too much to take. Solid frames (though they are never really fixed and concrete) are strategic tools that bring temporary safety and a landing spot to a wondering and becoming consciousness. This is a classroom, this is a teacher and those are the bits and pieces of familiar organisms and subjects involved in a signifiersignified dance. Strata work like blankets when one experiences a zero degree temperature yet one spring day the blankets should no longer be necessary—“people to come”—one day, some day. [I]f you blow apart the strata without taking precautions, then instead of drawing the plane you will be killed, plunged into a black hole, or even dragged toward catastrophe. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 161)

Furthermore, the introduction of the strata (there are subjects, organisms, signifying systems and power relations at work) with regard to the self, other and “reality”/phenomena can help to prepare landscapes for oncoming sensory and conceptual becomings. It can also ensure the sustainability of sensory and conceptual becomings and charge them with potentia crucial to instigate necessary and vibrant transformations on personal but also cultural, social and political levels. You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and you have to keep small supplies of signifiance and subjectification, if only to turn them against their own systems when the circumstances demand it, when things, persons, even situations, force you to; and you have to keep

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small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality. Mimic the strata. . . . [Look] for the point at which . . . [to] dismantle the organization of the organs we call the organism. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 161)

To launch sensory and conceptual becomings means to make students open for the new, unknown and unexpected; to have them being able to perceive and think differently; to doubt the molar forms of the self, other and of various phenomena; to feel with any-a-other(s) while experiencing an absolute becoming-other during deterritorializations; to allow the self brief suspensions of recognition and immediate comprehension; to be able to think an unthinkable novelty; to be and act in-between gravitational forces; to postpone the ultimate truth and the finite knowledge ad infinitum. At the same time, being able to resist the molar forms, to extract molecules and to actually undergo vital molecularizations indicates the ability of abstract thinking, creativity and self-criticism; an aptitude for respect for difference; affirmative interaction skills; a capability for teamwork also at the international level, and an ability to adapt and act in new situations. Yet, to be able to object to the molar forms and welcome a full speed and intense molecularization that will last and trigger further transformations it might be useful to be aware of and be ready to get involved in conversations and negotiations with the striated landscapes. This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 161)

The planes are cast and affects and concepts circulate in a vibrant manner. The meaning and sense are lost in order to be found in a corner of a painting with learning activities or possibly on one page (the last paragraph) of a book of content. There is no self and then a-self; there is no other and then a-other; there is no “reality” and then a-“reality”: ultimate deterritorializations and the finest art nouveau-like lines of the created contours of new—always—mobile meanings. Yet, a gallery of a peculiar work of an artist united with a vast desk onto which a work of a philosopher is spread requires a roof, a couple of walls, maybe some plugins and ordered catering (for people to come). Those elements are

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crucial to form a territory, which is always already problematic in its solidity (the roof can fall in, the walls may break and food spoils), onto which to start the work and which to ultimately challenge and problematize. An artphil (a’p), when launching rejuvenating conceptual and sensory becomings with her/his/their corporeal presence, teaching methods, learning activities, and content, and with various sculptures, paintings and books, needs to evoke, conjure and present the always uneasy presence of the self, the other and the phenomena; the identities, the organisms, the significations, and the power structures; the habits, customs, convictions, beliefs, and regulations. To invoke and to play with “the,” and to articulate the negotiation with “the,” that is with strata, is a tricky activity. This is because it carries a danger of getting involved in the dialectical dance that leads through the ally of the binary oppositions into the finale of the unity, stability and sameness. Therefore, to summon the strata means to make a brief strategic move, to tighten the territory, to fix the trembling line in order to help to detect and recognize the various molar shapes and forces at work and then quickly leave this thick and sticky landscape so that conceptual and sensory becomings take place. ’’’ Recipe for ‘Classroom sensory and conceptual becomings with some strata attached’ The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, pursuing each other, perpetually. . . . Gradually the dark bar on the horizon became clear as if the sediment in an old winebottle had sunk and left the glass green. Behind it, too, the sky cleared as if the white sediment there had sunk, or as if the arm of a woman crouched beneath the horizon had raised a lamp and flat bars of white, green and yellow spread across the sky like the blades of a fan. Then she raised her lamp higher and the air seemed to become fibrous and to tear away from the green surface flickering and flaming in red and yellow fibres like the smoky fire that roars from the bonfire. Gradually the fibres of the burning bonfire were fused into one haze, one incandescence which lifted the weight of the woollen grey sky on top of it and turned it to a million atoms of soft blue. The surface of the sea slowly became transparent and lay rippling and sparkling until the dark stripes were almost rubbed out. Slowly the arm that held the lamp raised it higher and then higher until a

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broad flame became visible, an arc of fire burnt on the rim of the horizon, and all round it the sea blazed gold. (Woolf 2005, 6)

’’’

I.1–VII.7+’’’ Cole, David R. 2011. “The Actions of Affect in Deleuze: Others Using Language and the Language that we Make. . .” Educational Philosophy and Theory 43 (6): 549–561. Connell, Mark. 2008. “From Shame to Joy: Deriving a Pedagogical Approach from Gilles Deleuze.” TPS-OISE, University of Toronto, 1– 19. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London and New York: Continuum. —. 2009. What is Philosophy? London and New York: Verso. Probyn, Elspeth. 2004. “Teaching Bodies: Affects in the Classroom.” Body & Society 10 (21): 21–43. Semetsky, Inna. 2009. “Deleuze as a Philosopher of Education: Affective Knowledge/Effective Learning.” The European Legacy 14 (4): 443– 456. Wallin, Jason J. 2010. A Deleuzian Approach to Curriculum. Essays on a Pedagogical Life. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Waaldijk, Berteke, and Edyta Just. 2010. Tuning Educational Structures in Europe. Reference Points for the Design and Delivery of Degree Programmes in Gender Studies. Bilbao: Universidad de Deusto. Woolf, Virginia. 2005. The Waves. London: Collector’s Library.

CHAPTER TWO MONSTER PEDAGOGY: A FAILING APPROACH TO TEACHING AND LEARNING IN THE UNIVERSITY LINE HENRIKSEN, ERIKA KVISTAD AND SARA ORNING

Introduction: Our Monsters Pedagogy is the practice of daily failure. The conditions are never ideal: even if nothing more serious is affecting you or your students in the teaching encounter, chances are that you got the classroom where the windows do not open, so by hour two everyone is breathing pure carbon dioxide, or that the textbooks have not arrived in the bookshop yet so no one has done the reading. But even in the most perfect teaching situation, the processes of teaching and learning remain unpredictable. The learning outcomes we write, sometimes long before the teaching itself takes place—by the end of this course you will know this—are more often than not hopeful guesses, divinations, or attempts at cold-reading our own intentions. By the end of this course: but who will we all be then? And if the desired outcome is necessarily in some ways unimaginable, can we ever not fail? As teachers, we do not fully know how or what the students will learn from us. We labour over a lesson plan (“with such infinite pains and care”, says Victor Frankenstein [Shelley 2009, 58]) and it lurches to life, looking, perhaps, very different to what we had expected. This is even more the case when it comes to teaching the kind of skills that are not easily testable: we can tell, if not always as straightforwardly as we would like, whether a student has learned the Tudor line of succession or can solve a second-degree equation, but it is harder to clearly judge whether and how their critical skills or imagination are growing. In universities, this

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unpredictability tends to be overlooked or to go unspoken. Restraints on time and money tend to lead to a heavy use of top-down, one-to-many teaching; there are predetermined outcomes, lesson plans, and a clear divide between the person who teaches and the people who learn. The present-day tendency to conceive of the university as a business only contributes to this: the idea that students are “buying an education,” that they are less independent than ever and yet need controlling and disciplining more than ever, that every aspect of what a university does can and should be quantified, measured and given a monetary value. All of that might teach us to think that teaching is a replicable product: something we can deliver. However, the unpredictability of learning and thought is not purely intellectual—indeed, when it comes to learning we would argue that there is no such thing as the purely intellectual. Students and teachers exist in excess of their academic roles, and what is called the life of the mind cannot be separated out from whatever else we are. As will be thematised in the three subsequent parts of this text, the work that takes place in the university is done by flesh and nerves, skin and blood and bone, by embodied tangles of obsessions, crushes, illness histories, frustrations and distractions. But, too often, these aspects of our selves are perceived as excessive by the academic structures in which they work. Our bodies and emotions are even seen as antithetical to the pursuit of knowledge, as though we could apprehend knowledge with any hands other than our own sticky ones. To attempt to call on our embodied, excessive selves, one of us always begins the semester by asking her students, “what are your challenges?” This is one of several questions that pairs of students are set to ask each other, but the only one that invariably evokes confusion and befuddlement. What counts as challenges? Their answers make it clear that the question opens up a space for talking about the myriad things we struggle with while we try to conform to whatever we perceive as classroom etiquette. Someone has a child to look after, another has just arrived in the country and does not understand the language or the culture, yet another has not qualified for student loans and must work full-time in order to feed herself, and someone has just lost a dear friend. Shared across our seminar room table in this way, for everyone to hear and witness, everyone’s monsters see a flicker of lightning and are acknowledged as part of what we are and do in the classroom. In this text, we approach the processes of teaching and learning in the university through what we call monster pedagogy: the idea that learning is always a monster, a failing experiment, unpredictable, gappy, and

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stitched together from disparate parts. The figure of the monster will (to make another hopeful guess, this time in the form of a thesis statement) help us think about unpredictability, failure and vulnerability in university teaching, but also allow us to uncover the vulnerabilities present in our own academic practices. How, for example, do we deal with the most central, but also the most mystifying and often (both for our students and for ourselves) the most difficult, part of academic output, namely writing? In a system geared towards counting submitted assignments or published articles, the “process” of writing often ends up as the “product” of writing, obscuring the monsters we battle along this path. In the following we lay bare some of the vulnerabilities connected to this most intimate of academic actions, bringing to light monsters such as writer’s block and the void of the blank page. Vulnerabilities also show up in our discussion of the body’s place in the classroom, both in the guise of which have been deemed the “right” (and, conversely, the “wrong”) bodies in academia, and in the runaway monster of the trigger warning. Here especially the body of the student is analysed as a carrier of moral outrage, be it over the allegedly imminent downfall of male dominance in the academy or the freedom of speech in and beyond the university. Our engagement with the monster is embedded within the emerging scholarly and artistic field of Monster Studies. Foreshadowed by feminist theory like Donna Haraway’s essay “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others” (1992), Monster Studies has its roots in the 1990s. Especially Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s anthology Monster Theory (1996), as well as J. Halberstam’s Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995) opened up new ways for scholars to discuss the figure of the monster in their work. For this text, we are particularly inspired by Margrit Shildrick’s book Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self (2002), where the monstrous and vulnerability become concepts that critically destabilise what is perceived as normal within a Western context: Vulnerability [is] an existential state that may belong to any one of us, but which is characterised nonetheless as a negative attribute, a failure of selfprotection, that opens the self to the potential of harm. As such it is, like the notion of the monstrous, largely projected on to the other and held at bay lest it undermine the security of closure and self-sufficiency. The link that I want to make is that we are always and everywhere vulnerable precisely because the monstrous is not only an exteriority. (Shildrick 2002, 1)

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With the concept of a monster pedagogy, we are not trying to present a new or ideal pedagogy so much as a way to engage with teaching and learning as a collaborative, unruly, subjective, and relational process—and to bring its unseen aspects into the light (if not the steady light of understanding, then at least a flicker of lightning). In this, we build on traditions of feminist and norm-critical pedagogy. In our addition to this scholarship, we discuss the pedagogical process by engaging with the monster as something that is not an exteriority, something that is not about closure and self-sufficiency, but instead a question of daily failures and vulnerability. In order to perform this monstrous lack of closure and self-sufficiency in the form as well as in the content, we have decided to write a text that is made up of disparate parts; the “I” of each section represents a different writer, though their voices might blend together. We have joined up the pieces but left the stitches visible in order to discuss our both shared and separate experiences of failure. The text is raw; it bleeds in places. We have tried not to close it up completely, but instead open it up to a larger discussion of what teaching and learning with our monsters present might look and feel like. –X–X–X–X–X–X–X–X–X–X–X–X–X–X–X–X–X–X–X–X–X–X–X–X–

Into the Void On anxious writing I would like to begin with a short story about beginnings. “[I]n the beginning was the White,” it begins. Uniform, indistinctive whiteness. And God wrote. The omniscient author had no writer’s block. Facing the absolute whiteness . . . he separated light from darkness, the waters from the land, night from day, and so on. (Herzogenrath 2013, 3)

I would like to begin by saying that this God-like creator with no writer’s block is very like me. Instead I had better begin by saying that whenever I face the “absolute whiteness” of my Word document, I find it very difficult to terraform the digital realm of the blank page. The sharp divisions I want to summon (light from darkness, waters from land, night from day) always turn into something disturbingly neither-nor. Something

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wrong. Something monstrous in its hybridity. And so I usher these monstrous creations into documents labelled “rubbish” and try again. And again. And again. And they just keep coming back, always a little different, always wrong. Instead of a linear narrative of a beginning, middle and end, my writing-process becomes one of stutters, repetitions and ghostly returns. Unlike the all-seeing, all-knowing Author God, I do have writer’s block, and opening a new, blank document fills me with anxiety. How does one navigate such a monster-filled void?

H According to literary theorist Bernd Herzogenrath, Western thought associates whiteness with the unmarked, something that becomes clear in the colour’s racist and colonial history. Whiteness, he explains, is also understood as formless non-being, as beginnings and passivity: “the white itself does not move—it is indeed moved, informed, by a First Mover|Informer: God” (Herzogenrath 2013, 4). In this sense, the Author God navigates the ghostly white by filling it with writing and being, thereby fully annihilating the void. This is a writing process that is often taught in academia: 1) know everything before you sit down to write; 2) begin at the beginning; and 3) end at the end. Yet, the god-like perspective that is needed for such smooth, linear writing is not easily gained. Indeed, it may be understood as forming part of what feminist theorist and storyteller Donna Haraway calls the “god-trick” (1991). The god-trick is the myth that not even scientists can fully and completely understand a given subject by studying it from afar. The more distant the scientist, the more he will be able to observe; and the more detached he is from what he is observing, the more objective he is, so the myth goes. According to Haraway, however, it is never possible to distance oneself completely from what one is observing. Instead, the observer and the tools she uses in order to observe become an intrinsic part of the research result itself. In other words, the research object and research subject can never be fully separated. This unsettles the Author God image, which is deeply rooted in dualisms and distinctions. If one cannot neatly separate the world into dualisms—subject/object, researcher/researched, light/darkness, water/land, day/night—can one separate the writer from the written? The writer from monsters? The writer from the void?

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E According to psychoanalyst Roberto Harari, it is possible to form a transgressive relation with the void. Indeed, he argues that such a rela-tion exists in anxiety. Traditionally, psychoanalysis has argued that the difference between fear and anxiety is that fear is based on a relation with an object, for example a spider, whereas anxiety has no object. Jacques Lacan, whose theories about anxiety Harari is engaging with, takes this argument in a slightly different direction, arguing that nothingness is the object of anxiety. In other words, anxiety does have an object, but this object is nothing, which is understood as “not having any defined borders and being a void” (Harari 2001, 74). Not unlike the Author God’s white-blank page, the void is undefined, boundless, without distinctions and dualisms. Yet, whereas the void in the stories of the Author God is passive and unmoving, the void of anxiety seems strangely active. This is a void that threatens to come nearer, and anxiety—according to Harari—is the signal that it has come too close for comfort, and that it may overflow the very boundaries of the subject herself. Indeed, the void calls to the subject, demanding that “the subject erase(s) its borders, handing itself over to it in an unconditional manner” (Harari 2001, 75; italics in original). Whereas the Author God sets the white world of the void in motion and fills it with colours, borders and boundaries, the void of anxiety cannot be contained, least of all within a dualism between self and other. The void of anxiety is also not passively awaiting inscription, but threatens to inscribe you, the anxiety-haver, by taking you over and undoing your sense of being a bounded, separate subject. It threatens to break you and put you back together again in unlikely ways, creating what Harari through Lacan refers to as the corps morcelé—the body in bits and pieces. In other words, the proximity of the boundless void replaces the subject’s map of her own embodied, unitary self with a map of a broken and fragmented body. This makes it very difficult to move indeed. The inability to move can take the form of difficulties in swallowing or in walking, Harari writes. To me, however, the experience of fragmentation usually results in the inability to write when facing the apparent boundlessness of the blank page. In other words, the anxious relation with the nothingness of the blank page can bring about a writer’s block.

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L Whereas the Author God can simply banish the void, the anxious writer may be caught in endless repetitions and returns, unable to move into new sections of text. For her, the void is too close for comfort, and it may be full of haunting monsters that insist on returning, again and again, without ever taking satisfactory shapes. In this sense, however, the blank page is never truly blank. Whiteness is not unmarked, and even nothing is never purely nothing, especially when taken as the object of anxiety. In an anxious writer’s block, nothing turns into an uncanny something. In this relation with nothingness, the void is never passive, awaiting inscription. It inscribes, it summons, and it calls out to the subject. It draws blood as it fragments the imagined boundedness of the writer. As such, I do not suggest not taking writer’s block seriously or glossing over the pain and frustration it can cause. What I will suggest is to navigate away from the myth of the all-seeing Author God, whose method of infallibility is of very little help, and instead steer towards an understanding of the blank page as agential. In this way, the void of the blank page may well be understood as monstrous in its active responses and therefore as a force to be reckoned with during the process of writing.

L If one practises and teaches writing as something that is not about imposing perfection onto a passive background from a safe distance, but instead an uncertain and at times anxiety-inducing companionship with a responsive void, one may be able to navigate the writing process differently. By differently I do not necessarily mean flawlessly, but perhaps in ways that are more forgiving of mistakes and failures as one attempts to navigate a monster-filled void with plans of its own and the ability to write back.

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The body in the classroom I was preparing for the upcoming semester; I was going to write this text, I was answering emails from students; I was taking care of various administrative responsibilities. Then I had a miscarriage. A miscarriage does not necessarily put a full stop to academic activities (at least hopefully not for long), but it does wrench one’s attention rather violently away from whatever one was doing in the office. Suddenly one’s body is thrown into the foreground of consciousness, pushing everything else out of the way. Analytical abilities come to a screeching halt, overview is impossible, details become blurred, and the vital importance of remembering to include that one particular article in the syllabus for next term fades away quickly. It is like the part of us that we always carry with us, that is us, but that we rarely include as important in our academic endeavour, finally claims its due. We are acutely reminded of our embodied view of the world because, as Adrienne Rich writes, “To say ‘the body’ lifts me away from what has given me a primary perspective. To say ‘my body’ reduces the temptation to grandiose assertions” (1994, n.p.). This part is not about reproductive failures or office practices per se. Rather, it is about the odd and often monstrous meeting between the body and academia, or perhaps between bodily and academic identity, or maybe even between what might be called our matter and what might be called our mind. That this should constitute a meeting at all somehow implies that there are two separate entities that meet; a centuries-old perception of which it is hard rid ourselves. René Descartes only riffed on an old theme when he wrote that, this ego, this soul, by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from the body and is easier to know than the latter, and that even if the body were not, the soul would not cease to be all that it is now. (Descartes 2000, 21)

His was not an embodied philosophy. Long before him, Plato argued for the separation of mental faculties and the flesh, instituting not only a breach between the body and the mind that would prove obstinate, but also gendering the faculty of reason as male (Lloyd 1993). The body, what Descartes would call “a mere collection of limbs”, was relegated to the individuals less prone to the pursuit of reason, mainly women (and, in Plato’s time, slaves). In this text, I argue against the assumption that our bodies can ever be excluded from our processes of learning; indeed, they are crucial to it (and not only because they keep us alive and breathing).

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Our own lives as instructors, our students’ lives, and our interactions in the classroom make that clear. Ever since Plato, academic inquiry has largely been built on the refutation of the flesh, separating thought from body and bodily processes from analytic ones. When engrossed in a book or an article of particular interest, many of us have experienced forgetting our bodies while reading—only suddenly becoming aware of a sleeping foot or a stiff neck. When we experience being “in the flow” of thinking or writing, we may not feel that aching heart or painful back. It can feel exhilarating to forget one’s mortal coil and be able to retreat into the realm of thought and imagination for a while. Yet these are usually only that, moments that do not stretch on for very long. Some of us, who live with chronic illness or disability, do not have the luxury of forgetting our bodies for any lengths of time. The same goes for people who frequently experience various kinds of microaggressions because of their bodies, be it racism, sexism, or ableism (Gressgård 2014). Inhabiting marked bodies can make it hard to concentrate on reading and writing—or listening to your lecturer in class, for that matter. Women have been particularly prone to inhabiting marked bodies in the academy. Regarded as unsuited for public professions and academic achievement on account of their bodies being “in the way” of thought, it took a long time before they were allowed into learning institutions. In 1874, for example, the physician Edward Hammond Clarke claimed that women who “graduated from school or college excellent scholars” had “undeveloped ovaries”, which would leave them sterile when they later married (1995, 93). Women’s bodies were much too delicate for the hardships of education, he argued, and explained his reasoning by way of how the blood during their monthly periods “drained” them and made them weak. Thus, learning would undo women’s real potential—being wives and mothers—by literally destroying their bodies. Clarke’s claims did not go unchallenged. In her award-winning essay “Do Women Require Mental and Bodily Rest during Menstruation?” (1876), the physician and reformer Mary Putnam Jacobi goes straight to the point: Such indeed is the audacity of the human intellect, that the discovery of limits usually proves hopeless in only one case, namely, when they are perceived to apply to a different race, class, or sex, from that to which the investigator himself belongs. (Jacobi 1995, 97)

Here Jacobi puts her finger on one of the most important criticisms that could be levelled at the practice of nineteenth-century science, namely that

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certain “investigators” considered themselves immune to the limits they imposed on others. Drawing in not only sex, but also race and class, Jacobi’s proto-intersectional analysis of access to education focused more on the obstacles to this access than on the alleged suitability of the potential students. As educators, we still face the issue of the suitability of students, avoiding, if we try, the temptation to divide them into “bad”, “good”, or “mediocre” students. Instead, we need to keep an eye on the unequal preparations they may have had for academic life, and the obstacles they face. Submitting to a course of study is sometimes exactly that: students must obey the rules of academia: write academically, keep to deadlines, include references, read the curriculum, speak up in class, take notes, keep up, do not fall behind, ask questions, do not plagiarise. Each autumn, new students arrive and try to figure out how to navigate this new sea of strangeness, and we guide them as best we can through the classes and curricula we offer. Through this process of learning—and teaching—we build our academic identities on models both directly in front of us (our professors, lecturers, seminar leaders, and fellow students) and those we find in texts. Much of academic history seems to be holding up as a gold standard the least bodily encumbered. This does not always reflect reality: even if there are hosts of able-bodied, white men (and some women) in the canons of academe, there are also notable exceptions. I was surprised after having for some time worked with the legacy of Andreas Vesalius, that the great Renaissance anatomist who revolutionized Western views of the body, might have had dwarfism. In the important post-structuralist debates between Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault, I saw no mention of the fact that Habermas has a cleft palate and a speech impediment. It was in feminist theory, and later in disability theory, that I found a real, concrete acknowledgement of bodies, and of the fact that bodies and thinking are not separate. Indeed, they deeply inform each other. In her foreword to her landmark work Gender Trouble (1990), Judith Butler recounts experiences that triggered her theorising: I grew up understanding something of the violence of gender norms: an uncle incarcerated for his anatomically anomalous body; . . . gay cousins forced to leave their homes because of their sexuality, real and imagined; my own tempestuous coming out at the age of 16; and a subsequent adult landscape of lost jobs, lovers, and homes. (Butler 1999, xix)

In other words, her theory of “gender performativity”—how we become gendered by constantly repeating small, stylised acts until what

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are actually effects seem like an essence—is firmly rooted in a bodily experience of the world and trying to make sense of this experience with words and theory. Her project serves to expand the possibilities of the intelligible, thus dispelling some of the fear we have of the margins and whatever unintelligible, strange, and monstrous things might be lurking there. What cannot be interpreted, understood and made sense of becomes the monster. We can never quite dispel the monsters on the margins of the classroom existence. Both lecturers and students bring bodies, worries, pains, and emotions into the academic endeavour. What we may attempt is to open up a space to address our monsters and bring them momentarily into the light, collectively acknowledging our failures and victories and letting them be part of our learning and teaching process.

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Trigger Warnings 1. Sore Spot Just the phrase is unpleasant. When I think about it I can feel something in my body, not intense but aversive, a kind of anxious selfarmouring tightening. Trigger warnings are a sore spot. Writing on the role of free speech in academia, Timothy Garton Ash notes that the kinds of people who make bold, original guesses at the frontiers of science may not always be the careful, sensitive, emotionally intelligent types we need in intercommunity relations. (2016, 154)

University teaching is partly frontiers of science and partly intercommunity relations: what places do sensitivity, care and emotion have there? Do those soft qualities gently edge out and expel boldness and originality? What space is there for sore spots in a university classroom? I’ve told you how I feel right now, writing this: tense, a little on edge. One of my thumbnails has been bitten to the quick over the course of the preceding paragraph. Those feelings fit uneasily in an academic text; they fit uneasily in a university classroom. Chances are that any given article on JSTOR will have sentences that were written in a white-hot fury, or in a steadily building exhilaration, or while the author twisted a lock of hair over and over around a pencil, changed their position restlessly, backed off repeatedly from a point that felt too tough in order to check Facebook self-

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soothingly, bit their nails. Meanwhile, the words this agitation produced are as cool and smooth as glass. This isn’t deception: no one really pretends that there are no feelings in academia. They are just not the focus. The complex passion a researcher feels for their subject is implied in the fact that the research was done at all. In the classroom, students are surrounded by peers, friends, and teachers they want to impress or at least not get in trouble with: incentive to hide big or ugly feelings. And classrooms are social spaces, with the usual social rules, so in most cases, a student who is showing emotion can count on everyone else helping to gloss it over. The academic surface becomes smooth again. Here, starting in on the nail of my left little finger, I want (in spite of the soreness) to think about one particular figure of emotion in the classroom, the trigger warning, and trace the ripples that it triggers on the academic surface. Trigger warnings are any form of advance notice that a potentially emotionally difficult, or specifically PTSD-triggering, subject is going to come up so that those who need to can prepare themselves. In her essay “Against Students,” which is about the ways in which students are talked about—the “series of speech acts [that] consistently position students, or at least specific kinds of students, as a threat to education, to free speech, to civilisation”—Sara Ahmed describes trigger warnings as a tool for making difficult conversations more possible: “a partial and necessarily inadequate measure to enable some people to stay in the room so that ‘difficult issues’ can be discussed” (2015). This tends to match my own experience with and use of academic trigger warnings, and it makes them sound boring. An accommodation that, like a ramp on a set of steps, makes the university classroom more straightforward to access for some students: partial, necessarily inadequate. However, in the popular and scholarly imagination the trigger warning is not partial and inadequate, but excessive and overwhelming: it looks and behaves like a monster. “We’ve gone too far with trigger warnings,” writes Jill Filipovic in an article that marks out an acceptable space for the use of trigger warnings (“It’s perfectly reasonable for a survivor of violence to ask a professor for a heads up if the reading list includes a piece with graphic descriptions of rape or violence”), but then assumes that their use will nonetheless spread into the unreasonable (2014). As Judith Shulevitz notes in “In College and Hiding From Scary Ideas”, “the notion that ticklish conversations must be scrubbed clean of controversy has a way of leaking out and spreading” (2015). In this story the trigger warning has always gone too far. In Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s “The Coddling of the American Mind”, the focus is on the fear and sense of threat that trigger warnings create: it describes students who want

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trigger warnings to be punitive, driven by “vindictive protectiveness,” and cites a professor who is “terrif[ied]” by his apparently trigger-warningdemanding students (2015). In this story the trigger warning is a Frankenstein’s monster created by PC culture: pathetic, ludicrous, but no less frightening for that. It may be hard for academics not to identify with Victor Frankenstein, who creates life during his BA. But the monster is explicitly a student, who sickens as it reads, because the “increase of knowledge only discovered to me what a wretched outcast I was” (Shelley 2009, 83). Through the monstrous figure of the trigger warning, the emotions people feel within academia—and especially the emotions of academia’s often abjected fuel source, the students—are no longer glossed or glassed over, but open to concern and speculation. And as Ahmed (2015) points out, the greatest concern and the most interesting topic of speculation is the over-sensitive student, the student who needs (or, in this discourse, is so coddled that she thinks she needs) trigger warnings in the first place: The story goes: because students have become too sensitive, we cannot even talk about difficult issues in the classroom; because of their feelings we (critical academics) cannot address questions of power and violence.

The spectre of the over-sensitive student, the student whose feelings demand too much, is herself seen as a warning that triggers fears over the future of academia, as if the classroom might be about to collapse under a deluge of student feelings.

2. Pay Attention A fairly common assumption in writing against trigger warnings is that users of trigger warnings want to not feel bad, even at the cost of their personal growth or education. Neil Gaiman called his latest short story collection Trigger Warning, and it starts with a preface about how, as a child, reading texts that made him feel bad helped him grow: these texts troubled me and haunted my nightmares and my daydreams, worried and upset me on profound levels, but . . . now, as an adult, I would not erase the experience of having read them if I could. (2015, xiii)

Filipovic picks up this idea in her description of what the university classroom is for: “It is, hopefully, a space where the student is challenged and sometimes frustrated and sometimes deeply upset” (2014).

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Nevertheless, criticisms of trigger warnings can also by their nature hold an inherent fear of pain—especially others’ pain, especially pain that goes beyond a productively challenging “upset.” In “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix”, Susan Stryker writes about the monster as a warning, a way of drawing our attention beyond itself to something else: ‘Monster’ is derived from the Latin noun monstrum, ‘divine portent,’ itself formed on the root of the verb monere, ‘to warn.’ . . . Monsters, like angels, functioned as messengers and heralds of the extraordinary. They served to announce impending revelation, saying, in effect, ‘Pay attention; something of profound importance is happening.’ (Stryker 1994, 240)

Pay attention. The trigger warning, usually read as a shield against pain, is also a reminder of it. It evokes, interpellates, a person who could need or want such a warning. It conjures up a spectre of the trauma victim who could be in the classroom right now. It makes the experience of pain spectrally real. In this way, the trigger warning is our monstrous guide into the sore spots of the university classroom. It makes us pay attention to the fact that each person in the classroom has a past, an emotional landscape, a ragged psychic terrain. Everyone in the room is a sore spot. This thought is at once banally obvious and almost literally incomprehensible, as George Eliot’s narrator in Middlemarch points out: If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. (Eliot 1994, 104)

Most of the time, any such keen vision, let alone any such keen feeling, is beyond us, in the classroom as in any other workplace. Most of the time, quite reasonably, we don’t have time for pain, which is why over the past few paragraphs I’ve been writing to you about warnings and portents and Middlemarch and not about the fact that the ragged edge of my nail has started to bleed. We have work to do: we can’t always only talk about what hurts. But, we also can’t for the sake of a smooth surface try to exorcise that ghost of pain, that monstrous reminder—to pretend it doesn’t live with us, moving in wherever we go, even into the classroom.

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Closing and Opening Monsters do not go away. They change, they transform, they lose an arm and stitch a new one back on, but they never disappear. Monsters embody everything we wish would go away, but which keeps following us. This is part of why they may present themselves as challenging and imaginative guides when it comes to thinking differently about pedagogy, teaching and learning. Through three tales of vulnerability and haunting monsters, we have attempted to open a discussion of what learning and teaching with monsters rather than against them may look like. These are tales that spring from our own embodied experiences with difficulties and doubts; that is, experiences that are haunted by monsters that we have attempted to do away with. Each of us failed at this exorcism, presenting yet another daily failure produced within educational systems that often have little tolerance for mistakes, misunderstandings, botched learning outcomes and which cannot be quantified, measured, categorized and dealt with accordingly. In such systems, failure is only tolerable if it can be transmuted into something productive or marketable. The monsters of monster pedagogy are those that cannot easily be turned into something productive. The failures they embody cannot necessarily be transformed into successes and their hauntings cannot always be wrought into easily understood knowledge. By the end of this class, you will know—but this is only a guess. What you will know by the end of the class is something you could not know before you knew and before you were that person, who knew it. As such, the transformations of the monster are already at work in the very promises of a system that claims to know the future: how can such a system not fail? How can it not produce monsters? And yet to ask: What are your monsters? is to ask a question that is usually deemed un-scholarly. It is also a question without a given answer, which is often regarded with suspicion within an academic system based on measurable learning outcomes. This, however, does not mean that it is not worth asking, for we bring our monsters into the classroom. We bring them into the teacher’s room, into our offices, into the blank page. As unscholarly as they are, they still follow us wherever we go, and demanding of teachers and students alike that they must do away with them in order to be proper academics is unsustainable. Monster pedagogy may offer ways to think about teaching and learning as something that always takes place through transformation and therefore possibly excitement, fascination and pleasure, but also anxiety, pain, uncertainty and doubt. It does not presuppose that learning and teaching must be scrubbed clean of negative emotions in order to be tolerated.

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Instead, it aims to rethink and reimagine learning and teaching as something that can never be perfect or predictable, something that does not happen in spite of vulnerability, anxiety and pain but with them. It claims that failing is necessary in order for the new and unexpected to take shape and different knowledge to be formed. Further still, the figure of the monster may even be helpful when it comes to engaging with the challenges of teaching and learning skills that are not easily testable. At the same time, monster pedagogy also stresses that what is considered a failure cannot always be domesticated and made useful in the end. It can be devastating and heart-breaking. It can hurt, sometimes unbearably. Monster pedagogy is our way to discuss how one may live with one’s monsters while learning and teaching. We do not argue that one should not make plans, or avoid sketching out learning outcomes. Instead, we argue that a monster pedagogy may make it more sustainable to live with the inevitable failure of such plans and promised outcomes. We argue that mistakes, doubt and anxiety should not be hidden or shamed. Instead, such vulnerability is an inherent part of the classroom and the blank page. In other words, we argue that a monster pedagogy may help teachers and students imagine ways to live with daily failures rather than be destroyed by them. By the end of this chapter, you will know— That we have failed. That we have wandered and gone astray and inevitably ended up in places that we did not predict and created a monster that is beyond our control. Now, at the very end of the chapter, tradition demands that we do away with this monster; that we stake its heart, conjure its ghost, and nail its coffin shut lest it rises again. Tradition also demands that we fail at this task as a rotting hand shoots out from the grave, a shadow falls across the floor and a moaning wail is hurled at the moon. In other words, we do not want to—nor can we—conclude this chapter, that is, tie it together in an explanation of what a monster pedagogy really is. The ropes will always break and the monsters will roam free, appearing in new and unpredictable places. Instead of tying the text together, we therefore want to open up a stitch and extend the thread to you, in the hope of sparking a bigger discussion: And you? What are your monsters?

–X–X–X–X–X–X–X–X–X–X–X–X–X–X–X– –X–X–X–X–X–X–X–

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Bibliography Ahmad, Aalya, and Sean Moreland, eds. 2013. Fear and Learning. Essays on the Pedagogy of Horror. Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland and Company Inc. Ahmed, Sara. 2015. “Against Students.” Feminist Killjoys. Accessed February 12, 2017. https://feministkilljoys.com/2015/06/25/againststudents/. Browning, John Edgar. 2013. “Towards a Monster Pedagogy: Reclaiming the Classroom for the Other.” In Fear and Learning. Essays on the Pedagogy of Horror, edited by Aalya Ahmad and Sean Moreland, 40– 55. Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland and Company Inc. Butler, Judith. 1999 [1990]. Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Clarke, Edward Hammond. 1995. “Sex in Education; or, A Fair Chance for Girls.” In Medicine and Western Civilization, edited by David J. Rothman, Steven Marcus, and Stephanie A. Kiceluk, 92–96. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Descartes, René. 2000. Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings. Translated by Desmond M. Clarke. London: Penguin. Eliot, George. 1994 [1871–72]. Middlemarch. London: Penguin. Filiopvic, Jill. 2014. “We’ve gone too far with ‘trigger warnings.’” The Guardian, March 5. Accessed 12 February, 2017. https://www.the guardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/05/trigger-warnings-can-becounterproductive. Gaiman, Neil. 2015. Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances. London: Hachette. Garton Ash, Timothy. 2016. Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World. London: Atlantic. Golub, Adam, and Heather Richardson Hayton, eds. In preparation. Monsters in the Classroom: Essays on Teaching the Monstrous. Gressgård, Randi. 2014. “Å stange hodet i veggen: Mikroaggressjon i akademia.” Nytt norsk tidsskrift 1: 17–29. Haidt, Jonathan and Greg Lukianoff. 2015. “The Coddling of the American Mind.” The Atlantic, September. Accessed February 12, 2017. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-cod dling-of-the-american-mind/399356/. Harari, Roberto. 2001. Lacan’s Seminar on “Anxiety”—An Introduction. Translated by Jane C. Lamb-Ruiz. Revised and edited by Rico Franses. New York: Other Press.

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Haraway, Donna. 1991. “Situated Knowledge: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women—The Reinvention of Nature, 183–202. London: Free Association Books. Hellstrand, Ingvil, Line Henriksen, Aino-Kaisa Koistinen, Donna McCormack, and Sara Orning. In preparation. “Promises of Monsters.” Herzogenrath, Bernd. 2013. “White.” In Prismatic Ecology—Ecotheory Beyond Green, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 1–21. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Hughes, Jacob. 2009. “A Monstrous Pedagogy.” Rocky Mountain Review 63 (1): 96–104. Jacobi, Mary Putnam. 1995. “Do Women Require Mental and Bodily Rest during Menstruation?” In Medicine and Western Civilization, edited by David J. Rothman, Steven Marcus, and Stephanie A. Kiceluk, 97–102. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Lloyd, Genevieve. 1993. Man of Reason. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Rich, Adrienne. 1994. Bread, Blood, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979– 1985. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Shelley, Mary. 2009 [1818]. Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shildrick, Margrit. 2002. Embodying the Monster—Encounters with the Vulnerable Self. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: SAGE Publications. Shulevitz, Jill. 2015. “In College and Hiding From Scary Ideas.” New York Times. March 21. Accessed 12 February, 2017. http://www.nytimes .com/2015/03/22/opinion/sunday/judith-shulevitz-hiding-from-scaryideas.html?_r=0. Stryker, Susan. 1994. “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1 (3): 237–254.

CHAPTER THREE FROM DIRT TO SECRETS: TROJAN HORSE PEDAGOGY AND THE INTERDISCIPLINARY SOCIAL JUSTICE CLASSROOM SAL RENSHAW AND RENÉE VALIQUETTE

So you want to change the world? Great, so do we. So, in fact, does a dizzying array of the academic disciplines that populate the contemporary Western University. From the obvious suspects, such as Critical Race, Postcolonial and Women’s and Gender Studies, to Education, Environmental Science and Urban Planning and Design, social and environmental change has been implicit in many of their curricula. But for those of us within academia who have long tangled consciously and explicitly with a transformational and political mandate as our purpose and goal, we find ourselves increasingly challenged by several pressing questions: who are the students drawn to our classes? How diverse are our classrooms, not only in terms of race, class and sexuality, but just as importantly, in terms of intellectual heritage, and political and ethical backgrounds? And given our self-identified mandate to encourage change towards a more just and environmentally sustainable world, how effectively do we actually enact the deep, affective transformation necessary for such ambitions? In other words, how well are we doing in extending the influence of our curriculum? And how can we do more? After more than fifteen years of wrestling with these questions in the Department of Gender Equality and Social Justice at Nipissing University—a mostly undergraduate Liberal Arts College in Northern Ontario, Canada—we are more convinced than ever that the people who need to be in our classrooms, the people our society as a whole needs in our classrooms, and ones like them, are not just the ones who would normally sign up for a Gender Studies or Environmental Justice course.

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It’s the students who won’t sign up for courses like these who we really need. Without them, we may continue to produce an (ever dwindling) cadre of dedicated activists, but we risk losing a critical opportunity, indeed one of the only opportunities remaining in contemporary civil society, to expose a broad array of people to an environment where adventurous encounters with transformative ideas are made possible. Where, if not at the university, does a civic space remain where the neoliberal consumer can be challenged by that which they have not already decided to “like”? In light of this potential, and the increasingly “wicked problems”1 we face as a global society, we think it imperative to explore new strategies to better harness the potential of the university classroom.

A New Model for Interdisciplinary Social Justice Education With the goal of reaching more politically and ethically diverse audiences, the past fifteen years of employing varying curricula and pedagogical strategies have left us with a clear sense that the problem of upscaling a challenging social and environmental justice content is itself a wicked problem. However, our recent foray into teaching high impact, deeply interdisciplinary concept courses is showing a lot of promise. In this paper, we aim to provide an account of some of the insights we have gleaned about effectively delivering an ethically transformative curriculum through the development and delivery of five iterations of our model second year Interdisciplinary Concept class Introduction to Interdisciplinary Analysis. Each offering of the course is built around an anchoring theme, which so far has included DIRT, SLOTH, WATER, GENIUS and SECRETS, and is designed to be an interdisciplinary affecto-intellectual adventure, where students encounter approximately twelve different disciplines over two semesters. Our goal in this class is to move both hearts and minds, in part by “forcing” an encounter with at least some knowledges that students have already decided they are not interested in. With guest faculty from disciplines as diverse as Business and Biology, English and Physics offering their own often idiosyncratic take on the core theme, this leaves us, the course directors, the delightful, inspiring and sometimes exhausting job of making sense of it all in a dynamic classroom space that is co-created in immanent relation with our students and colleagues. We have come to call this approach Trojan horse pedagogy, as the theme and structure of the course allow a creative “cover” for the interdisciplinary social justice curriculum that each

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offering aims to deliver. By gently exploiting both a neoliberal as well as an institutional interest in interdisciplinary programming, we have successfully created a course structure that is supported and promoted across our Applied and Professional as well as Arts and Science faculties, and as a result it has been consistently drawing students from a far broader range of backgrounds and disciplines than is typical for our Gender Equality and Social Justice classes. The courses are rooted in our own unique approach to interdisciplinary pedagogy that draws on poststructuralist feminist theory, in particular in response to the oeuvre of the French philosopher Hélène Cixous, in order to engender in students a set of core competences centred on “immanent relationality,” a complex appreciation of difference, “epistemic” as well as “diversive curiosity” and intellectual and ethical courage in the face of wicked problems.2 After four years of ongoing development and delivery we believe the course model is proving itself to be impressively effective, not only in delivering on the promise of teaching critical thinking within an ethical framework, but most importantly in making this experience at once adventurous and transformative.

The structure of the course In addition to co-conceiving and co-developing each iteration of the course, including recruiting appropriate guest faculty members and suggesting topics they might consider, the two of us also serve as the principal course directors and facilitators. While we are often both in the class together, one of us will be the primary lead, present for every class, lecture and seminar alike. Each course is structured around alternating discipline-based guest lectures followed by interdisciplinary seminars. The curriculum for the first course, DIRT, for example, included lectures from twelve faculty members, across a range of Arts and Science disciplines,3 each of whom presented discipline-based material inspired by the framing concept. In DIRT, for example, there was a lecture from a biologist on soil recovery in a rural nickel mining town, an art historian on the paradoxical beauty of the Albertan tar-sand photography of Edward Burtynsky, a cultural theorist whose analysis of Dracula unexpectedly and inspiringly focused on immigration and “dirty” people, and a geographer on the scientific discovery of the cause of the cholera epidemic in 19th-century London. The course director/s co-teach and co-facilitate every other class, and this includes lecturing on interdisciplinarity as well as facilitating interdisciplinary engagement with the disciplinary content, including those readings assigned by the guest faculty. Often, we bring material into the

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seminar space to enrich the interdisciplinary work as it emerges. The faculty members who have participated as guest lecturers are invited to sit in on their colleagues’ lectures, which many of them do, and students are encouraged to bring friends and family members to the guest lectures. We recently experimented with a model of delivery where we integrated a group of more than thirty lifelong learners over the age of 50 into the guest lectures, thereby creating a classroom that was unusually diverse in respect of age cohorts. We couldn’t have been more surprised or delighted by the fecundity of the intellectual conversation this mélange created and it has inspired us to consider ways in which we can open the classes more broadly to the local community in the future. Despite the generativity of these blended audiences we always restrict the seminars to registered students and ourselves—no guests. In so doing, we protect the relational dynamics of the core group and enhance the potential of that relationality to create a deeper sense of trust, something we feel is essential to fostering the kind of risky intellectual experimentation required for deeply transformative learning.

Trojan Horse Pedagogy Having lived with the frustration of hearing students lamenting finding themselves in our classes in Gender Equality and Social Justice in the last year of their studies rather than the first we have a finely tuned sense of how challenging the neoliberal vocationally driven university environment is and how it seriously affects the choices students feel able to make. Even if we are willing to bracket the question of whether or not the relentless death notices for the humanities are justified, there is little doubt that the call itself is a significant deterrent to any class not seen to contribute more or less directly to a job. Hence, the approach we take to recruiting students for the Interdisciplinary Concept courses is one that shamelessly appeals precisely to a neoliberal subject. We even appease vocational anxiety by emphasizing the utility of interdisciplinary skills in the contemporary workplace. By provoking what Ian Leslie (2014) calls diversive curiosity, a form of curiosity that he suggests fuels our interest in all things new, the titles of the courses cultivate a powerful desire to know more. They are tantalizing and intriguing. Few courses reveal so little in their titles yet simultaneously seem to suggest so much. What is one to make of a course called DIRT, a course that is clearly not on “dirt”? In short, the courses exploit the diversive curiosity of neoliberal consumer subjectivity. Leslie explains:

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In adults, diversive curiosity manifests itself as a restless desire for the new and the next. The modern world seems designed to stimulate our diversive curiosity. Every tweet, headline, ad, blog post and app at once promises and denies a satisfaction for which we are ever more impatient. (2014, 16)

In this way the titles of the courses are the Trojan horses which trade on diversive curiosity to pique interest but that is just the beginning. We have found that the structure of the courses allows us to parlay diversive curiosity into what Leslie describes as epistemic curiosity, a curiosity that moves us towards sinking in and deepening our knowledge of an area or topic (2014, 16). When diversive curiosity is entrained—when it is transformed into a quest for knowledge and understanding—it nourishes us. This deeper more disciplined and effortful type of curiosity, is called epistemic curiosity. (2014, 16)

Once this transition takes place, we have the foundation to establish a richer intellectual context, a context that makes room for a deeper transformation of the learning environment. Again, in recognition of the potential of neoliberal desires, not just the threats, we have also developed an aesthetic identity for the courses, branding them all with a visual image that is recognizable and, frankly, beautiful. As the students themselves become ambassadors for the classes, the brand identity plays a stronger role in encouraging enrolment and weakening the anxieties that typically accompany a social justice curriculum. The openness of the branding in terms of a specific curriculum also allows students the freedom to identify with something that is uniquely their own—no theme will be offered twice—and not overly-determined by established ideologies and disciplinary politics. Whereas a Gender Equality and Social Justice course evokes a range of assumptions about course content that prevents many students from even considering enrolling, DIRT or SECRETS has no such baggage. Though of course we worry that this approach surrenders too much to such politics, we have been sufficiently awed by the ways in which these courses permit a pathway to social justice education to a far greater number of students, to believe that the ruse is justified. This indirect approach to recruitment allows us to harness the full capacity of the university classroom in the effort to enact social transformation by creating opportunities for more students to feel excited rather than afraid of an encounter with difference. This, in our experience, is the essential first step of transformative education: excitement, rather

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than fear, in the face of “otherness.” A sense of intellectual adventure and excitement about changing the world for the better begins with an experience of difference, of what is not yet understood. This matters because the other dilemma that dogs the heels of teachers of social justice is just as pernicious as the problem of attracting an audience: how do we expose the truth of things like systemic racism, rising global poverty, relentless and ongoing gender discrimination, environmental devastation, human caused mass extinction, the list goes on, without suffocating the desire to learn more? How do we tear off the veil of unwitting ignorance and sometimes witting complacency without overwhelming and thus disempowering the students, such that at the end of the class they are left only with a sense of the vastness of the problems and the futility of their potential efforts? How do we create more opportunities for students to become excited about different and deeply transformative ways of thinking and knowing, and how do we keep this excitement from being extinguished even as we present the nastiest aspects of our global reality? In considering these questions, we have developed a unique approach to core competences. As we will detail below, the Interdisciplinary Concept courses offer an exciting new model of learning, designed to complement disciplinary education that draws on post-structuralist feminist theory to reinvent generic skills towards enacting a more ethically just world.

Section B: Re-thinking Generic Skills The New Model meets Generic Skills In many ways, Adventurous Encounters is a timely call to the spread of what is being taken to be a new set of generic competences for universities, ones that sharpen the focus on the challenges of the contemporary employment context that students will face post-graduation. In truth, however, these are the competences that have long been the bedrock of Women’s and Gender Studies programs, and, somewhat ironically given the institutional pressure many of these programs are currently suffering under, it would seem our time has come. It would appear that the world is actually in need of precisely what we have been doing for the last forty years: facilitating in students the capacity to be critical as well as self-critical; an appreciation of and respect for diversity understood as involving multiple axes of differentiation; interpersonal and communication skills; an ability to work in a team and in both local as well as international contexts; and perhaps most importantly of all, an ability to adapt to and act in new situations. And yet, at the level of the

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institutions themselves, whether they are in North America or Europe, we would wager that few administrations turn to their Women’s and Gender studies faculty and consult them as the professionals with the most sustained experience in the academy of delivering precisely on these socalled “new” competences. It is because of this ongoing and wilful blindness on the part of the institutions themselves, as well as the first dilemma we mentioned at the start of this paper, the dilemma of recruiting students, that the Trojan horse approach to delivering these competences is now so necessary and thus why we are finding the students flocking to and so excited by the Interdisciplinary Concept courses. The appeal of the approach we are taking in these courses comes as no surprise to our Women’s and Gender Studies students though we do believe that the Interdisciplinary Concept courses have significantly extended the potential of our strategies for inclusion.

The Relational Classroom The very structure of the courses pushes students to think in relational terms with respect to knowledge and expertise and this is one of the key strategies in managing overwhelm and alienation—again a point already made in and modelled by Women’s and Gender Studies programs. The more we empower students as knowledge makers, the more they feel collective ownership of the ideas and issues they are exploring. In the Interdisciplinary Concept classes, they come to know what they do with and in relation to others—never alone. In some classes, they might enjoy the benefit of a background in the topic—they might be biology majors for instance and thus they will be familiar with the lecture on trees—but in others, they will be neophytes, truly encountering an idea or a discipline for the first time. In their confrontation with new ideas and new knowledge the seminars in particular, push them to reflections on what they thought they already knew and how it might be shaped or changed by this current experience. The seminar spaces are primed to create ethical dialogic encounters where knowledge emerges immanently and always in relation to the question of why it matters. In other words, they come to know in and through their relation with others in the moment. While our Women’s and Gender Studies students have long benefitted from an approach to pedagogy and to knowledge which destabilizes the empty vessel approach to learning, this is still, sadly, often the all too familiar model in many disciplines, perhaps especially the sciences. As interdisciplinary curriculum developers invested in transformative ethical education, we owe the deepest debt of gratitude to the pedagogical

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risks that have been taken in Women’s and Gender Studies classrooms. Displacing traditional authority through innumerable strategies in assessment and delivery feminist teachers have long engaged in subversive strategies to democratize the classroom and we aspire to do the same with the Interdisciplinary Concept courses. But when it comes to re-thinking the relationality of pedagogy itself we owe specific debts to the poststructural feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous, as well as to the relational sociologists Ann Game and Andrew Metcalfe. From Cixous we understand all subjectivities to be contingent and emergent with open encounters with difference as the lifeblood of expansive onto-epistemology. The other in all his or her forms gives me I. It is on the occasion of the other that I catch sight of me; or that I catch me at: reacting, choosing, refusing, accepting. It is the other who makes my portrait. Always. And luckily. The other of all sorts, is also of all diverse richness. The more the other is rich, the more I am rich. The other, rich, will make all his or her richness resonate in me and will enrich me . . . The world is mistaken. It imagines that the other takes something from us whereas the other only brings to us, all the time. (Cixous 1997, 13)

From Game and Metcalfe, who themselves draw extensively on the philosophy of Martin Buber, we share their understanding of relationality as ontologically primary. Game and Metcalfe argue that in Buber’s notion of the I-Thou, as opposed to the Hegelian notion of the I-It, we can find the seeds of an ontology that displaces the seemingly inevitable logic of the subject/object distinction and moves instead towards an alternative way of understanding encounters with difference. The I-Thou meeting is direct, they argue, not shaped by ideas, desires or values that precede the encounter and thus it stands in stark contrast to the I-It relation. In the directness of this I-Thou meeting there are no subjects produced through their desire for objects; time loses the future orientation of aim and anticipation, and space loses the Euclidian quality of a subject-object opposition. Buber’s argument is that it is this relational ontology, time and space that allows for an ethics of dialogue, that is, for a non-appropriative responsive relation with difference. (Game and Metcalfe 2012, 352)

Drawing out and combining all these thinkers we begin from the assumption that the classroom, which for us is always implicitly a feminist classroom, is and must be a dialogic space of collaborative epistemology if it is indeed to be an ethical space capable of initiating active transformation. Whatever is going to be known/learned will come to be in its particularity in and through relations with others and will therefore

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depend deeply on those relations. In our interdisciplinary classroom, knowledge per se does not precede the relation. Relationality precedes knowing; the acquisition of knowledge is never a solitary engagement and therefore knowledge is always already situated and contextual. “When there are no longer individual sources of energy and knowledge, the dialogue involves everyone as learner and everyone as teacher” (Game and Metcalfe 2009, 46). One of the key strategic ways in which the Interdisciplinary Concept courses produce this I-Thou relation to difference, this immanent relationality, is through the hybrid role of the course facilitators, about which we will say more in the section below. Suffice it to say here that for half the classes, i.e., for all the guest lectures, the course facilitators are themselves students, sitting with the students, asking questions like the students, producing an intermediary space that is at once neither fully expert nor fully student. In the seminars, we cannot assume the same discipline-based expert role assumed by the guest lecturers and thus we remain in what turns out to be a highly ethically productive liminal space where hierarchical authority and thus the subject/object relation have been displaced by the logic of relationality.

Deconstructing Traditional Power Structures For all our aspirations to produce a relational classroom, however, the reality is often that the students come to us deeply trained in passivity as well as acclimatized to its safety. To speak in class, to ask a question or venture an idea is to risk one’s Self and students are acutely aware of that as a potentially negative affective experience. Thus, the more they can come to understand themselves as subjects in relation to and with each other, as intersubjective, the more willing they are to take risks. The immanent and ethical interdisciplinary classroom provides the perfect conditions for this kind of challenge to the notion of the subject as a discrete and fully formed knower who is simply awaiting the addition of more knowledge, prior to her encounter with others. It would seem that the Interdisciplinary Concept classes are uniquely able to displace the notion of a single authoritative expert, more so than in any other interdisciplinary model we have tried thus far. In each class the students are confronted by different experts, some of whom directly challenge the ideas presented in an earlier class. Moreover, and most importantly, the most consistent experience they have of a professor in this class is decidedly unorthodox. The professor, with whom they are most closely engaged, as noted above, is one of them for at least half the classes, positioned with them, both literally in terms of where they sit, and figuratively in terms of listening to

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a lecture delivered by an expert in another discipline. For the other half of the classes the course facilitators ostensibly occupy the more traditional role. Yet they also don’t. They can’t, because it’s relational and because they cannot be taken up in the traditional way as a deliverer of content. The professor with whom the students are most engaged is like them, a colleague on a journey towards understanding, perhaps a facilitator but definitely not a traditional expert. Rather they are expert at modelling the transformative potential of moving towards new ideas with excitement and enthusiasm. And it turns out this teaching structure is powerfully liberating for everyone. Students consistently report that in both the lecture classes where they see us constantly interrupting the guest lecturers, i.e., the experts, to seek clarification and ask questions, as well as in the seminars where we partner them in uncovering meaning and making new connections, they feel less intimidated, and perhaps most crucially, less alienated. Even if the subject matter is outside their own particular area of interest the relational group experience tends to bring them with us. It’s harder to psychically disappear, a phenomenon with which any teacher is all too familiar these days, perhaps especially now in light of the diversive distractions of technologies like cell phones. In displacing the traditional “teacher as expert” model, a new space is opened for students to see themselves as co-creators, along with the course director, of the understanding that emerges. While many Women’s and Gender Studies classes have aspired to the displacement of the authority of the traditional teacher/student structure, we have come to believe that the secret to our success with this model lies in the structural shift that is embodied in the role of the course director. In our experience, no amount of alternative assignments, collaborative group work, or student-led classes seems to accomplish this democratizing in quite the same way. As students witness the course director coming to understanding in the now, in an immanent relation with knowledge, they themselves feel freed from the constraints of an understanding of themselves as the kind of subject who should know and thus the kind of subject who is at risk of “losing face.” We are acutely cognizant of this dynamic as facilitators and thus we regularly model what we’ve come to call the art of the “dumb” question. In the guest lectures, we try to anticipate where the students may be confused and ask the most basic of questions to help connect expert to learner. We are not anxious about our intellectual legitimacy and therefore we can ask anything, no matter how “dumb” it might seem. This creates a vastly different learning environment than what is typically delivered in the conventional classroom where too many students remain silenced by the structural expectations of university education and no speech act about

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open dialogue, in our experience, can overcome this. Instead, we show them it’s safe by taking the risks first and the result for us has been the highest levels of participation we’ve seen in fifteen years of teaching. While this particular strategy of decentring the authority of the teacher is clearly one of the structural Trojan strategies we have come to rely on, there is a further Trojan aspect to the role of the course director. It is undoubtedly true that the course directors are typically not experts in the particular discipline that is the subject of the class on any given day, but they are, and must be, consummate exemplars of the best of critical and ethical thinking—the very thing we want to develop in all our students. In order to be truly effective in their midwifery role as facilitators of emergent immanent understanding they have to be experts in identifying the central issues and assumptions in an argument or problem, able to recognize and make connections between often disparate ideas, evaluate evidence and authority and make meaningful inferences from the information they are encountering. Perhaps it is not insignificant that both of us come to our teaching with significant backgrounds in feminist philosophy. Philosophy has not only trained us in the practice of critical engagement, it empowers all its students to think of knowledge as open to critical engagement and analysis. Of course, we understand from feminism that without simultaneous ethical engagement with epistemology we risk reproducing the hierarchical structures of power that infuse knowledge practices more broadly. Thus, we find the course directors need to be able to facilitate the kind of critical understanding that is also political and ethical; only then does it carry the potential for transformation. Through both modelling—a vastly underrated teaching strategy these days—as well as facilitation, the course director embodies the best of the generic skills and competences we are wanting our students to accomplish.

Encounters with Difference and Epistemic Curiosity As many of us teaching in the increasingly neoliberal context of 21stcentury higher education know, students are more and more encouraged to focus their studies in ever narrower and more utilitarian ways. Vocation looms over their heads lacing the architecture of their encounter with knowledge with a deep sense of anxiety about their future capacities to economically survive. It is an intellectually and ethically stifling atmosphere that leaves little room for the kind of curiosity-driven exploration of ideas that might once have informed a liberal education, let alone a sense that their classroom experiences could be deeply socially and ethically transformative. The essential vision for the Interdisciplinary

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Concept courses is to offer students an opportunity to experience the way that disciplinary knowledge is actually enhanced by encounters with other voices, from different perspectives and with diverse forms of expertise. This above all is the skill they will most need going forward and it relies on their willingness and ability to free themselves enough simply to be curious—epistemically curious, not just diversively curious. Deep interdisciplinarity, as opposed to the additive model of multidisciplinarity that, in our view, is often mis-identified as interdisciplinarity, begins with the recognition that the disciplines themselves carry debts to a multitude of others, whether or not these debts are acknowledged, and that disciplinary borders have always been leaky. As Joe Moran suggests in Interdisciplinarity (2010) “Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos. . .” (2010, 1). Deep interdisciplinarity means acknowledging the inherent messiness of the very ideas that shape and define the disciplines and rejoicing in that messiness, seeing it as the compost for innovation and creativity rather than the chaos of anarchy. In conceiving of these courses, we hoped that providing students with an opportunity for such delight might help reorient their approach to learning away from instrumentality and individualism and towards curiosity and collaboration. Of course, this is not an either/or. We cannot do this work without disciplinarity. We need to be informed by the spirit of both/and: both disciplinarity and deep interdisciplinarity; both specialization and generalists, and both diversive as well as epistemic curiosity. Like many of us, we have long known that the classes students report stay with them the most are the ones taught by the professors who clearly loved what they were doing. A fantastic professor, it would seem, can elicit a 180-degree turn in a student and we have found that the Interdisciplinary Concept courses have repeatedly accomplished this feat. Consider this comment from the evaluations of DIRT by one of our initially very resistant Business Studies students who reported only taking the course because she was being made to take a humanities’ elective. In the spirit of a true neoliberal subject she mused aloud in class about why she had to pay for this when she could otherwise take another business class, which is what she was really paying for! I would like to begin by saying that this is literally the most valuable course I have ever taken. Firstly, it has created an appreciation for disciplines that I haven’t studied before, that I otherwise may have thought of as useless or bullshit. It has opened my eyes to the possibilities within my education, and has fed a desire to learn that was a fraction of what it once was. I think the course has rekindled my curiosity in the world and all

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the things I may one day come to know. I also think this course has provided a unique opportunity to see the way everything is connected, and I hope that I will not forget this lesson throughout my life. I think all students in every program would benefit from this course . . . . Some of the benefits of interdisciplinary analysis: 1) critical thinking, 2) question everything, 3) don’t overestimate the legitimacy of your knowledge, 4) a greater, more holistic view of the world, 5) my hand really hurts, but I could go on . . . I would like to thank everyone for the work they put into this course in order to make it a possibility . . . —Stephanie Dickson, Business Studies, Accounting

Curiously, and unexpectedly from our point of view in the planning of these classes, it turns out that just as the students found themselves freed up from the demands of their more disciplined subjects we found that many of the professors who guest lectured for us reported the same thing. Thus, by accident another Trojan aspect of the courses is revealed. Professors who have been freed from the demands of evaluation, as well as the responsibility of feeling that it is their job to deliver certain content frequently report to us that they loved these classes and that they were affectively transformed as professors. Consistently surprised at how thoughtful and engaged the students were, many of the guest professors said that teaching their guest class was one of the most memorable and fun teaching experiences of their careers! While from our perspective the guest classes are actually the ones that still most clearly conform to a traditional classroom, the structure of the course overall would seem to be allowing for an enhanced sense of relationality even for the guest professors. They felt more free to engage with the students’ questions—to go “off-script” as one of them described it—and clearly they too found it transformative. Many reported re-thinking their pedagogical strategies in their so-called normal teaching. And perhaps even more fascinating, many of the guests have told us that the experience of having to make a creative connection between their expert knowledge and the theme changed how they think about their own research. For example, in conceiving his lecture on plant dormancy for SLOTH, our resident botanist was able to re-think the way he teaches students plant biology. An established limnologist with a PhD in zoology taught himself about plant and animal intelligence in order to deliver a lecture on GENIUS. Curiously, while he continually told the students that he was not an expert in this area, his effusive excitement for what he had discovered in a field he never would have turned to were it not for his commitment to providing a lecture for us was perhaps more powerful than a lecture from someone who has said it all before. In other words, the course design not only opened unique opportunities in the

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seminars but in the lectures as well. Students are more likely to witness their professors in the role of learners as they present either newly considered material or a new approach to material they know well. No one is in familiar territory. In dismantling the traditional classroom by creating a relational space in which students feel collectively responsible for and excited by their coming to knowing we have repeatedly heard them report being surprised at the class they would describe as their favourite. It has become commonplace for us to hear them report hating English in high school and loving the class on poetry, or thinking that maths was boring and physics incomprehensible only to discover that their favourite class was on quantum physics and the origin of the universe. The relational classroom is opening a space for an engaged curiosity and for a different affective relation to knowledge. In so doing it powerfully tackles the second dilemma of social justice education: the dilemma of alienation and overwhelm. This makes the model especially exciting for emerging interdisciplinary fields such as the environmental (post)humanities that aim to take on wicked social/environmental problems.4 In WATER, for example, rather than being presented with terrible truths about the state of water globally, the students discovered such realities themselves in the spaces of the disciplinary lectures. Students felt empowered by the connections and conflicts we together uncovered among and between indigenous, feminist, geographical, ecological and historical perspectives on water. This element of discovery mitigated against the heaviness (or thickness) of the material, a density we have often found obstructive when introducing students to critical perspectives on social and environmental issues. In being actively involved in making the connections, the students do not feel assaulted with terrible news, but are instead able to slowly develop an awareness of the situation, often through additional research they elect to do as they are given pieces of a not yet determined picture, and in the process become spokes-people for the issue being considered. They are not told what to think, which is unavoidable to some extent in a disciplinary context that relies on scientific data, but are instead presented with a series of fragments that they can assemble themselves. The terrible truth about water doesn’t change, but how the students come to know and act in the face of such truths is remarkably and meaningfully different.

Courage and Resilience in the Face of Uncertainty One of the challenges of the trend towards interdisciplinary programming in contemporary universities comes from the fact that no one can precisely

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agree on a definition of interdisciplinarity. Earlier in this paper we identified an approach to a curriculum that we think of as multidisciplinary rather than interdisciplinary. Often fuelled by the financial interests of university administrators this is the model where you have a range of disciplines simply presenting material from their own disciplinary perspective. One of the consequences of this kind of strategy is that it can indeed displace certainty—something we generally think of as a good thing—but it does so in ways which we do not think are necessarily productive. To undermine certainty by simply offering competing ideas does little to open a productive epistemological space for people who don’t have sufficient depth of knowledge in an area to experience either meaningful engagement or challenge. Given that most undergraduate students are not proficient at the skills of critical thinking, this can and likely will leave them confused and disempowered. Who do you believe when psychology tells you A about an animal’s capacity for emotion and biology tell you B? The model of facilitation that is at the heart of the Interdisciplinary Concept courses directly addresses this problem by fostering productive uncertainty, a kind of uncertainty that actually stimulates both intellectual courage as well as epistemic curiosity, i.e., the desire to seek more knowledge. The alternative is rightly accused of leading to confusion and then risking foreclosing on curiosity. It takes courage and resilience to dwell with uncertainty, without giving up on knowledge and truth, and again, these are skills our students desperately need in order to manage a rapidly changing world. While insights from cognitive psychology have shown that we learn better when learning is difficult, when we have to wrestle with ideas, it is also apparent that when learning is too difficult, when students are left without a map for making sense of competing ideas their impulse is to contract their interests, to take shelter in the familiarity of what they already know i.e., their own discipline.5 Once again, we find the course director’s role perfectly positioned to manage the challenge of interdisciplinarity and to foster the right kind of desirable difficulty. As Ian Leslie notes “[E]pistemic curiosity is not a ‘natural’ state of mind requiring only the removal of obstacles to flourish, but a joint project that needs to be worked at” (2014, 192). The world that we are leaving to the students graduating from universities now and for the foreseeable future is one which is laced with uncertainty. It is no wonder that many experience the prospect of what they will do with their lives with trepidation. Neoliberal university cultures encourage students to enrol on courses they are invited to believe will be

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vocationally helpful and to filter any further selections through the same instrumental criteria. Students, perhaps particularly in North America, are pushed to decide on majors very early and in so doing to seek a sense of safety in the face of this uncertainty. Disciplinary training then reinforces this tendency by encouraging them to think of themselves as developing disciplinary expertise, something which further reinforces an experience of their own subjectivity as discrete and independent of others. They are developing their identities as experts in their own chosen fields and they come to their encounters with others often committed to its ongoing production. This is a disciplinary encounter with certainty. Yet the reality of their lives outside the university will likely not reinforce this notion of certainty. On the contrary they are likely to encounter difference and challenge almost immediately. Creating spaces where they have already experienced the richness, promise and creativity of productive uncertainty, where they have even experienced excitement in the face of it, better prepares them for the reality of both the vocational lives they are likely to have as well as the ethical life of citizenry we must also prepare them for. Their encounter with difference in the Interdisciplinary Concept courses gives them an affective experience of the pleasure of intersubjective uncertainty to the extent that this means that any truths they arrive at will be conditioned by the possibility that they will not be absolute. Preparing our students for a world in which truths change, and experiencing this as a good thing and not an occasion for anxiety, is an ethical project. Giving them the skills to understand themselves as relationally responsible is a powerful counter to the disempowering neoliberal fantasy of individual responsibility. It is the neoliberal subject who responds to wicked problems like climate change, global poverty, tenacious gender inequality and environmental degradation with a sense of futility and despair. To the extent that the Interdisciplinary Concept classes allow the students to experience themselves as relational subjects with relational responsibility they offer a powerful antidote to the ethical inertia and alienation of neoliberal subjectivity.

Conclusion Ethical pedagogy aimed at social and environmental transformation rests on the recognition that we, and the knowledges we produce, are all subjects in relation. The conventional disciplinary classroom struggles to enact the affect of relationality inside the structure of neoliberal individualism. No matter how much group work is assigned, and to some extent no matter the content of the course, the disciplinary environment

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within the neoliberal institution mostly fosters a phenomenology of individualism and separation. Vocational anxiety reinforces such a separation if only for pragmatic reasons as students do not feel free to risk succeeding or failing together. Such a separation also contributes to the wicked problems of alienation and intangibility that dog the social and environmental justice curriculum. In some ways, what we’ve discovered and fostered in the Interdisciplinary Concept courses is simple: for deeply transformative learning to take place students have to feel something different from what the conventional model permits. It’s not enough to lecture against the structure without altering the structure. At their best, these courses create a space in which students can, without feeling that they are risking too much, open themselves to an affective, phenomenological experience of learning as exciting, important, communal and essential to creating a better world.

Notes 1 The term wicked problems, originally used in the 1960s in relation to intractable problems in social planning, has come to refer more broadly to problems the complexity of which calls for collaboration between vastly different stakeholders. They are typically problems that resist easy resolution and while they can be experienced locally, as in homelessness in a particular city, they are often also simultaneously global; urban homelessness for example, is a problem across the world. Other examples might include entrenched global poverty, climate change, mass extinction, de-forestation, food security, and rising levels of xenophobia. The complexity of these vast problems invites, in fact demands, interdisciplinary collaboration (see Tackling Wicked Problems: Through the Transdisciplinary Imagination (Brown et al. 2010)). 2 The notions of diversive and epistemic curiosity are drawn from Ian Leslie’s 2014 book Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends Upon It, and we will expand on these notions later in the paper. 3 In setting up each iteration of the course we attempt to balance content evenly between the sciences, the social sciences and the humanities with representation from the Faculties of Arts and Science, Applied and Professional Studies as well as Education. We are especially committed to the integration of science into the humanities curriculum. 4 In “Four Problems, Four Directions for Environmental Humanities,” authors Astrida Neimanis, Cecelia Åsberg, and Johan Hedrén identify “alienation and intangibility,” the difficulty we humans have in appreciating wicked problems happening at global, geological and climactic levels (2015, 69; 73), as central challenges for environmental humanities education. 5 In Curious, Ian Leslie notes the work of cognitive psychologist, Robert Bjork, who in the 1990s discovered that contrary to our assumptions, in fact we learn better when learning is difficult (Leslie 2014, 91–93). Creating a context in which

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we can generate the right amount of “desirable difficulty” (Bjork’s phrase) is precisely what the Interdisciplinary Concept courses seem primed to accomplish.

Bibliography Brown, Valerie, John A. Harris and Jacqueline Y. Russell. 2010. Tackling Wicked Problems Through the Transdisciplinary Imagination. New York: Routledge. Buber, Martin. [1970] 1996. I and Thou. New York: Touchstone. Cixous, Hélène, and Mireille Calle-Gruber. 1997. Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. London: Routledge. Game, Ann, and Andrew Metcalfe. 2009. “Dialogue and Team Teaching.” Higher Education Research & Development 28 (1): 45–57. —. 2012. “‘In the Beginning is Relation’: Martin Buber’s Alternative to Binary Oppositions.” Sophia. International Journal of Philosophy and Traditions 51: 351–363. Leslie, Ian. 2014. Curious: The Desire to Know and Why your Future Depends On It. Toronto: House of Anansi Press. Moran, Joe. 2010. Interdisciplinarity. Second edition. New York: Routledge. Neimanis, Astrida, Cecilia Asberg and Johan Hedrén. 2015. “Four Problems, Four Directions for Environmental Humanities: Towards Critical Posthumanities for the Anthropocene.” Ethics and Environment 20: 1, 67–97.

CHAPTER FOUR ATMOSPHERIC ENCOUNTERS: GENERIC COMPETENCES IN LIGHT OF POSTHUMANIST TEACHING PRACTICES WITH/ON AFFECTIVITY MALOU JUELSKJÆR

In this chapter, generic competences will be placed in a posthuman framework. This framework effects a disruption of the everyday, takenfor-granted teaching-learning ontology with its distinctions between theory/practice, subject/object, time/space, and content/competences. Competences are not viewed as in opposition to content, but as emergent with and through it. This means that, in learning processes, the qualities of both (content and competences) come into being as “intra-active” forces of materialization. These forces are not only human. Generic competences, in all their human-centredness and preoccupation with boosting human capabilities (and societal growth), must already be more-than-human in order to be/come. I will argue that a posthuman pedagogy which takes into account and actively works with the agency of the nonhuman, the spatial (spatio-temporal), and the affective is helpful in terms of the development and critical examination of more-than-human generic competences. I will unfold these arguments as I examine a teaching methodology in which university students (of educational psychology) designed “leadership chairs”1 as part of an intensive course on Affect Theory and Contemporary Management: Psy-leadership in/of Organizations. By designing leadership chairs, the students created a milieu in which to imaginatively evoke dilemmas, hierarchies, tensions, hopes, and pitfalls within specific leadership practices.2 This teaching methodology is an example of a posthuman pedagogy that—when given specific attention (that is, turned into a research case)—may help readdress generic competences. A posthuman framing turns the attention to sensuous,

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affective, material, and spatial qualities of pedagogical practices (and work-life practices). Furthermore, a posthuman framing shifts the ontology of competences from something acquired, individually held, and “transportable” (Biggs and Tang 2011, Chapman and O’Neill 2010) to a (radically) entangled becoming with no fixed beginning or end. This will be elaborated through an empirical example. The teaching methodology involved the creation of a “sensorium.” A sensorium is understood as a faculty of sensing and, furthermore, in a posthuman framing, sensing is neither an individual nor an exclusively human affair (Juelskjær 2016, 1545). Hicky-Moody (2009) (inspired by the work of Deleuze) points to the pedagogical quality of what she terms enmeshments: The enmeshment of individual, ‘human’ subjective traits with a non-human medium (world-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. (Hickey-Moody 2009, 274)

This also means that teaching practices are strategically aestheticized3 or, as Michels and Beyes (2016) argue, they become “atmospheric.” An atmosphere, argues Stewart, is not an inert context but a force field in which people find themselves (Stewart 2011, 452). Atmospheric encounters, then, are a framing of the quality of the aesthetic eventalization4 of teaching and learning of which designing leadership chairs is an example/event. Hereby, a specific platform is opened for further reflection and discussion concerning the achievement of generic competences. “Psy-leadership” is a theoretical, analytical concept for what occurs when management (of employees and of students) incorporates methods from the psy-sciences (psychology, pedagogy, and sychiatry/neuroscience) (Rose 1999, 2009). It involves an indirect governing of the intensity, energy, commitment, and learning capacity of employees and students. This occurs indirectly through the shaping of emotions and through the strategic shaping of the physical environment (Juelskjær and Staunæs 2016). Investigating psy-leadership in university teaching as a “diagnosis” of conditions of contemporary work life involves working with a number of theoretical and analytical resources on affect, leadership, etc. Furthermore, it calls for developing an understanding of the subtle workings of power relations and not just critiquing at a distance. One needs to try to understand how leading and governing through affectivity also operate beside cognitive awareness and involve positive affects and moods in ways that are not “bad” in any simple sense. Psy-leadership operates through the employees’ motivation; their thrill at learning something new; their ability and eagerness to work creatively, autonomously, and

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collaboratively, etc. In this respect it may be argued that psy-leadership operates through and promotes attractive generic competences (motivation, (lifelong) learning capacity, analytical skills, creativity, competences to work autonomously and collaboratively, etc.). Therefore, when dealt with academically in the teaching of students, psy-leadership not only calls for new analytical frameworks and gazes, but for experimental teaching and learning practices, in order to address how subjectivities—through intensities of being—are done, undone, and redone in ways that have both intended and unintended consequences for employees, leadership, and organizations (Juelskjær and Staunæs 2016). This chapter has a three-sided agenda in relation to generic competences: 1) To theoretically situate generic competences within a posthuman framework. Generic competences are not individual achievements and possessions to carry around but entangled becomings; nonhuman spatial and temporal forces and components are agentic (and come to specific life through intra-action). This furthermore readdresses or problematizes the view of “generic” as something that may be easily “transferred” or “transported.” This framing makes it possible to: 2) Analyse how generic competences (understood in this chapter as more-than-human, entangled becomings) are catered for/produced through psy-leadership in contemporary work life and how psyleadership vampirises on these very same competences. 3) Analyse how the teaching practice of “designing leadership chairs”—as a sensorium that enables atmospheric encounters— both promotes and disturbs generic competences in a class and engenders reflection on how generic competences are a “tool” or “channel” of complex (affective) power processes in work life. It is furthermore argued that this methodology makes the students sense complexities and develop constructive critical sense and arguments in relation to psy-leadership practices (and “human resource management” practices).

A posthumanist framing5 In broad terms, posthuman pedagogical endeavours involve sensitivity to consider and take into account “what participates in knowledge-making

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practices” instead of concentrating on “who” (Hinton 2015). The answer to the question of what matters—that is, the agencies involved in processes of learning—is opened up to include non-human agencies of various kinds. Many scholars have already effectuated this broadening of agencies, leading to both rich analyses and discussions on pedagogical and educational issues—as well as theoretical and conceptual refinements.6 For the chapter at hand, I will stress some basic assumptions and resources to think and act with. First and foremost, (pedagogical) practices are practices of mattering; “wor(l)ds” are continuously in the making (Barad 2007). Following Barad, this may be theorized as intra-activity; the radical open-endedness and entanglement of what we, in teaching (and everyday living), have come to see as individual, self-enclosed human subjects7 engaged in individual—though collectively mediated and processed—activities, while learning skills and content. Barad notes how prior to, or “outside intra-actions, words and things are indeterminate” (Barad 2007, xx). Following this, students (“clever students,” “hardworking students,” and “no-good-students”), teachers, and leaders come into being together with materialities of bodies, things, technologies, and spaces within education. Furthermore, competences and content are not to be viewed as dead, brute matter, but as matter already entangled in the processes of coming to life through intra-action. What acts, what comes to life and matters, as teachers, students, and competences are enacted, is not only human (Juelskjær and Plauborg 2013). As matter and meaning are entangled and constituted through each other (where “each other” is the effect of the intra-action and the “wor(l)ding”), the status of ontology (in academic practice) is opened up: “The very nature of intellectual inquiry is the work of ontology in its complex mappings, splittings, and traversals . . . all conceptual work is, at its core or by very definition, methodological. That is, theory is practice and it is (a) practice that matters” (Hinton 2015, 13–14): a mattering process with boundary-setting and difference-producing effects. A concept of learning inspired by posthumanist thinking is thereby . . . a basic performative perspective, in which the subject and the world are constantly in a dynamic state of becoming and where there is no a priori separation between the world and us. In agential realist thinking, learning is an emergent and open phenomenon without a beginning or end. (Plauborg 2015, 3)

What are also in becoming (in “worlding” (Barad 2007) and in learning (Plauborg 2016)) are temporality and spatiality:

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Mattering and materializing are dynamic processes through which temporality and spatiality are produced as something specific. Barad names this process spacetimemattering (2007) to emphasize the way components are produced together in one ongoing movement. This is a profound reframing, or one might say, ‘queering’ of time and space (Barad 2010) which has significant consequences for what we know about time and space in specific historical material-discursive practices. (Juelskjær 2013, 755)

Time and space are set in motion in pedagogical practices (Juelskjær and Plauborg 2013, Plauborg 2016) and may be addressed strategically. Working with this understanding of time and space will influence the concepts of generic competences. Furthermore, affectivity plays an important part in processes of learning (as well as in the constitution of subjectivities (Juelskjær 2013)). To cut a long and complex theorization very short, I draw on HickeyMoody’s consideration of affectivity in relation to posthuman pedagogies. Hickey-Moody describes how “affect is the concept of taking something on, of changing in relation to an experience or encounter” (Hickey-Moody 2009, 274). She cites Deleuze (1988, 48–51), who defines the concept of “affectus” as ‘an increase or decrease of the power of acting, for the body and the mind alike’ . . . Affectus is the materiality of change: ‘the passage from one state to another’ (Deleuze 49), which occurs in relation to ‘affecting bodies’. . . . Affectus is a rhythmic trace of the world incorporated into a bodybecoming, 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. Through creating subjective change (or a modulation) in the form of affectus, such media are posthuman pedagogies: meta-subjective material forces of change. (Hickey-Moody 2009, 274)8

Summing up the question of “what participates in knowledge-making practices” (Hinton 2015) vis-à-vis pedagogy: posthuman pedagogy is inherently affectively charged and may actively incorporate creative media and/or turn to creative productions within teaching and learning. These strategies mobilize sensual registers as a mode of coming-to-know, by facilitating movements in thoughts, feelings, wonderings, and questions that enable students to become different, imagine, and discuss with and of the faculty of sensing (Juelskjær and Staunæs 2016b). Furthermore, these endeavours produce and are produced by temporality and spatiality. How,

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and to what effects (also in relation to generic competences), will be a matter of empirical encounters—encounters of atmospheric qualities.9

Affecting students During the university course, students read a diverse body of literature on neuropsychology, bodies, affect, and emotion. In class, theoretical and conceptual complexities are held open: the theories and scholars draw on and depart from each other. A substantial amount of “epistemological damage” is done in academic texts; that is, caricaturing and knocking down other scholars’ work with little respect for nuance (Barad in interview in (Juelskjær and Schwennesen 2012)) (for example in (Wetherell 2012, Massumi 2002); see (Staunæs 2014) for a comment). So, when teaching with these texts, students also need to read beyond the critical voices in the texts for an in-depth understanding of the theories. This leads to some frustration among students. When teaching students studying for a master’s degree in educational psychology, there is a push in the studies and in the student subjectivities towards “wanting to do good” and “do right,” and thus a search for “right/good positions.” The students search for what to critique and be opposed to (=sensing one’s academic resources/generic competences as a critical student) and what to use/like (=sensing one’s academic resources/generic competences as “tools to use”). This tendency has to be counteracted in class to accommodate complexity and both/and instead of either/or. Caring for complexities and to “stay with the trouble” (Haraway 2016) also entails working with rich empirical material—where “material” involves a range of non-human actors—soundbites, video clips, images of work environments and contemporary educational architecture, and visits to art galleries—to evoke senses as a way of grasping affectivity as non-cognitive movements. Various physical practices were also included, and, finally, designing leadership chairs. All these practices took place in order to evoke multiple ways of grasping what affectivity may be and may effect when mobilized in/with leadership and governing practices (practices that work with and vampirise on generic competences), to find ways of engaging students in the complex and constructive critical academic practice of leadership exploration, and to consider possible “futures-to-come.”

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Psy-leadership in/of organizations and generic competences entangled in these practices A posthuman framing of pedagogy and learning—and thus the competences emerging within and hereof—influences pedagogical practices. It may open teaching and learning strategically to become atmospheric encounters; not as a routine, but as a manner of attending to the specificities of what is to be taught and learned. Therefore, some further elaboration of affect and psy-leadership is needed to clarify the pedagogical aim of producing leadership chairs in a course focused on affect theories and psy-leadership practices. Affect Theory and Contemporary Management: Psy-leadership in/of Organizations was set within the framework of a course in which students were invited to dwell on a specific area or topic. The course invited students into research on psy-leadership and its affective, material, and spatial ways of operating.10 The concept of psy-leadership (and thereby the empirical analyses conducted, the development of further concepts, and the coining of leadership techniques and technologies that it opens for) has been crafted through (years of) work with theories of affectivity, governmentality, feminism, discursive psychology, new materialism, agential realism, post-structuralist geography, etc. It has been coined to describe the work going on (in diverse empirical fields) where the capacities of humans are “opened” through more-than-humans in order to transform the human into something else/more (in the field of work—and education— within advanced capitalism). It is a shaping of the human that also occurs as an effect of the radical openness of humans via the diverse entanglements that they are of, channelled through the sensual—touch, taste, hearing, seeing, and smell—through which affects may also flow. The term psy-leadership has been coined (theoretically and analytically) to denote a certain form of governance where the leadership of employees and students incorporates methods from the psy-sciences (psychology, pedagogy, and psychiatry/neuroscience (Rose 1999, 2009)). Psy-leadership distinguishes itself from other forms of governance and self-governance by focusing upon the intensity of affectivity rather than the identity of subjects (Juelskjær, Staunæs, and Ratner 2013). Identities may or may not change as an effect of an increase or decrease in the capacity to act, but identity formation is not in focus: the focus is on the (tiny) openings of capacities and the effects of these openings. Psy-leadership works strategically with affect and intensity, navigating intensities by the way that something or someone is strategically attuned towards, for example, learning, being creative, or being gifted at work. Contemporary

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(Western) employees “stretch” their capacities in order to give more, learn more, develop more, etc. (Juelskjær and Staunæs 2016). Psy-leadership concerns an indirect managing of the intensity, energy, commitment, and learning capacity of employees and students. Indirect in the sense that it occurs through the shaping of desires and moods, as well as through the strategic shaping of the physical environment: the spatial arrangements and materialities participate in transforming intensities and shaping desire by affecting bodies, voices, atmospheres, and social relations (Juelskjær, Staunæs, and Ratner 2013, Juelskjær 2014). But what might that entail? Consider for a moment modern workplace environments. An iconic example is the Google headquarters, where the interior design invites employees to shift between formal desk work and informal, playful areas with soft seating arrangements and “happy colours.” Ponder which generic competences you think are (needed and) promoted by such a playful interior, designed for informal chat and the opening of creative forces, new ideas, etc.11 Consider furthermore a contemporary reworking of educational architecture and interiors to see similar invitations to informal learning (Juelskjær 2014, Boys 2010).

Fig. 4-1. Examples of the interior layout of an education building. Images by Malou Juelskjær (2015).

Such spatial invitations to be affected, to act, and to sense in certain ways have been termed “environmentality” by Massumi (inspired by Foucault)

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(Massumi 2009). Environmentality is a specific form of governance which manages the intensities instead of the identities of humans and does so through modulations of the environment and by facilitating possible fusions, openings, and connections. It is potentializing what may become through the retainment and cultivation of desire that aims to shape who we are and who we desire to become (Juelskjær and Staunæs 2016) (Massumi 2009). As a diagnosis of practices taking place in contemporary work life (and education), psy-leadership is entangled with the generic competences called for by the labour market (some of which are also promoted in education): for employees to be (self-)motivated, self-managing, creative, adaptable, development-oriented, etc. (Chapman and O’Neill 2010). One could say that psy-leadership employs generic competences as a foundation: it works through affectivity and the spatial when indirectly cultivating the employees’ desire for further development, acting in the practices where generic competences are integral to the working processes. When it “goes bad,” psy-leadership vampires/cannibalizes these competences: the employee’s willingness to be (to come into being as) “analytical,” “critical,” and “self-critical.” Interpersonal and interactional skills may also have the effect that the employee keeps on model-ling/working with who he/she is as an employee (work on “your self”) or keeps reworking the content he/she is working on (when is something ever good enough?). To always remain focused on learning, giving more, working “autonomously,” etc., may complicate the employees’ boundary drawing processes; that is, processes of withdrawing (when is it (good) enough? when is the working day over? when to not answer emails; when and how to shut down ideas, thoughts and concerns?). The ability to adapt—leave behind what you thought you knew—may give the sense that you are constantly lacking. The exhaustion of senses and mental capacity, in the form of burnout and stress, is the possible effect.12

Atmospheric encounters—on the becoming of affected students Using the concept of “atmospheric pedagogy” (Michels and Beyes 2016), it is possible to flesh out the practices of teaching within posthuman pedagogy and underline the importance of senses, affects, materials, and spaces. I will now turn to the concepts of atmosphere to develop a framing of the work with the leadership chairs. On the concept of atmosphere, Anderson states: Perhaps the use of atmosphere in everyday speech and aesthetic discourse provides the best approximation of the concept of affect—where affect is

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taken to be the transpersonal or prepersonal intensities that emerge as bodies affect one another . . . atmospheres may interrupt, perturb and haunt fixed persons, places or things.

He concludes that “Atmospheres are a kind of indeterminate affective ‘excess’ through which intensive space-times can be created” (Anderson 2009, 80). Specific qualities are highlighted by Michels and Beyes (2016) when considering a pedagogy of atmospheres first it is attuned to spatial multiplicity; second, it both feeds off and generates, or interferes with, atmospheres; third, it turns spatial multiplicity and the everyday production of spatial atmospherics into the very material of management education,

and furthermore, they suggest three tactical slogans to adumbrate the implications for management education: enable self-reflexive engagements with the spaces of the business school; undo its everyday spatial routines; and leave its spaces for everyday life. (Michels and Beyes 2016, 323)

The choice of a chair is strategic: It evokes the material, spatial, affective, and sensual, it links to the metaphor of “chairing” or being “the chair” and physical chairs as part of a long tradition of assisting and enacting leadership practices. Listen—as inspiration—to this leader (in interview, Larsen and Laursen 2012): To enable a good dialogue, I need to set aside some of the signifiers of power, and there is a lot of power in here with my 22 inch screen . . . there are lights that I can use and the chair I can lift up so that I am substantially taller than you. I can also use all those signifiers of power when I need to, uh, play my trump cards, then there’s also, uh, then there’s also all the stuff that remains unspoken; that’s signifiers that can exist by adjusting the chair’s height and, uh . . . and then it’s easier in certain situations for me to give an instruction and trust that it will be done, uh . . . Or I can choose to place myself at eye level and be conscious of the signals I transmit . . . because there is a power structure in here, certainly . . . So, if I want a dialogue with some employees, then I have to hope that they’ll play along, because it’s an illusion; I have the power to hire and fire, they don’t . . . but if they’ll play along, then it can result in some bloody good dialogues . . . but my contribution can be to remove all those signifiers of power . . . take off the tie, you know, or not have one on in the first place. (Larsen and Laursen 2009, 36)

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In another situation, a leader discussed caring for a distressed employee in an open-plan office environment: Interviewer: Where can you have a serious talk in here? Leader: Yes, that is a bit of a challenge. I mean, I introduced what we call ‘the crying curtains’ because they can be drawn to create sort of a bunker atmosphere in here . . . but if you come in crying, no matter if it’s because your father died or whatever . . . then it needs rigging up before you are really able to let loose. (Larsen and Laursen 2009, 54)

The work with designing leadership chairs was chosen strategically to: 1) force the students to think of leadership as “more than human;” 2) play with the leadership metaphor of “chairing” and attend to the material specificities of chairing; 3) address the affective as something that flows (and takes form) through the spatial and material; 4) force the students to consider specific leadership practices; 5) invite the students to imagine themselves situated in (or to become of) the qualities of the design and the practice; and 6) disrupt the habitual taken-for-granted teaching (this will all be outlined concretely in the section below). The theoretical content of the course and the concordant training of competences such as critical thinking, collaboration, and creativity, were enacted through each other and through the affective spatio-temporalities while working with (and presenting for each other) temporary, sketchy designs: a pedagogy sensitive to—and working with the creation of—specific atmospheres. Lambert notes: To situate pedagogic relations and experiences in aesthetic terms is to draw critical attention to the ways in which teaching and learning both support hegemonic modes of sense perception and have potential . . . to ‘redistribute the sensible’. Such disruption and redistribution are critically important as the space for resistance or the generation of alternative versions of reality gets squeezed. (Lambert 2012, 224)

As a redistribution of the sensible, the event of producing leadership chairs was a creation of a specific (posthuman) sensorium, of getting to know something while disrupting the knowing self: hitting the sensual registers and infusing theories as thinking in action—as worldmakings, as differing and sensing futures-to-come. Let’s start by looking at a reflexive note written by a student in the midst of designing a chair: It is exciting to work with the chair-arrangement. But also frustrating. It’s exciting to sense, see, and hear the values that we will come up with, and

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Chapter Four that we want the chair to contain/enable [values in relation to leadership, relations/encounters, material qualities, etc. MJ]. At the same time, it is also almost utopic, impossible to materialize. We have many ideas about what it must and absolutely must not afford. We have been ‘tossing around’ a lot of ideas to sense what we like/dislike. It will be exciting to see our result—it may end up very pompous or very minimalistic; we do not know yet. (Student reflexive note, 2015)

Materialising affective qualities/flows of leadership practices through designing leadership chairs seems to be a material-discursive affective endeavour: excitement, tensions, and materialities-on-the-move. It is at the same time about being engaged, sensing engagement (and disengagement), and reflecting and theorizing. Complex loops, co-producing materials, human and non-human subjects, and competences of more or less specific types, are all entangled herein.

Sensing leadership and affectivity through design processes The students worked in groups of three and began by choosing two leadership chairs from the art book The Leadership Chair (Ledarstolen) by Jan Nottberg and Hans Persson (2000). The book contains images of chairs as works of art with metaphoric names (e.g., “Divided loyalties,” “User-friendly ambivalence,” or “Probationary dialogue”). The students used the images to interview each other about what they associated with leadership and the sense of being led. Discussing psyleadership and spatial-affective arrangements through the images kickstarted creative discussions about how to materialise dilemmas in leadership and being led in and with “a design.” The students then chose a specific situation/dilemma of leadership practices that involved psyleadership and discussed this in depth. The process of “producing” their own chairs and spatial arrangement then started. The groups’ designs went in many directions. Every design was presented by the group and the dilemmas materialised were examined by all in plenum discussions. New understandings evolved by engaging with each other’s designs, discussing them together, playing with arguments, and exploring theories by examining what the design and situation/dilemma may be imaginatively effected. Two examples: One group designed a soft seating arrangement with a transparent quality (glass as the dominant material), discussing “transparent leadership” as a metaphor for specific leadership practices and their associated benefits and issues.

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Fig. 4-2. Draw wing by studennts13 (2015). Thee group made tw two, similar draawings one with green ligght ‘inside’ andd one with red.

In their presentation, the students explained thaat they envisiioned the seating arranngement as made m of glass, with the posssibility of chan nging the colours/lightt “inside” (frrom green to red). The foorm was described as “Round. ‘Baagelish.’ Orgaanic, wavy.” The intentionn with the glass was to consider “trransparent leeadership” as something aambiguous—iinvolving both an invvitation to be open and ap ppreciative in the relation (between leader and eemployees) inn order to enccourage reflecction and deveelopment, and an enaactment of the t surveillin ng gaze. Theey further noted n the characteristiics of the chhair arrangem ment and whaat it symbolizzed (in a PowerPoint presentation):

Trannsparency ĺ vuulnerability = The T rhizomatic m movements of the t affects aare entangled with w success/failure Hardd and cold = Deespite the cushion and the softt shape, despite dialoguee and good inteentions, the chaiir and the leadeership that are entangleed and enacted constitute c a technology that iss designed to ma ake the emplloyee perform more, m better. Thee circle = Invitees you into a bub bble of ‘cozine ss,’ presence, communnity, intimacy. ment shuts you in i and detains ĺ intimidating The chair arrangem ment Movvement, processs, and dynamicss ĺ potentialityy and developm

Fig. 4-3. Studdents’ PowerPoint (2015).

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This ambiguity was discussed in a plenum. What are the possibilities for “openness” in contemporary working life? Why this desire for openness? What does the desire tell us about how psy-leadership works? Partly, it shows how working through affective forces may lead to both “positive” and “negative” feelings. The employee may feel appreciated and “seen” and this may improve work-life satisfaction; at the same time, there is a risk of vulnerability and shame: what if you are not seen as you want to be seen, or what if your work is not assessed positively? This was discussed at length: not as something that could be easily resolved, but as an inherent condition of being. Furthermore, the question of transparency and openness called for a consideration of organizational and relational ethics concerning the possibilities of “closing” and “hiding.” This furthermore allowed the dilemma to be turned on its head, investigating how transparent leadership is also risky for the leader herself. She may unwittingly discourage the employees and reveal an insufficient understanding of employees; transparent leadership may enact all the leader’s flaws. “How then is honesty possible (if indeed it is), one student asked, when affective leadership is a strategic manoeuvre?” How is it possible to organize a “space of leadership” in which the authenticity and honesty of the relation will not vanish, replaced by manipulation and exploitation? The students’ work demonstrates a tension in the contemporary relations of leading and being led through generic competences such as the willingness to stay open/keep learning, (intrinsic) motivation, the balancing of autonomy and collaboration, etc.: competences that are obviously not the possessions of an “individual” but are mobilized in the entire arrangement and in the relations and inherent boundaries created. The chairs and the resulting discussions enacted the desire for a democratic relation, or for an active balancing of the relation (leader/led) in order to remain as equal and non-hierarchical as possible. This desire emerges side by side with sensing the im/possibilities of this relation. This is the flipside of the desire and the tensions: the ever-present risk of being “cheated” by this figure (from the perspective of the employee) as it is “a technology that is designed to make the employee perform more, better” (quote, PowerPoint). The vampire is lurking and activated with the acceptance of the invitation to “take a seat” in the spatio-material arrangement of the leadership chair. These dilemmas become graspable, specifically, because the students try to materialise a leadership chair that addresses them and attempts to work around or even overcome them. The discussions took place through the design and the “stuck places” (Lather 2007) that the designs materialised. This materialised rich sensing

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of how such situations (of being in a stuck place) may be (through imaginatively placing yourself in that space of action), how to manoeuvre with and against the dilemmas that surface, and how to grasp and address the processes and effects of psy-leadership that go on partly beside cognitive awareness. There is a “more” to the teaching situation (as there always is). This more has an atmospheric quality—as a force field in which people find themselves (Stewart 2011, 452) and thereby as a spatiotemporal multiplicity: at the beginning of the course, the students had hopes that appreciative leadership practices were “good” and something to apply and teach others to apply in a future work context. This hope was first destabilized, then re-stabilized as something slightly different, noninnocent, and requiring the development of (ever-changing and emerging) ethics. Pasts and futures come to be in the eventualization of the specific designs and their sensing and discussion. In the next example of a leadership chair, some of the same dilemmas were addressed, but with other specifics: a group went to a playground, took photographs, and made a short video of “The art of psy-leadership through see-sawing.” They noted:

Fig. 4-4. An Image taken by the students (2015) The leadership chair visualizes the art of balancing that leading is. The chair facilitates the different positions that the leader may adopt. It becomes the leader’s task to balance his/her position in relation to the employee based on the latter’s physical signals. It is also the task of the leader to lead on the intensities that may show themselves corporeally. Reflection and transformation of affectivity become a source for reaching the potential in the relation. (We made a video to show the constant

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Chapter Four movements and adjustments taking place.) (A PowerPoint presentation made by the students of educational psychology, 2015)

In a plenum, we discussed whether the see-saw (which in this particular version could go both up and down and rotate around its own axis) was a design solution/metaphor that could transcend some of the dilemmas and pitfalls from the previous discussion (of vulnerabilities related to openness and the risk of manipulation, sense of shame, etc.). As the see-saw rotates, you may place yourself in the various positions that the other person was in a moment before; you will be forced to sense the situation from constantly changing and specific positions, and you may read the other person’s bodily positions and reactions. The design is explicit and specific about the ups and downs in the art of balancing and the need to sense movements; therefore, leader and employee may take more care, which may enable positive potentials to evolve. On the other hand, the design may effect dizziness, nausea and disorientation. Furthermore, there is the risk of “no limits”/perpetual motion—as is obvious in the specific design. That feature of the design then opened for rich discussion in class: the employee may take on too much responsibility for the organization; and then what? We continued analysing in a class; re-posing questions, inviting each other to sense differences, situations, and specificities. When investigating the “productivity” of the leadership chair and the psy-leadership while trying to sense it from within processes of both leading and being led, discussions shifted and nuances emerged. Perhaps the leader hopes for a balanced and energy-expanding relation but faces constant labour and alertness due to the risk of affects running wild in the ebbs and flows (the ups and downs and spinning of the see-saw, or the flickering between red and green of the bagel-like chair) of the balancing of relations. Leading becomes simultaneously more comprehensive and more fragile. This enabled students to sense new complexities and made them less brutal in their critique of leaders as “masters of panopticon,” thereby opening up new possibilities for how to sense and draw up boundaries, resist (situationally) being exploited, and furthermore, as a student, to understand the phenomenon of psy-leadership from a dif-ferent register of understanding: the sensorium allows students to momentarily come into bodily being as both employee and leader, understanding that vulnerabilities, risks, and failures exist on both sides. The bagel-shaped leadership chair even shows that there are no stable, opposite sides; no demarcations to make for either of the humans. As described by the students: “The bubble of cosiness, presence, community, intimacy encloses and detains you.” All parties may be overwhelmed and led

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unintentionally by the specific situations and by the non-human actors that co-lead the relations—and that work through a range of highly appreciated competences (to be summed up in a moment!). This art of discussing and investigating designs enabled the students to draw on experiences from their own working lives—and their ideas and hopes for the future after attaining their master’s degree in educational psychology. The spatio-materialities hold the diverse tensions, co-produce them, accelerate the tensions, or assist in their balancing. Bodies (imaginatively or concretely) come to specific being of the sensorium and open up for and with these tensions and dilemmas. The tensions and dilemmas stick; they are not to be solved but (I claim) are complexly entangled with futures to come as well as re-enacting the sense and practice of being a “critical student.” Mind you, this sort of teaching is not a “safe way out”; on the contrary. It has its own normativity, a normativity of staying with the trouble, as Haraway puts it (Haraway 2016). There is no exteriority from where to fix a problem or replace a “bad” psy-leadership technology with a “good” one. We can only stay (with the trouble), ask again, and reframe our questions. Here, staying with the trouble entails reframing the human and its competences within a posthuman setting of co-dependence and of multiple agencies and vulnerabilities in the practices of teaching/learning/ leading/organizing/being led.

“Acquiring” generic competences Working with theories of affect and psy-leadership and exemplifying the micro-workings hereof through a sensorium of designing, sensing from, and discussing leadership chairs are founded on the dictum “knowing is a direct material engagement” (Barad 2007, 379). It is to attend to an ongoing engagement and enactment of complex relations between matter and meaning, epistemology and ontology, theory and practice, human and non-human, spatio-temporal and affective (in teaching/pedagogy). A specific enactment of content and competences is to stage teaching and learning in this way and to work strategically and pedagogically through the atmospheric encounters in/of the sensorium: there is content to be known, theoretical positions to be understood, and there are competences to be sensed, accessed, and learned. However, with this posthumanist methodology we are not going in a specific direction, but wandering in the landscape of (content-competence) complexities—a

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sensorium of getting to know “more,” sensing a concept, getting at the sense and the agency of a competence in its fleeting meaningfulness while grasping a fleeting affect and an act of governing and leading in its multilayeredness and complex topology of power (-lessness). Entangled becoming throughout: there is no self-enclosed human subject, there is no brute matter (content/skill) waiting to be “acquired” in any simple, fixed manner. I have suggested that (and how) a posthuman framing of generic competences may turn the attention to sensuous, affective, material, and spatial components/qualities in pedagogical practices. Furthermore, a posthuman framing shifts the ontology of skills/competences/abilities from something acquired and individually held to a (radically) entangled becoming with no fixed beginning or end. To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence. Existence is not an individual affair. (Barad 2007, ix)

Working with and through leadership chairs involved the creation of a sensorium. A strategically aestheticized pedagogy with affects and sensations as “drivers” of that practice: skills/competences such as the ability for abstract thinking, analysis, and synthesis; the ability to process and analyse information from a variety of sources; the ability to identify, pose, and resolve problems; the capacity to generate new ideas (creativity); the ability to be critical and self-critical; the ability to adapt to and act in new situations; the ability to work autonomously; an appreciation of and respect for diversity and multiculturality; interpersonal and interaction skills; and the ability to work in a team. All are of the sensorium, an atmospheric, multiple spatio-temporal enabling and disabling of competences. These competences may be “acquired” strategically as well as implicitly through the teaching and learning processes within education—and as they are acquired, they are already entangled with past experiences and future experiences. This, however, does not mean that competences are (innocently) transported through time and space. In various situations, competences may enact and inflect a number of un/intended and wild processes as they “surface;” for example, within a landscape of psy-leadership. Pasts and futures come to be in the eventualization of the specific designs and the sensing and discussions of these, competences are stretched through space and time and reconfigured as something you need to have a keen eye (ear and touch) for, specifically and situationally. This furthermore troubles the notion of generic:

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competences are not something to carry around and “plug and play” into a given context. As demonstrated, within the course we deal with and develop a range of competences (understood as always becoming and more-than-human) that are in demand, thrive, and are “vampired on” in the workplaces of advanced capitalism. The analytical capacity that is built up during the course is of another kind rather than classical academic analysis. It acknowledges and opens up for the trans-personal in order to address the fact (or ontology) that advanced capitalism mobilizes competences environmentally, relationally, and affectively. While demonstrating such a post-human notion of competences, we offer other sensings and views to enable the employee-to-be to work both through, with, and against the effects, situationally. Things move fast when the employee is invited into the cosiness of the “bagel” or the spinning of the seesaw and the awareness of an analytical capacity to decide (and act) when it is too much, too close, too whatever, is “useful.”

Generic competences and tactical manoeuvres while teaching and learning as atmospheric encounters To promote and develop generic competences as always in the process of becoming, non-human and more-than-human, let’s sum up the characteristics of a posthuman pedagogy that addresses material-spatioaffective qualities of living, doing, and thinking. Adhering to Michels and Beyes’ tactical slogans towards a pedagogy of atmospheres (2016) I mention the following: Do not only read texts, but engage in thinking-doing with, for example, a design process, to open up language and the process of working, grasping, and learning. This will: 1) strategically enable multiple sensual registers to be “hit” or activated (attend to the materialities and spatialities of the situation); 2) enable imagining and reinvention (past and future) of everyday practices (practical experiences, fantasies, associations, and metaphors), thereby enacting multiple spatio-temporalities. In the process you will need to facilitate and; 3) push the limits of the metaphors (of leadership) in order to investigate one’s own and others’ “blind spots” and preconceptions. Furthermore, it is necessary to queer the metaphors > move past the deadlocks of power/powerlessness. The questioning of power relations is important; 4) re/work complex issues of power, body, agency, and relationality; 5) sense and work with the “both-and” instead of critique from an (imagined) distance; 6) always be open for looking at the shifting dynamics and shifting answers to complex questions, troubling

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answers, looking anew. Be aware of your own normativities; 7) attend to the affective flows at play while doing all this work. Work around questions of how to make lives liveable. Remember how “theorizing is worlding, and worlding is theorizing” (Thiele 2015, 99).

Notes 1

The course took place at Aarhus University, Copenhagen. Developed and run by Dorthe Staunæs and Malou Juelskjær, the course was held twice for students of educational psychology; twice for educational leaders participating in a master’s programme on educational leadership; and twice for PhD students. In this chapter, I will focus on the students of educational psychology who, in their 5 years of university education—and specifically during the course—are expected to develop generic competences. In a special issue of the journal Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology (RERM) on “Writing Organizations: Management, Leadership and Appraisal,” the work that the students of the programme on educational leadership did with “leadership chairs” will be used to analyse dilemmas in organizational life and the leadership hereof (Juelskjær and Staunæs, forthcoming). This chapter is, naturally, inspired by the collaboration between myself and Dorthe. Furthermore, it is heavily inspired by a talk I gave at the University of Warsaw, Institute of Philosophy, on “Feminist new materialism—a political perspective in the context of post-transition gender politics” (2015) as part of the “PATTERNS Lectures,” developed and run by Monika Rogowska-Stangret and Olga CielemĊcka (www.patternslectures.org). I extend my warmest gratitude to Monika and Olga for this opportunity. I am also indebted to Monika for our conversations on new materialist/posthumanist framings of teaching during her stay at the University of Aarhus in January 2016, as a “short scientific mission” sponsored by the COST action “New Materialism. Networking European Scholarship on ‘how matter comes to matter.’” 2 For a more concrete idea of what the students’ leadership chairs looked like, visit the second half of this chapter. Keep in mind, first of all, that, as students of educational psychology, they were not making “real designs” for “real chairs,” but using sketches and other visuals to explain their ideas. Furthermore, the “chairs’ were not the sole end product; part of the “output” were the discussions (on theories, dilemmas in contemporary working life, etc.), as well as the sensations and the metaphors that were developed by reflecting on the chairs and their possible capabilities. As such, the leadership chairs are an example of how to create specific pedagogical conditions enabling thinking-sensing (in this case) psyleadership while also enabling the thinking-sensing of the generic competences that are foregrounded. 3 Aesthetic understood not as that which is concerned with what is beautiful, but with senses and sensations. 4 “In eventalization the invitation is the point. Not as a superficial gesture, but as a committed offer, at the same time transparent and closing around itself, because

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only under these conditions will eventalization remain worthy of eventalizations yet to come” (Born, Frankel, and Thygesen 2006, 212). 5 I have been thinking with agential realism for quite some time (Højgaard Cawood and Juelskjær 2005): as such, Barad’s concepts take centre stage in this very brief and basic outline of a posthuman framework for education/pedagogy. Many other thinkers could have been included. 6 The list of references here could be quite extensive. Both within STS research, post-structuralist, and feminist materialist research on pedagogical and educational issues: see for example (Fenwick, Edwards, and Sawchuk 2015, Sørensen 2009, Taguchi 2009, de Freitas and Sinclair 2013, Hinton 2015, Plauborg 2016) and the special issue of Gender and Education from 2013: “Material feminisms: New directions for education.” 7 The idea of the self-enclosed subject has long been challenged broadly within post-structuralist thinking. 8 I stick to the word affectivity, not affectus. This will be elaborated later. 9 These abstract claims will be unfolded and enacted throughout the chapter and exemplified by elaborating the teaching methodology—so please bear with this “lofty beginning.” 10 For example (Juelskjær, Staunæs, and Ratner 2013, Juelskjær and Staunæs 2016, Raffnsøe and Staunæs 2014, Juelskjær 2011, Staunæs 2011, Staunæs and Bjerg 2011, Juelskjær 2014, 2013). 11 You may Google images and type “innovative workspaces” to get an impression of such office landscapes. Similarly, you can find a vast number of articles discussing whether such workspaces make employees “happy” and “more productive” (!). 12 At the “PATTERNS Lectures” in Warsaw, we discussed in what sense these issues could be considered “real problems.” I consider burnout, stress, and problems drawing boundaries real issues. Furthermore, both employees and leaders struggle with these issues, complicating any quick or simple attempts to settle the question of (power) relations, analytically. Having said this, I must underline that I acknowledge the specificities of these problems and the privileges that they also carry in relation to labour market inequalities between Western and Eastern Europe, Global South and North. 13 All student material used with permission.

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Raffnsøe, Sverre, and Dorthe Staunæs. 2014. “Learning to Stay Ahead of Time: Moving Leadership Experiences Experimentally.” Management & Organizational History 9 (2): 184–201. doi: 10.1080/17449359.2014.891794. Rose, Nikolas. 1999. Governing the Soul: the Shaping of the Private Self. Second edition. London: Free Association Books. —. 2009. The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-first Century. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Staunæs, Dorthe. 2011. “Governing the Potentials of Life Itself? Interrogating the Promises in Affective Educational Leadership.” Journal of Educational Administration and History 43 (3): 227. doi: 10.1080/00220620.2011.586454. —. 2014. “Turning Right to Affect?” European Journal of Women’s Studies 22 (1): 109–112. Staunæs, Dorthe, and Helle Bjerg. 2011. “Self-management through Shame: Uniting Governmentality Studies and the Affective Turn.” Ephemera 11 (2): 138–156. Stewart, Kathleen. 2011. “Atmospheric Attunements.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (3): 445–453. Sørensen, Estrid. 2009. The Materiality of Learning: Technology and Knowledge in Educational Practice. New York: Cambridge University Press. Taguchi, Hillevi Lenz. 2009. Going Beyond the Theory/practice Divide in Early Childhood Education: Introducing an Intra-active Pedagogy. New York: Routledge. Thiele, Kathrin. 2015. “Theorizing is Worlding—Teaching New Feminist Materialisms in Contemporary Feminist Theory Courses.” In Teaching with Feminist Materialisms edited by Peta Hinton and Pat Treusch, 99–111. Utrecht: ATGENDER, the European Association for Gender Research, Education and Documentation. Wetherell, Margaret. 2012. Affect and Emotion. A new Social Science Understanding. London: Sage.

CHAPTER FIVE GOVERNMENTALITY IN/AROUND THE “COLOGNE” EVENTS: DEVELOPING GENERIC COMPETENCES IN STRUGGLING WITH A CHALLENGING EVENT SIGRID SCHMITZ

Intro Using the debates around sexual assaults against women on New Year’s Eve 2016 in Cologne in this article, I will present an approach aiming at understanding these debates that took place in the follow-up to the “Cologne”1 events—at least some of their facets and background. I first started this discussion with a number of students during a seminar at Graz (Austria) University in January 2016 and developed it further in a lecture entitled “Brushing-up Gender Theories” which I discussed with a broader public of gender practitioners, theoreticians, academics and students in March 2016. The starting point of the discussion was not least the speechlessness regarding the “Cologne” events, including that reigning within the feminist communities, which resulted from the fear of one’s own racism, on the one hand, and the many exploitations that misused the “Cologne” events for sexist, racist, paternalistic and right wing slogans, on the other. The debate that followed “Cologne” indeed mixes male versus female ascriptions with assignments to non-western civilisations; both types of perception are involved in the construction (and the reality, too) of fear generating public spaces and of migration policies, and are also, always accompanied by powerful discourses. Feminist and postcolonial scholars struggled with the following challenge: what can we do to end these misuses and, first of all, our own speechlessness? For one thing, we could at least try to identify the discursive threads that accompanied the “Cologne” events and understand

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the instrumentalisations of these debates in the media and in public as well as political statements. This means that we have to structure the arguments and representations2 (images and texts, in the media and in the streets) and their exploitations by different groups and to expose their effects. The aim of both my seminar and lecture in Graz was to analyse and explain the “Cologne” events in their relation to theories of “governmentality,” “bio-politics” and “body politics.” How can feminist theories and postcolonial perspectives help us to analyse the enactment of racism, sexism and “othering”, and of relationships of power within the “Cologne” discourse? How can we speak, write, represent and perform to oppose them? Not least—and here my endeavour meets the objective of this collection: how can feminist and postcolonial scholars support “students” in developing generic competences to find and articulate their own position with regard to the “Cologne” debates? How can they “escape easy interpretations and . . . go beyond the beaten track” (see the concept of this collection) by using critical and creative forms of thinking and doing? In this conception, the “teacher’s” task could be that of providing the theoretical backgrounds and methodical tools for such analyses— guidance for the students to gain knowledge and develop their own critical-reflexive standpoints. To complicate things further, however, the confrontation with the “Cologne” events and the debates, which followed them, are marked by great emotionality and dismay, and that probably has to be so. It is a question of permanently finding a balance between arguments, images and slogans, which are emotionally and rationally disturbing, and their theoretical foundations. It is an attempt to categorise at least some fragments of discourse. Only thus will we be able to assess them critically, to develop our own position and express it, and to react adequately to those arguments. The reader may have realised that I changed my language from a thirdperson account as an “external” teacher to an involved “we.” I am a feminist scholar of Science Technology Studies and of Social Studies of Sciences and a feminist political activist. I am not standing outside the “Cologne” events. I am touched, affected, embarrassed, worried; I was speechless—as my colleagues, friends and students were. Therefore, I will follow “our” discussion lines (including those of the students, gender practitioners, theoreticians, academics and myself) around the “Cologne” debates, our attempts to relate them—affectively and rationally—to theories of governmentality, body politics and bio-politics as well as our approaches through the lenses of feminist and postcolonial perspectives.

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Nevertheless, I will take up and discuss didactics from feminist materialist pedagogies that I used in the seminar and lecture at the end of the chapter.

The “Cologne” events and governmentality The concept of governmentality was developed by Michel Foucault in the 1980s. He tried to characterise a certain development which had already begun in the 16th century. The term governmentality means, [t]he ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security. (Foucault 1991, 102)

The debates concerning the “Cologne” events contain many of these components of governmental techniques. To be able to analyse the discourse about “Cologne” we must first dig a bit into the theoretical foundations. The tendency which, over a long period and throughout the West, has steadily led towards the pre-eminence over all other forms (sovereignty, discipline, etc.) of this type of power which may be termed government, resulting, on the one hand, in the formation of a whole series of specific governmental apparatuses, and, on the other, in the development of a whole complex of savoirs. (Foucault 1991, 103)

This quotation resumes what, according to Foucault, makes up governmentality. It is the interaction of components within a political apparatus, i.e. what is said and even more how it is said, and what is not said; what is regulated by law, how individuals are led to follow certain rules which, moreover, they are supposed to accept as being apparently chosen by themselves. Another important aspect of governmental techniques is their reference to a whole complex of forms of knowledge which are their prerequisite as well as their result (Foucault 1982). This is because governmental techniques always derive from knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, and are legitimised by referring to this form of knowledge as apparent facts (“Now, we know that, don’t we!”). Foucault wanted to characterise a certain development that saw the power of the sovereign transform into the techniques of an administrative and governmental state. That is what he calls governmentality (Foucault 1991).

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It was the feudal lord (for it was a lord, mostly, not a lady), i.e. an entity, a person or a ruling family, who, in former times, decided in an autocratic manner on what was right and what was wrong, on punishment, on who was to die and who was to live—the ultimate objective being the defence of one’s own territory. Until the 18th century, the position of the sovereign was legitimised by right of birth, succession or tradition or by contract, e.g. intermarriage between dynasties, or else by violence. That position legitimised property, and the sovereign’s power was geared to maintaining his sovereign territory, i.e. his personal property, which included land and people. With his concept of governmentality Foucault wanted to show how many other actors gained power in the transition from the 16th to the 18th centuries.3 These were the times of bourgeois revolutions, the increasing claims to power of an emerging middle class and changing economic conditions (as the bourgeois citizen’s legitimisation of property and power was no longer his birthright but his rights stemming from the economic accumulation of capital). It became necessary, therefore, to make the forms of sovereign power more flexible in order to allow for the integration of different actors and their demands, to respond to changing requirements and ensure the productive management of the citizens. Governmentality means governing by managing. Foucault (1991) describes this principle by using two concepts: first, the “administrative state” which directs the members of its “social group,” using rules and discipline in order to make them acquiesce to these same rules and to apply them productively, and enforces them through disciplinary measures. The second concept, that of “productivity” (more precisely: productive power), means that it is no longer the sovereign who retains the power over life and death. Instead, there are governmental techniques which via specific legal concepts and interpellations make the population obey given rules out of its own volition and so doing, transpose them into a behaviour that is productive for the individual as well as for the group. In that way, Foucault describes the change in the relation between power and law. The administrative state, which targets its population in order to introduce and implement the governmental rules, invokes a certain complex of knowledge to justify and legitimise them. The complex of economic knowledge is a manner of thinking which focuses on the economic efficiency of a government. The economic theories, that gained discursive power in the 16th and 17th centuries, were the first to use demographic data to create population statistics and—based on these

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surveys and statistical calculations—formulated forecasts on how to create and maintain wealth through economic efficiency and growth while competing with other social groups or nations. “[T]he art of government is precisely to exercise power in the form, and according to the model, of economy” (Foucault 2009, 134). In the beginning, the economic-based governmental concepts were closely connected with the idea of the functioning of a family. The pater familias governs his family with diligence, patiently and attentively caring for its wealth but also exercising surveillance and control. This principle of family management becomes central when the “new” techniques conjoin in the governmental apparatus of the state: attention, care, patience as well as surveillance and control. This is the art of governing! (Foucault 1991) Another crucial aspect of governmentality, linked to economic knowledge, is precisely the fact that it is not merely about governing a person or persons but about governing the relations between things and humans, with humans being considered as things, too, in this context. In other words, it is about organising economic conditions and relationships given that one and the other mutually depend upon each other. The economic management of these relationships—that is the meaning of the term “government:” managing relationships (Foucault 1991). Characteristically, this form of management does not focus on punishment but on positive interpellation. These interpellations address and connect one another on different levels: the individual level (“you are responsible for your own security and wealth”), the economic level (“you are responsible for ensuring security and wealth for your family”) and the political level (“you are also responsible to help ensure ‘our’ wealth, i.e. that of our group, our country, our nation which is competing with other states”). In short, governmentality is not about law but about tactics which are used to govern the members of one’s own social group, it is about techniques of management which can be used as instruments, in Foucault’s words . . . with government it is a question not of imposing law on men, but of disposing of things: that is to say, of employing tactics rather than laws, and even of using laws themselves as tactics—to arrange things in such a way that, through a certain number of means, such and such ends may be achieved. (Foucault 1991, 95)

If we want to analyse the “Cologne” events we need one other crucial concept of Foucault’s framework: the “dispositif,” i.e. a perception as well as a norm with which the individual has to comply and which they adopt

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(Foucault 1976). The dispositif is a difficult concept. In short, it means a complex of rules, (scientific) statements, practices, institutions and laws that govern relations of power. This definition is close to Foucault’s concept of discourse. The dispositif, however, is a symbolic figure.4 Central to governmentality is the “dispositif of security.” It designates three important objectives: first, the security of one’s own (national) group: “we must protect ourselves against enemies who threaten our property, (for example by war or internal uprisings)”; secondly, protection against economic threats (for example financial or supply crises); thirdly, increasing “our” wealth, which means individual wealth as well as that of one’s own social group, state or nation. Thus, the dispositif of security is always a means of, and needs, demarcation from the “other.” In this context, Foucault repeatedly highlights the reference to ostensible facts and, in particular, the factuality of science. If I am asked to believe that I myself, my social group, my state, or my nation is more worthy of protection (i.e. “better”) than “the others” then I would wish this affirmation to be justified and legitimised in some form or other. If science says that man is better than woman, at least in some domains, then this, too, functions as a legitimisation. And if I, a woman, am told—with implicit or explicit reference to the dispositif of security—that man has to protect me because I am a woman, that only he can protect me because he has always done so since the days of early evolution when he protected his grouplet of women—then this is a (pseudo-)scientific legitimization of the dispositif of security. How then does the theoretical foundation of governmentality relate to the “Cologne” events? On New Year’s Eve in Cologne sexual assaults and sexual harassment as well as non-sexual attacks that covered attempts of theft were directed against women, groups of women, homosexual or mixed-sex couples or mixed-sex groups. These events were commented on and analysed at length in the media and they were exploited by right wing political groupings in demonstrations of “concerned citizens” (Pegida in Germany and FPÖ in Austria). The evocation of the fear of uncontrollable sexual violence works through the generalisation of the fear of an uncontrollable vague mass of non-Western (i.e. not belonging to “our” social group) gangs of men running wild. When brought up in the media and taken onto the streets, this fragment of discourse serves three objectives: first, to categorise bodies, subjects and groups either as enemies or as the ones to be protected or as the protectors; secondly, to assign particular characteristics to those bodies, subjects and groups, i.e. the aggressive and sexually uncontrolled non-

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Westerners, the passive female victims and the active male protectors; thirdly, to legitimate certain “new” rules as well as further acts directed against these groups of “others,” ranging from political and judicial measures to citizens’ action (vigilante groups). Critical reporting on the events including its representations, not only by feminists, has focused precisely on that: how right wing groups stir up racism rather than fight against sexism. The connection of sexism and racism is inseparably interwoven with a number of prerequisites and consequences (not only in Cologne) which will be elaborated in the following chapters from a feminist and postcolonial perspective.

Feminism and Foucault To first consider the background of sexism let’s turn to the “dispositif of sexuality,” the second important complex of rules, statements, practices and policies, that organises and governs power relations in society (Foucault 1984a, 1984b). The crucial point is: sexuality is a discursive construct as much as it forms the base for discourse. It is something that is perpetually created5 by discourse (by speech and act, institutions, legal regulations, etc.) while at the same time forming the base to which acting, rules and power relations in society refer. Foucault also calls the dispositif of sexuality a discursive form that we adopt in our concept of the self. Sexuality shapes identity formation: who am I, what am I, whom do I desire, and is part of the process of subjectification. In his analyses of the dispositif of sexuality Foucault argued that sexuality was a constant reference that characterised both the speaking and acting of individuals as well as of society as a whole (Foucault 1984b). This was the case in domains like the church (be it the two-personrelationship during confession or the public sermon from the pulpit), the hospital (the individual micro-relationship between doctor(s)—mostly male—and their patients (male and female) as well as in medical compendia) and later on the psycho-analytical relationship between analysts and (his!) patients. Foucault even speaks of the “incitement to confession,” i.e. the urge to constantly refer to and explain and justify one’s own sexuality (Foucault 1976). The feminist debate agreed with much of what Foucault developed here. However, at least since Judith Butler (1990) it has been made clear that his concept is too narrow, or more precisely, too generalising. The feminist debate disagrees with the idea that the dispositif of sexuality affects and concerns all human beings equally. It has shown quite clearly that not everybody is concerned by governmental technologies and

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dispositifs to the same extent, and that we have rather to distinguish between several fundamental aspects here. With regard to the gender question these fundamentals have come to be called the “heteronormative matrix.” It means that “our” society is fundamentally characterised and structured by the notion that there are two (and only two) sexes: man and woman. The two should fundamentally differ one from the other, at least when it comes to sexuality: women should desire men and men should desire women. Individual relationships, desire, the job market, family and the domain of care, rules and regulations, in short, society as a whole is structured by the dichotomous two-sex-model and heterosexuality as the norm. In addition to that, specific gender characteristics, skills and preferences are ascribed to these apparently homogenous sex groups: masculinity vs. femininity, ratio vs. emotion, production vs. reproduction, activity vs. passivity, and culture vs. nature. These ascriptions are more or less dichotomous, their manifestation differs throughout history and there might be a process of some deconstruction underway in the “contemporary West.”6 Nevertheless, heteronormativity is still a structuring characteristic in society, and individual beings interact socially more or less along these gendered structures (“doing gender”) as well as along cultural gender norms. The structural, the individual interacting and the symbolic level together constitute the heteronormative matrix. Heteronormativity, i.e. the two-sex model aligned with hierarchical gendered and behavioural norms and with the “dispositif of heterosexuality” (let’s call it that with Foucault) are central components of scientific and societal discourses. For a long time, all deviations from the heterosexual norm were considered pathological conditions. The more recent acknowledgment of more than one sexual category or of intermediate or transsexual to transgender categories and forms of desire does not entail that these are considered equal, let alone that they benefit from equal treatment. At the symbolic level the perception of and the ascriptions to (hetero-) sexuality as the norm are justified and legitimised by scientific knowledge—which leads us back to Foucault’s fundamental complexes of knowledge. Feminist Science Studies, which critically analyse knowledge production in the natural sciences (Schmitz 2016), have highlighted since the 1980s that the (natural) sciences and medicine have particularly been, and still are, creating factualities that affirm the two-sex model. They did and continue to do that by demonstrating through experimental research that all behaviour is geared towards reproduction. More specifically, since the 1980s the concept of the selfish genes established as a paradigm that there is a fundamental difference in the strategies of male and female gene

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carriers: competition on the one side versus care on the other. Consequently, the exclusive orientation towards reproduction explains and determines heterosexual desire as the only reasonable = normal form capable to ensure the effective passing on of genes. That is why it is assumed to prevail in the course of evolution. The transfer of this knowledge into society and, inversely, the reference to scientific knowledge in society lead to the understanding that the base and the objective of every form of sexuality is reproduction.7 We need to introduce one more concept in order to understand why certain specific forms of knowledge and heteronormativity and certain governmental techniques linked to them are accepted in society to such a large extent and why they could manifest themselves in that manner, although there have always been persons who lived between those categories or shifted from one to another—doing that more openly today. With the term “performativity” (Butler 1990) the post-structural feminist discourse attempted to make clear that it does not matter whether the bodies of knowledge and the normative statements stemming from these bodies are true or not. Repeated acts of speech in a form that is institutionalised and legitimised, for instance by science or by law (not as private utterances), create subjects who are understandable and intelligible. Acknowledgement therefore is legitimised recognition through regulated repetition, for example through registering name and sex in the birth certificate and identity documents, through marriage, the code of laws or guidelines for medical treatment according to different categories. Heterosexuality as the norm thus becomes intelligible because it is accepted as the norm on the individual level and the level of social interacting, and is reinforced in and through the structural and institutional framework. The two-sex-dichotomy and the dispositive of heterosexual desire are constructed, but at the same time maintained by performative interpellations and their appearance of naturalness, the latter reinforced by the scientific complex of knowledge. In other words: in a given society, gender relations are realised through that society’s powerful norms, but they could be realised otherwise. Moreover, heteronormativity is not only a question of sex/gender but rather of many interwoven categories of class, race, and abled vs. disabled bodies, which are linked to cultural concepts of masculinity and femininity. Intersectionality Studies deal with the powerful effects of intersectional categorizations on the ascription of, the inclusion in and the exclusion from positions in society through which discrimination as well as privileges are legitimised (Crenshaw 1989).

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The postcolonial perspective: Sexism—racism—othering in “Cologne” Intersectionality leads us to the second term interwoven with sexism: racism. The intersectional complex has been discussed and analysed in recent years from the postcolonial perspective. The reason of being of normative discourses and of governmentality is always the wish to distinguish oneself from the “other” in order to assert one’s own subjectivity and collective identity, including as a group. By saying, “you are the other!” I assert my group identity. This nearly always takes the form of hierarchy and holds in particular, when distinguishing Western white identity from non-Western non-white categories. The perception of one’s own civilizational superiority meets self-assertion through “othering.” Note that postcolonialism does not indicate that there has been a linear evolution. It is not a term for a chronological time period. Nor is it a concept meaning that an evolution of whatever kind (for the better or for the worse) took place after colonisation ended. “Post” does not designate a historical “after” but rather a politically motivated category for analyses of the historical, political, cultural and discursive aspects of the enduring colonial discourse (Ha 1999, 84). Taking the postcolonial perspective means to be aware that the colonial attitude and its governmental techniques still exist and that it repeats itself, referring to the past, the present and the future. Postcolonial Studies try to differentiate more precisely how exactly raced and gendered hegemonic constructions of predominance are created in order to assert the own self by devaluating the other and how the resulting power relations, inclusions and exclusions are legitimised. The critical postcolonial perspective, therefore, is always a political one, a form of resistance against colonial power and its consequences (Castro Varela/Dhawan 2005, 24). Because the critical postcolonial discourse focuses on the deconstruction of power relations, exploitation, hierarchies, inclusions and exclusions which are stabilised through cultural representations and political control, it raises the question of the mechanisms of colonia-lization as an oppressive process of “subjectification.” It is important to expose the argument according to which “we,” after all, have made civilisation a reality in our countries, thus ensuring a better world for the members of our community. It’s the humanistic ideals of the Enlighten-ment which legitimise up until modern colonial times our claim that “we” (the enlightened ones) have to bring our model of civilisation into non-Western cultures—because that is the right thing to do! Let’s leave aside for the moment the question of which achievements of civilisation are worth

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being universalised across humanity as a whole, for humanistic or other reasons. In any case, following Kien Nghi Ha (2010) the colonial model is grounded on a Western claim to superiority which legitimizes the process of colonialization with the notion of a developmental pyramid. Let’s go back to the “Cologne” events. In our seminar, we tried, among other things, to unveil with the help of a feminist-postcolonial grasp the naturalised concepts of “othering” which were instrumentalised in these debates. Those commenting on the “Cologne” events, especially from the right wing political sphere, pretend that the assaults and attacks are a Muslim problem. According to them, the underlying cause is the negation of women’s rights in Islam. This is “othering in practice,” i.e. creating an image of a civilisation that is different from ours, while at the same time instrumentalising women’s rights: opposing a civilised society against the veiling of women, “ours” being a society where women are free and selfdetermined, “theirs” one of the lack of freedom and of oppression. Representations in words and pictures play a decisive role in this context. Both science and media as well as the street language and images are always charged with metaphors and messages that reach far beyond the actual facts. Representations do not merely represent, they also put opinion into words and pictures. What we said earlier applies in this case as well: repetition, independent of veracity, performatively creates intelligibility. Immediately after the events of New Year’s Eve in Cologne, the acts were ascribed to young male Syrian refugees when the names and the images of the perpetrators as well as their national or cultural affiliation (which was completely wrong!) were publicised. The images of supposed perpetrators were distributed in the “official” media, for example, the main German TV evening news, together with appeals to the public to help identify them. Whether one approves of such steps or not is a matter of discussion, but this precisely is governmentality combined with the creation of the other as a different category, i.e. “othering.” A crucial aspect of the feminist debate around the “Cologne” events, including the image politics, was the following: to show that sexual violence cannot be explained only as being a result of a (homogenous) Muslim civilisation, but that it is also a central part of Western civilisation as found for example in public spaces (the Oktoberfest) as well as in the privacy of one’s own family. Sexual violence was not imported by asylum seekers—that precisely is the postcolonial instrumentalisation of sexism for the purpose of racism or, inversely, racism for the purpose of sexism. This is anything but an easy debate, not in the feminist discourse either: it is not acceptable that a man may grab at a woman’s breast, bum

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or genitals in public just because sexual assaults and sexual violence were, and still are, commonplace in our Western civilisation, too. The paradox result of this conjunction of sexism and racism is, however, that feminists were afraid of being accused of a racist attitude when condemning these assaults. This fear was present in the feminist debate around “Cologne,” sometimes even dominating it. It can’t be denied that these debates give rise to very complicated negotiations and they bring with them a great feeling of helplessness when facing the many exploitations appearing in this discourse and the question: what then can we say, what can we do? We discussed that question intensively in the seminar and the lecture. I cannot judge how successful we were in our in-depth analysis of the feminist-postcolonial background and the identification of its different aspects. At the very end, however, we witnessed a real outburst: “I want to be able to say that they [the perpetrators in Cologne] are ass-holes and saying that does not make me a racist!” This statement reveals something I would like to call with Haraway (1988) a “situated point of view.” It means being allowed to say that in a particular situation a person has committed acts of violence and this person has to be punished—without this being considered a racist statement. There is one big challenge (in the discourse as well as in teaching) when talking about such statements and points of view: we must expose the reasons behind constructions of racism and sexism to prevent the instrumentalization of the same statement but with a different message, namely that of “the others are the culprits and they must go!” This is not easy, and it will take time to explain the background and to counter speechlessness with analytical-reflexive competence. At least feminist pedagogies must enable students to develop an own position within this highly emotionalised discourse. Exposing at least some of the groundings within governmentality with the help of feminist and postcolonial concepts is the means to achieve that objective.

Body politics—Bio-politics: The body of the “Cologne” events The question is always (also) about bodies. The whole debate around the “Cologne” events is inseparably connected to bodies. This is why in our search for theoretical tools and concepts to expose underlying reasons we also have to look at body politics and bio-politics. One of the aspects that Foucault established while developing his concept of governmentality is that of bio-politics (Foucault 2008).

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As we said earlier, Foucault described how sovereign power developed into governmentality in the 17th and 18th centuries: how the power to inflict death transformed into the power to foster life, more precisely the power to inscribe measures into individuals and society to organise productive life. He identified two interwoven lines of power that are at work here: the “disciplinary power” and the “bio-power.” The focus of the disciplinary power is the individual (i.e. singular bodies) who is guided to discipline her/his own body and simultaneously to manage it productively for more effectiveness—all this embedded in a machinery of power (Foucault 1976). The first instructions given by the disciplinary power were sanitary rules: rules on hygiene for the well-being of the individual as well as for the benefit of society. These sanitary rules took the form of apparently self-determined decisions (keeping your body clean and disciplining your body). This makes them the first manifestations of regulatory instruments to govern bodies. The second strand, bio-power, focuses on the social group, the underlying assumption being that of the own group or nation. The first demographic measures aimed at controlling and regulating the own population; population being understood here as a group characterised by certain (biological) principles, a kind of collective body which—in the same way as an individual body—has to be steered towards its economic advance. It is the economic knowledge at that time about statistical data, death and birth rates, population statistics and demography, together with factual knowledge gained from medicine and natural science that forms the basis for bio-political measures (it still does today). Natural science, in particular, gains enormous interpretive power which helps to establish (and maintain until today) its paramount position within the realm of scientific cultures. Demographic measures were devised to control and increase reproduction, lower the death rate, fight diseases and ensure public health, all of them aiming at increasing the workforce and, consequently, the wealth of the own community. Foucault calls this reference to scientific knowledge the “clinical view.” Institutionally and architecturally solidified, biomedical knowledge produced in the clinics provides the foundations as well as the legitimisation for the bio-politics developed by the administrative state (see above). Bio-politics is then transposed by the administrative state into productive rules applied by the disciplinary power to manage individuals and by the bio-power to manage the community.

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Bio-politics only comes to life under the clinical view. It determines what is normal and what is abnormal; a process Foucault calls “normalisation.” Normalisation as a central structure of modern societies combines disciplinatory power and bio-power and works through statistical data (Foucault 1976). Indeed, normalisation and demarcation through scientific objectification and statistical categorization are not that easy. Firstly, normalisation is achieved by referring to the apparently objective statistical normalisation of scientific data. The Gaussian normal distribution represents the range of attributes, e.g. bodily characteristics, of a group under investigation. Statistical values within a normal Gaussian distribution always show a variation (for example ranging from -1 to +1). Within this distribution more data cluster in the centre, i.e. around the mean, and less close to the borders. On the one hand, statistical normality homogenises data that are within “normal” ranges from those that are outside “normality.” Defining a zone of statistical normality allows medicine to detect: “You are ‘within’ therefore healthy, and you are ‘outside’ therefore diseased.” On the other hand, however, there is no simple yes/no scheme. There is no single point of data designating the normal body, because the variation of data around the statistical mean is equally important. It enables a ranking within the group of the “nondeseased”. This variability of normality within the Gaussian distribution allows medicine to establish again a hierarchy between individuals by saying: “You all are certainly normal, but you here are a bit better—or worse—than the other there.” That way, individuals are compelled— steered—to improve themselves. Foucault (2008) identifies as the main functions of normalisation: comparison, homogenisation and exclusion, differentiation, hierarchisation and individualisation. That is what constitutes normalisation and that is what Foucault calls the interaction of knowledge and control with the power of the norm. The society of normalisation functions through scientific normalisation and the clinic as a powerful space where medically categorisable bodies are naturalised. There was one thread of discourse around the “Cologne” events that I found particularly disgusting: the picturing of black hands on white women’s bodies. I keep referring to those images even though the newspaper “Süddeutsche Zeitung” withdrew that particular picture (the magazine “Focus” didn’t). It is a more than explicit example of how a paternalistic exploitation of the female body combines racist, colonial arguments: “You bad black man—keep your hands off my white woman!”

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Here racism, sexism and the passive female body considered as a property come together to play a wholly gruesome scene. Or take the noble knights who protect their women: in Liesing, a district of the town of Graz (Austria) a woman was walking her dog early in the morning, while it was still dark. A car followed her. She stopped to talk to the occupants . . . and it turned out, oh, the young men only want to protect her! When she who must be protected told them to leave her alone, she can look after herself, thank you very much, they ignored her so that she had to call the police . . . and filed a charge for harassment. That happened in . . . March 2016. The paternalistic concept of property does function only if something—in this case woman—is declared a property which has to be defended against “others.” The humanistic ideal of the protector serves as legitimisation while at the same time the image is conjured up of the prehistoric hunter who takes to the street, spear in hand, to fight against the bad black man. And that is where we find the clinical view again, namely the scientific foundation of the official theory of evolutionary impetus by men the hunters.8

Multilayered messages and instrumentalisations I want to present a “scientific” message here and it will become clear soon why the quotation that follows has so many blanks. Since ‘rape is in its very essence a sexual act,’ . . . , a woman’s risk of attack rises along with her hemline, and her willingness to socialize without the company of ‘male protectors’ . . . . Accepting this ‘scientific knowledge’ . . . about forced sex ‘empowers women to avoid it’ . . . by helping them understand the ‘costs associated with dressing provocatively and going out alone at night and so forth.’ [X] denied blaming the victim: ‘All we’re doing is giving women the information about male sexuality and thereby letting them choose’ . . .

During the lecture on “Brushing-up Gender Theories,” me and the audience put together the messages which are conveyed in this quotation: victim blaming; rape is serving reproduction; man as protector; listen to science and you will know what to do and why; attribution of responsibility to the woman: it’s your own responsibility to take the risk of being raped if you make yourself up or go out. The most perfidious message, however, is that concerning “her willingness to socialize”: women getting together in the street. . . now, that

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is an absolute no-go. We are faced here with a political statement against the women’s movement, against the political engagement of women together, at least in public. Now here is the complete quotation: Since ‘rape is in its very essence a sexual act,’ Thornhill and Palmer told reporters (New York Times, 1/15/00), a woman’s risk of attack rises along with her hemline, and her willingness to socialize without the company of ‘male protectors’ (CNN Talkback Live, 1/18/00). Accepting this ‘scientific knowledge’ (Washington Post, 1/28/00) about forced sex ‘empowers women to avoid’ it (CNN, 1/18/00) by helping them understand the ‘costs associated with dressing provocatively and going out alone at night and so forth’ (Today show, 1/24/00). Thornhill denied blaming the victim: ‘All we’re doing is giving women the information about male sexuality and thereby letting them choose’ (NPR Talk of the Nation, 1/26/00). (Jennifer L. Pozner (Head of the Women’s Desk at FAIR, 01 May 2000)

The quotation was taken from a very nuanced contribution to the debate with Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer about their thesis of rape as a reproduction strategy. Already in the mid-1980s Thornhill had qualified as rape the forced copulation in scorpion flies in his publications on that subject. From this forced copulation in male flies which, because of a damaged organ, cannot offer food to their mate in order to incite copulation Thornhill then drew an argumentative chain up to the human being: “rape” in animals is a marker of naturalness, therefore the same behaviour, i.e. rape, is a successful reproduction strategy of the human male if he does not have enough resources to find women willing to reproduce with him. This theory was picked to pieces in the 1980s, and today even the forced copulation in scorpion flies has been disproved. Unabatedly, however, A Natural History of Rape by Thornhill and Palmer has been thrown at the American market since 2000 and this book is still causing a great stir. Many have taken its arguments to pieces—among them members of the scientific community itself. Susan Brownmiller (2000) has reviewed the book and listed the arguments against its sexism in detail. There was an intense discussion at the time about whether we (feminist academics in natural science studies) should publicly take a position on the book at all. Should we draw attention to it? Should we give Thornhill and Palmer the space to distribute their rubbish arguments? Performativity cares little about the veracity of statements. It is only their iterative citation within established institutional settings (here the sciences) that provides them with power and intelligibility. Jennifer Pozner’s position was that we should take a stance and show how unscientific the arguments of the book

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are even if that means that its authors receive more public attention than would be appropriate. I share her position in this particular case, because with a few omissions (the dates of years in the quotations) the arguments are, in fact, still valid today when it comes to the “Cologne” events.

Governmental interpellations in the context of the “Cologne” events We have so far considered many aspects: the generalising and deindividualising manner in which the female body is represented; how it is degraded to be the property of the (protecting) white male in the fight against the uncivilised and uncontrolled violence of the black man, the “other.” Women’s bodies are instrumentalised while at the same time selfresponsibility is demanded of the female subject. That refers back again to governmentality and disciplinary power. A central characteristic of governmentality is the apparent selfresponsibility for acts and technologies of the self (Lemke 2002), as it appears in the above quotation under the generic term of “empowerment.” Remember: governmentality is the strategy of imposing certain rules on the individual while making him/her believe that the decision is his/her own—productive governmental techniques. Concerning the “Cologne” events: how now do we deal with such interpellations? Which technologies of the self do we deem appropriate? In our seminar, we listed the following ones as important: solidarity with women and with others victims of racism, actions, the objective analysis of underlying causes, and the presence of women in the public space. We rejected the following: interpellations of the concerned citizen or the— preferably male—protector, the instrumentalisation of the “Cologne” events as a political means to justify new administration techniques (surveillance, deportation, and failed integration, “we won’t succeed”), and ascriptions to the concerned citizen (male and female) as being fundamentally a potential victim. These statements were the results of our debates and work in the seminar, and were taken up in my lecture and the discussion that followed it. However, the points of rejection were developed during an enduring negotiation between partly differing standpoints. As such, our “route of learning” included difficult and highly ambivalent debates and positions and by no means represented one truth. This is precisely the aim of feminist pedagogies (Crabtree et. al. 2001): to enable students to develop

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subjective knowledge, to critically discuss one topic from different standpoints and, in doing so, to get to know different positions. The aim is to support them in developing their own points of view on the given question or issue. Current approaches even adopt a more heuristic attitude. They address rational, affective and embodied knowledge development and connect them by using concepts of feminist materialist pedagogies (Treusch and Hinton 2015, Schmitz 2015). I have presented this debate as a walk around “Cologne.” During the seminar, the students developed their arguments on a common pin board which were then structured and continuously re-arranged along with the theoretical inputs of governmentality, Feminist Science Studies and postcolonial perspectives. By doing this, we tried to materialise our, sometimes differing, positions. One could argue that “Cologne” was “only” a case study to apply these theoretical backgrounds. Yet, it was more than that. It was a common struggle with its various instrumentalisations and the development of ability for critical thinking. As the “teacher,” I was able to provide access to theoretical backgrounds and methods to structure the debate and to articulate possible standpoints. This—to my view—is the task of a teacher.

Acknowledgements I want to thank the participants in my seminar: Ingrid Franthal, Felicitas Fröhlich, Elisabeth Ladeck, Christina Pernsteiner, Sophie Sporn, and Lise Suanjak, and the organisers, Ilse Wieser and Ingrid Franthal, as well as the participants in the lecture for their engaged discussions, inputs and struggling with me for understanding. Special thanks to Ruth Schmitz for fruitful discussions and her support in the English editing of this paper.

Notes 1

In the German speaking world “Cologne” has become a stand-alone term to designate these events. 2 Representation politics, i.e. the question of what messages are transported by the images and texts around the “Cologne” events are always of crucial importance in these discourses. 3 This “new” type of governmentality did not emerge overnight; it was the subject of many and controversial discussions, and of long disputes during the 17th and 18th centuries. 4 Calling the dispositive a symbolic figure means that these designations do not necessarily have to be explicitly named.

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5

The fact that something is constructed does by no means prevent it from becoming a reality for individuals and in society. 6 With regard to historical periods of time, even more than a century of women’s movements and efforts to obtain gender equality, from the beginning of the suffragette movement around the 1900s up to now, is a short span of time. 7 Again, behavioural assignments based on this binary model have started to soften up in the last decades. Moreover, Feminist Science Studies have elaborated how deeply sex and gender are interwoven, inseparably developing in interaction between nature and culture (for an overview Schmitz 2016). 8 Although this is not entirely true anymore. There are now in science several other acknowledged (intelligible)—although controversial—versions of the evolution theory: the hunter theory is challenged by that of the female gatherer and both by that of the scavengers. One look into the museums, these purveyors of knowledge to society, is enough, however, to make clear that the theory of the hunter is almost uncontested, occupying the top position in the popular media.

Bibliography Brownmiller, Susan. 2000. “Thornhill: Rape on the Brain.” Review of A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion, by Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer. Accessed January 18, 2016. http://www.susanbrownmiller.com/susanbrownmiller/html/review-thor nhill.html. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Crabtree, Robbin D., David A. Sapp, and Adela C. Licona. 2009. “Introduction: The Passion and the Praxis of Feminist Pedagogy.” In Feminist Pedagogy: Looking Back to Move Forward, edited by Robbin D. Crabtree, David A. Sapp, and Adela C. Licona, 1–22. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Castro Varela, Maria do Mar and Nikita Dhawan. 2005. Postkoloniale Theorie. Eine kritische Einführung. Transcript: Bielefed. —. 2007. “Migration und die Politik der Repräsentation.” In RePräsentationen. Dynamiken der Migrationsgesellschaft, edited by Anne Broden and Paul Mecheril, 29–46. Düsseldorf: IDA-NRW. Crenshaw, Kimberlé W. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: a Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum, 139–167. Dawhan, Nikita. 2014. “Affirmative Sabotage of the Master’s Tools: The Paradox of Postcolonial Enlightment.” In Deconolonizing Enlightment, 19–78. Leverkusen: Budrich University Press.

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Ebeling, Smilla, and Sigrid Schmitz, eds. 2006. Geschlechterforschung und Naturwissenschaften. Einführung in ein komplexes Wechselspiel. VS Verlag: Wiesbaden. Foucault, Michel. 1976. Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. Edited by Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books. —. 1982. “The Subject of Power.” In Michel Foucault. Beyond Strukturalism and Hermeneutics, edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, 208–226. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. —. 1984a. The History of Sexuality Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Random House. —. 1984b. The History of Sexuality Vol. 3: The Care of the Self. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books. —. 1991. “Governmentality.” In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, edited by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, 87–104. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. —. 2003. Society must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76. Translated by David Macey. New York: Picador. —. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the College de France, 1978-79. Edited by Michel Senellart, translated by Graham Burchell. Palgrave MacMillan —. 2009. Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78. Edited by Michel Senellart, translated by Graham Burchell. Pargrave McMillan. Ha, Kien Nghi. 2010. “Postkoloniale Kritik als politisches Projekt.” In Postkoloniale Soziologie: Empirische Befunde, theoretische Anschlüsse, politische Intervention, edited by Julia Reuter and PaulaIrene Villa, 259–280. Bielefeld: Transcript. —. 1999. Ethnizität und Migration Reloaded. Kulturelle Identität, Differenz und Hybridität im postkolonialen Diskurs. Berlin: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Berlin. Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–599. Lemke, Thomas. 2002. “Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique.” Rethinking Marxism 14: 49–64. Pozner, Jennifer L. 2000. “In Rape Debate, Controversy Trumps Credibility.” Extra, May 1. Accessed January 18, 2016. http://fair.org/extra/in-rape-debate-controversy-trumps-credibility/.

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Schmitz, Sigrid. 2016. “Science.” In Handbook Gender: Sources, Perspectives, and Methodologies, edited by Renée C. Hoogland, 347– 362. Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Reference USA. —. 2015. “Collaborative Enactments in Teaching with Feminist Materialism.” In Teaching with Feminist Materialisms, edited by Pat Treusch and Peta Hinton, 67–82. AtGender Teaching with Gender Book Series. Utrecht: AtGender. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2012. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press. Thornhill, Randy, and Craig T. Palmer. 2000. A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Treusch Pat, and Hinton, Peta, eds. 2015. Teaching with Feminist Materialisms. AtGender Teaching with Gender Book Series. Utrecht: AtGender.

Articles from public media about the “Cologne” debates which we discussed in the seminar and lecture Clemm, Christina and Sabine Hark. 2016. “Sind wir über Nacht zu einer feministischen Nation geworden?” Die Zeit Online, January 18, 2016, http://www.zeit.de/kultur/2016-01/feminismus-uebergriffe-koelnclemm-hark-10-nach-8, 18. Januar 2016. “Frauen klagen an,” Fokus Cover Page, January 8, 2016. Gottschalk, Katrin, “Zurück zur Ungemütlichkeit,” Frankfurter Rundschau, March 8, 2016. Lohaus, Stefanie, and Anne Wizirek. 2016. “Die Rape Culture wurde nicht nach Deutschland importiert—sie war schon immer da.” Vice, 6 January, 2016, http://www.vice.com/de/read/die-rape-culture-wurde-nichtnach-deutschland-importiert-sie-war-schon-immer-da-aufschrei-118. Necia. Necla, “Verhätschelte Söhne, dienende Töchter,” Der Standard, March 8, 2016. Schrupp, Antje. 2016. “Die Gewalt von Köln und was jetzt zu tun ist.” Stern, 6 January 2016, http://www.stern.de/familie/leben/koeln---wasjetzt-zu-tun-ist--ein-gastbeitrag-von-antje-schrupp-6632962.html. Stokowski, Margarete. 2016. “S.P.O.N.—Oben und unten: Des Rudels Kern.” Der Spiegel Online, January 7, 2016, http://www.spiegel.de/ kultur/gesellschaft/margarete-stokowski-ueber-sexualisierte-gewalt-a1070905.html. Süddeutsche Zeitung, Cover Page, January 9, 2016.

CHAPTER SIX CRITICAL THINKING IN GENDER STUDIES EDUCATION: THEORY AND PRACTICE ANNA LUNDBERG AND ANN WERNER

Critical thinking. . . . after graduation, this is above all what I mastered. I don’t know whether I was able to actually produce anything, but I knew how to criticize just about everything. And that is not always very . . . I mean, the next step [to produce]; I had to learn through work life. It [Gender Studies education] can be quite reactive; this is what I experienced once I stepped outside [of the university].1

Critical thinking as a concept has been negotiated, developed and employed throughout more than 2500 years. In contemporary higher education, the ability to think critically is highlighted in course descriptions, syllabi and learning aims throughout the field. Hence, critical thinking is a main generic skill/knowledge advocated in contemporary higher education curricula. Even so, what is actually meant by “critical thinking” is rarely spelled out, nor are the teaching methods used to help students to acquire this wished-for ability always accounted for. Considering this, we would like to ask: what is critical thinking, and how do we engage in this activity, in theory and practice? In this chapter, these questions will be approached against the backdrop of Gender Studies. This is the subject which we both teach on a daily basis, working as teachers in Swedish higher education, and therefore know best, but Gender Studies is also an academic field where critical thinking is regarded as imperative, not only according to descriptions of the field, but perhaps even more so according to Gender Studies students. This position among students became evident in a study, including a nation-wide survey and focus groups, where former Gender Studies students in Sweden were asked about their evaluation and experience of Gender Studies education, in relation to work as well as private life (Werner and Lundberg 2016).

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The vast majority of participants put forward critical thinking as one of the most important aspects, if not the most important aspect of Gender Studies (Lundberg and Werner 2013; 2014; Werner and Lundberg 2016). The capacity to challenge, subvert and question current societal and cultural structures was repeatedly promoted as a central acquired skill and a game changer; in private as well as professional life. Also, throughout the focus groups, the participants spoke of critical thinking, analytical abilities and “Gender Studies lenses” as three skills important for everyone. One of the informants said: The best thing with [doing Gender Studies] was the subversive challenge [it presented to] my own prejudice, of myself and others.

But what is the content of the skills acquired through Gender Studies? Looking closely at the quotes, being critical seems to be understood as subversion of existing practices and as a tool used to expose and unmask reality. Further, in the opening quote, being critical and being productive are described as opposites. The informant describes hirself as a fullyfledged master of critique, but s/he was in doubt whether s/he was capable of producing anything at all after graduating. The quote points to important questions about critique: is being critical or pursuing critical thinking the opposite of being productive? This chapter will scrutinise the epistemological, ontological and practical aspects of critical thinking in Gender Studies. The text starts out by accounting for a set of different understandings of critique, applying these modes in the field of Gender Studies. Then we account for ways of expanding the understanding of critique. The chapter concludes by accounting for the practical implications of different understandings of critique in the Gender Studies classroom.

What is Critical Thinking? An Overview On a general level, critical thinking is defined as “the art of analyzing and evaluating thinking with a view to improving it” (Elder and Paul 2008, 4). This includes: [T]he intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action. In its exemplary form, it is based on universal intellectual values that transcend subject matter divisions: clarity, accuracy, precision,

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consistency, relevance, sound evidence, good reasons, depth, breadth, and fairness. (Scriven and Paul 1987)

Drawing on the work of Johan Fornäs, we would like to map out ways of understanding critique and critical thinking. These are relevant for our discussion of critical thinking in Gender Studies. Critique and critical thinking in the fields of arts, humanities and social sciences, including Gender Studies, can according to Fornäs be divided into five different categories: negative, aesthetic, philosophical, political, and finally communicative (Fornäs 2013). We shall now briefly account for these understandings of critique. The negative, or fault-finding, practice of critique dates back to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, roughly denoting the contemporary everyday use of the concept. Criticism is here used to describe value judgements and contestations. “Stop criticising me!” here means “Stop commenting on what I do and say in a negative, fault-finding, manner”. In practice, critique here refers to situations where someone, or something said, done, or written, is apprehended as bad and wrong, and therefore needs to be objected to and rectified. Hence, it is in need of critique. This kind of critique is often based on moral judgements, different kinds of normative thinking, and constructions of hierarchies, where the one being critical positions hirself in opposition to, distanced from, as well as more enlightened—morally and intellectually—than the subject in need of rectification. Most of us, whether aware of it or not, practise this kind of critical action in our everyday academic lives, when criticising certain texts, theoretical approaches or implementations of methodologies. This kind of critique is often delivered in a dismissive or derogatory manner, sometimes with ridicule or irony. Therefore the intervention often leads to animated and vigorous exchanges of excitable speech, followed by waves of excited, negative and exhausting emotions, not least for those receiving the critique. In the eighteenth century, an aesthetic brand of criticism emerged. This brand of critique is devoted to evaluative comments and reflections on aesthetic work. Similar to the negative critique, the aesthetic one can contain unfavourable assessments. It can however equally be positive, praising the work of art. Hence, aesthetic critique may cover a range of different interventions focusing on aesthetics. Johan Fornäs writes: In the eighteenth century, Kant and others generalised this aesthetic concept of critique so that it came to signify any detailed analytical judgement based on an ability of distinction, differentiation and discrimination. (Fornäs 2013, 505)

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The philosophical concept of critique on the other hand moves away from evaluation and towards cognitive and rational aspects of distinction and analysis. This take on criticism and critical thinking dates back to the Greek meaning of the word. The word critique stems from the Greek word krino, which (amongst other things) means to separate. Thus, the philosophical approach to critique has to do with activities like contemplation, speculation, scrutinising a situation or an object in a systematic search for knowledge, and asking questions like: how is this multi-facetted phenomenon or situation best understood? In this sense, the philosophical take on critique implies the action of differentiating the seemingly straightforward and one-dimensional, trying to pay attention to the complexity of the matter at hand. The philosophical mode of critique does not focus on the distribution of power. This aspect of critique is, on the other hand, very much the focus of the political critique. This critical apprehension takes the three previous conceptualisations of critique into account; transforming them into a multi-faceted, emancipatory social critique focusing on societal inequalities and aiming to change them by criticism. The political type of criticism is associated with representatives of the Frankfurt School, emerging in the 1930s, and their so-called “critical theory.” The Frankfurt School critique is to a large extent based on Marxist theory and ideology. Johan Fornäs describes this critique as follows: Systematic social critics used their sharp judgement to attack unworthy living conditions and unjust power relations. . . . Social critique wants to make the world a better place, not just objecting to it, interpreting it or analysing its foundations. (Fornäs 2013, 505)

As is the case with negative critique, the political critique is mainly articulated from a position distanced from the subjects of the critical intervention. In a radical gesture, the critique conveys the urge to break away from what is criticised, trying to reveal structural shortcomings in search of a new and better alternative. The politically coloured critique articulated by the Frankfurt School has been extremely influential and has contributed valuable work: displaying biased systems of power. However, a different kind of critique is needed, according to Fornäs; a mode of critique willing to build bridges, based on the act of communication. The need is motivated by a contemporary globalised cultural and political order, more heterogeneous than ever before, demanding approaches and tools to analytically deal with highly complex objects and situations, taking departures in the struggles, negotiations and dilemmas when exercising the act of critique. This is what Fornäs is

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aiming at when describing a fifth form of critique, which is communicative and able to apprehend, appreciate and hold on to dilemmas and ambivalence, i.e. the kind of social and political situations that are perhaps the most difficult to approach. It is a critique that is open enough to be able to harbour polyphony. It is described by Fornäs as a critical spirit that thrives in incongruous situations, not aiming to end up with a nicely rounded, homogenous analysis (Fornäs 2013, 506). This kind of critique is useful as it counteracts reductionism, rigidity and either-or thinking, in an elaborated and intentional manner. When teaching, discussing and practising critique and critical thinking in higher education, it becomes necessary to distinguish between different types of critique, their focus and effects. It is important to take into account, according to us, the ways in which difference is enacted in critique, and the relation between the critic and the object of critique. In negative, as well as political critique, the relation between the critic and the object of critique is mostly marked by dichotomous distance and hierarchy. Difference is established by the critic being dis-associated from negative qualities attributed to the object of critique, defined as the opposite. This is not necessarily the case with aesthetic, philosophical and communicative critique, where the critic may be positioned in a closer range to, or perhaps may even be a part of the object of critique. In Gender Studies certain critiques and conceptualisations of critiques have shaped the subject during the past decades. Following Fornäs’ map of critique we will discuss three important critical interventions relevant in Gender Studies; bell hooks’ intersectional critique, Chantal Mouffe’s political critique and Judith Butler’s critique of the “heterosexual matrix.”

Critical Thinking in Gender Studies: Implications and Examples Within contemporary critical thinking in Gender Studies, we see examples of all of Fornäs’ five types of critique: the negative, the aesthetic, the philosophical, the political and the communicative. All of them have been important for the field to grow, flourish, and transform. In Gender Studies, articulations of critique are influenced by disciplines like philosophy, psychology, cultural studies, history, literary studies, and political theory. Also, fields of knowledge such as Postcolonial Studies and Queer Studies have influenced the ways in which critique and critical thinking are carried out in contemporary Gender Studies. As mentioned in the opening of this chapter, the role played by critique, and not least political critique, in the field of Gender Studies

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cannot be overestimated. This comes as no surprise as feminist ideology and practice are one of the corner stones of Gender Studies and the subject has its origins in the political rights movements’ reactions to social and political systems of oppression, systems that need to be highlighted, contested, and altered through critical interventions. Thus, Gender Studies has a close relationship with the political critique. The violent nature of oppressive structures has resulted in a feminist critique entailing feminist critical subjects spending time and energy focusing on a certain object which is found to be fallacious and in need of radical correction, and in some cases in need of total abolition. The object is not only attacked, but often also completely separated from the position of the critical subject. However, and as we shall see later, this is not the only way in which critique may be exercised in Gender Studies. We shall now give three contemporary examples of critical interventions that have been particularly important for the field.

The Intersectional Critique Gender Studies’ critical thinking, based on feminist thinking and activism, has since the emergence of the field focused on biased gender and power relations in culture, society and science. Issues such as: inequalities between men and women regarding the right to vote, regarding political impact, education, economy, physical and sexual health, and cultural representation, have been raised. However, the gender relations highlighted have often been naturalised in terms of, for example race, class and sexuality. The subjects in focus have often been white and heterosexual, not properly basing the critique on the fact that gendered experience differs due to, for example race, sexuality, and class. This bias repeatedly occurring in Gender Studies and feminist thinking has been critiqued from a range of perspectives, focusing on class (expressed for example by feminist Marxists in the 1970s), and race (expressed by for example black and postcolonial feminists). In 1851, Sojourner Truth, an African American abolitionist, former slave and women’s rights activist, gave her legendary speech, raising the question: Ain’t I a Woman?, hence doing away simultaneously with the idea that women were unfit to vote due to a fragile constitution, and the somewhat absurd situation where women, as a category, per se were associated with the white bourgeoisie: That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and

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planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! (Truth 1972, 94)

Many contemporary feminist critics have since raised the need to take into account multiple intersecting structures of power such as gender, race, class, sexuality and so on when performing Feminist and Gender Studies critiques (hooks 2000). This is what the so-called intersectional turn implies. This turn towards a critical focus on the ways in which systems of categorisation and oppression are intertwined has emerged through critical work carried out by amongst others African American scholars (Crenshaw 1994; Hill Collins 1998), highlighting the ways in which feminist politics and research exclusively build on the practices, experiences and perspectives of white straight women from the ruling classes. This critique has also addressed the reluctance for sharing the privilege to decide on the curriculum, or to define what questions should be asked in Gender Studies (hooks 2000). One of the scholars who have critically highlighted this bias in Feminist and Gender Studies is bell hooks. In 2000, she wrote: The exclusionary practices of women who dominate feminist discourse have made it practically impossible for new and varied theories to emerge. . . . Criticisms of or alternatives to established feminist ideas are not encouraged, e.g. recent controversies about expanding feminist discussions of sexuality. . . . Privileged feminists have largely been unable to speak to, with, and for diverse groups of women because they either do not understand fully the interrelatedness of sex, race, and class oppression or refuse to take this interrelatedness seriously. (hooks 2000, 9–15)

Continuing, and in a striking way, hooks brings forward her experiences as a black working-class woman as essentially different to those of her white fellow students, doing what in the 1970s was called Women’s Studies: When I entered my first women’s studies class at Stanford University in the early 1970s, white women were reveling in the joy of being together— to them it was an important, momentous occasion. I had not known a life where women had not been together, where women had not helped, protected, and loved one another deeply. (hooks 2000, 12)

Through such critical observations, hooks keeps putting forward the fact that black women have a central and valuable role to play in the making of feminist theory and Gender Studies. hooks’ critique of the US women’s movement points out what was by then naturalised and taken for granted, hence not addressed: the white bourgeoisie woman’s needs and

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joys were still given starting points for Feminist or Gender Studies activities. hooks’ critique has many similarities with the political critique described by Fornäs, and is in many ways reactive: using examples from Gender Studies and feminism as objects to critique. As a result of voices such as hooks’ and many others, recent decades have seen broad critical demands increasingly discussed within Gender Studies and feminist research. These are asking for clarifications and articulation of the research subject i.e. the position from which the critique is formulated, and how different kinds of criticism may be articulated due to the subject’s position. Different concepts of reality are manifested depending on the position of the writing subject. This is what Donna Haraway has coined “situated knowledge,” and has become a vital part of feminist critique, where the knowing subject is deeply involved in the knowledge (and critique) produced (Haraway 1989). The intersectional critique of white, mainstream feminism in Gender Studies raises questions of difference and power. hooks asserts, in line with the communicative critique, that in order to critique and engage in disagreements that are constructive and caring, critiques that contain a verbal tearing-apart of one another need to be eliminated, together with win-or-lose competitiveness: Women need to come together in situations where there will be ideological disagreement and work to change that interaction so communication occurs. This means that when women come together, rather than pretend union, we would acknowledge that we are divided and must develop strategies to overcome fears, prejudices, resentments, competitiveness, etc. (hooks 2000, 65)

To hooks, these strategies imply a need to acquire the ability to disagree and argue with one another without acting as if we are fighting for our lives. Safety, support, and solidarity do not arise from—solely— fraternising in groups where the participants are alike and share similar values. Rather, commitment to a situation, where the participants are backing each other, and appreciating difference and disagreement, provide a sense of safety, support and solidarity.

Political Agonism One scholar, who has been advocating the need for a critical political approach, and thus carrying on the legacy of the Frankfurt School’s political critique, is political scientist Chantal Mouffe (2005; 2007). Her take on critical thinking has, like hooks’ been important in Gender Studies. Mouffe´s critique of modern liberal democracy has thus had a considerable

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impact on Gender Studies research on politics and power. According to Mouffe, the democratic structure of the contemporary welfare state has been replaced by managerial logics, by negotiations and management techniques similar to the ones in corporate business, hence changing political life. Mouffe defines “the political” as constituted by an agonistic dimension, where a political situation that acknowledges conflicts of interests between various actors, groups and hegemonies is central to maintaining a vivid democracy. Following this, she accuses contemporary Western post-political systems of reducing politics to a set of technical strategies of consensus and rationality, where antagonism is smoothed over and no differentiated alternatives are clear. The exclusion of individuals and groups, different solutions and power struggles, are thereby covered up. According to Mouffe, democracy is not about consensus; it is not about finding the “right” solution. Democracy is a battlefield where different standpoints and agendas are put against each other, and this must be acknowledged, or else we might end up putting democracy itself at risk (Mouffe 2005; 2007). To acknowledge agonism is to acknowledge the political. The term agonism and agonistic pluralism are at the heart of her critical thinking, and her views on politics and political action. She writes: I use the concept of agonistic pluralism to present a new way to think about democracy which is different from the traditional liberal conception of democracy as a negotiation among interests and is also different to the model which is currently being developed by people like Jurgen Habermas and John Rawls. While they have many differences, Rawls and Habermas have in common the idea that the aim of the democratic society is the creation of a consensus, and that consensus is possible if people are only able to leave aside their particular interests and think as rational beings. However, while we desire an end to conflict, if we want people to be free we must always allow for the possibility that conflict may appear and to provide an arena where differences can be confronted. The democratic process should supply that arena. (Castle, Laclau and Mouffe 1998)

Mouffe’s thinking is focusing on political types of critique and draws firmly on the need for a clear and oppositional difference between the critical subject and the object of critique.

The Heterosexual Matrix The third example of Gender Studies critique that, according to us, has been important for the development of the field is Judith Butler’s theory about the heterosexual matrix. Butler (1990) argues that formations of

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gender in contemporary culture are based on certain principles: the separation of two genders; male and female, the value ascribed to them where male is valued more highly, and the assumption that the two will desire and complete each other. The heterosexual matrix explains cultural and social patterns where the female and male bodies naturally are understood as dichotomous and to be followed by equally dichotomous female or male behavior: behaviours that naturally involve sexual desires directed towards the opposite sex. This theory does not only speak to how identity is formed, but to the organisation and meaning of society and culture at large. Butler’s critique reshapes previous conceptions of gender and as such, it is a critique of Gender Studies, but it mainly focuses on the discursive and material manifestations of intersections of gender and sexuality in society. As such, it is a political critique, as well as a negative and philosophical critique, intervening with inequalities in society, highlighting the naturalisation of heterosexuality as implicitly given by gender. Butler’s theoretical intervention may, however, also be described as communicative, since the subject, according to her views on language and discourse, is always included in and shaped by discursive structures (Butler 1990, 33). To sum up our discussion about critical interventions in Gender Studies, the object of study and the type of critical thinking used may vary. However, we would claim that the modus operandi of Gender Studies’ critical thinking is mainly to de-naturalise and make visible what is taken for granted, accounting for unacknowledged power hierarchies structuring culture and society. Critical thinking is thus often, but not always, inspired by (negative and) political criticism, pointing out what is wrong with the ways in which power structures shape culture and society, methodologically drawing on philosophical criticism in assuming that these power structures are hidden, and need to be exposed by paying attention to the complexity of the matter of fact. This detective-like practice is not only a conspicuous feature in Gender Studies, but shared with other parts of arts, humanities and social sciences. Feminist criticism, practised within Gender Studies, is thus a political critique, where the researcher is positioned within society and culture; it is evaluative, reflective and analytical, encountering different phenomena and texts, pointing out what is biased and needs to be altered. The common denominator of critiques presented is that they all are mainly reactive, projecting focus and energy on subjects that need to be contested. In the next section, scholars discussing the limits of reactive critiques are presented in order to point out that there are other ways of conducting

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critique in Gender Studies; ways that emphasise generative and communicative aspects of critical thinking.

The Limits of Critique: The Affective Turn Having accounted for three important critical interventions shaping the field of Gender Studies, we venture into the discussions of critique as an activity in need of re-articulation. Voices from the field of feminist theory and Gender Studies presented in this section have a different take on how to deal with structural inequalities, and they offer alternative critical strategies. The common denominator for these ways of addressing critical thinking is that they are grounded in an affirmative approach. Taking a departure in the work of French philosophers Luce Irigaray (1985) as well as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), we argue that it is a critical gesture to turn one’s back on power structures that are dysfunctional and obsolete in their repetitive acts of oppression, and to instead focus on radical alternatives. This is a critical direction that, by Rosi Braidotti and others, is descried as generative (Braidotti 2002). Reactive movements and gestures have become standardised when it comes to critique, not least in politics. They allude to the format of the battle, where combatants throw themselves at each other with determination and force. The scenario has been articulated throughout history ever since the dramaturgy of the Greek Drama, stirring up feelings of excitement and exhilaration, and has become familiar through repetition, this to such an extent that we tend to associate and compare political struggle with a battlefield. The reason, we would argue, is that most critical gestures point back to the opposed, the oppressive, unjust system or discourse. The object of critique is focused through an act of interpellation; it is addressed, called upon, and hence kept alive. Keep directing attention to a system or object that you want to get rid of, and the system/object will not only remain constitutive, it will also keep playing a central role in shaping the critique. Elizabeth Grosz calls this approach “servile” arguing that these critical interventions seem to strive for recognition—of the critical subject—by socially dominant positions (Grosz 2005, 194). She calls for a different kind of politics, or critique, paying less attention to the Althusserian interpellation, devoting attention to producing a “future in which forces align in ways fundamentally different from the past and present” (Grosz 2005, 193). Similarly, Rosi Braidotti claims, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, that feminist politics represents a Nietzschean “slave-morality” (Braidotti 2002, 81) as long as it perpetuates repetitions of dominant values. For

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feminism to be radically different from present power and discourse, it needs to be able to articulate un-Oedipal, multiple possibilities of desire, based on positivity and affirmation rather than the dialectical order of reactive critique. This altered mode of critique is based on “lines of flight” from reactionary modes, “if only in momentary flashes” (Davis 2000, 138). Diane Davis is the scholar who perhaps most blatantly points out the risk of a feminist critique that settles for being “an answering machine” to oppressive systems such as phallogocentrism. She asserts that reactive feminist critique holds a valuable tactic that cannot be dismissed. However, stopping at reactive politics means that feminism will remain trapped within the phallogocentric framework against which it labours. Quoting Avital Ronnell, she asks: [H]ow can you free yourself? How can you not be reactive to what already exist as powerful and dominating? How can you avoid a resentimental politics? Is it possible to have a feminism that is joyous, relentless, outrageous, libidinally charged [?]. (Ronell, quoted in Davis 2000, 138)

The generative feminist critique advocated by these scholars draws on the ideas of Luce Irigaray and her theory of the (female) sex which is not one, hence impossible for use as a dichotomous mirror, based on a multitude of differences (Irigaray 1985). Braidotti (1994, 2002) takes this idea as her point of departure when investigating how difference can be con-ceptualised affirmatively, rather than in the more common understanding: “You are different, hence you are bad, or at least not as good as I am”. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) and Rita Felski (2015), both American scholars active in the fields of Literary Studies, Queer and Feminist Studies, have introduced concepts useful for practising this generative or affirmative critique. Sedgwick is using the term “reparative reading” to describe her approach. Felski frames her ideas with the concept “postcritical.” Both of them question the domination of what Ricoeur (1977) calls the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” describing the epistemological position from which the world is intrinsically hidden, masked and undisclosed, in need of constant deciphering, denaturalising and demystification. According to Sedgwick, the hermeneutics of suspicion has become “widespread critical habits indeed, perhaps by now nearly synonymous with criticism itself” (Sedgwick 2003, 124). She observes that the hermeneutics of suspicion has, to a wide number of scholars within arts, humanities and social sciences, become a “mandatory injunction rather than a possibility amongst other possibilities” (Sedgwick 2003, 124). This, she claims, has involved a privileging of paranoia. Thus,

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according to Sedgwick, there is an affective side to critical practice, where paranoid inquiries are based on negative affects like anxiety and fear, fuelling the need for shelter against humiliation. Sedgwick’s argument aligns with the foundational ideas of Fornäs’ communicative critique, but her affective angle sets them apart from each other. Sedgwick, somewhat mesmerised, ponders over the reasons for the paranoid, detective-like desire for uncovering systems of oppression, this in a situation where the very same systems, most of the time, are painfully obvious: Why bother exposing the ruses of power in a country where, at any given moment, 40 per cent of young black men are enmeshed in the penal system? In the United States and internationally, while there is plenty of hidden violence that requires exposure there is also, and increasingly, an ethos where forms of violence that are hypervisible from the start may be offered as an exemplary spectacle rather than remain to be unveiled as a scandalous secret. (Sedgwick 2003, 140)

Rather than ruling out paranoid critical strategies, Sedgwick calls for the need to acknowledge the strategy as one out of many, rather than the single one way of seeking, finding and organising knowledge, of being rigorous or radical. She calls for critical and theoretical interventions able to undertake the proliferation of a multitude of affects. She is questioning the tendency of paranoid readings to view the (ordinary) readers as naive, constantly in need of unveiling, and constantly ready to become surprised or disturbed by the shocking result of critical interventions. With the concept of reparative reading, Sedgwick presents an alternative to this approach. Reparative reading is a weak theory; it is local, nonce, and, contrary to the paranoid position, not in fear of surprises, of the new. Rather, from the reparative position, it may be seen as realistic and necessary to experience surprise, good or bad (Sedgwick 2003, 146). It allows for multiple positions and flexibility, a back and forth process. Hope, often a fracturing thing to experience, is one of the energies through which reparative readings organise the objects encountered. Love is another one. Reparative readings are not necessarily more optimistic, or less realistic than paranoid reading. Sedgwick sets out the difference: In a world full of loss, pain, and oppression, both epistemologies are likely to be based on deep pessimism . . . . But what each looks for—which is again to say, the motive each has for looking,—is bound to differ widely. Of the two, however, it is only paranoid knowledge that has so thorough a practice of disavowing its affective motive and force and masquerading as the very stuff of truth. (Sedgwick 2003, 138)

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In her intervention, Sedgwick highlights the affective side of critical thinking. Equally to Sedgewick, Rita Felski is concerned with the affective side of critique, underlining that arguments presented in critique are a matter of not only content, but of style and tone: discussing literary criticism she asks: “Why is the affective range of criticism so limited? Why are we so hyper-articulate about our adversaries and so excruciatingly tongue-tied about our loves?” (Felski 2015, 13). In line with Sedgwick, she questions the all-exclusive position of paranoid critique, describing it as a remarkably contagious and charismatic idea, drawing everything to its field of force, patrolling the boundaries of what counts as serious thought. It is virtually synonymous with intellectual rigor, theoretical sophistication, and intransigent opposition to the status quo. (Felski 2015, 7)

As an alternative, she explains postcritical reading as a way of situating the reader in front of the text, addressing it as a co-actor, as something that makes a difference, calls forth, unfurls, rather than something full of hidden causes. Drawing on actor-network theory, Felski calls for a more affirmative and engaged aesthetic response, where art can function as a way to inspire civic engagement. Postcritical reading, not to be confused with uncritical reading, does justice to the trans-temporal liveliness of texts and acknowledges the co-constitution of text and reader, without divorcing intellectual rigour from affective attachment. It becomes “a matter of attaching, collating, negotiating, assembling” (Felski 2015, 173). In a postcritical reading, it is the entanglement between reader, the reading and the read that is in focus, in a close, generative and productive way. The difference between this kind of critical stance and the reactive lies first and foremost in the motives for engaging in critical activities.

Critical Thinking in Gender Studies Education: A Practical Approach Having accounted for various aspects and modes of critique and critical thinking, as well as for differences between reactive and generative critique, we would like to end this chapter by drawing on Sedgwick’s insights in analysing Gender Studies education. We see, in our students’ work, as well as in our own, a dominance of reactive critical interventions. We see more negative and political critiques and less communicative critique. Presenting generative and alternative paths for critical feminist thinking would balance Gender Studies critique. The former student quoted in the opening of this chapter put it aptly when claiming that s/he,

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after having graduated from Gender Studies, knew how to criticise just about everything but was still uncertain of hir ability to actually produce anything. Neither Sedgwick, nor Felski, is particularly exhaustive in their descriptions of alternatives to reactive critique. Hence, there is an opportunity for us, and our students, to explore ways in which generative critique can be developed: in theory and practice. We would like to end this chapter with three practical examples of ways in which critique may be performed in Gender Studies. We see these three examples as the very foundation for facilitating learning environments where students get the opportunity to practise a range of critical modes, reactive as well as generative. We take our point of departure in the academic seminar: the perfect setting for examining the ways in which critique is conveyed, since the core idea of a seminar is of participants actively taking part in an intellectual process.

Critical Intervention as a Matter of Time and Intimacy The basic rule is simple: the more familiar one is with a text, a field of knowledge or a theory, the more equipped one is to engage with it. And getting to know something intimately takes, as we all know, time. If the student/critic is not well versed in the subject of discussion s/he is always running the risk of what we would like to call Facebook fallacy; that is blurted-out biased critique, shouted out from a safe distance. The result can be distorted and uninformed, but also sometimes down-right prejudiced. Often, Facebook fallacy occurs due to laziness in combination with a readiness to take the position of the detective-like critic described above, or in selfish motives, manifested in skilful manipulations of ideas servicing one’s own interests (Scriven and Paul 1987). To be thoroughly acquainted with the object at hand is not only a question of academic rigour, but also of academic ethics, fairmindedness, openness and curiosity, and needs time (Norlander 2012, Bessman and Talerud 1992). The intimate relation with an object also facilitates the sense of security needed to change one’s mind, or to be open about the simple fact that none of us are fully fledged experts, but rather producers of knowledge in constant need of new perspectives and new surprises (Brookfield 1997). Listening/reading is therefore an activity that is equally important to speaking/writing in the process of critical thinking.

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Critique and the Necessity of Difference Critique and the Necessity of Difference take their starting point in quoting Nietzsche: The more emotional affects we allow to be expressed in words concerning something, the more eyes, different eyes, we know how to train on the same thing, the more complete our ‘idea’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity’, will be. (Nietzsche 1994, 13)

Different eyes, differently situated, are involved in the critical struggle and negotiation over meaning and power. This is an important quote, since it underlines the fact that knowledge production gains from difference as such, and it becomes impoverished by hegemony and domination. In a TED-talk entitled The Danger of a Single Story (2009) Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie advocates something similar, however with a focus on gender, race, class, and nationality. In her talk, she displays the poor, biased, and ignorant results of the narrative situation she calls “the single story,” where some voices are repeatedly taken into account, while others are repeatedly unheard, and she is doing so by drawing both on her own middle-class based prejudice towards people from the Nigerian working class, and the narrow-minded and racist ideas she faced as a black woman moving from Nigeria to the US to study. Providing space for multiple stories strategically enforces intersectional critique by avoiding the dominance of a single story. Adichie’s critique is reactive, as well as generative, since it takes its starting point in a constantly shifting, never completed world-view. In critique, as well as in the production of academic text, multiple stories have proven to be a productive starting point. For example, poet and Gender Studies researcher Hanna Hallgren has, throughout her many years of experience of group-based discussions of work in progress, stressed the fact that it is important to view the text as a product created by several people (Hallgren 2014). Deleuze and Guattari state, concerning the book A Thousand Plateaus: “We have been aided, inspired, multiplied” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 3), referring to the crowd of agents lurking behind their names, printed on the book’s cover. This is, as we see it, an important thing to acknowledge: the fact that the production of academic text is a group-based activity. At the seminar, the author needs to take a step back, letting other people contribute with well-considered critique and suggestions on how the text may be processed (Hallgren 2014). The critical readers need in turn to view the text as if it partly and for the moment belongs to them, hence they need to show generative care of the

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text, aiming at giving the writer the help that s/he needs to proceed or finalize, not just find problems. Again, according to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), it is important to understand reading as a productive act.

Avoiding the Master Suppression Techniques In an eagerness to achieve what is expected of us, to fulfil the performance of the detective-like critical subject, the use of what Berit Ås (2004) calls “master suppression techniques” sometimes lies close at hand. These are techniques defined as strategies of social manipulation by which a group or individual tries to manipulate, suppress and humiliate opponents. Examples of frequently used techniques are ridicule, ignoring/making invisible, to withhold vital information, shaming and blaming, implicit or explicit threats and double punishment (damned if you do, damned if you don’t). The master suppression techniques, we would claim, are used by most (if not all) of us as rhetorical tools in debate and critical interventions. They are not only socially destructive and violent; they pervert critical discussion, turning the focus away from what the discussion actually is about. The effects of master suppression techniques are sometimes slippery and vague, difficult to articulate and pin down when set in motion, resulting in awkwardness, insecurity and selfcensorship in those who are subjected to them. We therefore strongly advocate continuous attention to this phenomenon, both through preventive awareness-raising activities as well as actions in situations where the techniques are used. Then it becomes easier both to avoid using them, and to be able to manage becoming a target. This is particularly important in order to be able to enact Mouffe’s agonism. She describes ultimate respect as the backbone of the agonistic critical situation (Mouffe 2005). We started this chapter by quoting a former Gender Studies student. The quote highlighted, as we have argued, the dominance of reactive critique in Gender Studies. However important it is that students in higher education learn how to master reactive critique, we find it equally important that they grasp the implementation of generative critical thinking and practice. Throughout this text, we have attempted to write about various modes, aspects, effects and affects related to critique. Feminist theory, Gender Studies and intersectional research focusing on discrimination and oppression repeated and experienced again and again, over time and space. At the same time, the political drive to achieve something different, something better, is at the heart of Gender Studies, as

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well as several other subjects. The act of critique is a crucial aspect of Gender Studies: its intellectual and political implications. Therefore, it is central to improve our ability to keep several things in mind at the same time: to be able to perform reactive as well generative critical thinking. We need to be able to think both-and, rather than either-or.

Notes 1

The quote is taken from a focus group discussion with former Gender Studies students about their studies and transition to the labour market. For a full discussion on method see Lundberg and Werner (2013). Due to anonymisation no further information about the place and time is given here.

Bibliography Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2009. The Danger of a Single Story. Accessed November 1, 2016. https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda _adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story/transcript. Bessman, Mona, and Bo Talerud. 1992. “Tid att reflektera—ord för att förstå.” In Högre lärande?, edited by Mona Bessman and Bo Talerud, 77–90. Stockholm: Stockholms universitet. Braidotti, Rosi. 1994. Nomadic Subjects. Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. —. 2002. Metamorphoses. Towards a Materialist Theory of Beco-ming. Cambridge: Polity Press. Brookfield, Stephen. 1997. Developing Critical Thinkers, Challenging Adults to Explore Alternative Ways of Thinking and Acting. San Francisco: JosseyBass Publishers. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London and New York: Routledge. Castle, Dave, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. 1998. “Hearts, Minds and Radical Democracy.” Red Pepper. Accessed November 1, 2016. http://www.redpepper.org.uk/hearts-minds-and-radical-democracy/. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1998. “It’s all in the Family. Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation.” Hypatia (3): 62–82. Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams. 1994. “Mapping the Margins. Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence against Women of Color.” In The Public Nature of Private Violence, edited by Martha Albertson Fineman and Rixanne Mykitiuk, 93–118. London and New York: Routledge.

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Davis, Diane D. 2000. Breaking Up [at] Totality. A Rhetoric of Laughter. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Elder, Linda and Richard Paul. 2008. The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking. Concepts and Tools. Dillon Beach: Foundation for Critical Thinking. Felski, Rita. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fornäs, Johan. 2013. “The Dialectics of Communicative and Immanent Critique in Cultural Studies.” Tripple C (2): 504–514. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2005. Time Travels. Feminism, Nature, Power. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Hallgren, Hanna. 2014. “Några reflexioner och en lathund.” In Kreativt skrivande och kritiskt tänkande i genusvetenskap, edited by Anna Lundberg and Ann Werner, 35–42. Göteborg: Nationella sekretariatet för genusforskning. hooks, bell. 2000. Feminist Theory. From Margins to Centre. London: Pluto Press. Haraway, Donna. 1989. Primate Visions. Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. London and New York: Routledge. Irigaray, Luce. 1985. Speculum. Of the Other Woman. New York: Cornell University Press. Lundberg, Anna and Ann Werner. 2013. Genusvetarnas framtid. En nationell alumniundersökning av genusvetenskaplig utbildning och arbete. Göteborg: Nationella sekretariatet för genusforskning. —. 2014 “Med passionen som drivkraft. En intersektionell analys av genusvetenskap, de studerande och arbetslivet.” Tidskrift för genusvetenskap (1): 50–71. Mouffe, Chantal. 2005. On the Political. London: Routledge. —. 2007. “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces.” Art and Research. A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods 1 (2): 1–5. Nietzsche, Friedrich. [1887] 1994. On the Geneaology of Morality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Norlander, Kerstin. 2012. “Empathic Reading.” In Gender Studies Education and Pedagogy, edited by Anna Lundberg and Ann Werner, 10–13. Göteborg: Nationella sekretariatet för Genusforskning. Scriven, Michael, and Paul Richards. 1987. Defining Critical Thinking. Accessed on June 30 2016, http://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/ defining-critical-thinking/766.

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Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You.” In Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 123–151. Durham: Duke University Press. Ricœur, Paul. 1977. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ronell, Avital. 1991. “Interview with Avital Ronell.” Re:search: Angry Women. San Francisco: Research Publications (13): 127–153. Truth, Soujourner. [1851] 1972. “Ain’t I a Woman?” In Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings, edited by Miriam Schneir, 94–95. New York: Vintage Books. Werner, Ann, and Anna Lundberg. 2016 “Gender Jobs: Dilemmas of Gender Studies Education and Employability in Sweden.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 1–15. Accessed October 5, 2016. doi:10.1177/1350506816671162. Ås, Berit. 2004. “The Five Master Suppression Techniques.” In Women In White: The European Outlook, edited by Birgitta Evengård, 78–83. Stockholm: Stockholm City Council.

CHAPTER SEVEN AFFECTING FEMINIST PEDAGOGIES: PERFORMING CRITICAL THINKING IN BETWEEN SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES AND CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE BEATRIZ REVELLES-BENAVENTE

For feminist theory, an interdisciplinary approach helps to address, complexify and respond to a sociological problem from multiple angles. Toni Morrison’s work demonstrates how literature can tackle a sociological problem, yet, it is not common to think about literature and sociology together. This is mostly due to two particular facts: first, the fact that literary studies are assumed to be a subjective discipline (Griffin 2011) and; second, the fact that the interpretation of the connection between literature and sociology is not a straightforward cause-effect process. Methodologically speaking, a new entanglement in between literature and sociology is needed in order to understand what kinds of patterns are shifting the literary message through social communication. Pedagogically speaking, this also implies teaching literature in a more horizontal, rather than a hierarchical way, one in which this communicative process becomes the focus and not what the teacher has to teach or what the student is learning. Therefore, looking for differing relations in literature becomes essential in order to understand a communicative process between literature and sociology, as much as to situate specifically what terms will be relating through this process. The context that will be used in this chapter will be Toni Morrison’s novels and the specific digital materialisation of socio-cultural discourses that is Facebook as one of the most important Social Networking Sites (SNS). This relation responds to the two aforementioned approaches. Methodologically it becomes a perfect site in which empirical sociological units can be discerned in a literary

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context via the different comments appearing on the Facebook page. Pedagogically, it provides a familiar form of expression that facilitates the horizontal co-creation of knowledge with the general public and specifically with teenagers and graduate students. The sociological empirical units that will articulate this relation will be feelings, because they are radical empirical units to be used in any sociological approach (Clough 2009). At the same time, they are core for one potential “generic capacity” that is critical thinking, paramount for literary studies and a sociological analysis. According to Danvers, “[critical thinking] is also an intensely affective experience that is complex, contingent and contextualised” (2016, 282). Therefore, I want to claim that it is possible to find a connection between literature and sociology through affective critical thinking. This will also mean think of literature and sociology in an affective but also in a situated way. Understanding novels via this digital platform enables affective critical thinking, and as such it links sociology and literature together and allows a different pedagogical practice for literature. In this chapter, I argue that understanding novels through a digital platform motivates students to think differently about pre-established feelings, concepts such as gender or race, or even their own embodiment as knowledge creators. In addition, I will show how critical thinking (as an affective capacity) also challenges the meanings of emotions. Thinking of critical thinking as an affective capacity also opens up a space for social transformation and moves critical thinking away from neoliberal attributes that can also be linked with the conceptualization of generic skills. All in all, the objectives of this chapter will be to connect literature and sociology through (affective) critical thinking to teach literature differently, as well as explaining critical thinking as an affective capacity in order to show how it actualizes when literature is combined with digital platforms such as Facebook. This process will alter the concept of generic skill from an equalising normative position towards a performative politics of affects, and it will change pedagogical practices for literature and its understanding as a sociologically transformative tool. In order to achieve this, I will divide the chapter into four different sections plus conclusions. The first introduces the concept of critical thinking as an affective capacity. The second explains the need for critical thinking to be conceptualised and taught as an affective capacity. In the third, I give a practical example of how to incorporate this into a particular classroom: the literature classroom. In order to do this, I introduce a social media platform, Facebook, to explain how literature and social networking sites always relate to each other by means of certain feelings and how we

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can understand the connection between literature and sociology as inseparable from each other.1 The fourth section is the analysis of the most popular feelings and how they are defined in the relation between social networking sites and literature.

Critical thinking: an affective capacity? Nowadays generic skills transversally permeate not only higher education (such as undergraduate degrees), but also primary and secondary education. Generic skills are part of the academic debate, either supporting them or against them (Sweller and Tricot 2014). Since the scope of this debate is beyond the purpose of this chapter, I will trace a brief genealogical approach to the term by looking at its basis. The concept of generic skill was defined under the European framework of the Horizon 2020 and it aims at providing translatable tools for what the European policies consider an entrepreneurial future. According to the European Union, these can be divided into two different categories: “transversal” and “entrepreneurial,” being defined by the “Erasmus + Program” as follows: Transversal skills, such as the ability to learn and initiative-taking, will help people deal with today’s varied and unpredictable career paths. Entrepreneurial skills will help contribute to employability of young people in particular, as well as supporting new business creation.2

In spite of being a very useful concept in improving the relation between education and entrepreneurship, the concept of skill also sparks intense debate in the academic arena. According to Danvers, skill “assumes something tangible, transferable and measurable, whereas in practice, the acquisition of particular skills is complex and contextualized” (2016, 283). Critical thinking is precisely one of these particular skills that need to be highly contextualised in order to avoid being defining as “an instrumental knowledge transaction . . . individualized . . . , rather than a social practice” (ibid, 282). This conceptualization falls on the side of the debate that argues that generic skills serve as a neoliberal instrument in education because the instrumental framework in which they are defined as such focuses on how this skill can be rational knowledge transversally transferred (tangible and measurable). This approach is especially problematic for students because they feel that this skill is “time consuming, emotionally troubling and socially isolating” (ibid. 242). Indeed, if critical thinking is articulated in an individual manner, it will be socially isolating; while, at the same time, it becomes tangible, transferable

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and measurable in a neutral way and neutralises the embedded experiences of the students. As a solution to this, Danvers proposes a feminist approach to critical thinking as a generic capacity and not a generic skill. Agreeing with her, I believe that understanding critical thinking as a feminist capacity allows the ability to produce multiple meanings and materials. It can be the “capacity” (Coole 2013) to create resistance, to respond to a certain problematic, an ethical gesture towards our contemporary society, as well as the materialization of a certain political strategy. That is why, sometimes this capacity is perceived as “oppositional” (Danvers 2016, 288), because it tends to relate to the norm by means of resistance instead of agreement. This co-creation of knowledge that critical thinking as a feminist capacity enhancement is not only relational but also collective (Danvers 2016; Niccolini 2016) in the sense that it is created in a community (which more often than not is the classroom itself) and produces what Niccolini defines as a “queered knowledge transmission” (2016, 243). That is to say, it has the potentiality of altering heteronormative ways of knowledge transmission such as the hierarchy present in the relation between teacher and students.3 Therefore, its materialization is highly affected in the sense that it is an “impassioned energy” (Deleuze and Guattari in Niccolini 2016, 242) that circulates collectively but needs to be engaged within a very contextualised manner. That is why, following this argument of turning critical thinking into a feminist capacity, I would like to propose yet another step towards this conceptualization by engaging with it from a situated point of view; that is, engaging with Haraway’s (1988) “Situated Knowledges.” According to her, Positioning implies responsibility for our enabling practices. . . . These technologies are ways of life, social orders, practices of visualization. Technologies are skilled practices. How to see? Where to see from . . . What to see for? (ibid. 587)

Critical thinking is positioning itself because it implies an ability to “respond” (Haraway 2008; Barad 2010). It implies reflecting critically with society by means of proximity in order to fight against normative practices of visualization. And even if here Haraway refers to this as a “skilled practice,” in contemporary times, thinking of it as a feminist capacity has other potentialities from the point of view of teaching. If this capacity is elaborated through a Harawayan situated framework, then graduate students can benefit from problematizing certain gender and

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race stereotypes instead of accepting them as part of their socio-cultural structure. Besides, students may become sensitive to diversity issues such as gender, race, disability, sexuality or age differences; while at the same time, they can be taught certain capacities to be shared and transferred to the enterprise (Gilbert et al. 2004). Consequently, graduate students will mature with an entrepreneurial capacity that will create enterprises sensible to these issues instead of the fierce neoliberal ones. If critical thinking is considered a feminist positioning to ethically see from a certain perspective, it can be observed how “rational knowledge” (Haraway 1988, 587) can be grounded through this affective capacity. A feminist framework transforms this generic skill into what I call an affective capacity. While the benefits of the generic skills were pointed out at the beginning of this section, the feminist critique of these kinds of skills cannot be denied either. Transforming this skill into a feminist capacity is very important in order to shift the neoliberal chain that supports the entrepreneurial network sustaining a part of the economical substratum. Developing critical thinking helps to dismantle stereotypical injustices that, for instance, maintain women far from the top position at big enterprises.4 Thinking of critical thinking as a capacity introduces the feminist value of “respond-ability” (Haraway 2008; Barad 2010), which basically means to be able to respond against injustice. On the other hand, affectivity aims at thinking through each other relationally through contextualised feelings, as will be explained later. That is, contextualising critical thinking means situating it as a relation between different embedded experiences, in specific geographical places within theoretical frameworks, and in specific areas of knowledge that alter how we think but also the very factors affecting this relation. To sum up, feelings are affecting critical thinking in three different ways: the first is pedagogical, in that students feel emotionally challenged depending on the approach taken; the second is ontological, because feelings are relational and embedded experiences that conform a position to respond; the third is political, because students transform their critical thinking from a generic skill into an affective capacity able to respond to social injustices. However, bearing in mind the insecurities that this capacity might create in students and how they are materialised through different intensities and affected feelings, I would like to propose its teaching through social media, which is one of the digital expressions that connects better with young people. Concretely, I would like to propose teaching this capacity through the digital platform of Facebook and its connections with contemporary literature as a practical illustration that articulates critical thinking as an affective capacity and, at the same time,

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will transform the literary object itself, which is one of the goals of this paper, into an affective communicative process that transforms gender and race stereotypes. This will be important for two reasons. On the one hand, it will help students to articulate their experiences without feeling emotionally distant because it is a social medium that is very popular among graduate students. On the other hand, Facebook logic is constructed upon feelings and affinities, as will be demonstrated. In addition, nowadays, to open a fan page on Facebook is a trendy practice among contemporary writers. Such pages contain news about their works, conferences by these writers, and specifically certain quotes from their novels (which is what will be analysed afterwards). This helps the researcher to relate directly with a wide sample of readers in order to understand how they read a given novel or author and what is most interesting for them. Contemporary literature is sometimes regarded as a fiction of reality (Hume 2014 [1984]). It is a mimesis of reality to which people tend to relate in terms of affinities or as a materialization of their daily experiences (Revelles-Benavente 2014). Therefore, it gives researchers the opportunity to engage with “what is at stake for people . . . in ‘normal’ everyday practices, those practices of ‘fitting in’ and getting others to ‘fit in’ or engaging in strategies in response to their refusal to fit in” (Schostak and Schostak 2008, 17). I believe that these practices of “fitting in” or a “refusal to fit in” are not only present in a general understanding of literature but also in the capacity of critical thinking.

Affecting pedagogy: towards a feminist understanding of teaching Contemporary society is changing fast, dynamically and iteratively; however, particular problems persist through time that seem to indicate that as yet, we have not found accountable patterns to engage with these problems. As an example, I would like to refer here to Donna Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges” (1988), Karen Barad’s “Posthumanist Performativity” (2003) and Isabelle Stengers’ “The Wonder of Materialisms” (2011). The three authors point to the same social and cultural conflict albeit in different decades: capitalism as an abstract machine that homogenises the concept of life itself, the creation of knowledge and a reinforcement of a constant hierarchy of power that normativises and organises modes of being of the world and the world itself. Transversally entangling space, time and matter, these three authors encourage us to pursue an ethics of knowledge that allow us to provide divergences to this order, processual “intra-actions”5 to engage and dismantle it and diffractions to take the

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risks of knowing what differences matter (Barad 2003). Pedagogically, John and Jill Schostak identify a precise methodological strategy in order to problematize contemporary society which is raising questions that make the powerful feel uncomfortable, even threatened . . . this political dimension [that] suggests the possible overthrow of a previous stable or at least dominant order of ways of knowing, thinking, believing, acting. (2008, 1)

Haraway identifies these mechanisms of power as the “cognitive canon law” (1988, 575), which basically refers to the normativization of the creation and distribution of knowledge.6 If the kind of knowledge that is materialised refers only to a mainstreaming account of science and history with an androcentric vision of society, one site to resist these homogenising patterns is the classroom, and critical thinking is one of the most important tools. As I argued elsewhere, “[t]eaching is itself a relational process, in which many different elements are reconfiguring the very act in multiple ways” (Revelles-Benavente 2015, 53). In their book, Schostak and Schostak talk about a “communitarian epistemology” or the fact that “knowledge is not derived exclusively by our own resources for examining evidence but is dependent on there being a community of resource” (2008, 44). Here, I would add that the knowledge that is created in a classroom is not only a communitarian one but also an affective one. Affects, as pure intensities (Massumi 2002) produce material differences that matter and can create new theoretical frameworks in order to understand particular realities. In our contemporary society, we need to create “solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology” (Haraway 1988, 584), adjusting our “political scanners in order to name where we are and are not” (ibid. 582). As an alternative, the feminist materialist classroom needs to engage with affective relations, intra-actions, in order to stay with the struggle, take the risk to know something, and dismantle the cognitive canon law. This also entails thinking relations as the epistemological unit (Barad 2003) and therefore, avoiding the figure of the teacher or the student as pre-existing entities, and also looking for differing methodologies that enable our radical research. As articulated before, critical thinking is an affective capacity that enables the perception of the (in)visible forces materialising a certain phenomenon. These (in)visible forces are the affects, which are those connections that relate different objects through the materialisation of certain feelings. This affective capacity should be taught to allow students to see the invisible, dismantling the cognitive canon law and detecting those intra-actions that might reinforce social transformations in our

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contemporary society. Critical thinking allows an engagement with “permanent reflection upon what material processes are made visible and invisible while engaging with the creation of knowledge” (RevellesBenavente 2015, 62). Affects are one of those invisible aspects, while at the same time, material intensities that produce connections for differing patterns. Invisible because, as feelings, they become visible once a particular reaction has been produced in a body, but not at the relational moment in which they become tangible. However, at the same time, they are the material intensities that produce these differing patterns, insomuch as when they produce these intra-actions, these relations, the object’s part of that relation (in this case feelings altering the meaning of the novel) become something completely different (as will be demonstrated in the next section). For instance, the feeling of love in the particular context of Toni Morrison might turn itself into hate in between two particular characters, altering even a relationship between mother and daughter and producing consequences that differ from a normative culture. Accounting for these aspects is not a straightforward relationship, which is why teaching critical thinking as an affective capacity is helpful in order to understand phenomena as complex. According to Patricia Clough, affects are radical empirical units in a sociological context; that is to say, “[a]ffect subsists in matter as incorporeal potential” (2009, 48). As incorporeal, they are (in)visible to a linear perception of things; as potential, they have the capacity to alter the state of things. That is to say, a classical approach to teaching necessarily implies a hierarchical distribution of power in which affects can produce connections with very negative consequences, as Danvers infers: liking something and being critical of it felt oppositional. A critical thinker was imagined as someone incredibly serious, who always found fault and who always saw the worst. (2016, 288)

In contrast to this, she continues her argument as follows, being a critical thinker also held the promise of personal and social transformation—into the right kind of student, the right kind of professional or a better kind of person. (ibid.)

Rather than using the terms “right” or “better person,” I would argue that for critical thinking to be thought of as personal and social transformation, is to shift the relation between teachers and students and how we contextualise that relation. For this chapter, I will illustrate the articulation of this affective capacity within a specific pedagogical

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context: the relation between literature and a social networking site that is Facebook. In the following section, I will show how an affective pedagogy7 based upon an affective capacity is the potential ability to relate different contextualised feelings (embedded intensities), in order to produce a critical approach to socio-cultural problems. This is acquired by looking for the perception of the (in)visible forces, which are the correlations, the constant entanglement of feelings, and the becoming of certain feelings into something else. In the following section I will illustrate all this in a specific context, so it can be applied strategically as an affective and feminist pedagogical capacity.

Morrison’s official Facebook page: understanding love and hate through each other One specificity that explains critical thinking in this chapter is its application within literature and how it can be transversally approached not only as part of the literary curriculum at school but also to transform the way we understand literature in general, methodologically and pedagogically. Technologies help to combine everyday practices with literature itself, while at the same time technology finds empiricism and theory mutually dependent on each other. Toni Morrison’s official Facebook page provides a perfect example of this. Her official Facebook page is covered with embedded experiences from people all over the world who connect their individual meaning of the novels, and the quotes posted on the Facebook page with their daily practices (Revelles-Benavente 2015). Facebook provides a de-centralisation of both the figure of the literary analyst and the subjective descriptions of the literary work, according to his or her own background. That is to say, basing the understanding of the literary work upon what the Facebook community shares offers a different objectivity to the literary analysis. This de-centralisation is a methodological one. The wall, the comments, and the differing feelings on this virtual wall, or in this laboratory notebook, conform to a conglomerate of different affective patterns that are empirically accessible through certain feelings. In addition, it can be seen which are the more popular quotes and how the Facebook audience understands them and relates them with contemporary problems. For this reason, Danver’s conceptualization of critical thinking as “emerg[ing] through the web of social, material and discursive knowledge practices that constitute criticality and with the different bodies that enact it” (2016, 283) allows one to know how differing knowledge practices emerge through the web of the social, that is—in this case—Morrison’s official

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Facebook page, as well as how people intra-acting in this context constitute a reflective approach to Morrison’s work. Methodologically, this constitutes a source of related understandings that can reach a momentary agreement of the quote of the novel, in relation with contemporary society. There will be some examples of this below. One of the main focuses of pedagogical strategies in the field of literature has been reflecting upon positive and negative attitudes of the teacher towards his or her students (Westbrook 2013, 53). As an example, the Education Rigorous Literature Review points out two different strategies of positive attitudes towards students: “drawing on students’ sociocultural backgrounds” and “creating a safe environment in which students are supported in their learning” (ibid.). I argue that the relation of the author and the SNSs as a different pedagogical methodology provides these two scenarios. First, it relates with an activity that is very popular among young people (Facebook) and creates a safe space for students, because they do not need to express their own feelings towards the novel but can rely upon certain attitudes of the digital platform in order to verbalise what they feel. This aspect was one of the identified caveats of critical thinking in the first section of the paper. Nevertheless, the pedagogical approach that I am drawing on here tries to move beyond the responsibility of the teacher in order to move forwards to a relational process with the student. Regarding critical thinking, Facebook opens up possibilities of decentralising the relation between teacher and student. This abandons an androcentric view of knowledge based on the absolute figure of the agential literacy critic by sharing the analysis between readers, virtual spaces, the author and the researcher. Thus, it is necessary to build an “ethico-onto-epistemological”8 framework (Barad 2007) that dynamically strengthens digital contexts, literary studies and feminism. In this sense, looking at Morrison’s official Facebook page, it can be observed that there are several debates open with specific quotes from her novels, sparking hundreds of comments through which different readers share their opinions. Authors and readers re-create different meanings departing from some novels written more than thirty years ago, inserting them in the contemporary information society. Thus, social networking sites (SNS) create differing (since they produce a different type of communication and at the same time different physical and temporal contexts in a dynamic way) material-discursive practices. Situating critical thinking in this specific context already directs critical thinking towards a collective knowledge creation or community, which is the basis for the knowledge created through this affective capacity

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(Niccolini 2016; Danvers 2016). Being part of a group is implicit in this type of SNS (Van House 2011) via feelings of proximity. Therefore, participants “must speak or write as group members” (Dijk 1998, 32). This interlocutory act is framed within a normative discourse in which participants are expected to agree upon different issues, such as gender, race, oppression, civil rights movements, African-American literature, etc. These are gluing connections that belong to the field of affinities in a given dislocated space and time and become materialised within the specific structure of Facebook. Thus, participants in this digital platform are primarily connected via certain preferences and affinities creating particular socio-material meanings and enhancing a determined critical reflection on the society denounced on this digital platform. In other words, they collectively engage with critical thinking as an affective capacity because they materialise patterns to respond to social injustices. This will be seen in the reconfiguration of the feelings love/hate that I am explaining below. That is to say, an example, of how differing conceptualizations of the pair love/hate can be incorporated into the methodological toolbox of critical thinking as an affective pedagogical capacity. Besides, this gives the student the ability to introduce their own definitions of this pair through the explanations that they find on the Facebook page. Following Edyta Just’s words, “it is crucial to think about teaching practices that support students in daring to challenge, problematize and generate new meaning of experienced sensations” (2016, 294) and looking at the digital laboratory, the Facebook page, those experienced sensations or embodied feelings that are most popular for the participants of the page (as well as in Morrison’s novels) are love/hate as a relational pair of feelings. These two relational feelings become Clough’s sociological empirical units. Albeit rather than being a pure static variable from the sociological field, they are a dynamic movement that connects rather than separates into categorical boxes. It is the methodological shift mentioned at the beginning for literature and for sociological analysis. As can be seen in the table below, this pair is the most frequent in both cases, that is the Facebook page and the ten novels studied. For this reason, it can be seen how these feelings are transversally creating meanings in this audience and for the writer. This audience is a specific sample of a part of society with different characteristics but with commonalities: their interest in Morrison’s work and her gendered, racial and political denouncements, as well as their active participation in Social Networking Sites. Thus, they create the capacity to affect, to produce connections and create (in)visible forces that alter traditional meanings.

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This is why, as teachers, we need to encourage our students to challenge the conveyed meanings around these two particular feelings and their relational nature as affects. In a literary classroom this particularly affects two conditions. First, this approach connects literature with what people understand of it and how they conceptualise it (in this case, via particular feelings and the Facebook page) and then de-centralize the role of the literary critic. Second, this approach entangles qualitative methods coming from literary studies (such as close reading, Luckic and Sánchez, 2013) with quantitative methods coming from sociology (like using the program atlas.ti9). Therefore, Clough’s radical empirical units emerge in the same way as the capacity for Danver’s critical thinking. After producing a close reading of the whole digital platform and the novels by Toni Morrison, introducing all the content into the software atlas.ti the following table (a methodological approach that I have carried out in Revelles-Benavente 2014) with the most frequent feelings in the webpage and the novels can be drawn: Table 7-1.10 Feelings appearing on the FB page and in the novels. See Colour Centrefold. There are two remarkable facts visible in table 7-1. First is the visualisation of how many times certain feelings appear in one novel, giving the reader the ability to discern which one of the feelings is the most frequent in a particular novel, given by the number of times (0–100) that it appears in a novel (represented by one colour). However, it also shows which feeling is predominant in the totality of the novels by the density of the column itself (which refers to the number of novels in which a certain feeling appears). The most frequent feelings in both platforms are “love” and its traditional opposite in popular culture, “hate.” Collectively, the community of Facebook, Morrison, the novels and a neoliberal enterprise such as Facebook decide what is the affective force relating all of them in this collective signification. The second observation that can be made is the importance of feelings in general for this community created around Facebook. All the novels (as can be seen in the right-hand column) have an important representation (for lack of a better word) of certain feelings in their plots. Feelings co-create together with the author and the readers certain materialisations of historic pasts and presents (those narrated in the novels) in order to look for differing futures framed with an increase in social justice. Therefore, what we have in this table is a sample of radical units (coming back to Clough’s definition of affects) that materialise affective

Table 7-1.10 Feelings appearing on the FB page and in the novels. See Colour Centrefold.

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connections. Thinking about teaching practices that do not produce an emotional distance in practising critical thinking as an affective capacity, the Facebook page itself offers a good point of departure in order to engage with contemporary society in terms of affinities, embodied experiences, and proximities with graduate students without homogenising these meanings. It engages with students in such a way that they can relate with contemporary literature in a more dynamic way while, at the same time, meanings are co-created via the connections born through a critical reflection of these novels and their engagement with this particular community. Consequently, understanding Morrison’s novels through affective critical thinking implies relating the novels with how contemporary society transforms the novels and situates them within a specific network of affective relations. The novel does not stand by itself but through a permanent process of becoming socio-political, situated in this specific framework. The literary classroom becomes a site that reframes contemporary society into affective mechanisms of change by altering preestablished meanings. How these feelings become the articulation of literature, society and affective critical thinking capacity will be explained in the following section.

Affecting love/hate: in between literature and society In the previous section I outlined how critical thinking as affective capacity is enabled (or materialised) when literature is read and experienced through a digital platform. In this section I will give an example of pedagogical practices that allow students to “perform” and learn this generic capacity i.e., critical thinking as an affective capacity. The previous section has served to identify which feelings were the most important for the Facebook page. These have been love/hate, which will be the departing point in an imaginary literary studies classroom working with Toni Morrison’s corpus. Teacher, students and this particular Facebook community can produce situated connections (in the particular moment in which this is being taught) in order to affectively engage with these feelings and produce the capacity to respond to the social injustices that Morrison is denouncing. In order to illustrate more specifically the articulation between literature and society from the previous section through what we consider an affective capacity, I will illustrate the aforementioned relation with one specific example. I will analyse here one post on the Facebook page that includes both feelings in the same entry. “Gimme hate, Lord,” he whimpered. “I’ll take hate any day. But don’t give me love. I can’t take no

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more love, Lord. I can’t carry it.”—Toni Morrison,11 Song of Solomon.12 The entry was written on the 29th of August, 2011 and it was liked by 750 people, commented 25 times and shared on 460 occasions, and repeated on the 30th of June, 2014, which demonstrates a high support by the community. This support is also found in the content of the comments that the readers have written in the post (and bearing in mind the novel), a cocreated definition of this affective relation (love/hate) can be produced in order to begin a literary analysis. The redefinition that we can produce by understanding love and hate through each other and with the Facebook page offers a different point of departure for the literary critic. Instead of departing, for instance, from an intersectional approach (Crenshaw 1991) I propose to analyse the novel with affective critical thinking by pointing out the relational affect that is most common in the novels and on the Facebook page: love/hate. Throughout Morrison’s official Facebook page, it can be seen how love is always a relational affect mostly paired with hate. Focusing now on the debate created around this quote, the first comment reads as follows: “Amazing that we live in a culture where negative emotions, fear and hate are lighter to carry within your heart than love and compassion.” The use of the present time indicates contemporariness; that is to say, the seventies (when the novel was written) and 2011 (when the post was published) are parallel with past and present, becoming one in a cyberspace in which geographical spaces are blurred to confirm Morrison’s statement. This is a “rhetorical strategy of disclaimer” (Lazaar 2007) in which “love,” a traditionally positive cultural value, is used to depict oppression at the individual and political levels. It is individual because certain characters and people agree on the comment and some recognize that material suffering. It is also political because the burden of love becomes a site of political agitation, and Morrison is referred to as “Africa’s eternity and voice” and “voice to the voiceless” (which is repeated twice) in different entries of the debate. This is a perfect example of how approaching certain feelings with a critical attitude can alter first, their conventional definition, and second, the political intervention that can be materialised through using this capacity as an affective one. Thus, if love is a political burden, hate becomes a generator for the individual change, as the post entry referred above shows. This becomes particularly interesting because, in spite of the traditionally negative meaning of “hate,” the Facebook post entry is paralleled with a picture of Obama as president, thus entangling itself with contemporary politics, as can be read in another comment in the same debate:

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Remember when Bara[c]k [sic] Obama was first running for president and they asked him who his favorite author was and what book. When he said Toni Morrison I went bonkers, right then and there I knew who he was . . . when u don’t really know how to love and u’v been programmed to be negative that DEprogramming hurts.

Contemporary social conflicts are implicitly re-evaluated by reinforcing the public official political discourse. Thus, contemporary politics in the United States is associated with this “burden of love” on this occasion. Through different relations, a community creates a voice of its own in which race and gender necessarily acquire a different dimension in order to produce a contemporary change. The relations between the participants co-opt dynamically to secure and challenge hierarchical structures of oppression. Departing from this conceptualization of the pair love/hate (which is serving as a pedagogical practice for literary studies to guide the close reading of the novel), feminist professors of literature would engage with their students critically and encourage them to question their traditional standards and stereotypes directly related with their situatedness as specific subjects (whether it is Western, man, woman, black, white, etc.). Nevertheless, instead of relating to the meaning making that this relation provides through an intersectional approach (Crenshaw 1991), the emphasis would be put on doing so through an affective pedagogy that focuses on relational affects instead of static categories. According to Just, emotions such as fear, anger, disgust, sadness or happiness are not necessarily experienced in the same way by everybody [so] a given emotional state should not be conceptualized as universal. (2016, 296)

Thus, given that we cannot pursue a static categorisation of the feelings described on the Facebook page and in the novels, we are pursuing what Just denominates a “situated conceptualization” (ibid.). This situated conceptualization gives us affective relations in which critical thinking reformulates given stereotypes present in contemporary society. For literary studies, this analysis shows how even if we can bear in mind literary analyses of certain novels, it is important to relate to them also by contemporary accounts of those novels. For instance, one of the main premises in postcolonial studies is that racism turns love into hate (Schur 2004, 297). However, nowadays such a straightforward definition does not apply to the embedded experiences of those reading Morrison and perhaps, the students in a literary classroom. This would constitute a universal categorisation of both feelings. Applying critical thinking as an

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affective capacity opens up the potential for everyone to take part in the meaning making and the social and political transformation.

Conclusions In this chapter I have shown that it is possible to connect literature and sociology through the critical thinking conceptualised and practised as an affective capacity. Moreover, I have indicated that approaching critical thinking as an affective capacity may enable students to resist heteronormative accounts of society. As Waaldijk and Just (2010) specify, students need to be critical towards existing “habits and opinions,” that is to heternormative structures that re-install oppressive socio-material patterns in our contemporary culture. By promoting interdisciplinarity (“dancing” in between feminist philosophy, literature, pedagogy, mass media studies and sociology) and advocating for an affective pedagogy, this chapter provides a methodological toolbox for pedagogical practices that can significantly improve relations between teachers and students, and open up possibilities of resistance. Affective critical thinking is a capacity that de-centralizes the figure of the teacher (pedagogically) and the literary critic (methodologically). Furthermore, this affective capacity can also shift universal categorisations of feelings. Critical thinking understood as an affective capacity and the starting point for a literary analysis allows, as shown in this chapter, the complexifying of a contemporary definition of the relational affects love/hate, simultaneously creating space for social transformations. I claim that it is important to promote affective pedagogy and affective critical thinking. To situate determined feelings is to produce affective relations that materialise critical thinking as an affective capacity to engender social change from a feminist perspective. Digital platforms such as Facebook can enable teaching and learning critical thinking as generic, feminist and affective capacity.

Notes 1

The data that inform and illustrate this paper are drawn from research carried out as part of my doctoral dissertation titled: “Gender, politics and communication in the making: Understanding Toni Morrison’s work in the Information Society.” (2014). In this, I explored the relationship between literature and social networking sites (such as Facebook) and the empirical connections that certain feelings could affect by relating different participants. I chose to work with affects as radical empirical units (Clough 2009) because it allowed the relation between different

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subjectivities as pure intra-actions in the continuum created by the digital and the literary. 2 http://ec.europa.eu/education/policy/school/competences_en.htm (last accessed March 28, 2017). 3 To observe many different examples of traditional and normative ways of teaching and how they can be altered, see Hinton and Treusch (2015). 4 In order to observe an overview of the situation of women in big enterprises focused on the Spanish case, please visit the webpage of the project GENTALENT http://www.gender-ict.net/gentalent/index.php/en/scientific-results/ (last accessed September 12, 2016). 5 Intra-action is a neologism that Barad has explained in relation to a common understanding of inter-actions. Intra-actions are forces that relate different elements without assuming a separated ontology between these two elements prior to the relation (Barad 2007, 34). 6 This phenomenon has also been explained by Helen Longino (1990) and Sandra Harding (1986). 7 To see other examples of affective pedagogy see Hickey-Moody, 2016. 8 In Barad’s words: “The neologism ‘ontoepistemological’ marks the inseparability of ontology and epistemology. I also use ‘ethico-onto-epistemology’ to mark the inseparability of ontology, epistemology, and ethics. The analystic philosophical tradition takes these fields to be entirely separate, but this presupposition depends on specific ways of figuring the nature of being, knowing and valuing” (Barad 2007, 409). 9 This is a methodological resource that was applied in my doctoral thesis “Literature, Gender and Communication in the making: Understanding Toni Morrison’s work in the Information Society” defended in December, 2014. This methodological resource consisted of introducing all the novels into a software program called atlas.ti, which gives you the frequency of certain topics in the two platforms, the technological one and the literary one. Before introducing the novels into this software, a guiding approach was taken by looking at the most popular feelings that appear on Morrison’s official Facebook page. That is why the results of the table belong to both platforms: the novels and the Facebook page. 10 This table can be found in my doctoral thesis: “Gender, politics and communication in the making: Understanding Toni Morrison’s work in the Information Society” (2014). 11 This entry and the comments appearing in this entry can be found at the following link: https://www.facebook.com/OfficialToniMorrisonAuthor/photos/a .223075327704683.67924.175462542465962/240465072632375/?type=3&theater (last accessed March 28, 2017). 12 Song of Solomon was written in1978 and framed within the context of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. .

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Bibliography Barad, Karen. 2003. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (3): 801–31. —. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. —. 2010. “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-toCome.” Derrida Today 3: 240–68. Clough, Patricia. 2009. “The New Empiricism. Affect and Sociological Method.” European Journal of Social Theory 12 (1): 43–61. Coole, Diana. 2013. “Agentic Capacities and Capacious Historical Materialism: Thinking with New Materialisms in the Political Sciences.” Millenium Journal of International Studies 41 (3): 451–69. Crenshaw, Kimberle. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43 (6): 1241–99. Danvers, Emily. 2016. “Criticality’s Affective Entanglements: Rethinking Emotion and Critical Thinking in Higher Education.” Gender and Education 28 (2): 282–97. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. European Union. Program Erasmus+. Accessed September 18, 2016. http://ec.europa.eu/education/policy/school/competences_en.htm. Gentalent Project. Promoting Women’s Talent in the Technological Sector. Accessed September 18, 2016. http://www.gender-ict.net/gentalent/ index.php/en/scientific-results/. Gilbert, Rob. 2004. “The Generic Skills Debate in Research Higher Degrees.” Higher Education Research and Development 23 (3): 375– 88. Griffin, Gabriele. 2011. “Writing about Research Methods in the Arts and Humanities.” In Theories and Methodologies in Postgraduate Feminist Research. Researching Differently, edited by Rosemarie Buikema, et al., 91–104. New York and London: Routledge. Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism.” Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–599. —. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Harding, Sandra. 1986. The Science Question in Feminism. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Hinton, Peta, and Patricia Treusch, eds. 2015. Teaching with Feminist Materialisms. Utrecht University: Atgender. Just, Edyta. 2016. “Daring to Dare. Theoretical Experiment for Pedagogical Practices and Body-Brain-Embedded Subject.” Creative Education 7 (2): 293–301. Lazaar, Mitchelle. 2007. “Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis: Articulating a Feminist Discourse Praxis.” Critical Discourse Studies 4 (2): 141–64. Longino, Helen E. 1990. Science as Social Knowledge, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lukic Jasmina, and Adelina Sánchez. 2011. “Feminist Approaches to Close Reading.” In Theories and Methodologies in Postgraduate Feminist Research. Researching Differently, edited by Rosemarie Buikema, et al., 160–185. New York and London: Routledge. Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press. Morrison, Toni. 1978. Song of Solomon. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Niccolini, Alyssa. 2016. “Animate Affects: Censorship, Reckless Pedagogies, and Beautiful Feelings.” Gender and Education 28 (2): 230–49. Revelles-Benavente, Beatriz, et al., eds. 2014. “New Feminist Materialisms: Engendering an Ethic-onto-epistemological Metho-dology.” Artnodes 14. http://journals.uoc.edu/index.php/artnodes/article/view/n14-revellesgonzalez-nardini/n14-full-node-en. Revelles-Benavente, Beatriz. 2014. Literature, Gender and Communication in the Making: Understanding Toni Morrison’s Work in the Information Society. Doctoral thesis, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. —. 2015a. “How Toni Morrison’s Facebook Page Re(con)figures Race and Gender.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 16 (5), Article 11. http://dx.doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2490. —. 2015b. “Materializing Feminist Theory: The Classroom as an Act of Resistance. In Teaching with Feminist Materialisms, edited by Peta Hinton and Pat Treusch, 53–66. Utrecht: Atgender. Schur, Richard. 2004. “Locating Paradise in the Post-Civil Rights Era: Toni Morrison and Critical Race Theory.” Contemporary Literature. 45 (2): 276–99. Sweller, John, and André Tricot. 2014. “Domain-specific Knowledge and Why Teaching Generic Skills does not Work.” Educational Psychology Review 26 (2): 1–34.

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Van Dijk, Teun, ed. 1998. Discourse as Social Interaction. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage. Van House, Nancy. 2011. “Feminist HCI Meets Facebook: Performativity and Social Networking Sites.” Interacting with Computers 23 (5): 422– 28. Waaldijk, Berteke, and Edyta Just, eds. 2010. Tuning Educational Structures in Europe. Reference Points for the Design and Delivery of Degree Programmes in Gender Studies. Bilbao: Universidad de Deusto. Westbrook, Jo et al. 2013. Pedagogy, Curriculum, Teaching Practices and Teacher Education in Developing Countries. University of Sussex: Centre for International Education. https://www.gov.uk/government/ uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/305154/Pedagogycurriculum-teaching-practices-education.pdf.

CHAPTER EIGHT “LET THE THINKING BREATHE.” CORPOREAL THINKING IN CLASSROOM SETTINGS OLGA CIELEMĉCKA

In lieu of introduction: scraps Text/ure/s and knots Our classrooms are full of traffic and activity. They form constellations from bodies of all sorts: human and non-human; technological; material; discursive (bodies of texts, bodies of thought, bodies as inscriptions); affects; histories that are individual, minor, and canonised; movements; hierarchies and power regimes; ideas; concepts; and institutional disciplines (curricula, methodologies, disciplines of knowledge, academic economics of credits and evaluations, university rankings, etc.) all in a constant interplay. Teaching/learning event sites are full of what I call naughty knots—indiscernible transcorporeality of relations: bodies tangled with power, affectivity, theory, themselves, and other bodies. Naughty knots are anything but obvious or easy to grasp: they create a porous and dense texture, which is constantly in a process of being woven and unwoven. This is a monstrous structure, as it has no beginning or end, no inside or outside.

Pins How to make sense of these knots? How to talk about them? Where everything is interconnected and enmeshed, we need pins: “quilting points” which will anchor us and hold up the field of our intervention. I borrow and mimic the expression quilting point from a French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan. In Lacan’s writings (1993, 258–270), a

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quilting point represents the interaction of the signifier and the signified—it knits the two together, halting what otherwise would be an endless movement of slippage of the signified (body) sliding under the signifier (discourse). In this way, the quilting point stabilises meaning and organises the field of signification for the language to become possible. Quilting is not about attaching the material to a stable background, but rather knitting or pinning together elements in a relative and undoable way. Quilting knots to knots, and not to the object. Quilting points help discover connections in a constant flow of materiality. They are tiny bumps on an otherwise dauntingly dense immanent structure of the material of the reality; bumps which cluster and contain meaning. In the sections that follow I pinpoint how power affects bodies in teaching/learning settings and how bodies, in response, affect processes of under-standing and thinking as I pin together speaking, breathing, physiological reactions, and bodily movement with regimes of power and the power to disrupt them.

Stitching together It’s time to stitch the bits and pieces together. The aim of this paper is to point towards ways in which we can inspire students to think critically and creatively, and create spaces in which they can express themselves, experiment, as well as share their ideas, stories and knowledge. I will focus on three modes of thinking that work towards this goal: critical analysis, creative idea and concept creation, and experimentation, in which a theory is “checked” against practice. I treat them as methods employed in classroom teaching and as skills to be engendered in students throughout their university training. These skills help connect educational experience to a broader societal reality with the aim of critically discerning the oppressions and violence with which our practices are saturated (critical mode); create new concepts to describe the world around us, relate to it, and imagine it differently (creative mode); and to be able to do so in relation to embodied histories and experiences, not in isolation but together with others (experimental mode). I will look into entanglements of thinking with bodily functions and into junctions between power relations and the unruliness of bodily reactions in search of the ways in which we can teach, learn, and think creativ-/ely/ity and generate inclusive and positive educational experiences. Power regimes press upon bodies influencing the ways in which bodies move, breathe, perform, and speak. This knot of body and power is where I ask: what happens in the contact zones between them?

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How do we negotiate and reassemble these contact zones? And what kind of thinking and whose knowledge become possible if we do? I explore the interface between power and body to find out what kind of thinking emerges from there, and how this perspective can enrich our teaching/learning experience opening new modes of criticism, creativity, and experimentation. By looking into the embodied processes of breathing, speaking and moving, I pin the naughty knots which reveal the co-constitution of the bodies of flesh and the bodies of thought with the aim of opening the path towards a different way of thinking, one which is (trans)corporeal. I believe that the only kind of teaching, learning, or thinking that can inspire engagement and spark social change is a (trans)corporeal one: collective, situated and embodied. This paper starts from two assumptions. The first one is that university teaching is a site of power relations, hierarchies, and stratifications. Markers of difference such as class, race, gender, sexuality, age, dis/ability, rank of university faculty staff and students, all play a significant role in how bodies act, speak, move, and breathe in these spaces. Secondly, I draw on feminist methodologies which look into the inter- and intra-relationalities of the discursive and the corporeal, the semiotic and the material, the biological and the social, between texts and textures (Haraway 1991, Barad 2007, Kirby 2011, among others) in order to track down how sensing bodies, their cultural inscriptions, and academic knowledge production are entangled. So, my second assumption acknowledges a flow between the unconscious happenings of the body and those which get intentionally expressed (for example, between the way we breathe and the content of an utterance). There is also an interdependence between the ways in which body movements and reactions are freed or constrained in a classroom setting and the shape of the thinking, teaching, and learning that these bodies produce. In other words, that which influences how students feel also determines what is possible to be thought, learnt, and known by them. For example, in a classroom where some students feel too intimidated to speak up, the flow of creative thinking and the possibilities for inventiveness are thwarted. Certain forms of knowledge simply will not come to life, certain utopias will never be fantasised upon, and certain claims won’t be formulated. To put it bluntly, bodies of flesh are affecting and being affected by bodies of thought. I hope that this dual take, which mobilises both a perspective of the analytics of power and a materialsemiotic approach (Haraway 1991), will allow a reframing of how the incarnated body activates the movement of thought as a creative and openended process of thinking-together.

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The materiality of speaking. Speaking as violence . . . [T]he torment of getting up to speak. Her heart racing, at times entirely lost for words, ground and language slipping away—that’s how daring a feat, how great a transgression it is for a woman to speak—even just open her mouth—in public . . . (Cixous 1976, 880)

Inadequacy, awkwardness, and vulnerability take various shapes: heart pounding, shallow breath, dry mouth, sweating hands, and trembling voice. A blush creeps on the face and on the neck; pink patches appear on the surface on the skin. The train of thought is derailed. She gears up, getting ready for that moment when she will have to stand up and speak, she builds up armour and an attitude. However, on occasion this protective shield cracks, revealing the speaking or silent body as a vulnerable one, which is open and possible to be hurt. Let’s pause and focus on the very moment before she speaks: the act of breathing in the air with the aim to exhale it and spit it out, together with thoughts/words which were formed in her head. From the head to the tip of the tongue, from inhalation to discourse—this is how we speak. Thinking and speaking are never innocent or isolated acts—these processes are reactive and they stimulate material, affective, and enfleshed responses. Among other things, they affect (as well as they are affected by) the way one breathes. Breathing isn’t a purely biological, automatic function, but also a politically and socially imprinted one.1 Susan Stryker’s reading of the Transwomen of Color Collective leader, Lourdes Ashley Hunter’s words, “every breath a black trans woman takes is an act of revolution” (Hunter 2015), brilliantly illustrates how breathing is situated at the interface of biology, culture, and politics (Stryker 2016). Breathing, Stryker argues, is a political act for those who struggle to survive in the face of the deprivation and violence they experience daily. For minority bodies and identities, breathing becomes a strategy for survival; be it “combat breathing” (Fanon 1965, Górska 2016) in which one takes in air whenever one gets a chance, and holds on to it for as long as possible, whilst exhaling to augment their force during an attack; or be it the mindful breathing of yoga practice. Once rendered natural and mechanical, breathing tends to be perceived as a form of white noise, an invisible background against which organisms act, rather than a condition which determines modes of thinking and speaking. Stryker and Hunter show how breathing is intertwined with relations of power, representation, domination, and marginalisation. A focus on breathing also recasts the problem of speaking as an emblem of presence and power, and breathing’s very own relation to speaking. Thus, breathing reveals the power relations that are at

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play. While Stryker and Hunter point to trans and black bodies as those whose breath can be seen as something endangered as well as recalcitrant and politically incendiary, Hélène Cixous, whom I quoted earlier, turns to the female/other body as the one whose presence in the public sphere is marked by feelings of inadequacy, fright, and maladjustment. Notwithstanding, Cixous encourages “women” to search for forms of expression proper to their bodies, tapping into what she believes to be unique and precious modes of presence, language, and creativity. In a similar vein, classroom environments are not free from unequal distributions of power, authority, and voice. Needless to say, some students speak freely, confidently, and eloquently, while others remain silent. Others still, struggle to regulate breath and keep their voice under control as they try to articulate their opinion. The differences between these embodied and public speech acts are surely individual to a certain degree, determined by traits of character or styles of bodily presence, among other factors; but they are also structurally conditioned—generated and regulated by power regimes. These regimes are responsible for distributing bodies and voices in a given space, deciding on how much space they take up, how freely they can breathe, as well as how loud and how often they speak up. This uneven distribution of speaking power is very much visible (or rather, audible) in one of the most commonly applied formats of teaching a class, a full-group discussion. Brian Massumi makes the following observation based on his experience of teaching in the Montreal-based multidisciplinary research centre SenseLab: Full-group discussions predispose participants to perform themselves— their own already-acquired knowledge or interpretive virtuosity—at the expense of truly exploratory thinking-together in the moment, for the collective movement forward into follow-up activities. Self-performance can quickly have the effect of silencing those whose practice is not primarily text-oriented or language-based, as is the case of the majority of SenseLab participants with backgrounds in dance and movement, materials-based creative processes, and media art. It also skews participation along gender lines and according to personality traits like shyness. (Massumi 2015, 60)

“The effect of silencing” is correlated with specific ways in which bodies relate to space, text, and materials, as may be the case for dancers and visual artists, as the primary matter they work with is not language. Nevertheless, self-silencing will also happen in those who wrestle with language, like international students whose accents, diction, and mistakes

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will always betray them, denounce them as linguistic asthmatics. Accent, tone of voice as well as its weight and rhythm, are all subjected to regulation and normativisation. Stammering, stuttering, pausing, voice trembling, breaking, and pitching are considered to be unwanted interruptions which make speech influent and unpleasant to hear. For these reasons, as university lecturers we encourage students to perfect the art of a smooth and confident speech performance. Instead of professionalising the oratory capabilities of our students, an alternative approach I would like to suggest draws on the tradition of critical theory and analytics of power. It points to the differences in which subjects speak from their respective, always tentative positions within the materialised and ever materialising matrix composed of power, privilege, sex, gender, bodily stylistics, colour, ethnicity, different abilities, accents, class background and wealth. I advocate directing the critical attention towards the heterogeneity of speaking to uncover the power positions within the academy itself. Silencing and empowering to speak are potent pedagogical tools and they should be handled with extra care. For instance, a softspoken female subject shouldn’t stand alone as an emblem of the silencing procedures taking place in a classroom. This synecdochal transposition of meaning (i.e., equalling a silent or soft-spoken subject to a powerless one) not only victimises some female students but also works towards obfuscating how silencing is effectuated on the “loud” and outspoken students who are “penalised” for taking up too much space, speaking in a way that comes across as too aggressive, angry, or bossy. These silencing tactics form part of a larger system of the regulation, regimentation, and administration of speech-power along race, gender, class, and other significant lines. In other words, rendering someone as “too loud” is a classed, gendered, and racialised method of silencing them (Mohanty 1989, hooks 1994, Bell and Golombisky 2004). This passage from bell hooks demonstrates the complexity of intersectional and intervocal encounters as she considers class background in relation to a style of students’ classroom presence and the level of comfort experienced by them: I have found that students from upper- and middle-class backgrounds are disturbed if heated exchange takes place in the classroom. Many of them equate loud talk or interruptions with rude and threatening behaviour. Yet those of us from working-class backgrounds may feel that discussion is deeper and richer if it arouses intense responses. . . . Professors cannot empower students to embrace diversities of experience, standpoint, behaviour, or style if our training has disempowered us, socialized us to

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cope effectively only with a single mode of interaction based on middleclass values. (1994, 187)

Silencing can thus have a disciplinary, policing or punitive function directed at groups whose presence traditionally has been limited and unwelcomed in the public sphere. Navigating between different and changing tonalities of power relations in a classroom can be a challenging task, so much so that one (be it an educator or a student) needs to keep attuning herself to changes in tone as well as keep her own privilege in check at all times. As we tune both our very auditory system and analytical-critical toolkit to the noises and murmurs of power relations at work in a classroom setting, it’s important to face the fact that Academia never was a paradise of critical pedagogy but, rather, an institution shaped by and wired by exclusionary practices and epistemic traditions founded on limiting dichotomies (Meissner 2015, 130)

and an institution operating through the exclusion of women, minorities, and lower classes. That is not to say that a different academia is not possible but rather to stress the importance of a critical mode of teaching and learning. I argue that the feminist “politics of voice” whose objective is to unveil and talk back to the structural processes of silencing the historically marginalised voices (hooks 1989), should be supplemented with attentiveness to the ways in which we take in air, to the material layers of speech—its tonalities, stutters and breaks. This allows us to trouble and interrupt the alignment of voice with power, representation, and identity. Feminist scholars presented breathing as a material-semiotic practice, as a biological must and a conceptual tool that may uncover a deeper relationality running through bodies, power, and discourse production across and beyond traditional categories and identities. While the gesture of speaking is equal to either speaking as oneself (politics of identity: I speak) or on someone’s behalf (politics of representation: I speak on behalf of the other), breathing redirects towards the in-between-ness and trans-corporeality (Alaimo 2010), to the blurred boundaries and the sticky air between bodies and objects. Speaking is always effectuating ontological violence: when I speak, someone else is being silenced. Attentiveness to breathing as the material condition of speech, on the other hand, is a way of unfixing subjectivities, a way of agitating the sedimentary image of power structures and one’s own phantomised position within it. Its goal is to create potentially subversive or even revolutionary stutters and disruptions and apprehend the subject as a speaking as well as a respiratory one.

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I see stutters, pauses, chokes, and vocal breaks as a fundamental part of the processes of speaking and thinking-together. They form a semioticmaterial knot in which power relations are always already in vibration with our vocal cords and lungs. Against this backdrop, I urge for attentiveness to the materiality of speaking as an analytical-critical tool (one which pushes for critical thinking—allowing for a robust intersectional analysis of power relations in a classroom and beyond) which allows both academics and students to reflect on the ways in which we produce, embody and share knowledge. Giving legitimacy, attention, and recognition to the stuff being said relies as much on the words used as it does on that which passes over in silence.

Bodies in movement In this section, I’d like to elaborate on the problem of a classroom as a space of embodied performance. My focus shifts from speaking to movement. Throughout this part of the paper, I put forward the idea of the body as a kinetic and responsive one. It is the body that moves, feels, enacts gestures, and performs in a specific space, in this case a classroom setting. I would like to play with multiple meanings of the word “performance” as it can be understood as a broader framework or a paradigm of power, or as an embodiment of an interpellation or a command. Through this lens, I approach the creative potential dormant in teaching, learning, and thinking. At the beginning of the 1960s a British philosopher John L. Austin singled out special kinds of sentences—he named them “performatives” (Austin 1962). By this, he pointed to the fact that some acts of speech do not merely describe the reality but they actively change it—they “do” things. Austin writes: The term ‘performative’ . . . is derived, of course, from ‘perform’, the usual verb with the noun ‘action’: it indicates that the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action—it is not normally thought of as just saying something. (1962, 6-7)

Nevertheless, Austin was seemingly not concerned with the question of how words (trans)form different bodies, how they not only call them into a certain position—for instance interpellating them as either learning or teaching subjects—but also how they affect the body’s biological responses and motility, the ways in which bodies occupy and interact with space. Think about an educator’s harsh remark and a student’s possible response: a blush. When I was a PhD student in philosophy, I remember

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being told by one of my professors that I should rethink my thesis topic and maybe consider writing about something more “simple.” As a reaction to these words, which I found deeply insensitive and condescending, I barely held back my tears. What I would like to underline is the salience of the effects and affects imprinted on bodies by the use of performatives, i.e., words which do stuff to us. I depart from an assumption that flesh, performance, performatives, knowledge production, space, and thinking are intertwined and co-shape each other. At their intersection another naughty knot is formed. I take as my subject the kinetic, reactive body to suggest a mode of creative thinking which is not only introspective (self-reflexive) but rather intra-spective,2 i.e., focused on inter-relationality, co-dependencies, and entanglements running between and through different bodies and their gestures as embodied responses to the reality which surrounds and shapes them. Departing from J. L. Austin’s theory of speech acts, I see performative function as always already a function of power which affects bodies. These bodies are, however, anything but a passive canvas ready for inscription. Rather, they are agential, capable of resisting or kicking back. I would like to unpack this idea in reference to what Jon McKenzie (2001) calls “a performative paradigm.” McKenzie’s main argument holds that there has been a major shift away from disciplinary regimes that police bodies of subjects (students) towards “performative” regimes of embodiment and subjectification. McKenzie describes the age of performance in the following way: . . . performance must be understood as an emergent stratum of power and knowledge. . . . performance will be to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries what discipline was to the eighteenth and nineteenth, that is, an onto-historical formation of power and knowledge. (2001, 18)

The previously dominant paradigms of discipline and control were tied up with specific ways in which each of them produced subjectivities (Foucault 1995), “disciplinary schooling regimes” controlled bodies through drills, rules, and regimens (compare: Foucault 1995). Today the performative paradigm is responsible for the processes of subject formation. In academia, the advent of the performative paradigm can be paired up with a gradual meltdown of traditional academic disciplines and their substitution by interdisciplinarity, but also by the imposition of the “entrepreneurial” or “performative” model of the university, i.e. one whose mission is defined in terms of its measurable performance (how well it is placed in university rankings). Needless to say, the evaluation of the faculty staff’s work, effectuated in the context of progressively more contingent

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conditions of labour, is also based on similar criteria, measured primarily by their publication productivity and efficacy in bringing in external funding. All things considered, the performance paradigm is clearly already embroiled in a logic of late capitalism. Performance is a call for productivity, mobility, and flexibility. With this in mind, I propose to look at students’ educational experience in terms of their performative embodiments and seek ways to reorganise the teaching and learning praxes within—and not beyond—this paradigm. This is where Jon McKenzie’s Perform or Else comes in handy to further sketch the paradigm in question. The word “performance” is used in a polyvalent sense as McKenzie distinguishes three main types of performances: organisational, technological, and cultural. According to him, organisational management’s new principles are diversity, innovation, creativity, flexibility, and intuition. Control over workers, or students, is replaced by a will to empower them to reach the highest standards of performance, motivate them to achieve excellence, help them unleash their creative potential and boost innovation. This type of performance is closely related to techno-performance performed by machines such as, for example, computers. The last type, cultural performance, stemming from both theatre and ritual, is broadly understood as nearly any form of cultural production which interacts with social structures; it is “an engagement of social norms, as an ensemble of activities with the potential to uphold societal arrangements or, alternatively, to change people and societies” (McKenzie 2001, 30). In the classification offered by McKenzie, performance, through its calls to efficiency and effectiveness, underpins the neoliberal paradigm of productivity (or, to put it differently, it interpellates subjects to be highly flexible, effective, producing bodies), while at the same time what he calls the cultural type of performance seems to play a more ambivalent role working towards a reproduction of social norms but also producing disturbances within it (as may be the case of an artistic performance). Judith Butler in her famous recasting of Austin’s theory of speech acts is onto something similar, when she points to the subversive potential of performativity that challenges the social norm (Butler 1999). Accordingly, in a classroom setting, bodies are supposed to perform in certain ways but, as is often the case, they deviate, trouble, and question what is expected of them. They may excel in achieving the highest performance, or they may (choose to) fail. It is my feeling, however, that both McKenzie’s and Butler’s analyses fall short if we wish to theorise failure, resistance, or refusal to perform. I am interested in the unwanted side effects of performing: in bodily

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reactions, in those moments when the body lets us down, revealing tiredness, anxiety, or discomfort. I am interested in imperfect, unprofessional, and interrupted bodily performances. While the body (human or non-human: a computer, a dancing body, or a student’s body) is interpellated to perform through following a certain procedure (it can be a code, script, notation, ritual, social norm, standard or expectation, or a university curriculum, etc.), the possibility of a failed performance is always present. I focus on this aspect in the following section.

Hiccups The performance paradigm, as a regime of neoliberal power, produces the ideal of a perfect body: one which is in constant movement and change, a flexible, nomadic, adaptable, and creative body—an effective and efficient one. I wish to challenge this model by looking at biological responses to performance and how they wear upon the body. As the body performs, it also gets tired, excited, agitated, sweaty, teary, trembly, etc. The understanding of the body which I wish to offer here is not modelled on the idea of the modern body as a monolith or a monad separate from the mind or reason (the body ruled and controlled by the mind),3 nor is it a sterile, postmodern, fragmented body in permanent movement and change (a semiotic body divorced from its physiology and biology). Rethinking the body from a materialist and feminist perspective, it is biological as much as it is socially constructed, and it becomes together with, through, and in its surroundings. As performative regimes of power produce biological responses in the body, it is precisely to these responses that I turn in search of “lines of flight.” This exploration of how the performative paradigm incites the body made me think of a particular form of (cultural) performance, namely, experimental dance. In Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement, André Lepecki suggests a way to bypass the expectation for the body to be an always performing body, a body in constant movement. Movement is understood here as embedded in the project of modernity: “the only constant changeless element of Modernity is the propensity of movement which becomes, so to speak, its permanent emblem” (Ferguson in Lepecki 2006, 7). In consequence, under the current political paradigm the subject is expected to restlessly act, perform and move: to be a hyperactive, hyperkinetic body. While there is a largely unquestioned expectation of a tight bond between the dancing body and movement (Lepecki 2006, 1), the same goes for all bodies trapped in a paradigm of the late capitalist economy of mobility, transformation, and flexibility. Thus, since creativity

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seems to be firmly tied to movement, I will try to reverse this idea by aligning creativity with disturbance, failure, and stutter. Under this general condition of life in accelerated capitalism, students are expected to orient themselves in the changing landscape of the labour market, the rhizomatic rather than linear life paths to choose from, inconclusive and chimeric social expectations, and nomadic futures unfolding in front of them. I second Lepecki in his questioning of how to reconfigure one’s participation in mobility, as he is looking for disruptions, “kinaesthetic stuttering” or “hiccups” as he calls them (2006, 1), which would challenge or stall the expectation of continuous movement and efficacious performativity. As Lepecki seeks possibilities for a dancer/choreographer to initiate “a performative critique of his or her participation in the general economy of mobility that informs, supports, and reproduces the ideological formations of late capitalist modernity” (2006, 16), I would like to look into the bodily responses to the body’s own movement as a way to resist a perpetual neoliberal command to perform. In a way similar to a dancing body, the performance of students triggers reactions, affects, and kickbacks. When my professor criticised my poor performance, I was on the verge of crying in front of him though somehow I managed to pull myself together and suppress tears until I was finally alone and could let go. His words (through their performative function, as Austin would have it) somehow modified my body, its presence in and relation to the surroundings. Students commonly experience fear, fatigue, embarrassment, self-consciousness, and uneasiness, which are accompanied by fight-or-flight reactions: hands start to tremble or a face turns red. Again, just like in a dance performance a dancer is supposed to hide these unwanted reactions: sweat dripping down the skin and veins sticking out and pulsating from fatigue, a student is also expected to hide the trembling in their voice, the redness on an intimidated or embarrassed face. Or tears. However, these bodily reactions are not simply irrelevant by-products but are instead pivotal parts of the teaching, learning, and thinking experience. They shape the ways in which students think; how they connect concepts, problems, and solutions; how they put them in the context of their own experience; and finally how they relate to one another, build, and perceive the relationalities that bind them to the objects and bodies around them. My professor’s critique tapped into a history of undermining and daily microaggressions directed at women, and especially Eastern European women like me in the field of philosophy. He didn’t encourage me to think, explore, or create. However, in the long run I did feel empowered by others to look into the anger and tears4 and start thinking from and

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through them, taking this point of vulnerability as a departure point. Instead of trying to cover up the corporeal reactions and responses (for instance through applying extra deodorant to avoid sweat patches appearing on clothing or by putting on makeup to hide the blush), we can see them as potent ways to resist the regime of performative power with its concomitant call to always perform to the highest standards. I advocate the idea of exploring the surface of our skins and reading it as discursive material, which could open new ways of being, learning, and thinking together. It’s time to let go of the ideal of high-performing bodies not only in theory but also in the pragmatic context of our classrooms.

Let the thinking breathe I situate the three modes of thinking: critical, creative, and experimental, within a broader framework of corporeal thinking. Corporeal thinking nods to a speaking-thinking-moving-reacting naughty knot as essential to the enhancement of the educational experience. Corporeal thinking is material and dynamic. It is a-individual, endowed with agency and power to reconfigure the disciplinary, discursive, and institutional structures with which it is bound up, but it also affects individual bodies. Thinking as a collective effort, thinking as speaking and moving, or thinking as affecting and as being affected—is to examine and invent practical, experimental ways in which we could convert the teaching/learning situation into an open flow and a shared experience. This is a (trans)corporeal process (by which I mean that subjectivities are not individual formations but they become so in a process of coming together and co-shaping one another). Corporeal thinking is a force that passes through bodies leaving its mark on them, in a blush or a hiccup. The exclusion and marginalisation that happen through the shaming and silencing of certain bodies and voices impede and threaten this process. It suffocates it by making it impossible for us to tie what we teach and learn to the social reality around us, the struggles against inequality and oppression, and our own embodied histories. In a special issue of the journal Inflexions on the topic of “Radical Pedagogies,” the editors call for thinking as an open-ended, affective movement as they seek a way open to the eventfulness and artfulness of what cuts and intersects with the more-than of everyday life—sites and encounters that invent their own techniques for study within the rhythms of the world and not solely within the walls of a classroom called-to-order. We seek techniques for thoughts to land and take off. We seek both openness and dissent (think of

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Chapter Eight all the words that have been cut, displaced, taken out, for this sentence to appear as it does). (2015, 3)

Practising radical pedagogies is for them about bringing to life the kind of thinking which breathes. Yet, what would it mean to let the thinking breathe?5 I think of a deep, refreshing, and nourishing, breath; a breath which allows for the oxygen to be transported with the bloodstream to the brain. Then again, not being able to catch one’s breath or feeling suffocated can be a metaphoric way to express a striving for more space and freedom. In this sense, letting thinking breathe would mean opening up space for new constellations of thoughts, for experimentation, creativity, wandering, and thriving. Another powerful sense conveyed by “breathing” is when we perceive it as an act of engagement and a necessary proximity with what’s around. As Luce Irigaray writes: The near becomes one’s own, through air. If breathing estranges me from the other, this gesture also signifies a sharing with the world that surrounds me and with the community that inhabits it. Food and even speech can be assimilated, partially become mine. It is not the same for air. I can breathe in my own way, but the air will never simply be mine. (2001, 309)

Thinking that breathes cannot be owned, possessed, or fully appropriated rather opens up a space of an encounter and of commonality.

Three modes of thinking. Teaching with the body Teaching and thinking differently start with the recognition that knowledge (re)production is embodied and embedded. I look at the swarm of little gestures, sighs, and blushes because I take seriously a claim that the material and the enfleshed are not a mute substratum upon which forces of the discursive, the conceptual, and the rational inscribe themselves but rather that all of these are radically enmeshed. They are the signifiers and the signified at the same time, blended together. The respiratory subject exposes operating power structures; the kinetic subject reveals the role of the body’s symptoms in the processes of thinking and making meaning. To view the subject as both respiratory and kinetic, one offers a realisation that there is nothing fixed in the dominant hegemonic order. We also begin to understand ourselves as students and educators in terms of dynamic inter-subjective figurations, indexing different modes of agency. It is an occasion to think of subjectivity as a “mode of intensity, not a personal subject” (Deleuze 1995, 99). Here, subjectivities are always

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already knotted within the unexpected breathing/power and kinetic/performative couplings. I wish to channel educational experience towards three modes of thinking: I call them, critical, creative, and experimental thinking. This is to think off the beaten track; away from the constantly reproduced power structures which grant the ability to speak to some while silencing others and away from the capitalist paradigm of efficient and defragmented performance. On the one hand, attentiveness to breathing is set up to give access to theoretical tools of critique, which wouldn’t shy from the question of the materiality of voices and bodies and how these are enrooted in power structures. On the other hand, directing our attention and care towards kinaesthetic hiccups is an instrument that allows us to investigate how the body is an intrinsic part of the processes of learning; since it is conditioning, blocking, or otherwise propelling that learning forward, pointing to the creative potential that lays within the (trans)corporeal connectedness. I propose to look into the body to engender critical and creative thinking. How could this be done pragmatically? I suggest that we start paying closer attention to the movements, gestures, tonalities, and silences that occur in the classroom—moments of hesitation and discomfort. To discover unheard voices, we should inspire students to reflect in a critical mode upon the space which they take up and the ways in which they speak. We could even playfully reinvent the neoliberal instruments of measurability of performance to explore the power dynamics operating amongst us; to measure differently; to count the uncountable. Measure the time that each of us speaks in a classroom, measure the height of their voice, times when students get interrupted or cut off. Analyse the data collected and ask: how are these connected to structural minoritisation, the colonialising power of voice, and the tenets of legitimacy? Can we bring to light the patterns which rule the ways in which the voice is being distributed? Encourage students to seek ways to think with the body, in order to unmask the connectivities and interdependencies between our embodiments, experiences, bodies of texts, institutions, spaces, and hierarchies. If we want to dismantle these oppressive structures which impede creativity and relationality, we need to start in our own backyard—with care, respect and faith, even love—by looking at how we relate to one another in a classroom setting, how we repeat gestures of exclusion, and what effect these have on ourselves and the others. I also believe that to practise academia differently is to adopt the ethics of failing which allows us to see the potential in what seems to be a

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failure, embarrassment, block, stutter, slowdown, or resignation. In this, I see a way to give ourselves time to think, respond to each other, co-create, and even be unproductive. In our capacities as educators we can try to create spaces in which it is safe to fail and in which reflecting upon that experience of failure can be nurturing. Finally, we can inspire the ability to think experimentally—which is to bridge theory and the body and to avow that “the personal is not only the political, it is also the basis for the theoretical” (Braidotti 1991, 147). The moments when power regimes touch the body—with a touch that is neither caressing nor consensual— and the body’s reaction to it, in silence, a blush, tears, raised voice, etc., are two critical moments of disturbance, break, and discomfort from which theorising may begin. Sigmund Freud’s (2004) reckonings of the bodily symptom as a language-like intervention may perhaps help to clarify what I am getting at here. When Freud writes about hysteric symptoms, he collapses the body and language, the biological responses and social inscriptions—they speak and respond to one another, they are in conversation. He thus turns to the body, how it moves and talks, and to that which appears on the skin’s surface (some of his clients’ symptoms included: uncontrollable cough, stammering, painful legs, and hypersensitivity of the skin) and reveals how these are linked to personal stories of loss, abuse, and longing, disciplinary regimes imposed on bodies, class and gender all playing a role in the formation of symptoms. “We are all hysterics, at least intermittently” (Kristeva 1995, 64), our bodies, formed and transformed in material interactions and dialogues, tell stories. Let us shape our pedagogical experimentations in tune with the idea that the instances when the body “lets us down” are of fundamental importance for learning, teaching, and thinking. To do this, we must inspire students to turn their critical but compassionate gaze to these very moments of unproductivity and failure, think through them, and experiment with different ways of thinking to imagine them otherwise. To experiment or to experience (etymologically speaking, both these nouns are closely connected both coming from the same root, a Latin word experior, experiri) is to direct oneself towards the unknown, to move amongst the yet un-thought-of; not alone but together with the others. In order to achieve this, a safe space in which we all could breathe and blush needs to be created.

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Notes 1

See: M. Górska’s (2016) groundbreaking work on breathing in which she claims that breathing is a feminist issue relevant to current debates on politics, ethics, environmental justice, agency, and vulnerable embodiment. 2 The neologism intra-spection is inspired by Karen Barad’s (2007) notion of “intra-action” as distinguished from “interaction.” The prefix intra- is used here to underscore a relational and transformative character of the activity and the fact that individuals don’t precede it but rather are moulded through it. 3 I admit that this view on how modernity portrayed the subject and the body should be challenged and nuanced. There is a need for more feminist research which would explore how the modern subject is also an embodied one in virtue of its being the subject of emotions (see e.g. René Descartes’ Passions of the Soul (1649)). This task, however, exceeds the scope of this paper. 4 I would like to acknowledge that the ideas I put forward in this chapter have been co-produced and co-moulded by my colleagues and friends, in private conversations, academic discussions, and collaborations that brought us together; I owe special thanks to Nanna Hlín Halldórsdóttir and Beatriz Revelles-Benavente for their always feminist generosity in listening and sharing. I would like to extend my thanks to Andrew Zonneveld for his precious help in copyediting and proofreading this paper. 5 I borrow this expression from an inspiring position paper/manifesto which opens the special issue of the journal Inflexions on the topic of “Radical Pedagogies.” See: Ramona Benveniste et al. 2015.

Bibliography Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Austin, John L. 1962. “How To Do Things With Words.” The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting The Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics And The Entanglement Of Matter And Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Bell, Elizabeth, and Kim Golombisky. 2004. “Voices and Silences in our Classrooms: Strategies for Mapping Trails among Sex/gender, Race, and Class.” Women’s Studies in Communication 27 (3): 294–329. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press. Benveniste, Ramona, Érik Bordeleau, Michael Hornblow, Erin Manning, Brian Massumi, Mayra Morales, Csenge Kolozsvari, Leslie Plumb,

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Ronald Rose-Antoinette, and Adam Szymanski. 2015. “Entry Ways.” Inflexions. A Journal for Research Creation 8: i–v. Braidotti, Rosi. 1991. Patterns of Dissonance. A Study of Women in Contemporary Philosophy. Cambridge: Polity Press. Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge Press. Cixous, Hélène. 1976. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Translated by K. Cohen and P. Cohen. Signs 1, 4: 875–893. Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Negotiations. Translated by M. Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press. Fanon, Frantz. 1965. A Dying Colonialism. New York: Grove Press. Ferguson, Harvie. 2000. Modernity and Subjectivity. Body, Soul, Spirit. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. Translated by A. Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books. Freud, Sigmund, and Joseph Breuer. 2004. Studies in Hysteria. Translated by N. Luckhurst. London: Penguin Books. Górska, Magdalena. 2016. “Breathing Matters. Feminist Intersectional Politics of Vulnerability.” PhD dissertation, Linköping University, Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Linköping Studies in Arts and Science no. 683. Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. hooks, bell. 1989. “Talking Back.” In Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. Toronto: Between the Lines. —. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Free-dom. New York: Routledge. Hunter, Lourdes Ashely. 2015. “Every Breath a Black Trans Woman Takes Is an Act of Revolution.” Huffington Post, June 2. Accessed February 24, 2016. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lourdes-ashleyhunter/every-breath-a-black-tran_b_6631124.html Irigaray, Luce. 2001. “From The Forgetting of Air to To Be Two.” In Feminist Interpretations of Martin Heidegger, edited by Nancy Holland and Patricia Huntington, translated by Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluháþek, 309–315. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press. Kirby, Vicki. 2011. Quantum Anthropologies. Life At Large. Durham: Duke University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1995. New Maladies of the Soul. New York: Columbia University Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1993. The Psychosis. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book III. 1955–1956. Translated by Russell Grigg. London: Routledge.

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Lepecki, André. 2006. Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement. New York: Routledge. Manning, Erin. 2015. “10 Propositions of How to Rethink Value.” Inflexions. A Journal for Research Creation 8: 202–210. Massumi, Brian. 2015. “Collective Expression: A Radical Pragmatics.” Inflexions. A Journal for Research Creation 8: 59–88. McKenzie, Jon. 2001. Perform or Else. From Discipline to Performance. New York: Routledge. Meissner, Hanna. 2015. “Opening Spaces: The Politics of Feminist Materialisms as Challenge to the Entrepreneurial University.” In Teaching With Feminist Materialisms. Teaching with Gender. European Women’s Studies in International and Interdisciplinary Classrooms, edited by P. Hinton and P. Treusch, 123–140. ATGENDER. Utrecht: De Lekstroom Griffioen. Mohanty, Chandra. 1989. “On Race and Voice: Challenges for Liberal Education in the 1990s.” Cultural Critique 14, Winter 1989/1990: 179–208. The Construction of Gender and Modes of Social Division II. Stryker, Susan. 2016. “Breathe: Histories and Futures of Trans* Life Now.” A lecture delivered at The LGBT History Month Hungary and the Department of Gender Studies 2015–2016 Public Lecture Series, Central European University, Budapest, February 1, 2016. Accessed June 27, 2016. http://reliefweb.int/videos/single/ceuhungary/.

CHAPTER NINE “SAFETY” UNDER THE QUESTION: CONTESTING COMPETENCES AND AFFECTS IN A FEMINIST CLASSROOM OLGA PLAKHOTNIK

Once upon a time when I was a junior researcher, I was challenged by the opinion that education is too boring and too depressing a topic for a feminist philosopher. I disagreed. I studied feminist pedagogies in different countries, exercising them in Ukraine within my university teaching and queer-feminist activism. This paper presents my ongoing reflections on a “safety” issue that perfectly exemplifies the complexity of the feminist pedagogical praxis, and brings together affects, competences, politics and ethics in a feminist classroom.

Generic competences and their opponents Today the rhetoric of competences as a basic conception of education is internationally widespread. The principles and technologies of competence-based education are being developed and implemented in many national educational strategies. For example, the newest Ukrainian legislation defines higher education as a set of “systematic knowledge and practical skills; thinking capacities; professional, ideological and citizenship qualities; ethical values and other competences” (Verkhovna Rada 2014; emphasis added). The list of general and specific competences is the obligatory component of every higher education standard (ibid.). In this regard, Ukrainian legislation follows the EU and global educational politics, where traditional school subject-based curricula are replaced by competencybased curricula, academic qualifications integrated into a unified form of

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Competences are typically defined as a combination of knowledge, abilities and skills. Specific competences are specific functions, related to the particular job’s tasks; in contrast, generic competences are important in most occupations and applicable to a wide range of situations. With minor variations, generic competences include communication skills, problemsolving, reasoning, leadership skills, creativity, motivation, teamwork, and the ability to learn, among others. The key feature of generic competences is their transferability1 to a wide variety of functions and tasks that enable students to integrate successfully in employment and social contexts. At the same time, the conception of generic competences meets more and more critique from different perspectives. For example, Canning (2013) challenges the rhetoric of generic competences arguing, firstly, that since the main body of literature on generic competences “is descriptive and advocatory in nature” (Canning 2013, 129), there is little convincing evidence of their transferability across contexts. Secondly, Canning argues that the very concept of generic competences itself is socially constructed as over the years its meaning has continually changed according to the dynamic social, political and economic trends. Moreover, I would expand this thought in the way that the meanings of the generic competences are deeply embedded into gender, class, “race” and other differentials of social structure, and are therefore neither neutral nor really general. The most substantial criticism of the generic competences conception appears within a critique of the entire neoliberal politics in education. As Connell astutely pointed out, the idea of competences “did not spring out of thin air” (Connell 2009, 6); it emerged from the 1960s and grew rapidly in the 1970s as a sequence of market-oriented reforms in education: This gave an educational interpretation to the managerialist idea—derived from the muddled discourse of ‘excellence’ in corporate management— that there is always a ‘best practice’ that can be instituted and audited from above. (ibid.)

A critique of the neoliberal and neoconservative turn in academia is rich and encompasses different perspectives. It corresponds to the critical analysis of the university as an educational institution (Readings 1996, Taubman 2010), the issue of the global learning economy and knowledge capitalism (Han 2009, Slaughter and Rhoades 2004, Brown 2005), a critical pedagogy’s view on education (Biesta 2011, Fielding 2010, Giroux 2014), an anarchist view (Haworth 2012), a feminist standpoint (Gibson-

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Graham 2006, Nussbaum 2012, Mohanty 2003, Swarr and Nagar 2012, Fraser 2013; Gill 2009) and a queer-theoretical criticality (Berlant 2011, Halberstam 2011, Hennessy 2000, Duggan 2004, Ahmed 2010). A feminist view, in particular, stresses that the introduction of generic employment-related competences to the curriculum emphasises “the vocational, rather than the social aspects of learning, and competitive, rather than collaborative social relations” (Blackmore 2000, 149). Also, it points out that the sphere of generic competences is concentrated on paid work and excludes family and household management skills, and this division is significantly gendered (ibid.). Another direction of feminist criticality is concerned with the neoliberalization of academia that produces “model neoliberal subjects, with their endless self-monitoring, flexibility, creativity and internalisation of new forms of auditing and calculating” (Gill 2009, 248). Gill draws particular attention to how “compulsory individuality” (Cronin 2000) politics create a profound individualist framework as a new form of governmentality that turns away from systemic or collective politics and closes up possibilities for resistance since the latter are collective practices of solidarity. Thus, a basic assumption of generic competences as utterly individual skills could be questioned or expanded to the understanding of the learning process as a collective activity that includes room for feminist “collective resistance” (Fisher 2007, 205).

Gender Studies meets generic competences Educational administrators consider a competence-based model to be a meta-strategy for all academic disciplines, including such an interdisciplinary area as Gender Studies.2 Feminist scholars are aware of their complicated situatedness as both belonging to academia and fostering a critical view on the neoliberal managerial reforms. On the one hand, participation is a precondition for dissent, in Hark’s words, because “[t]aking part in the dominant rules of the game, accepting them, is the precarious precondition for change”3 (Hark 2015, 88). On the other hand, it is yet crucially important “to reflect critically upon those circumstances and conditions under which we produce, distribute and consume knowledge” (ibid., 84). In my view, the relations between the neoliberal academy (and the competence-based model as its product) and critical knowledge production in the Gender Studies area could be positioned using the “within/against” concept, which is borrowed from Lather’s writing. Referring to theorising on iteration and subversive repetition (Butler 1993), Lather understands

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within/against as “both ‘doing it’ and ‘troubling it’ simultaneously” (Lather 2001, 204).4 I would argue that the within/against positionality of Gender Studies programmes presumes the “dissent role” (Hark 2015), i.e. being inside of the neoliberal academia and, at the same time, fostering a critical discredit of any neoliberal rhetoric, revealing the oppressive and exploitative nature of capitalism constantly and diligently (Fraser 2013). To resolve a tension between the neoliberal premise of competencebased education and the critical mission of Gender Studies is a big challenge. Any such attempt is worthy and interesting, that is why I draw my attention to the book, which completes this task masterly and in a distinct feminist way—Gender Studies Tuning Brochure (Waaldijk and Just 2010). In my view, the feminist agenda of this book is multi-fold. Firstly, it is a result of the joint work of the ATHENA network participants and partners, i.e. it “is to a large extent composed of the results and reports of a decade of a cooperation between gender academics, students, activists and professionals” (Just 2012, 168). In doing so, the project embodies the idea of feminist collaborative research. Secondly, the Gender Studies Tuning Brochure adopts the conception of generic competences and looks at which ones are more significant for the design and delivery of the degree programmes in Gender Studies. (Technically the participants were asked to rate and rank a previously compiled list of competences.) Whilst there are many interesting and seminal moments among the results, for my research purpose I will focus on two particular moments. First is the conclusion that an ability for abstract thinking, analysis and synthesis is the most important competence, according to the opinion of the academics, activists, graduates and students (Waaldijk and Just 2010, 61); similar competences (like the ability to be critical and self-critical) are also evaluated as highly important (ibid.). Though this is not surprising, the value of this finding goes far beyond representing one more empirically obtained argument in favour of critical thinking. In my opinion, this datum utterly challenges the very concept of generic competences and makes it a potential object of feminist criticality. “To be critical” means to aim at unpacking and deconstructing the basic premises and concepts, including generic competences and the phenomenon of education as such. This is a very important point. The second concluding moment was much more surprising, so it animated my further reflections and finally resulted in this paper’s appearance. The Gender Studies Tuning Brochure shows that the “commitment to safety” was rated and ranked as one of the least important generic competences, according to the academics, activists, graduates and students. These data are quite trustworthy since they rely upon the

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consensual opinion of all experts.5 At the time, this conclusion sounded paradoxical to me since safety is one of the basic principles of feminist pedagogies. If we agree that feminist teaching, as a particular mode of educational philosophy, is an essential background of Gender Studies, how then could the conclusion about the low priority of the commitment to safety be explained? To answer this question, let’s take a closer look at the notion of safety from the perspective of feminist pedagogies.

Feminist pedagogies and paradoxes of safety Feminist pedagogies6 appeared in the late 1980s in North America7 as a discussion on the teaching of feminist ideas at universities, or the teaching done by self-identified feminists in any educational settings. Basically, they are conceived as an implication of feminist theories into educational praxis and could be defined as “a set of classroom practices, teaching strategies, approaches to content, and relationships grounded in critical pedagogical and feminist theory” (Crabtree and Sapp 2003, 131). In other words, feminist pedagogies are both the process and the result of feminist interventions into education. In terms of disciplinarity, feminist pedagogies usually serve as an umbrella term for a broad variety of approaches and practices far beyond Gender Studies departments. Feminist scholars from other disciplines and schools have applied (and continue to apply) feminist pedagogies’ principles and techniques not only to the teaching of social sciences and humanities but also to STEM (sciences, technology, engineering and mathematics). Relying upon the critical pedagogy project and, more precisely, the liberatory pedagogical philosophy of Freire (1970), feminist educators enriched and expanded these ideas by means of raising several issues. Firstly, the teacher’s role as a place of authority and power had been challenged: from the feminist pedagogical perspective, the teachers have to work on the diminishment of the teacher’s authority in the classroom and maintain as many egalitarian relations in the classroom as possible (e.g., Maher and Tetreault 1994; and others). Secondly, feminist educators challenged the universality of the “woman” category and stressed the intersectional character of oppression and inequalities, calling for engaged, interactive, transgressive teaching that is “an interplay of anticolonial, critical, and feminist pedagogies” (hooks 1994, 10). Thus, the understanding of oppression as multiple and intersectionally structured has situated feminist pedagogies as

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The notion of safety appeared in feminist pedagogies as an important principle.8 Liberal feminist discourse envisions the classroom as a safe place (O’Barr and Wyer 1992) in which students can express themselves and become empowered—in contrast to the traditional authoritarian model of teaching based on discipline and punishment. The very idea of the “safe classroom” came from the second wave of feminist activism, and is conceived as an ideal space, free from physical threat, judgement or verbal intimidation, and confident in the group members’ honesty and shared values (Fisher 2001). But in the course of the divergence of feminist theorising, the ambiguity of the safety concept became more and more apparent. Fisher discussed what happens when students expect a feminist classroom to be an ultimately “safe space:” “One student assumes that other students will automatically understand her experiences. Another expects the teacher to support everything she, the student, says.” When these “idealised expectations” are not met, students may withdraw their trust and even their participation (Fisher 2001, 143). At the same time, Fisher noticed a concern about safety ideals with a diverse set of “uncomfortabilities” within different groups of students while the class explores injustice issues. White students may feel confusion or guilt about their lack of awareness of racism; students of colour may feel that it is not safe to describe their own experiences of racism, and so on. So, the teacher’s initial intention to foster caring and safety in the classroom could be easily destroyed by the factor of socially structured inequalities that are inherently embedded into students’ and teachers’ experiences. Black feminist thought produced a more precise claim about the fundamental impossibility of “feeling safe” in the space that “appears to be a neutral setting” (hooks 1994, 39). Conceptualising a feminist classroom as an ideal place for a “feeling of community” (ibid., 40), hooks, however, expresses a serious concern that a safety issue becomes a “stereotype” of feminist pedagogy rather than a viable paradigm for intellectual and critical development (hooks 1989, 53). From hook’s observation, in a predominantly white classroom, the interrogation of privilege tends to disrupt safety for privileged students and instructors, that makes students of colour “the culprits for disrupting the classroom and making it an ‘unsafe’ place. Is this not a conventional way the colonizer speaks of the colonized, the oppressor of the oppressed?” (hooks 1994, 82) Analysis of safe space educational politics for LGBT+9 students corroborates a point of black feminist criticality and highlights that the

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assumption of safety as a “positive condition” for education is utterly problematic. In Stengel’s opinion, there are few “ironies” in calls for safe space that are rarely recognised: safe space does not always function to establish safety for students since it may also function to create emotional relief for adults. Students who are able to articulate a need for safe spaces often don’t need it, and vice versa—students who need safe spaces, often are unable to say so. Finally, the need for safe space for students who experience social exclusion and harassment is the result of a political economy that was intended to create safe space for others (Stengel 2010). The safety concept thus becomes an “overused but undertheorized metaphor” (Barrett 2010, 1) that reveals its ambiguous meaning in a feminist pedagogical context. On the one hand, it permeates the initial idea of feminist teaching—as a mode of a liberatory education that opposes an oppressive education. It presumes that the deployment of such principles as the privileging of individual voices and experiences, and the egalitarian teacher-student relationship must generate the students’ feeling of being safe(r) in the classroom. On the other hand, if one is to take into account the systemic structure of privileges and subordinations, safety in an educational setting might appear not just as a false promise or an unachievable goal, but also as a counterproductive strategy that deepens inequalities and oppressions. The strategy to develop safety as a form of policy in institutional schools, “often fail[s] to critically engage with the paradigms that underlie harassment and discrimination” (The Roestone Collective 2014, 1352). This explains why more and more feminist educators reject safety as an untrustworthy concept: There is nothing ‘safe’ about engaging students in rigorous and critical ways. It seems to me that to be able to speak of safety in the ‘belly of the beast’ reveals class and race privilege. Only a certain elite has the privilege of cultivating a safe space in mainstream institutions that perpetuate the very inequities, which we fight against as feminist educators. (Henry 1994, 2)

From the outlined points of the critique, in my opinion, there is nothing surprising in the results of the Gender Studies Tuning Brochure, i.e. the low rating and rank of the commitment to safety competence. I believe that the unanimous decision of all experts was determined by their awareness about the safety concept as being compromised by the considerations above. Today we see even more evidence for this: for example, the newest politics/panics on “trigger warnings” in Western universities10 where, in Ahmed’s ironic words, “safety is about feeling good, or not feeling bad” (the quote is from the feministkilljoys blog:

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Ahmed 2015). But, if a commitment to safety in feminist pedagogy is not a case anymore, according to the Gender Studies Tuning Brochure, what remains at stake, instead? If abilities for abstract and critical thinking have, on the contrary, the highest rank of priority, what kind of emotional climate corresponds to exercising these abilities? If we presume that “criticality is not only ‘a way of thinking’ but also ‘a way of feeling and being’” (Zembylas 2005, 198), what kinds of feelings could we expect to cultivate?

“Crisis” in a Gender Studies classroom Feminist and radical pedagogies have come a long way from modernist liberal feminist assumptions of the 1980s to contemporary variants of postmodern/queer pedagogies.11 I am not saying that later ideas are more progressive than earlier ones, but it is precisely the latter modes of theorising and the pedagogic praxis that have shifted attention from safety to quite opposite ideas. Postmodern feminist pedagogies and their (similarly conceptualised, but differently named) variations—queer pedagogy in North America12 and norm-critical pedagogy in Sweden13—are based on constructionist interpretations of identity as fluid, knowledge as always ideologically biased and situated, and oppression as discursively produced. They question the idea of caring about “others” and fostering safety for them, instead, they aim at challenging the whole system of “othering” and domination by means of specifically organised teaching and learning. This challenge might not be enjoyable or even comfortable for all participants, and a feeling of safety in a classroom might not be guaranteed. Some educators call for the replacement of safety as a sort of emotional condition with other, often semantically opposite emotional phenomena: for example, pain (hooks 1994), discomfort (Boler 1999, Zembylas 2011), “contested space” and conflict (Ludlow 2004), anxiety (Marciniak 2010), and crisis (Felman 1992; 1995). As Henry expresses, “My classrooms are places of extreme vulnerability and conflict. Tears of pain or anger and ambiguity are not uncommon consequences of deconstructing our lives and belief systems” (Henry 1994, 1). But how can we imagine a classroom that welcomes “crisis”? Do the crisis proponents call for the intentional fostering of a tense and chilly emotional atmosphere for the students? What, for instance, does Felman mean when saying:

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I would venture to propose, today, that teaching in itself, teaching as such, takes place precisely only through a crisis: if teaching does not hip upon some sort of crisis, if it does not encounter either the vulnerability or the explosiveness of an (explicit or implicit) critical and unpredictable dimension, it has perhaps not truly taught? (Felman 1992, 53; emphasis in original)

I will scrutinise the concept of crisis in a classroom as closely tied to affect and antithetical to safety, and argue that crisis is produced not merely by the teachers or students themselves, but by the character of the knowledge that is brought and discussed in a Gender Studies class. The crisis, however, could be triggered in any classroom by the topics that are commonly perceived as difficult and traumatic—for example, testimonies of the Holocaust survivors (Felman 1992) or survivors of ethnic cleansing and gendered violence in the Omarska Camp during the Balkan wars in the 1990s (Marciniak 2010). While both authors did not conceptualise a notion of affect precisely and emphasise psychoanalytic aspects of the crisis, they made an important point: “in many ways, the effects and affects of crises go against the institutionally propagated ethos of classroom ‘safety’” (Marciniak 2010, 888). Being aware of complex polemics on affects and “politics of affects” (Ahmed 2004a; Hemmings 2005; 2012; Sedgwick 2003), for the purpose of this chapter I adopt a view that both crises and affects are ontological, even existential categories:14 “Affect broadly refers to states of being, rather than to their manifestation or interpretation as emotion” (Hemmings 2005, 551). At the same time I conceive crises and affects, as well as emotions, to be a subject and a product of cultural politics (Ahmed 2004b), mutually constitutive and culturally mediated: “It is not simply that these crises exist, and that fears and anxieties come into being as a necessary effect of that existence. Rather, it is the very production of the crisis that is crucial” (Ahmed 2004a, 132). In line with both Felman and Marciniak, I consider a crisis in a classroom to be a “collective affect” (Berlant 2011). The political aim of challenging the whole system of oppression requires not simply more knowledge but specific, “disruptive” knowledge (Kumashiro 2009). This “troubling” (in Pierre’s words) of knowledge “examine[s] any commonplace situation, any ordinary event or process, in order to think differently about that occurrence—to open up what seems ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ to other possibilities” (Pierre 2000, 479). A feminist classroom is precisely the space that potentially provides students with opportunities to trouble knowledge they already have in ways that disrupt, discomfort and problematize what they take for granted (Kumashiro 2009). Telling examples were provided by the students, in their feedback

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on the undergraduate course Gender and Sexuality at the University in Ukraine they wrote: “At the beginning, I was told that after the first classes of this course many students couldn’t sleep at night. I did not understand why, but now I do . . .”; “For me, the course entailed deep crisis. I was somewhat prepared for this, but it is much deeper than I expected.” Kumashiro (2002) advocates the central and seminal role of crisis in the anti-oppressive classroom (particularly within the postmodern/queer configuration, namely “education that changes students and society”). Kumashiro notes that we “cannot do so [change students and society] without addressing the ways students and society resist change” (Kumashiro 2002, 62; emphasis added). So, resistance to “disruptive knowledge” entails affectively loaded crises, both individual and collective. When we (students and teachers) are faced with knowledge that undermines the system of normativity, that knowledge previously learned is normal and normative has to be unsettling. This unsettling is often discomforting and painful, sometimes experienced as a form of crisis. To explore further the nature of the crisis, I draw on the term “cruel optimism” that signifies “the condition of maintaining an attachment to a problematic object in advance of its loss” (Berlant 2011, 21; emphasis in the original). Berlant particularly stresses “clusters of desire” as one’s emotional attachments to a social state of play, though those clusters of desire are less about the objects of desire themselves, than their attachments. The moment an “impasse,” in Berlant’s words, describes the situation when previous attachments to the social order of things are no longer brought to bear to explain the world: “It is striking that these moments of optimism, which mark a possibility that the habits of history might not be reproduced, release an overwhelming negative force” (ibid., 31, emphasis in original). So, what do we (feminist educators) do, facing crisis/affect? The initial premise of postmodern pedagogy to deconstruct and de-essentialize phenomena and categories allows a reliance on “not only rational inquiry and dialogue but also excavation of the emotional investments that underlie any ideological commitment” (Zembylas 2005, 196). A “pedagogy of discomfort” approach (Boler and Zembylas 2003), for example, directs students to the problematizing of their discomfort and emotional challenges and exploring their ethical responsibilities. It calls for a move outside the comfort zone, which has to be done both by teachers and students as a necessary precondition of learning. It should be recognised that “the comfort zone reflects emotional investments and beliefs that by and large remain unexamined because they have been woven into the everyday fabric of what is considered common sense” (Boler and

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Zembylas 2003, 108). At the same time, it would be oversimplifying to see only the negative emotional side of crisis; in reality, “emotions do not only operate as blockages, they can also open up lines of communication” (Ahmed 2004b, 181). By understanding emotions as a generative power, we can expect different emotional outcomes, like “self-discovery, hope, passion and a sense of community” (Boler and Zembylas 2003, 129), a joy and excitement of knowing and “unknowing,” learning and “unlearning,” opening and becoming.

Discussion, or yet on accountability of safety At the beginning of 2016, I received a call for the AtGender conference.15 Being intrigued by the panel’s title “The (Im)Possibility of Safe(r) Spaces: Discomfort and Queer Failures in Learning Environments,” I became even more amazed by the panel as such.16 The ample audience of the panel and the results of the group discussion “What is safety for me?” illuminated the crucial importance of the issue for participants (mainly students and recent graduates, e.g. activists and early career researchers). Whilst some people conceived “safety in a classroom” in terms of non-oppressive teaching (a more traditional feminist view, outlined above), many others specified the particular issues: respect for students’ identity and representation (e.g., preferred naming and gendered pronouns); distinct anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic and anti-transphobic policies in the classroom; “tolerance for bad English;” a comprehensive inclusiveness of “unruling bodies,” and so on. The audience seemed to be seriously concerned about a “safe classroom” as an (ideally) discrimination-free place towards people who are systemically oppressed in our society, and where they can express their feelings and opinions without being silenced or attacked. Yet, it is exactly a space for discussions on oppressions and discrimination: “We have safe spaces so we can talk about racism not so we can avoid talking about racism!” (Ahmed 2015; emphasis in the original) At this panel, I realised that in a feminist context safety remains an explicitly political category, which is often at risk of being misused in the neoliberal university. It could be confused with a comfort that is never neutral, but “stratified through racialised, gendered, hierarchically valued bodies;”17 it could be spoofed with “security measures,” thus strengthen the privileges of the powerful.18 Then it produces a “false sense of safety implied by surveillance” that “is only creating a controlled and predictable environment that does not challenge the hegemonic system, thereby ignoring our subjective positionalities” (Kishimoto and Mwangi 2009, 94).

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The complex and contradictory character of safety did not slip away from the discussion, as well as an array of exciting contingent questions. At the same time, my personal conclusion of this experience is twofold. Firstly, “the mission [to create a completely safe space in a classroom] is impossible,” so we can address it only in terms of “safer” or “safe enough” (Stengel 2010, 536), always with a certain amount of caution. Yet, secondly, the idea of safety is not outdated in a feminist classroom, if to conceive it as a “living concept, identifying tendencies and variations in its use, and recognizing its situatedness in multiple contexts” (The Roestone Collective 2014, 1347). If to foster safety means to guard a classroom space from discriminatory (racist, sexist, LGBT+-phobic, Islamophobic, ableist, fatphobic/body shaming or classist) comments and forms of “othering;” if it means that the teacher has to be both sensitive and creative—this ever-incomplete task is worth struggling for, the topic is worth thinking about in depth, and safety does have to be accountable. In this chapter, I used the conclusions from the Gender Studies Tuning Brochure like a magnifying glass to zoom in on Gender Studies’ generic competences in their relations to safety and affect. Prioritising critical thinking abilities and contrasting them to a commitment to safety as the least important competence in the list, the project sustains—and, at the same time, promotes—the particular model of the Gender Studies classroom. It obviously refers to the diverse feminist and queer criticality of safety concept: used in a more traditional sense in respect to anyone’s experience, thoughts and feelings, in certain circumstances it might really serve the interests of privileged groups and become a tool of oppression. This logic might lead to the conclusion that criticality and safety are rather antipodes, barely compatible concepts19—and this point of view takes place, as I showed above. Corresponding critical thinking to the crisis in the classroom could open more productive space for feminist educators: they might reflect, on the one hand, on “negative” emotions and affects concerning the issue of privileges and inequalities in the classroom. On the other hand, however, discomfort and/or crisis are implied in the process of knowledge circulation and learning/unlearning dynamics. As proponents of pedagogy of discomfort show, doing emotionally intense (and most likely “unsafe”) pedagogy of discomfort might set up an exclusively productive atmosphere for the development of critical thinking abilities as an indissoluble junction of affects and reason. (Zembylas 2005, 198)

Finally, I would venture to argue that a commitment to safety has to be a significant competence and even a teacher’s obligation in the Gender

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Studies classroom today. Yet, it is crucially important to tackle safety carefully and critically, to understand it contextually, historically and intersectionally. As the Roestone Collective calls on, cultivating safe space is simultaneously reactive and productive work, reconfiguring existing and context-dependent social norms. This work . . . is full of possibilities; safe spaces are sites where dualistic or simplistic social norms reveal their pores. It is precisely this work, we argue, that makes safe space a valuable praxical concept. (The Roestone Collective 2014, 1360)

Acknowledgements On the different stages, this research project was supported by the Fulbright Scholar program and the Visby program of the Swedish Institute. I sincerely appreciate the thorough and encouraging editorial work of Edyta Just and Sarah Jane Mukherjee, and the friendly comments of my colleagues Olenka Dmytryk and Maria Mayerchyk to the first drafts of this chapter.

Notes 1

The idea of the universal transferability of competences entails the usage of “transversal competences” or “transferable skills” as synonyms to the notion of generic competences. 2 Usually, I use Feminist Studies as shorthand for Feminist/Gender/Women’s Studies (Lykke 2010, 11). But since this paper refers to the Gender Studies Tuning Brochure (Waaldijk and Just 2010) many times, I have chosen to use Gender Studies as un umbrella term in order to avoid confusion. 3 Hark argues: “Only if you know the rules, therefore, or rather if you are given the opportunity to learn the game in detail, only if you master the game, if you can anticipate where the ball will hit the ground, but also—perhaps the most important point—only if you can take up a critical stance on the game and its rules and query their rationality, as opposed to simply obeying them, will you ultimately survive in the field and be able to change it successfully. Dissent and participation, in other words, are inextricable” (Hark 2015, 84). 4 In the recent interview, Judith Butler addresses this term directly, describing performativity as “performative action that takes up the terms by which we have been addressed (and so a retaking, a taking over, or a refusal), the categories through which we have been formed, in order to begin the process of selfformation within and against its terms” (Ahmed 2016, 4; emphasis added). 5 “There is a profound and overwhelming agreement on the importance of the generic competences among the four groups in the field. The academics, activists, graduates and students evaluate all generic competences except 24 and 29 (safety

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and environment) above 3. In other words, not one group deems unimportant what another group finds important” (Waaldijk and Just 2010, 67). 6 I adopt the plural form of feminist pedagogies in order to stress the diversity of feminist movements/theorising and their educational implications. 7 Obviously, the same feminist-pedagogical ideas emerged across Europe and the globe under the different names—gender pedagogy, gender and education, normcritical pedagogy and so on. I refer here mostly to North American feminist pedagogies just because I know them better. 8 It is worth adding that safety as a feminist concern comprises not only “inclusive” feminist classrooms, but also separatist activist spaces. See more: (The Roestone Collective 2014). 9 The acronym LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) is the most common and internationally recognised name for the communities of non-heterosexual, noncisgender and non-binary people. This paper adopts the adding of the “+” symbol to the acronym to open up the potential infinity of non-normative identities. 10 See more: (Ahmed 2015; Halberstam 2017; and others). 11 For example, Fisher distinguishes modes of feminist pedagogies depending on certain values that define the aim(s) of teaching: (1) feminist teaching for equality, (2) feminist pedagogies based on caring, (3) feminist pedagogies of collective resistance, and (4) feminist pedagogies of deconstruction (Fisher 2007). Kumashiro also draws a line between four possible approaches following a similar epistemological vein but resting upon a broader field of anti-oppressive education. Kumashiro adopts an anti-oppressive pedagogy term as a broader framework that includes feminist, anti-racist, anti-homophobic and other radical educational theorising and praxis (Kumashiro 2002). 12 Queer pedagogy emerges as a result of queer theory intervention into curriculum and teaching, and could be summarised in Debora Britzman’s words as “pedagogies that call into question the conceptual geography of normalization” and as “an ethical project that begins to engage difference as the grounds of politicality and community” (Britzman 1995, 152). See more: (Pinar 1998). 13 The team of Swedish scholars and activists established the norm-critical pedagogy at the end of the 2010s in order to encompass a wider area than feminist and queer pedagogy. In the anthology “Normkritisk pedagogik” [Norm-critical pedagogy], the authors present an argument for this: since both gender pedagogy and feminist pedagogy have come to be associated in different ways with gender as a power relation in the Swedish context, and have often been used in a heteronormative way, the authors wanted to make an intersectional quest visible in a power-conscious pedagogy and they proposed a new term—norm-critical pedagogy—for their approach (Bromseth and Sörensdotter 2013). 14 Whilst the concept of affect in its ontological dimensions is essentially embodied, inscribed into a (human) body, I will not elaborate on this direction of thinking as it goes beyond the scope of this paper. 15 See: http://atgender.eu/activities-2/other-events/spring-conference-2016/. The synopsis of the panel is here: http://atgender.eu/files/2015/12/Conference_4.pdf. 16 There is no room for the description of this fascinating experience in detail, but the way in which this panel was organised and conducted was very unusual: it was

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teamwork that attempted both talking about safety and creating a safe(r) space in the conference room. Many thanks to the panel’s initiators and participants, from whom I learned a lot: Domitilla Olivieri, Svenja Engels, Nienke Hart, Whitney Stark, Mir Marinus, Catherine Wallemacq and Marilisa Malizia. 17 This idea belongs to Whitney Stark. 18 Domitilla Olivieri expressed this idea in the spoken discussion. 19 I am not saying that the Gender Studies Tuning Brochure explicitly concludes the incompatibility; I am developing my own interpretation of the results in line with existing scholarship.

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CHAPTER TEN IMAGINING PROFESSIONAL FUTURES IN FEMINIST CLASSROOMS NINA LYKKE

This chapter reflects on teaching practices that aim to encourage and empower students to engage in learning processes which allow them to develop skills in critical social fantasy. I discuss how such skills can enable students to imagine alternative futures and translate them into transformatory professional work. Critical educational programmes within the frames of Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Critical Disability Studies, etc., are found in many universities, predominantly in the western world, but also beyond it. These programmes are often sought out by students with activist backgrounds in social movements or NGOs who want academic tools to enable in-depth theorising of their political and professional practices. The chapter is based on the assumption that, by enrolling on such programmes, many of these students expect to gain a particular generic skill, defined as the ability to develop critically enabling and empowering social fantasy in terms of working to foster more socially and environmentally just futures. This claim is based on my decades-long experience of teaching Gender and Intersectionality Studies and my commitment to curriculum development within the field in both Scandinavian and wider European contexts. I will discuss this generic skill and, in particular, I will focus on the question of its development: how it can be facilitated in a classroom context. I will draw on traditions in feminist pedagogy that build on affectivity, passion and commitment to political change; among others, Black Feminist scholar bell hooks’ notions of “teaching to transgress” and the “pedagogy of hope” (hooks 1994; 2003), as well as feminist utopianism. Against this background, I shall reflect on the ways in which feminist theory can provide tools for imagining change and thinking about alternative futures, including the use of powerfully embodied and affectively grounded thinking technologies. In particular, I shall focus on

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the concepts of feminist “figurations” and “worlding” practices. Moreover, I shall discuss how the transgression of boundaries between academic and creative writing and performing, and between activism, scholarly and professional work can be introduced into pedagogical contexts. Here, they can be used to support the processes of developing skills in imagining alternative futures and engaging in modes of theorising that are grounded in affective processes of disidentification and intersectional critiques.

Gender Studies—Intersectionality and Change In particular, the chapter is inspired by my participation in the curriculum development and teaching of an international master’s programme entitled Gender Studies—Intersectionality and Change at Linköping University, Sweden. I am part of the group of teachers who developed and later taught the programme, which was launched in 2012. Building on my earlier experiences of developing Gender Studies programmes in European contexts, I made it a priority to include spaces in this programme within which students are encouraged to think about their future careers. This included the ways in which, in their future capacity as gender-studies professionals with a special focus on intersectionality and change, they can perform as agents for change in terms of combatting inequalities and working for social and environmental justice. I am well aware that the rhetoric of “careers” and “agents for change” taps into neoliberal discourses. I consider it necessary to use such terms, but also to address them critically. It is necessary to use them because it is not possible to “opt out” of neoliberal society when setting up educational programmes in universities. The ways in which academic conditions and careers are framed by neoliberalism cannot simply be ignored. Even in the act of “opting out” of normative and conventional academic career-path models, for example, when using a university degree to make a living as an activist worker in an NGO, fundamentally people are still part of the neoliberal society and subject to the effects of transnational capitalism. However, the genealogies of Gender Studies—Intersectionality and Change are closely linked to social and environmental justice activism, resistance and transformatory politics to combat inequalities. Therefore, as a curriculum developer within this academic field, it is unthinkable not to build in a strong critical dimension when teaching about “career paths” and becoming “agents for change”. To avoid the dilemma of being involved in, but also critical of, neoliberal academia, one may, as a programme developer, leave out the topic of future “careers” altogether. But, in my view, this is to take the

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easy way out, disavowing all responsibility for the troublesome question of students’ future careers and how to think about them. In our programme, Gender Studies—Intersectionality and Change, we did not want to ignore the question. Instead, we decided to create an arena within the programme for joint reflections on the issue of “careers”. Here, students and teachers could develop a critical social fantasy to help them imagine and reflect upon ways to act differently in future workplaces, while taking into account the difficulties and obstacles caused by neoliberal conditions. This chapter is a consideration of the arena for reflections about careers and future workplaces that we created as part of the programme. This arena is a course entitled: Career Paths and Professional Communication. I shall not go into great detail about the individual elements of the course, since the topic of this book is generic skills. Within the framework of this book’s overall aim of discussing affects and concepts in generic skills education, my reflections will concentrate on the following issues: 1) the main conceptual and methodological framework used to inspire and encourage students to develop critical social fantasy and imagination, and, in embodied ways, to think-feel differently about future careers and workplaces; and 2) the skills and competences required to become enabled and empowered to develop critical social fantasy and imagine the different futures that we—the programme developers—hope that the course will engage and inspire the students to reflect upon.

Theoretical-political genealogies I shall start with a brief presentation of the theoretical inspirations that framed our development of the course. One genealogical thread consists of theories of transgressive pedagogies, which have developed in close interaction with social and environmental justice movements. These include theories on feminist, queer and anti-racist pedagogies, related to various kinds of social movements. Prominently figuring among these are anti-racist Black Feminist pedagogies of transgression and hope (hooks 1994; 2003), normcritical and queer pedagogies, emerging out of queer movements (Bromseth and Darj 2010), anti-oppressive pedagogies as found in the intersections between queer and anti-racist movements (Kumashiro 2002), and now-classic contributions such as pedagogies of the oppressed (Freire 1970) and theatres of the oppressed (Boal 1979). The latter, which emerged out of mid-20th-century intersections of anti-colonialist and socialist-Marxist workers’ movements, have inspired many of the newer

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kinds of radically transgressive pedagogies, for example theatre formats (Armstrong and Juhl 2007) or formats crossing boundaries between academic and creative writing (Richardson 2000; Lykke 2014). Across their differences, these pedagogies share a focus on teaching and learning practices which aim to empower participants to act in a way that will bring about the transgression and transformation of oppressive societal structures and norms, as well as enable them to imagine the world differently, i.e. to engage in processes of reontologization. They also share a focus on the personal commitment and political-ethical accountability of both teachers and students. This requires paying close attention to hierarchies and hegemonic powers in the classroom, and engaging in conscious pedagogical work to deconstruct them. Affective intensities are also understood as a constitutive part of the process. Such intensities can translate into catharsis when processes of transgression enable individual participants to reimagine their worlds in new and empowering ways, but also they can lead to angry or sad disidentificatory processes triggered by normative claims to homogeneous and hegemonic actualizations of alternatives to the here and now (Butler 1993; Lykke 2014). Another strand of inspiration is drawn from trends in utopian thought, which are related to social movements and their ways of theorising and imagining better social futures. Women’s movements, which generated feminist utopias, are an example, and the literary genre of feminist science fiction that flourished during the 1970s and 1980s (by authors such as Joanna Russ (1975), Marge Piercy (1976), and Octavia Butler (1987)) became the epitome of feminist utopian thinking. Across their differences, the fictional universes of these novels are based on the critical exposure of a dystopian here and now, while simultaneously constructing other— utopian—worlds in which equal and democratic relations, the ethics of generosity and hospitality, collectivity and collaboration have replaced the sexism, racism, xenophobia, individualism, elitism, etc., of the here and now and have become new normative standards. Alongside utopian feminist science fiction, the genre of political manifestos is also part of the tradition of thinking the future otherwise. Manifestos share with utopian feminist science fiction an endeavour to combine the political critique of a dystopian present with demands intended to lead to future societal frameworks that are better, more enabling and more empowering than the present ones. However, while the tradition of manifesto writing has been strong in socialist movements, it seems as though a more ambivalent attitude to claims about a blueprint for the future organisation of society, an integral dimension of manifestos, has characterised feminist movements. It is in this sense notable that two

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famous feminist manifestos—the SCUM Manifesto (Solanas 1967) and the Cyborg Manifesto (Haraway 1991)—both interweave deep irony with political passion, and include strong elements of parody of the conventional genre of manifestos. It should also be noted that what might perhaps be interpreted as a Black Feminist manifesto—The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977)—does not use the term “manifesto”, instead taxonomising the text as a “statement”. A certain feminist ambivalence towards the normative, hierarchical and exclusionary thought with which manifestos might easily be associated—with the Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels 1848) occupying modern imaginaries as the epitome of the genre—is probably surfacing here. The reason for bringing the genre of manifestos into the discussion is that it exposes the dilemmas and risks of utopianism, which we need to keep in mind when arguing for it as a method in classroom teaching (Levitas 2013). While the genre of feminist science fiction is open to conceiving of futures as multiple and open-ended, the manifesto genre makes it clear that utopian thought may resonate with problematic modern narratives of teleological, linear progress, making utopias into normative blueprints that lay out static, and, in the end, repressive images of future societal perfection vis-à-vis an imperfect here and now. However, utopian thinking has unfolded on different onto-epistemological grounds. Post-structuralist critiques, for example, pinpointed how utopianism became a problematic thinking technology when utopias were conceived of as normative blueprints in the above-mentioned sense. Taking into account the conclusions of this critique, newer feminist Utopia Studies focus on processes and momentary actualizations rather than on static models of a “perfect” society (Levitas 2013; Cooper 2014). It is these newer trends that inspired our work on the course Career Paths and Professional Communication.

Career paths between professionalism, theory and activism Alongside inspirations from radical pedagogies of change and newer utopian thought, an important background for the course Career Paths and Professional Communication is also the history of the institutionalization of Gender Studies, and the ways in which the academic careers of many feminist programme developers are intertwined with this process. What we (i.e. feminists who have taken part in the institutionalization of Gender Studies all over the world) have built up, while making careers in Gender Studies, is actually a solid set of competences and skills in undertaking

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transformatory work in academic institutions. Without this work, which carved out spaces for Gender Studies programmes and research, there would be no such thing as Gender Studies at present-day universities. The biographies of those feminists who have taken part in the institutionalization of Gender Studies indicate how it has been possible, over recent decades, to achieve transformatory work in universities, implementing Gender Studies as an institutionalised field of research and teaching. For example, when I myself started at university during the heyday of the European and US students’ revolt of 1968, there were no spaces available in universities for doing Gender Studies or other kinds of intersectional studies. But, as collective social movements spilled over from activism into theorising and academics endeavoured to create space within universities for in-depth theoretical work on the questions raised by these movements, Gender Studies and other kinds of intersectional studies eventually became recognised and were allocated professional spaces in many universities in the west and beyond. Even though, at a global scale, the situation faced by Gender Studies is certainly very uneven today, I still maintain that its history as a recognised field of academic knowledge production can be considered a successful example of activism, theoretical work and professionalism merging into a praxis which has had transformatory effects on workplaces, specifically: universities.

Fig. 10-1. The triangle of activism-theory-professionalism.

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In Figure 10-1, I outline a triangle of activism, theory and professionalism, which is intended to indicate this merging. On the one hand, the figure is designed to show that feminist and intersectional theorising grew out of social movements. I have described elsewhere (Lykke 2010) how feminist theorising forms part of the resistance of feminist and other intersecting social movements—providing a theoretical carving out of discursive sites of resistance. The links between feminist theorising, activism, politics and social movements pinpointed in this figure are recognised by most feminist researchers. However, less often included as part of the reflections on the institutionalization of Gender Studies, are the links between the theory/activism nexus, on the one hand, and professional outlets, career paths and the neoliberal jobs market on the other. However, the latter links have been explored in some studies. Thus, I shall briefly refer to a feminist investigation of the employment, professionalization patterns and job expectations of Gender Studies students and graduates in nine European countries (Griffin 2005) and another in Sweden (Lundberg and Werner 2015). But besides giving useful information and reflections on career paths of Gender Studies graduates, these analyses also show that discussions of links to career paths and professionalization are often “tabooed” by Gender Studies students and graduates. Making “careers” is perceived as somehow “foreign” to Gender Studies (Griffin 2005). Graduates and students usually claim that they are doing Gender Studies because they want to theorise (activist) politics and do something politically meaningful, and not to pursue “careers” in an individualistic, neoliberal sense. However, instead of exclusively acknowledging the link between theory and activism, as is commonly done, I argue that the link to professionalization should be taken into account and theorised as well. Or, in other words: all three angles of the triangle (activism, theorization and professionalization) should be considered together. I see the triangle as facilitating the invention of ways to think differently about future workplaces, professionalization, and the doing of transformatory work within them. In the framework of the master’s programme, the course Career Paths and Professional Communication is an invitation to begin reflecting more deeply on this triangle and the transformatory professional powers which the links from professionalization to both theory and activism may facilitate. It is important to note, though, that, when I insist upon the relevance of the triangle for reflections on the potential transformatory powers (or lack thereof) of the knowledge production, fostered in Gender and Intersectional Studies programmes, I am not laying claim to utopianism in a

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classic modernist sense, i.e. as an orientation towards a universal and static blueprint. The triangle is not intended to model an easy, one-way route from “pure” activism and “pure” theorising “outside” the neoliberal university to “pure” transformatory work, which, like a magic wand, completely turns around oppressive or otherwise negative neoliberal conditions at workplaces, guided by a static blueprint. As already stated, I do not consider it possible, individually, to “opt out” of the structural conditions created by neoliberal society. Instead, the utopianism embedded in the triangle should be seen against the background of what feminist Utopia Studies scholar Davina Cooper has named “everyday utopias” (Cooper 2014). Along the lines of newer Utopia Studies, Cooper defines these as utopian processes and moments which are always already mixed up with the societal mechanisms and forces of the here and now, which often push or pull in directions other than utopian ones. To distinguish utopian moments and processes in the midst of the chaotic messiness of everyday events, Cooper (2014) suggests that we look at the interplay between concepts, imaginations, and actualizations. I shall use this conceptual framework to explain how, when setting up the course Career Paths and Professional Communication, we reflected on ways to stimulate and enable students to develop critical social fantasy while reflecting on future workplaces and the possibilities for transformatory work within them. I shall first discuss a couple of the feminist tools that we introduced in order to help students engage with the processes of conceptualizing and imagining alternative futures (the concepts of figuration and worlding). After that, I shall focus on how we use creative writing and theatre methods to stimulate students to create scenarios for the actualization. Finally, I shall discuss some examples from the classroom.

Tools for conceptualising and imagining alternative futures Feminist commitment to subjective and societal change has generated a strong dedication to the critique and problematization of the here and now. However, questions of more positive—affirmative (Braidotti 2002) or reparative (Sedgwick 2003)—approaches have also been forcefully raised: what kind of alternative visions of intersectional, gendered subjectivity, embodiment, society and culture can feminisms generate? But, as indicated in my discussion of the risks of utopianism above, this apparently simple question is based on a dilemma. For, as I have discussed in more detail elsewhere (Lykke 2010), the move from critique and

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problematization to affirmation can easily slip into an act of essentialization and the universalization of a specific vision of subjectivity, embodiment, society and culture that is supposed to be “good and right” for everyone. Thus, we can end up with a violent claim to identity politics and sameness, which disregards intersectional difference. This dilemma has led to the question: how can we develop positive visions of alternative ways of restructuring subjectivity, embodiment, society and culture on a socially and environmentally just basis, whilst maintaining a dynamic openness, and avoiding processes of universalizing and essentializing? I consider the concepts of figuration and worlding, which I shall discuss in the following pages, to be important in this context. Both offer a framework for conceptualising and imagining alternative futures without falling into the trap of universalism and essentialism. Moreover, they complement each other. While the concept of figuration is oriented towards alternative subjectivities, that of worlding relates to alternative constructions of social and cultural worlds.

Figurations Figurations have been brought into feminist debates by the feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti, among others. According to Braidotti, a feminist figuration is “a politically informed account of an alternative subjectivity” (Braidotti 1994, 1), i.e. an alternative subjectivity articulated in a figurative form that suggests ways out of hegemonic, genderconservative discourses about gender/sex in its intersections with other sociocultural categories. Braidotti bases her definition of figurations on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and his thoughts on bodily and affectively grounded processes of becoming. According to Deleuze, subjects, which are understood as mergers of mind, emotion and body, are always in the midst of processes of change and emergence, or, as he articulates it: “becoming” (Braidotti 1994, 111ff.). Along similar lines, a feminist figuration is defined as a vision towards which the subject is moving in an intellectual, emotional and bodily sense. Braidotti emphasises that figurations are figurative and do not only refer to concepts such as liberation or emancipation. A concept is a phenomenon we can embrace with our rational minds, but it is not an object of desire. Something that is figuratively formed is, however, different. It can be pervaded by mind, emotion and body, inhabited in an intellectual, bodily and emotional way. Braidotti emphasises that the notion of figuration challenges “the separation of reason from imagination” (Braidotti 2002, 3), which for centuries has characterised mainstream European philosophy.

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One more important point is stressed by Braidotti: a figuration is, according to her, not a mere metaphor, but a lived reality: A figuration is a living map, a transformative account of the self—it is no metaphor. Being nomadic, homeless, an exile, a refugee, a Bosnian rapein-war victim, an itinerant migrant, an illegal immigrant, is no metaphor. . . . These are highly specific geo-political and historical locations—history tattooed on your body. One may be empowered or beautified by it, but most people are not; some just die of it. Figurations . . . draw a cartographic map of power-relations and thus can also help identify possible sites and strategies of resistance. (Braidotti 2002, 3)

According to this definition, a figuration cannot be understood in isolation from current societal power relations and the position of the subject within them. But, at the same time, it can constitute a site of resistance, and here the visionary aspect of the notion comes into play. Within Braidotti’s framework, the subject is not a mere victim of the way ze is positioned. Ze has agency; ze can think, imagine, act, and resist in order to change hir situation. All this means that a figuration includes a palpable and literal moment of here and now positioning. But, on the other hand, it is also a figuratively formed vision encompassing the subject’s process of intellectual, emotional and bodily change towards something other than a status quo. Braidotti characterises the figuration as a “political fiction” (Braidotti 2002, 7); or, to speak with another feminist theorist of figurations, Donna Haraway, we can describe figurations as phenomena balancing on the boundary between fact and fiction, between lived social reality and (science) fiction (Haraway 1991, 149). According to Haraway, the balancing act of figurations points us in the direction of an “imagined elsewhere” (Haraway 1992, 295); but, in so doing, it influences the ways in which we think about our here and now situation. Both Braidotti and Haraway emphasise that figurations involve a continuous feedback between the lived reality of the here and now and imagined alternatives.

Worlding Another notion which I suggest is a fruitful conceptual tool for imagining the future is the notion of worlding—or “world making,” i.e. the idea that the world (and ontological assumptions about the way it is built) is not just given, but constructed along the lines of different epistemologies. Worlding is part of Martin Heidegger’s conceptualization of the world as picture (Heidegger 1976), which describes how modernity changes the image of the world epistemologically, making it into a picture from which

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the human subject can stand apart, look at and thereby control, instead of being unavoidably immersed in it. According to Heidegger, this modern reconstruction of the world as picture has dire consequences, leading to the modern technocratic (and capitalist) instrumentalization and exploitation of the world as an object and resource for human endeavours. As can be seen, for example, in the context of the University of California’s Worlding Project (Wilson and Connery 2007), Heidegger’s critical worlding concept, among others, has been recycled (and rethought) by critical cultural studies scholars, who use it as an alternative to neoliberal and capitalist framings of globalization as well as to methodological nationalism. The worlding concept has also been interpellated by postcolonial cultural critic Gayatry Spivak (1985) in a re-reading of classic novels from feminist canons, such as British novelist Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Spivak shows how their worldings (here: literary universes) rested on colonialist grounds and ideas about white supremacy, even though colonial relations were not the explicit theme of the novels. However, in the context of this chapter, it is the more futuristic feminist versions of the worlding notion that are particularly important. These are primarily attached to feminist cultural readings of science fiction, and to feminist posthuman studies, with Donna Haraway’s work as a point of convergence. In discussions of feminist science fiction, the worlding concept becomes a tool to analyse literary universes which, in a feminist sense, embody utopian (or dystopian) dimensions. Haraway’s work includes many examples of readings of feminist science fiction novels whose literary worlds embody new and alternative social and environmental relations, such as those by Joanna Russ (1975) or Octavia Butler (1987). Haraway defines these novels as “cyborg writing” which is “about the power to survive [for those who are marked by otherness, and to do it], not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other” (Haraway 1991, 175). Later, Haraway explicitly defines worlding in a way which resonates closely with this, i.e. as “a permanent refusal of innocence and selfsatisfaction with one’s reasons and the invitation to speculate, imagine, feel, build something better” (Haraway 2008, 92). Here again, she relates to science fiction as a literary genre, within which she sees this refusal materialising in attempts to build better, alternative worlds that continue to critically question the here and now, and its exclusionary mechanisms. As part of this interpellation of feminist and queer recyclings of the worlding concept in a futuristic sense, I should also mention the US queer of colour scholar José Esteban Muñoz (1999), who links the worlding concept with his discussion of disidentification in queer of colour

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performance art. Muñoz’ point is to define this art as having a worldmaking power in a futuristic sense, which can be compared to the power Haraway finds in feminist science fiction. The acts of disidentification performed by the queer of colour performance artists discussed by Muñoz in their stage performances can be seen as ways of departing from heteronormative and whitenormative mainstream images and values, but without jumping straight to counterimages. Muñoz shows how these artists, by exploring heteronormative, white mainstreams in a queer, displacing way, establish an ironic distance from these mainstreams, while critically exposing them. Through ironic displacements, they also succeed in building something new, different and better.

Resonances between the concepts of figurations and worlding Even though the concepts of figurations and worlding are borrowed from somewhat different theoretical traditions, they nevertheless still resonate enough to use them in a complementary sense due to their postmodern and postconstructionist open-endedness. Neither of them is prescriptive in terms of actually generating a counter-image—an essentialised, “perfect” utopia, which ends up being hegemonic and exclusionary. Moreover, both concepts are defined as existing in between a real and problematic here and now and an alternative—more empowering, less hegemonic, less exclusionary, less normative, etc.,— future. It is precisely this openness and temporal in-betweenness which I suggest make the two concepts important as tools in the context of thinking about future workplaces. The idea is to encourage students to think in open-ended ways about their future workplace—i.e. to think about it as being something that, on the one hand, is rooted in a future not too different or distant from the here and now, but, on the other hand, includes open potential for change and transformation for the better.

Methods for creating scenarios of actualization: creative writing and theatrical acting While the concepts of figurations and worlding are intended as a framework that can help students to conceptualise and imagine their future workplace, we involve writing and theatrical acting as methods of inquiry when it comes to creating scenarios for the actualization of these workplaces. The goal is to work across the borders of academic and creative writing/performing in order to make space for ways of working within which the logics of academic argument and presentation go hand in

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hand with passion and embodied commitment. Or, in other words, to open up a space for thinking-feeling-embodying working modes along the lines of a Deleuze-inspired pedagogical approach which radically transgresses the conventional divide between rational thought and affective embodiment.

Writing as a method of inquiry First and foremost, the students are encouraged to make the figurations and worldings of their future workplace materialise in written scenarios, in which they specify the content of the work, the organisational format, the forms of internal and external workplace communication, a scene from a typical working day and a reflection on tensions/conflicted relations in the workplace. The scene is supposed to show the kind of work that the author hirself carries out in the workplace, the kinds of colleagues with whom ze collaborates, the kinds of discussion that take place and how the working environment is organised. Students are instructed to be as concrete as possible and include not only visual, but also other sensory details to make the description of the workplace scene as vivid as possible. This form of writing is inspired by, among others, US sociologist Laurel Richardson’s argument for writing as a method of inquiry in qualitative research (2000) as well as by a wider argument for including playfulness, serendipity, passion and the search for poetic truths in intersectional scholarly writing (Lykke 2014). The point here is that writing in the borderlands between the academic and the creative can mobilise the full potential of the performative and ontologising effects of language, using it not only to analyse and argue in a conventional academic sense, but also to create new subjectivities and worlds against the background of the analysis. The instructions for the workplace writing exercise take into account the idea that the workplace scenarios should be written as everyday utopias in Cooper’s (2014) sense. This means that the workplaces should be anchored in the messy quotidian and mundane world of the here and now, while also including utopian openings into more empowered subjectivities and better worlds, but without creating static and universalising blueprints. It is also part of the instructions that the workplace should not necessarily be an existing one, but that it should still be plausible five years from now, i.e. in a world which is likely to have somewhat changed, but not fundamentally. It is made clear to the students that the point of the exercise is not to write science fiction, in which everything can be totally different, but to actually grapple with present-day conditions.

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Theatrical acting as a method of inquiry In addition to the scenario writing, students are invited to explore and actualize imagined conflict situations in their future workplaces through theatrical acting. The method used is the revolutionary format developed by the Brazilian leftist theatre theorist, Augusto Boal: the theatre of the oppressed (Boal 1979). When Boal’s format is taken into the feminist classroom context to explore conflict situations in future workplaces, the most important aspect is, first of all, the ways in which the theatre form, forum theatre is supposed to deconstruct the dichotomy between actively performing actors and passively viewing spectators. Boal’s point is that everybody should be involved in decisions about the direction taken by the action on the stage. The theatre audience should be empowered, in a radically democratic sense, to contribute to decision-making on stage, as in society at large. Boal therefore invented the idea of transforming the spectators into so-called “spect-actors” (i.e. spectator-actors) through theatre formats in which individuals who are initially positioned in the role of spectator can shift position and become spect-actors (Boal 1979, xxi). One of the theatrical formats that Boal invented to make this transformation possible is the forum theatre. The forum theatre opens with a conflict situation that is intended to engage the audience with issues relevant to them. The situation is performed as roleplay in front of the audience. The first time this proceeds in a conventional way, with the audience observing from the outside, but unable to step onto the stage. But during ensuing replays, the audience is explicitly encouraged onto the stage to replace one or more actors. Through such interventions, they may perhaps change the course of events and, if possible, resolve the conflict, or at least provide ideas for different conflict resolutions than those embedded in the primary actors’ version of the play. In this way, audience members are transformed from onlookers, passively following the action on stage, to actor-subjects and shapers of the dramatic action. Boal pinpoints the format which facilitates this transformation as a “poetics of the oppressed” (Boal 1979, 98). Boal’s forum theatre format was originally designed to be used together with people in precarious conditions on the streets of Lima and Buenos Aires during the early 1970s, after his political activities had driven him into exile from his native Brazil. Transposed to the feminist classroom, forum theatre functions as a catalyst for discussions about conflicts and problems related to topics relevant to the class; in the case of the course Career Paths and Professional Communication, these include conflicts and problems that students imagine they might encounter when doing transformatory work in future workplaces.

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Such discussions could, in principle, also take place in a more conventional classroom format. However, what makes the forum theatre classroom different and more likely to inspire commitment than an ordinary one is that what is going on is not only discussion, but also the embodied intra-action of different characters that are given voice, body and gesture in roleplay invented by the students and teachers in the room. The participatory role which the students are invited to take up via this format develops an ethical obligation in a different and more committing way than the mere position of onlooker. Moreover, the format is important in terms of understanding what transformatory work may imply. By having the opportunity to try to change the roles and actions of certain characters in the play, the students gain an embodied thinking-feeling understanding of the dilemmas and conflicts discussed. It can be very intense to reflect on the question of which actor-position(s) in the conflicted space can best generate solutions, and then try out a certain solution by taking up the position of an actor in the roleplay. Moreover, forum theatre can also give students concrete experience of conflicts that cannot be solved due to structural oppression and conditions that lie outside the sphere of influence of the group of characters in the roleplay. This can also encourage reflections on other arenas and routes for transformatory action that might address the problem in question, rather than the one embodied in the particular roleplay.

Classroom materializations In this section, I shall briefly refer to some classroom examples from students’ papers and presentations. This will serve to clarify my points about writing and theatrical action as methods to create future workplace scenarios that can be used to reflect upon everyday utopian actualizations of conceptual frameworks and imaginations. The task for the students to accomplish in the classroom is, first of all, to link the overall conceptual frameworks of Gender Studies—Intersectionality and Change to imagination, and concretely imagine a future workplace along the lines described above (content, organisation, colleagues, communication, and conflict issues/tensions). This part of the learning process usually results in a diversity of committed workplace and job descriptions—for example, workplaces engaged in teaching, consulting or advocacy work on gender and intersectionally based violence, discrimination, unequal treatment, the intertwinement of racism, sexism and ableism, refugee issues, etc. Building organisations for norm-critical sex education and media-related workplaces such as online magazines, or blogs on

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gender and intersectionality issues, are also among the suggestions, and so is entering into a university career as a PhD student or teacher of gender and intersectionality issues. Some students invent new organisations for the purposes of the exercise, while others take their point of departure in existing workplaces they already know, imagining how these workplaces can be transformed through equality work that is sensitive to gender and intersectionality. Secondly, students are confronted with the task of being specific about how they imagine the actualization of the workplace five years from now. As described above, they are prompted to create a concrete scene, including characters, communication and sensory details, and to insert a conflict/tension. When creating the scene, students often include passionately narrativised everyday utopian elements. These can relate to the internal organisation of the workplace, and to the way in which it is based on nonhierarchical, democratic decision-making structures, grounded in strong friendship ties, built up as diversity-inclusive work environments with a good work/leisure balance. The utopian elements are also thought through in terms of what can be accomplished in the external relations of the workplace in question, regarding its overall goals of working for a more equal, democratic, socially and environmentally just society. This, too, is often articulated in forceful and passionate ways. Most often, the required dimension of conflict/tension is also vividly imagined and narrativised by many students. This might, for example, involve tensions related to internal disagreements, based on different feminist takes on particular issues; these could be tensions related to an environment that is indifferent or directly hostile to gender and intersectionality, whose prejudices have to be confronted; it might also involve economic problems (how can one make a living through the work which is carried out?). A focus that includes not only utopian moments, but also the dimension of conflict/tension is further strengthened by the forum theatre exercise, during which students are put into groups and required to collectively develop a roleplay that pivots around a conflict in a workplace situation where gender, intersectionality and change are at stake. They are then required to enact their play in front of the class, being prepared to let the spectators become spect-actors, i.e. enter the play from the point of view of one of its characters and try to change the course of events from there. Almost always, the creation, preparation, enactment and reenactment of the roleplays and the spect-actor interventions release a lot of productive intensity in the classroom. In the ensuing evaluations, students generally express their great appreciation and remark that they find the forum theatre format very thought-provoking. It seems as though the

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individual preparations through creative writing about plausible workplaces five years from now—with utopian aspects as well as moments of conflict—make up a very strong background for committed collaborative work in the forum theatre groups. The group work usually results in roleplays which are both theoretically/politically sophisticated and emotionally committed, and which bring out both core dilemmas and creative suggestions from spect-actors in terms of fostering change and overcoming stalemates. In one recent class, for example, a roleplay critically scrutinised the controversies over different feminist approaches that can occur in a shelter for women who have been submitted to genderbased violence, when a transwoman enters the stage to get protection. Another roleplay asked how to prevent a sensation-hunting journalist from publishing an interview with a feminist party leader under a misleading headline that distorted the whole interview. As teachers, we emphasise that the point of the classroom tasks is not to map out all possible utopian and conflicted dimensions, but rather to be very concrete and specific about some utopian moments and some conflicts/tensions. This pedagogical approach is based on the assumption, which is embedded in the guiding concepts of figurations and worlding that the aim is to engage the students in embodied thinking-feeling processes about their future careers and not just to give them an intellectual exercise in terms of identifying job opportunities on the neoliberal job market.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have discussed a generic skill—the ability to develop critical social fantasy and to work professionally for change—which I consider to be important in all kinds of studies, embodying knowledge production in transition from social movements committed to a more socially and environmentally just, equal and democratic society, to academic courses in universities. As my case study, I have used a master’s programme: Gender Studies—Intersectionality and Change, and in particular the course Career Paths and Professional Communication, which is cast as the programme’s arena for thinking about future workplaces. I have described what it means to teach this generic skill through a reflection on the conceptual frameworks forming the background against which the course is constructed. I have shown how feminist conceptual tools, such as the concepts of figurations and worlding, as well as transgressive methods such as creative writing and theatrical acting, can be used to encourage learning processes built on embodied thinking-feeling.

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I consider such learning processes to be crucial when it comes to this particular generic skill, which is intended to help both students and teachers to navigate between utopian thought and messy here-and-now conditions. However, even though I consider embodied thinking-feeling processes to be central in this context, I do not intend to canonise the particular conceptual and methodological framework of this course. Instead, it is meant to serve as an example, introduced here in order to make a more general point. Nevertheless, it is my hope that the specifics presented here can be inspirational for other teachers and students who want to set up classroom arenas for exploring how to navigate between neoliberal conditions and feminist utopias.

Bibliography Armstrong, Ann Elizabeth, and Kathleen Juhl. 2007. Radical Acts. Theatre and Feminist Pedagogies of Change. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Boal, Augusto. 1979. Theatre of the Oppressed. Translated from Spanish by Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride and Emily Fryer. London: Pluto Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 1994. Nomadic Subjects. Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. —. 2002. Metamorphoses. Towards a Materialist Theory of Be-coming. Cambridge: Polity. Bromseth, Janne, and Frida Darj, eds. 2010. Normkritisk pedagogik. Makt, lärande och strategier för förändring. Uppsala: Uppsala University, Centre for Gender Research. Brontë, Charlotte. 1847. Jane Eyre. London: Smith, Elder & Co. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter. On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” London, New York: Routledge. Butler, Octavia E. 1987. Dawn. New York: Warner. Combahee River Collective. 1977. A Black Feminist Statement. Reprint: Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott and Barbara Smith: All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave. Black Women’s Studies. New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York 1982: 13–22. Cooper, Davina. 2014. Everyday Utopias. The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces. Durham, London: Duke University Press. Freire, Paulo. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.

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Griffin, Gabriele, ed. 2005. Doing Women’s Studies. Employment Opportunities, Personal Impacts and Social Consequences. London: ZED. Haraway, Donna. 1991. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs and Women. The Reinvention of Nature, 149–181. London: Free Association Books. —. 1992. “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others.” Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula A. Treichler, 295–337. New York, London: Routledge. —. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Heidegger, Martin. [1938] 1976. “The Age of the World View.” Translated from German by Marjorie Grene. Boundary 4 (2): 340–355. hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. London: Routledge. —. 2003. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. New York: Routledge. Kumashiro, Kevin. 2002. Troubling Education: Queer Activism and Antioppressive Education. New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Levitas, Ruth. 2013. Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society. London: Palgrave. Lundberg, Anna, and Ann Werner. 2015. Gender Studies, Education and Pedagogy. Swedish Secretariat for Gender Research. Accessed June 2, 2015. http://genus.gu.se/digitalAssets/1470/1470887_edu-ped_web.pdf Lykke, Nina. 2010. Feminist Studies: A Guide to Intersectional Theories, Methodologies and Writing. New York: Routledge. —, ed. 2014. Writing Academic Texts Differently. Intersectional Feminist Methodologies and the Playful Art of Writing. New York: Routledge. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. [1848] 2004. Manifesto of the Communist Party. Translated by S. Moore. Marxists Internet Archive. Accessed on March 27, 2016. Muñoz, José Esteban. 1999. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Piercy, Marge. 1976. Woman on the Edge of Time. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Richardson, Laurel. 2000. “Writing as a Method of Inquiry.” In Handbook of Qualitative Research, edited by Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, 923–948. London: Sage.

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Russ, Joanna. 1975. The Female Man. New York: Bantam Books. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. Touching Feeling. Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Solanas, Valerie. 1967. SCUM Manifesto. New York: Olympia Press. Spivak, Gayatri. 1985. “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” Critical Inquiry, 12 (1): 243–261. Wilson, Rob, and Christopher L. Connery, eds. 2007. The Worlding Project. Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization. Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books. Accessed March 27, 2016. http://www.english.hku.hk/courses/WorldingPacificHKU2011/Worldi ng_Project_%5Blo-res%5D.pdf.

CONTRIBUTORS

Olga CielemĊcka is a postdoctoral researcher at “The Seed Box. A Miastra-Formas Environmental Humanities Collaboratory” at the Unit of Gender Studies, Department of Thematic Studies, Linköping University. She holds a PhD in philosophy from Warsaw University in Poland. She was a research assistant at the Wirth Institute at the University of Alberta in Canada, and a visiting researcher at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. She brings together research within the domains of contemporary philosophy, feminist theory, and posthumanism, in an effort to re-think the concepts of the subject, community, and collaboration in the times of advanced capitalism and environmental change. Her articles have been published in Women: A Cultural Review and Somatechnics. Wera Grahn is associate professor (docent) and senior lecturer at the Unit of Gender Studies, Department of Thematic Studies, Linköping University. Her academic background is based in Gender Studies, ethnology, and theory and history of science, and she has a BA in journalism. She has a broad empirical interest in the field of cultural heritage, ranging from museums to monuments, historical sites, places and landscapes. In her research, particular focus is given to gender perspectives, especially intersectionality. Her publications include amongst others: Identifying Heritage Values in Local Communities (2011a), Intersectional Constructions and Cultural Heritage Management (2011b), Fragmentated or Represent-tative? Construction of Cultural Heritage Values along Akerselva in Oslo (2010), Cultural Heritage in the Making (2009), and Gender Constructions and Museums. A Handbook (2007). Line Henriksen has a PhD in Gender Studies from the Unit of Gender Studies at Linköping University. Her research interests include hauntology, monster theory, feminist theory, Internet story-telling and creative writing. Her work has appeared in Women & Performance, The Ashgate Research Companion to Paranormal Cultures and the Somatechnics Journal. Her fiction has appeared in, among others, The

212

Contributors

Unlikely Coulrophobia Remix, freeze frame fiction and Pankhearst: Wherever You Roam. Malou Juelskjær is associate professor in social psychology, Department of Education, Aarhus University, Copenhagen. Her research focuses on the shaping and governing of human subjects (in education), studied through post-structuralist, posthumanist and feminist materialist thinking. She is interested in how temporality, spatiality, materiality, and affectivity are productive forces in the constitution of subjectivities. Malou is an experienced qualitative researcher using diverse methodologies and art based research. Malou is currently working on two book projects on agential realist research practices and methodologies. Edyta Just is associate professor (docent) and coordinator of the InterGender Consortium and Research School in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at the Unit of Gender Studies, Department of Thematic Studies, Linköping University. She is also a co-chair of Atgender, The European Association for Gender Research, Education and Documentation and a cochair of the strand Feminist Pedagogies, Didactics and Education in the research field of Feminist Studies and Education of GEXcel International Collegium for Advanced Transdisciplinary Gender Studies. She holds degrees in Political Science (MA) from the University of Lodz, Poland and Gender Studies (PhD) from Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Her field of expertise includes Gender Studies, pedagogy, philosophy, cultural studies of science and technology and in particular of neuroscience. Erika Kvistad has a PhD in English literature from the University of York, and is a senior lecturer in English at the University of Oslo. She writes on the Victorian period, with a particular focus on Charlotte Brontë; sex and power dynamics in literature; and horror writing. Her teaching and supervision interests include popular culture, feminism, sexuality, horror, and the digital humanities. She is currently co-editing “Monstrous Encounters: Nordic Perspectives on Monsters and the Monstrous”, a special issue of Women, Gender & Research. Anna Lundberg is associate professor and lecturer at the Unit of Gender Studies, Department of Thematic Studies, Linköping University, Sweden. Her main field of expertise is feminist and intersectional cultural analysis and politics. Together with Ann Werner, she has written and edited a range of texts and volumes discussing Gender Studies education, in terms of design, content, theory and method, but also from a social and cultural

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perspective. Lundberg’s most recent research projects are based on a) feminist interactive action research, focusing on intersectional negotiations over meaning in theatre for children and youth, and b) exploring the concept of intersectionality through the method of transversal dialogues. Nina Lykke, Professor Em, Gender Studies, Linköping University, Sweden, is co-director of GEXcel International Collegium for Advanced Transdisciplinary Gender Studies as well as scientific leader of the Swedish-International Research School, InterGender. She has published extensively within the areas of feminist theory, intersectionality studies, feminist cultural studies, and feminist technoscience studies, including Cosmodolphins (2000, with Mette Bryld), Bits of Life (2008, with Anneke Smelik), Feminist Studies (2010), Writing Academic Texts Differently (2014) and Assisted Reproduction Across Borders (2016, with Merete Lie). Her current research is a queerfeminist, autophenomenographic, and poetic exploration of cancer cultures, death, and mourning (Queer Widowhood. Lambda Nordica. 2015: 4) and critical feminist studies of whiteness and feminist postsocialism. Sara Orning has a PhD in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and is currently on leave from her senior lecturer position at the University of Oslo to be a postdoctoral fellow at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She is also one of the editors of the Norwegian Journal of Gender Studies. Her academic interests, both in writing and teaching, span feminist theory, monster studies, animal studies, and disability studies. She has forthcoming publications on animal-human hybridity in art, and embodied film theory. Olga Plakhotnik is a doctoral researcher at the Open University (UK) and a Docent in the Philosophy Department of the National Aerospace University (Kharkiv, Ukraine). Alongside with the longstanding passionate interest in the topic of anti-oppressive pedagogies, her current research interests relate to feminist studies and queer theorising. She focuses on epistemologies and knowledge economies, feminist and LGBT+ activism in Ukraine and in post-socialist societies, in general. She authored and co-authored articles and chapters on "gender and education" topic, queer pedagogies, gender politics and feminist activism in Ukraine. As an editor of "Feminist Critique: East European Journal of Feminist and Queer Studies", she is keen to contribute to seminal networking between academic and activist communities in Eastern Europe and internationally.

214

Contributors

Sal Renshaw is associate professor in the departments of Gender Equality and Social Justice and Religions and Cultures at Nipissing University in Northern Ontario, Canada. She holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of New South Wales, Australia and is the author of The Subject of Love: Hélène Cixous and the Feminine Divine (Manchester University Press, 2009). Her current research on the ethics of interdisciplinary scholarship and collaborative pedagogy draws especially on her experience as the Chair of the Gender Equality and Social Justice program for over ten years. Beatriz Revelles-Benavente is a postdoctoral researcher granted with a national funded scholarship named Juan de la Cierva at Universitat de Barcelona. In addition, she is the Spanish Management Committee of COST Action IS1306 and board member of Atgender, the non-profit European Association of Research, Pedagogy and Documentation in Gender Studies. Previously, she was a funded doctoral student at IN3, in the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. Her lines of research are concerned with communication and social media, feminist pedagogies, new materialist methodologies and contemporary literature. She has participated in national and regional researches in gender and ICT issues and has published in the European Journal of Women’s Studies, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, among others. Currently she is coediting a book with Ana González titled Teaching Gender: Feminist Pedagogy and Responsibility in Times of Political Crisis to be published by Routledge in April, 2017. Sigrid Schmitz is visiting professor for Gender and Science at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Coming from biology and with a venia legendi from the University of Marburg, she was university lecturer at the University of Freiburg, where she headed the Forum of Competence “Gender Studies in Computer and Natural Sciences” [gin], 2001–2009. She has held professorships of Gender Studies at the Universities of Vienna, Graz, Oldenburg and Berlin. Sigrid’s research and teaching have covered Feminist Science Technology Studies for 30 years, with a particular focus on brain research, neurocultures, body discourses in neoliberal societies, biopolitics, and feminist epistemologies. Her recent anthology is Gendered Neurocultures. Feminist and Queer Perspectives on Current brain Discourses (Vienna, 2014, together with Grit Höppner).

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Renée Valiquette has been a lecturer for nearly twelve years in the Gender Equality and Social Justice department at Nipissing University, in Northern Ontario, Canada. Renée’s research is focused in two areas. The first draws on French post-structuralism to better understand the root causes of environmental crises, while the second explores the potential of interdisciplinary education for social and environmental change. Ann Werner is associate professor and lecturer in Gender Studies at Södertörn University, Sweden. Her research interests are in the field of feminist cultural studies mainly focusing on music consumption and new media. Together with Anna Lundberg, she has written and edited books and articles discussing Gender Studies education, in terms of design, content, theory and method, as well as from a social and cultural perspective. Ann Werner’s latest publications are mainly concerned with music use and the Internet, discussing media and culture as well as feminist readings of new media technologies for music streaming.

INDEX

ableism, 37, 182, 205 academia, 31, 33, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 47, 157, 159, 165, 172, 173, 174, 192 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 126 aesthetic figures, 13, 16, 18, 20, 23 affect, 2, 3, 4, 5, 12, 13, 14, 17, 21, 62, 66, 69, 70, 71, 73, 81, 82, 141, 146, 152, 154, 158, 179, 180, 182, 184 affective capacity, 3, 6, 7, 132, 135, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, 146 affective critical thinking, 6, 132, 143 affective intensities, 71, 135, 137, 138, 139, 194 affective pedagogical capacity, 141 affective relations, 137, 143, 145, 146 relational affect, 135, 141, 142, 144, 145, 146 affectivity, 66, 69, 70, 71, 73, 76, 79, 85, 135, 151, 191, 212 affinities, 16, 21, 136, 141, 143 affirmative approach, 1, 3, 10, 11, 14, 121, 122, 124, 198 African-American literature, 141 agents for change, 192 Ahmed, Sara, 40, 41, 173, 177, 178, 179, 181, 183, 184 anti-oppressive classroom, 180, 184 anxiety, 33, 34, 35, 43, 50, 57, 62, 63, 123, 161, 178 Armstrong, Ann Elizabeth, 194 atmosphere, 57, 66, 73, 75, 178, 182 atmospheric encounters, 5, 67, 71, 81, 83

atmospheric quality, 79 Barad, Karen, 68, 69, 70, 81, 82, 134, 135, 136, 137, 140, 147, 153, 167 Berlant, Lauren, 173, 179, 180 bio-politics, 90, 100, 101 Boal, Augusto, 193, 204 body, 7, 31, 34, 36, 37, 38, 39, 66, 69, 70, 83, 90, 100, 101, 102, 105, 120, 138, 152, 153, 154, 155, 158, 159, 161, 162, 164, 165, 166, 167, 172, 182, 184, 199, 200, 205, 214 bodily experience, 39 body politics, 90, 100 marked bodies, 37 Braidotti, Rosi, 121, 122, 166, 198, 199, 200 Bromseth, Janne, 184, 193 Brontë, Charlotte, 201, 212 Butler, Judith, 38, 95, 97, 115, 119, 120, 160, 173, 183, 194 Butler, Octavia, 194, 201 CielemĊcka, Olga, 7, 84, 211 Clarke, Edward Hammond, 37 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 31 Combahee River Collective Statement, 195 communicative process, 131 affective communicative process, 6, 136 Communist Manifesto, 195 competence, 2, 5, 6, 7, 9, 17, 49, 52, 53, 57, 65, 67, 68, 73, 75, 76, 78, 81, 82, 83, 100, 171, 172, 173, 174, 177, 182, 183, 193, 195 concept, 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 12, 15, 21, 32, 48, 49, 66, 68, 69, 71, 73, 82,

218 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 103, 111, 113, 114, 119, 122, 123, 132, 133, 136, 152, 172, 173, 174, 176, 177, 179, 182, 183, 184, 199, 201, 213 conceptual becoming, 4, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 23, 24, 25, 26 conceptual personae, 13, 16, 19, 20, 23 contemporary literature, 6, 135, 136, 143, 214 Cooper, Davina, 195, 198, 203 creation of knowledge, 132, 134, 136, 138 creative thinking, 153, 159, 165 crisis, 3, 7, 178, 179, 180, 182 critical social fantasy, 3, 7, 191, 193, 198, 207 critical thinking, 6, 49, 59, 61, 75, 106, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 118, 120, 121, 124, 125, 127, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 158, 174, 178, 182 critique, 6, 7, 70, 80, 83, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 162, 165, 172, 177, 195, 198 aesthetic critique, 6, 113, 115 communicative critique, 6, 113, 115, 118, 123, 124 feminist critique, 116, 117, 118, 122, 124, 135 intersectional critique, 115, 118, 126, 192 negative critique, 6, 113, 114, 115, 120, 124 philosophical critique, 6, 113, 114, 115, 120 political critique, 6, 113, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119, 120, 124, 194 Cyborg Manifesto, 195

Index Danvers, Emily, 132, 133, 134, 138, 141 Darj, Frida, 193 Davis, Diane D., 122 Deleuze, Gilles, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 66, 69, 121, 126, 127, 134, 164, 199, 203 Descartes, René, 36, 167 difference, 1, 2, 9, 11, 12, 13, 17, 18, 25, 34, 49, 51, 54, 55, 62, 68, 96, 115, 118, 119, 122, 123, 124, 126, 153, 184, 199 disability, 37, 135, 213 disability theory, 38 discrimination, 52, 97, 113, 127, 177, 181, 205 disidentification, 192, 201 dispositif, 93, 94, 95, 96 diversive curiosity, 49, 50, 51, 58, 63 Eliot, George, 42 embodied experience, 8, 11, 43, 141, 143, 152, 205, 207, 208 embodiment, 2, 4, 12, 13, 16, 17, 22, 23, 24, 30, 34, 132, 158, 160, 165, 167, 184, 191, 193, 198, 199, 205 environmentality, 72, 73 epistemic curiosity, 49, 51, 58, 61, 63 ethics of knowledge, 136 everyday utopias, 198, 203 experimental thinking, 7, 165 Facebook, 6, 39, 131, 132, 135, 136, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147 failing, 30, 44, 63, 165 failure, 3, 4, 29, 31, 32, 43, 44, 160, 162, 166 feelings, 6, 39, 41, 69, 78, 121, 132, 135, 137, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 155, 178, 181, 182 Felski, Rita, 122, 124, 125

Theories of Affect and Concepts in Generic Skills Education: Adventurous Encounters feminism, 57, 71, 118, 122, 140, 212 feminist critique. See critique feminist manifesto, 195 feminist materialist pedagogies, 6, 85, 91, 106, 137 feminist pedagogies, 100, 105, 171, 175, 176, 178, 184, 214 feminist science fiction, 194, 195, 201, 202 Feminist Science Studies, 6, 96, 106, 107 feminist theory, 31, 38, 52, 117, 121, 131, 175, 191, 211, 213 feminist Utopia Studies, 195, 198 feminist utopias, 191, 194, 208 post-structuralist feminist discourse, 49, 52, 97 figurations, 8, 164, 192, 198, 199, 200, 202, 203, 207 Filipovic, Jill, 40, 41 Fornäs, Johan, 113, 114, 115, 118, 123 forum theatre, 204, 205, 206 Foucault, Michel, 38, 72, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 100, 101, 102, 159 Freire, Paulo, 175, 193 future workplace, 193, 197, 198, 202, 203, 204, 205, 207 Gaiman, Neil, 41 Game, Ann, 54, 55 Garton Ash, Timothy, 39 gender, 2, 9, 22, 38, 52, 62, 84, 89, 90, 96, 97, 107, 116, 117, 120, 126, 132, 134, 136, 141, 145, 147, 153, 155, 156, 166, 172, 174, 184, 192, 199, 205, 206, 211, 214 Gender and Intersectionality Studies, 8, 191 Gender Studies, 3, 6, 7, 8, 47, 52, 53, 54, 56, 111, 112, 113, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 124, 126, 127, 128, 173, 174, 175, 177, 178, 179, 182, 183,

219

185, 191, 192, 193, 195, 196, 197, 205, 207, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215 gender-studies professionals, 53, 192 generic competence, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, 16, 52, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70, 72, 73, 78, 82, 83, 84, 90, 172, 173, 174, 182, 183 generic skill, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 52, 57, 111, 132, 133, 134, 135, 191, 193, 207, 208 god-trick, 33 governance, 71, 73 governmentality, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 98, 99, 100, 101, 105, 106, 173 Gressgård, Randi, 37 Griffin, Gabriele, 131, 197 Grosz, Elizabeth, 121 Guattari, Félix, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 121, 126, 127, 134 Habermas, Jürgen, 38, 119 Haidt, Jonathan, 40 Halberstam, Judith, 31, 173, 184 Harari, Roberto, 34 Haraway, Donna, 31, 33, 70, 81, 100, 118, 134, 135, 136, 137, 153, 195, 200, 201, 202 Heidegger, Martin, 200, 201 Henriksen, Line, 4, 211 Herzogenrath, Bernd, 32, 33 heteronormative matrix, 96, 115, 119, 120 hooks, bell, 115, 117, 118, 156, 157, 175, 176, 178, 191, 193 immanent relation, 48, 56 immanent relationality, 4, 49, 55 interdisciplinary approach, 9, 48, 49, 55, 61, 131 intersectional turn, 117 intra-action, 5, 65, 67, 68, 136, 137, 138, 140, 147, 167, 205 Jacobi, Mary Putnam, 37, 38 Juelskjær, Malou, 5, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 84, 85, 212

220 Juhl, Kathleen, 194 Just, Edyta, 3, 11, 141, 145, 146, 174, 183, 184, 212 Kumashiro, Kevin, 179, 180, 184, 193 Kvistad, Erika, 4, 212 Lacan, Jacques, 34, 151 learning outcomes, 29, 30, 43, 44 Levitas, Ruth, 195 LGBT+, 182 literary curriculum, 139 literary studies, 115, 131, 132, 140, 142, 143, 145 Lloyd, Genevieve, 36 Lukianoff, Greg, 40 Lundberg, Anna, 6, 111, 112, 128, 197, 212, 213, 215 Lykke, Nina, 7, 8, 183, 194, 197, 198, 203, 213 master suppression techniques, 127 material-discursive practices, 69, 76, 140 Metcalfe, Andrew, 54, 55 microaggressions, 37, 162 monster, 4, 30, 31, 33, 35, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 211 Frankenstein’s monster, 41 monster pedagogy, 4, 30, 32, 43, 44 Monster Studies, 4, 31, 213 Morrison, Toni, 6, 131, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147 motivation, 66, 78, 172 Mouffe, Chantal, 115, 118, 119, 127 Muñoz, José Esteban, 201, 202 neoliberal politics, 160, 161, 162, 172, 174, 192, 201, 208 neoliberal society, 9, 48, 50, 51, 62, 192, 198 Niccolini, Alyssa, 134, 141 ontology, 54, 65, 66, 68, 81, 82, 83, 147 Orning, Sara, 4, 213 othering, 18, 21, 90, 98, 99, 178, 182

Index pedagogy, 3, 4, 9, 10, 32, 43, 48, 53, 54, 62, 66, 69, 71, 73, 74, 75, 81, 82, 83, 85, 136, 146, 157, 172, 175, 176, 178, 180, 182, 184, 191, 212, 214 affective pedagogy, 145, 146, 147 anti-oppressive pedagogies, 184, 193 Black Feminist pedagogies, 193 feminist pedagogies. See feminism monster pedagogy. See monster norm-critical pedagogy, 4, 32, 178, 184, 193, 205 pedagogical strategies, 48, 59, 140 pedagogies of the oppressed, 193 pedagogy of atmospheres, 74, 83 pedagogy of discomfort, 182 posthuman pedagogy, 65, 69, 73, 83 queer pedagogy, 7, 178, 184, 193 performativity, 38, 97, 160, 162, 183 Piercy, Marge, 194 Plakhotnik, Olga, 7 plane of composition, 4, 13, 14, 16, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23 plane of immanence, 13, 16, 19, 20, 21 Plato, 36, 37 polyphony, 115 postcolonial perspective, 90, 95, 98, 106 postcritical, the, 122, 124 posthuman framework, 5, 65, 67, 85 posthuman framing of generic competences, 82 posthuman framing of pedagogy and learning, 65, 71 power, 5, 6, 24, 26, 41, 57, 66, 67, 69, 74, 82, 83, 85, 90, 91, 92,

Theories of Affect and Concepts in Generic Skills Education: Adventurous Encounters 94, 95, 98, 101, 102, 104, 105, 114, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 126, 136, 137, 138, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 161, 163, 164, 165, 166, 175, 181, 184, 200, 201, 212 world-making power, 202 privilege, 85, 97, 117, 156, 157, 176, 177, 181, 182 psy-leadership, 66, 67, 71, 73, 76, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84 race, 2, 9, 22, 37, 38, 47, 97, 116, 117, 126, 132, 135, 136, 141, 145, 153, 156, 172, 177 racism, 6, 37, 52, 89, 90, 95, 98, 99, 100, 103, 105, 145, 176, 181, 194, 205 Renshaw, Sal, 4, 214 reparative approach, 122, 123, 198 respond-ability, 134, 135, 141, 143 Revelles-Benavente, Beatriz, 6, 136, 137, 138, 139, 142, 167, 214 Richardson, Laurel, 194, 203 Russ, Joanna, 194, 201 safe space, 140, 166, 176, 177, 181, 182, 183, 185 safety, 7, 24, 55, 62, 118, 171, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185 commitment to safety, 2 scenarios for the actualization, 198, 202, 203, 204, 205 Schmitz, Sigrid, 5, 96, 106, 107, 214 SCUM Manifesto, 195 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 122, 123, 124, 125, 179, 198 sensorium, 66, 67, 75, 80, 81, 82 sensory becoming, 4, 12, 13, 16, 17, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26 sexism, 6, 37, 90, 95, 98, 99, 100, 103, 104, 194, 205 Shildrick, Margrit, 31 Shulevitz, Judith, 40 silencing, 155, 157, 163, 165

221

social communication, 131 Social Networking Sites, 131, 132, 133, 139, 140, 141, 146 social transformation, 5, 51, 132, 137, 138, 146 spacetimemattering, 69 spect-actors, 204, 206, 207 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 201 strata, 4, 10, 14, 17, 18, 19, 24, 25, 26 Stryker, Susan, 42, 154, 155 stuck places, 78, 79 subjectification, 14, 18, 24, 95, 98, 159 teaching, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 26, 29, 30, 32, 38, 39, 43, 48, 56, 57, 59, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 75, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 100, 111, 115, 131, 134, 135, 136, 138, 141, 143, 146, 147, 152, 153, 155, 157, 158, 160, 162, 163, 166, 171, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 181, 184, 191, 192, 194, 195, 196, 205, 212, 213, 214 theatres of the oppressed, 193, 204 theatrical acting as a method of inquiry, 8, 202, 204, 205, 207 triangle of activism, theory and professionalism, 196, 197, 198 trigger warnings, 31, 40, 41, 42, 177 Trojan horse pedagogy, 4, 48, 50, 51, 53, 57, 59 Truth, Sojourner, 116, 117 unpredictability, 30, 31 Valiquette, Renée, 4, 215 Vesalius, Andreas, 38 void, 17, 22, 31, 33, 34, 35 vulnerability, 31, 32, 43, 44, 78, 80, 81, 154, 163, 167, 178, 179 Werner, Ann, 6, 111, 112, 128, 197, 212, 215 wicked problems, 48, 49, 60, 62, 63 Woolf, Virginia, 27 workplace environments, 72

222 workplace scenarios, 203, 205 worlding, 8, 68, 84, 192, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 207 writer’s block, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35 writing, 8, 17, 20, 31, 32, 33, 35, 37,

Index 39, 41, 118, 125, 159, 192, 194, 198, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 207, 211, 212, 213 as a method of inquiry, 202, 203