Cult Stud of Sci Educ DOI 10.1007/s11422-014-9623-y
Making sense of the complex entanglement between emotion and pedagogy: contributions of the affective turn Michalinos Zembylas
Received: 7 July 2014 / Accepted: 7 July 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014
Abstract The purpose of this paper is to highlight three recent contributions of the affective turn: moving beyond the emotion/reason dichotomy; highlighting the politics of emotion and affect; and, strengthening the intersections of the psychic and the social. While these contributions are not necessarily paradigmatic of scholarship in the affective turn, they do highlight some important threads of thinking about affect theory in several fields of study, and thus they can be insightful in the context of science education as well. This discussion is motivated by the notion that science teaching and learning can benefit theoretically from these latest developments of affect theory. Although the question of why science teaching and learning has not paid so much attention to emotion and affect in the past is no less important, this paper will move past this in an effort to focus on the openings that are created for pedagogy in general. Keywords
Emotion Affect Pedagogy Affective turn Politics
O rjopo´1 sot paqo´mso1 a9qhqot ei9mai ma rtfgsg9 rei sg rtmeiruoqa9 atsot9 pot omola9fesai ‘affective turn’, sg rsqoug9 dgkadg9 pqo1 sa rtmairhg9 lasa jai so
Lead Editors: S. Ritchie and K. Tobin. This article draws on and expands material from the following papers: Theorizing ‘difficult knowledge’ in the aftermath of the ‘affective turn’: implications for curriculum and pedagogy in handling traumatic representations. Curriculum Inquiry (2014); Reinstating or disrupting the dichotomy of reason/emotion in higher education? A historicized approach. Invited keynote address at the Higher Education Close-Up Conference 6, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa (July 12, 2012). M. Zembylas (&) Open University of Cyprus, P. O. Box 12794, 2252 Latsia, Cyprus e-mail:
[email protected]
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‘airha9merhai’ pot paqasgqei9sai rsg bibkiocqaui9a sa seketsai9a vqo´mia. H rtfg9 sgrg atsg9 epijemsqx9 mesai re sqi9a jolbija9 fgsg9 lasa: sgm tpe9qbarg sot di9pokot rvg9 laso1 ‘rtmai9rhgla/kocijg9 ’, sgm e9luarg rsgm pokisijg9 sxm rtmairhgla9sxm jai sgm irvtqopoi9grg sxm diasolx9 m (intersections) lesant9 sot ‘wtvijot9 ’ (psychic) jai sot ‘joimxmijot9 ’ (social). Paqo´ko pot g rtmeiruoqa9 atsg9 sg1 rsqoug9 1 pqo1 sa rtmairhg9 lasa jai so ‘airha9merhai’ dem peqioqi9fesai edx9 , sa fgsg9 lasa atsa9 amadeijmt9 otm rglamsije91 rtmde9rei1 pot tpa9qvotm ama9lera re aqjesa9 cmxrsija9 amsijei9lema jai eqetmgsije91 peqiove91 pot arvokot9 msai le hexqi9a sot airha9merai jai sa rtmairhg9 lasa. Rtmepx9 1, g ama9ktrg sot1 edx9 lpoqei9 ma apobei9 aqjesa9 vqg9 rilg jai rso vx9 qo sg1 didajsijg9 1 sxm utrijx9 m epirsglx9 m. Apo´ lia opsijg9 cxmi9a, g rtmeiruoqa9 atsg9 lpoqei9 ma aposeke9rei rglei9o auesgqi9a1 cia amarsovarlo´ pa9mx rsi1 diepirsglomije91 rtfgsg9 rei1 pot diena9comsai cia sa rtmairhg9 lasa jai so airha9merhai. Am jai sa eqxsg9 lasa ciasi9 g didajsijg9 sxm utrijx9 m epirsglx9 m dem e9dxre so´rg rglari9a rsa rtmairhg9 lasa jai so airha9merhai le9vqi pqo´ruasa dem ei9mai kico´seqo rglamsija9, g rtfg9 sgrg edx9 ha epijemsqxhei9 rsa ‘amoi9clasa’ pot dgliotqcot9 msai le9ra apo´ atsg9 sgm pqoopsijg9 , idiai9seqa cia sgm paidacxcijg9 pqa9ng. H pqo´herg lot, rtmepx9 1, dem ei9mai ma pqobx9 re lia cemeakoci9a sxm rtrvesi9rexm ama9lera rsa rtmairhg9 lasa jai sgm paidacxcijg9 , ot9 se ma paqahe9rx lia emdekevg9 amarjo´pgrg sg1 hexqi9a1 sot airha9merhai, akka9 ma paqahe9rx ja9poie1 helekix9 dei1 ide9e1 pot ani9fotm sg1 pqorovg9 1 sxm lekesgsx9 m sg1 paidacxcijg9 1 hexqi9a1 jai pqa9ng1, amena9qsgsa apo´ so cmxrsijo´ amsijei9lemo le so opoi9o arvokot9 msai. I find the theme of this special issue provocative and certainly long overdue. Not only because science educators have often had a ‘difficult’ relationship with emotion and its place in science teaching and learning—to say the least!—but also because I find it interesting that the affective turn (Clough 2007) has significantly influenced thinking and scholarship in numerous other fields of study, yet not so much science education. The affective turn in the humanities and social sciences during the last two decades has made emotions and affects the object of scholarly inquiry in new ways, inspiring continuing efforts to rethink the interrelations between the psychic and the social and explore their implications in various aspects of social and political life (Cvetkovich 2012). Given that I have always argued that at the heart of pedagogy is the provocation of emotion and affect (e.g. Zembylas 2002, 2013a), it is valuable to consider how some ideas of the affective turn enrich our efforts to make sense of the complex entanglement between emotion and pedagogy. Although the focus of my discussion will not be science teaching and learning as such—not the least because my work has moved away from science education almost a decade ago—my intervention will hopefully offer some theoretical ideas that might be useful to science educators too. These ideas conceptualize emotion in both psychic and social terms, yet they do not disavow either the subject-matter value or the pedagogical concerns residing therein. In particular, the purpose of my discussion in this paper is to highlight three recent contributions of the affective turn: moving beyond the emotion/reason dichotomy; highlighting the politics of emotion and affect; and, strengthening the intersections of the psychic and the social. While these contributions are not necessarily paradigmatic of scholarship in the affective turn, they do highlight some important threads of thinking about affect theory in several fields of study, and thus I believe they can be insightful in the context of science education as well. In a sense, these three contributions serve as points of departure to reflect on current interdisciplinary conversations about affect and emotion (see
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also Rice 2008). My discussion is motivated by the notion that science teaching and learning can benefit theoretically from these latest developments of affect theory. Although the question of why science teaching and learning has not paid so much attention to emotion and affect in the past is no less important, I will move past this in an effort to focus on the openings that are created for pedagogy in general. My intention is less to create a genealogy of the links between emotion and pedagogy or to provide a thorough review of affect theory than to suggest some fundamental ideas about emotion and affect that deserve our attention as scholars of pedagogy, regardless of the subject-matter we are aligned to.
The affective turn The affective turn (Clough 2007) in the humanities and social sciences has developed some of the most innovative and productive theoretical ideas in recent years, bringing together psychoanalytically informed theories of subjectivity and subjection, theories of the body and embodiment, and political theories and critical analysis of affect and emotion. Although there are clearly different theoretical approaches in the affective turn—e.g. psychoanalysis, post-structuralist perspectives, theories of the body—there is a substantial turn to exploring the intersections between the social and the psychic, the cultural and the unconscious. The affective turn, then, marks a shift in thinking about these intersections, highlighting the interrelations of discourses and social and cultural forces on the one hand, and the human body and individually-experienced but historically situated emotions and affects, on the other. This growing category of scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences has been dubbed critical emotion studies (Seibel Trainor 2006), that is, studies which explore ‘‘the relationship between emotion and whatever it is that a particular discipline studies, from brain chemistry to teacher education to election results’’ (p. 645). A crucial distinction that is often made in the affective turn is that between ‘affect’ and ‘emotion’ (see also Zembylas 2007). For some scholars, in particular (e.g. Massumi 1996), emotion signals cultural constructs and conscious processes, whereas affect marks precognitive sensory experience, relations to surroundings, and generally the body’s capacity to act, to engage, to resist, and to connect. In general, I agree with those scholars (e.g. Cvetkovich 2012) who use affect in a generic sense. Affect, then, can be seen as a category that encompasses affect, emotion, and feeling and ‘‘includes impulses, desires, and feelings that get historically constructed in a range of ways’’ (Cvetkovich 2012, p. 4). Affects are always embedded in acts and practices; they are not psychological or mental processes, but they constitute an integral part of the practical activities with which bodies relate to other subjects and objects (Reckwitz 2012). Also, emotions can be defined in terms of both a social and a psychic dimension (Braunmu¨hl 2012). The distinction between affect and emotion makes sense if it enables the introduction of nuance into debates on our differential affiliations and reference points as well as their consequences (Hook 2011). At the same time, we ought to be careful not to establish a new dichotomy but rather look at this distinction as an opportunity to renew our theorization about the prospects of transformation and the changing entanglements of the social and the psychic. Indeed, a deeper exploration of the entanglements between the psychic and the social enriches our theoretical tools for making sense of the interrelations between emotion and pedagogy. The transition from paradigms of social constructivism to psychoanalytically informed and Foucault-inspired poststructuralist theorizations such as those conducted in postcolonial studies (Athanasiou, Hantzaroula and Yannakopoulos 2008) helps us reconsider the role of affect and emotion in historical, cultural, political and pedagogical
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processes. A symptom of this affective turn, as Athena Athanasiou et al. (2008, p. 8) argue ‘‘is the move from a strictly constructivist account of the body as a material substratum of ensuing social inscription to a more refined exploration of the ‘mattering’ of the body, whereby agency emerged as a dynamic force—at once cognitive, psychic, affective and sensual—of performative surprise’’. In the following parts of the article I will focus on three specific contributions of the affective turn that I consider valuable in re-framing the structures of our theoretical work on emotions and pedagogy: moving beyond the emotion/ reason dichotomy; highlighting the politics of emotion and affect and its implications; and, strengthening the intersections of the psychic and the social. Moving beyond the emotion/reason dichotomy Historically, the split between emotion and reason goes back to the Greeks (particularly Plato), although in fact, it was never as absolute as it is often presented in the literature. However, the division between emotion and reason was greatly sharpened during the Enlightenment period in the seventeenth century (particularly it can be traced to Descartes and Kant). Throughout Western philosophy during this time period, reason was redefined as a faculty uncontaminated by emotions. This positivist doctrine established the rise of modern science and stipulated that the truth could only be reached when humans were completely devoid of subjectivity and emotions. Within this tradition, a number of other distinctions were gradually made such as body/mind, nature/culture, public/private, men/ women, casting emotion, body and other related features on the losing side of the dualistic nature of modern thought. A shift to these dominant features of Western thinking has been gradually developed in the second half of the twentieth century; this shift has undermined rigid distinctions between ‘head’ and ‘heart’ in several disciplines. For example, work in neurobiology in the last few decades has done much to challenge the emotion/reason binary by showing that emotions are central to reason (Antonio Damasio’s work comes to mind here). Within this perspective, emotion is relocated from a hostile and distant position in the process of human cognition to a supportive and integral one: emotions are not disruptive of reason any more, but are considered to be mutually constitutive. Also, recent work in anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies has focused on emotions as multidimensional (in other words, as having thinking, feeling, and acting dimensions), as both cultural and embodied, as actions and practices that arise in power relationships. This idea implies that emotions are part of the relations and interactions between humans rather than an individual or internal phenomenon. In particular, the cultural studies scholar Sara Ahmed (2004) argues that emotions are not things or internal mental states, but rather emotions are relational. As she writes: ‘‘It is through emotions, or how we respond to objects and others, that surfaces or boundaries are made: the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ are shaped by, and even take the shape of, contact with others’’ (Ahmed 2004, p. 10). This notion of relationality emphasizes that emotions are understood—experientially and conceptually—in terms of how they are socio-spatially mediated and articulated rather than as entirely interiorized subjective mental states. As Ahmed explains: ‘‘Emotions do things, and they align individuals with communities—or bodily space with social space … Rather than seeing emotions as psychological dispositions, we need to consider how they work, in concrete and particular ways, to mediate the relationship between the psychic and the social’’ (2004, p. 119). It is important, then, to clarify the following idea: to argue that emotion needs to be included in education—either through emotional intelligence skills, emphasizing emotional management or through various therapeutic projects focusing on self-esteem, caring
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and well-being (Ecclestone and Hayes 2009)—is to assume that emotion is not already part of reason. When emotions are portrayed as a desirable supplement to rational processes in education, that position continues to assume the division of reason and emotion. This division does not recognize that systems of reason have been produced as the effects of culturally and historically specific power relations that always entail an array of human faculties. The emotions that are identified as aspects of the affective domain—e.g. trust, caring, safety—have also been constructed by historical power relations. To essentialise these affective aspects is to assume the universality and naturalness of emotions that are culturally and historically specific. For example, take the feeling of comfort: comfort has no universal applicability; there is no satisfactory basis on which to assume that an atmosphere that feels safe, welcoming and caring to one person will feel that way to another person (see e.g. Hooks 1994). More importantly, when people acknowledge their differences in anything but trivial ways, those differences can be expected to be precisely unfamiliar, and therefore likely to be uncomfortable and disconcerting. People who face systematic injustices daily generally recognize that feelings of trust and safety are not prerequisites of participation, but privileges endowed by existing hierarchies. Therefore, it is misguided to require a sense of caring or safety as a basis for community because these dimensions are neither universal nor natural. It is precisely then through this division of emotion/reason that emotions are disciplined (Boler 1999). This division is a way of setting the terms of debate by which it is possible to think and talk about emotions. To set the terms of the debate is to govern what emotions can and cannot be (e.g. do not express anger; do not question authority; do not resist those who have power). Emotional management and regulation is an integral part of reflexive work upon the self (Fendler 2003). Teachers and students, for example, are constantly encouraged to examine and work upon their emotions: to control them as well as express them, as the situation permits. These emotional rules are taught through different forms of emotional regulation in terms of what is considered ‘appropriate’ or not (Zembylas 2005a, 2011b). Consequently, the boundaries of emotions that are deemed appropriate (or not) should become available to critical scrutiny, and should make us wonder: Is an argument for emotional intelligence and emotional safety dependent perhaps on not noticing that these discourses and practices in education create certain exclusions and inclusions? At whose expense are these discourses and practices developed? What are the material consequences of normalization, especially in contexts in which people suffer from grave social injustices? What I want to suggest is to move beyond a reason/emotion binary to an analysis that recognises how emotions become sites of control as well as resistance. This task, then, entails a constant interrogation of the relationship between emotion and power as well as its implications at the micro- and macro-levels of education. Furthermore, the literature which suggests that there should be a turn to emotions in education, is equally problematic because once again it denies the capacity to be critical of the power relations that have shaped what is possible to think of as ‘emotion’. When the rational is divided from the non-rational in such an essentialist (ahistoric) way, the current construction of what rational is appears to be eternal, true, natural, monolithic, and—most importantly—unchangeable. This naturalization supports and reinforces the existing power hierarchies and the status quo of stereotypes about the role of emotion in education and the naı¨ve promotion of management models such as that of emotional intelligence. When rationality is historicized, however, it becomes apparent that there have been many and various meanings of the rational, and the emotional, throughout history. More importantly,
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perhaps, when the dichotomy is denaturalized, rationality loses its monolithic position of privilege, and other possibilities for ways of thinking become more readily available. Both of these tasks—that is, the interrogation of emotional norms and the denaturalisation of therapeutic cultures in education—contribute to what I call critical histories of emotions. Critical histories of emotions are accounts that recognize, critique and interrupt the ways in which emotions are taken to be as such. Critical histories of emotions are critical investigations that invoke emotions in a historicized sense and so emotions are not located in an individual or a personality but rather in a subject that is shaped by dominant discourses and ideologies. Such critical histories help us to see how power and its strategies are subtle and frequently invisible in everyday life interactions, yet they constitute a terrain of social control, struggle and resistance. Critical histories and the pedagogies that promote them have something important to offer here precisely because they assert that these issues must be placed at the heart of educational practices in education. The fundamental task is therefore not to teach young people how to feel about themselves, but rather to enable them to understand why they have certain feelings in a particular social and political setting; why, perhaps, they are not supposed to feel otherwise; and how to critically imagine conditions in which radical alternatives may be possible (Amsler 2011). Highlighting the politics of emotion and affect My work in science teaching and learning (e.g. Zembylas 2004a, b, 2005b) concentrated on unpacking the role of emotion in pedagogy through invoking how social, political, and cultural aspects are entangled with the experience of emotion in curriculum, teaching and learning. I critiqued the over-reliance on ‘psychic’ aspects to the detriment of ‘the social’ and so my effort focused on examining the discourses, institutions, and ‘technologies’ in curriculum and pedagogy that constitute emotion and affect, and how cultural formations (including science) shape and are shaped by certain ‘emotional regimes’. Also, I suggested that the dominance of scientific, biomedical and psychological discourses on emotion in education, and the demonization of emotion in critical inquiry, constituted a carefully invented absence of affect as a political force and intensity. Just as the formation of science necessitated purposeful boundaries and appropriate rationality rules to deal with nonscientific elements, so too did discourses on emotions in education, whose founding characteristics reproduced the necessity for boundaries and rules. Through carefully created omissions of the political implications of emotional responses to social injustice and inequality, one could see that a fabricated absence of the politics of emotions was crucial to the sense of a pure and unadulterated ‘critical’ or ‘scientific thinking.’ This situation was further complicated by the fact that the habit of ignoring the politics of emotions was understood to be an ‘objective’ gesture. In recent years, scholarship in critical emotion studies has challenged conventional oppositions between emotion and reason, or the psychic and the social, highlighting the complex relations among power, emotion, affect, and subjectivity. For example, Ahmed (2004) uses the term ‘affective economies’, and Leela Gandhi (2006) proposes the notion of ‘affective communities’ to describe how emotions bind subjects together into collectivities and thus theorize what the sociality of emotions and affects means in terms of historical changes and power configurations. These works show us that what is felt ‘‘is neither internally produced nor simply imposed on us from external ideological structures’’ (Rice 2008, p. 205), but rather this new scholarship theorizes that affects and emotions cannot be thought outside the complexities, reconfigurations and re-articulations of power, history and politics (Athanasiou et al. 2008). This scholarship raises new questions such as:
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How do affect and emotion create new types of subjects and new relations and encounters between those subjects in contexts of global injustice? What new pedagogical spaces or possibilities of knowledge, action and politics are generated by such relations and encounters? The theme of ‘politics of emotions’ in the context of teaching and learning focuses on the connection between emotional practices, sociability, bodies, and power. Paying attention to the politics of emotions in this context means analyzing and challenging the cultural and historical emotion norms with respect to what emotions are, how they are expressed, who gets to express them and under what circumstances. It is in this sense that I have consistently argued there is always something ‘political’ in which teachers and students are caught up as they relate emotionally to one another across classroom spaces, because power relations are unavoidable; there are always emotion norms caught up in subject-matter epistemologies and pedagogies, emotion discourses and emotional expressions in the classroom. My work in recent years has attempted to show how power relations work through specific articulations and movements of emotions that produce new affective and embodied connections (Zembylas 2011a, 2012, 2013b). The formation of particular affective economies in the classroom, for example, suggests that emotions do not reside in individuals but they circulate in relationships of difference. Such an argument clearly challenges the assumption that emotions are individual and private phenomena and supports the position that emotions and affects are political in the sense that power is an inextricable aspect of how bodies come together, move, and dwell. Affective economies may establish, assert, subvert or reinforce power differentials. Therefore, it is important to emphasize that emotions and affects play an important political role in enabling critical resistance to hegemonic emotional regimes. What the theme politics of emotion means for pedagogical practice, then, is that pedagogies in the context of any subject-matter teaching are inevitably ‘pedagogies of emotion’. For example, the lack or rejection of desire for empowerment and resistance to some knowledge regimes in the classroom indicates how pervasive some dominant pedagogies of affect and emotion are in schools and the society, that is, how some school, workplace and societal discourses and practices function in ways that sustain the forms and effects through which hegemony is lived and experienced; these dominant pedagogies of affect and emotion play undoubtedly a structural role in the constitution of subjectivities and in the justification of subjection (Worsham 2001). What is suggested here is that pedagogy’s rhetoric of affect needs to be demystified and the complexities of emotional knowledge have to be analyzed more deeply in the context of teaching and learning. As Lynn Worsham emphasizes, without a fundamental revision of our thinking about the emotional aspects of knowledge and its consequences, the radical potential of pedagogy to reconstitute the emotional connections of students and teachers may be compromised, in spite of our best intentions. This task requires a constant reconsideration of new pedagogical resources to enhance the potential of pedagogies such as critical pedagogies of emotion (Zembylas 2013a). I argue, therefore, that part of ‘demystifying’ critical pedagogy’s rhetoric of affect is delving deeper into understanding the implications when students and teachers carry strong emotions such as shame, guilt, resentment, nostalgia or loss. This requires a more nuanced understanding of the consequences of the emotional burden carried by students’ affective investments to particular ideologies, especially when the desire for empowerment and humanization seems to be rejected or eroded. A more nuanced understanding of critical pedagogy’s rhetoric of affect and its implications implies two important things: first, the recognition that the work of dominant pedagogies of emotion in society and in schools has
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a powerful negative impact on the affective struggle for empowerment and resistance (Worsham 2001). Failing to understand how students’ emotional attachments are strongly entangled with epistemological, cultural and historical circumstances and material conditions will undermine teachers’ pedagogical interventions. Second, as Worsham (2001) further states, there are many emotional manifestations of disempowerment and lack of resistance such as boredom, apathy, resentment, hatred, anger, nostalgia, sorrow, loss, shame, guilt and humiliation, and generally the ways those emotions are organized and practiced across differences of race, class, and gender. A form of critical pedagogy that does not apprehend its own limitations of the complex discourses and practices of emotion that are embedded in posttraumatic situations is less likely to acknowledge emotion as a crucial aspect of political struggle for change. Thus the desire for empowerment and resistance cannot be taken for granted as a ‘natural resource’ for critical pedagogy (Amsler 2011); rather, the affective tensions around issues of empowerment and resistance must be placed at the heart of critical pedagogy. Strengthening the intersections of the psychic and the social Finally, another critical issue that is highlighted by recent studies in the affective turn is the importance of finding constantly new ways to strengthen how psychic elements of relationality are entangled with historical, cultural, social and political norms and conventions. For example, this means that instead of arguing whether a person either buys into racist or nationalist beliefs wholesale or has them imposed wholesale, as Jenny Rice (2008) says characteristically, we are enabled to theorize affects and emotions as intersections of language, desire, power, bodies, social structures, subjectivity, materiality and trauma. To further explain this, Derek Hook (2011) offers an example that is worthy to be quoted in full: I may express myself in a discourse of non-racist, multi-cultural tolerance, I may well feel genuinely emotionally committed to such values – identifying with such ideal-ego values at a imaginary level – yet I might, nevertheless, experience a set of anxious, affective, bodily reactions in relation to the physical proximity of certain others. Such affective responses remain conditioned by a symbolic horizon, by a (pre-reflexive) backdrop of historical values, meanings, roles and similar symbolic designations. Affective force as such is never a ‘pure outside’. Although it exceeds the ‘gentrification’ of prevailing discursive norms and eludes full symbolic mediation, it remains nonetheless within an imaginary and symbolic frame, within the ambit of ongoing (if unsuccessful) attempts to domesticate its excessive, potentially traumatic quality with meaning, ‘identity’, with symbolic place and value. (p. 111) What is epistemologically and ontologically crucial to the affective turn, point out Athanasiou et al. (2008), reiterating Patricia Clough (2007), Hook (2011) and others, is the transition from one-sided paradigms (e.g. crude social constructivism) to both psychoanalytically informed theories and critical social and political theories. The turn to affect, then, points to a dynamism that recognizes bodily matters and their interrelations with political economies; this may be the most provocative and enduring contribution of the affective turn (Clough 2007) that has profound implications in our attempts to theorize emotion and pedagogy in the future and to think with some of the interventions and arguments of affect theory. Judith Butler (2004a, b, 2009) is one of those theorists who push us to reconsider the challenge that psychic elements pose to the prospects of ethical and political
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transformation and vice versa (see Zembylas 2009, 2014). Butler’s increasing turn to emotions and affectivity in recent years makes a useful contribution to bringing together psychoanalytic and sociopolitical perspectives. Butler’s work allows for the emergence of productive openings as well as for the consideration of closures that enable us to reconsider emotion and affect from a psycho-social perspective, while also exploring the potential promise of this renewed theorization for ethical and political transformation. In particular, Butler’s critical focus on psycho-social affect is an important resource for directing our attention to the social and political norms that are entangled with our everyday life, and especially how these norms and habits are perceived corporeally. Thus, novel insights and questions might be raised such as: What are the psycho-social difficulties that constrain the possibilities for learners’ ‘‘becoming otherwise’’ (Butler 2004b, p. 173) in the aftermath of difficult social, political and historical situations? What would it mean to efficiently take into account the social/cultural/political construction of non-verbally represented and non-conscious emotions (e.g. resentment, shame) and what would it take to destabilize the hegemonic psycho-social order of this entanglement? How can pedagogy and the curriculum get organized by teachers so that they move learners from affective dissonance to affective solidarity, without ending up reinstating empty empathy, pity or sentimentalism? To instill these transformative possibilities in pedagogy, argues Jonathan Jansen (2009), teachers need to recognize that classrooms are deeply divided places ‘‘where contending histories and rival lived experiences come embodied with indirect (and sometimes direct) knowledge into the same pedagogical space to create deeply complex challenges for teachers’’ (2009). Teachers and learners are implicated within the social, political and psychic narratives of a deeply troubled and unequal world and so the knowledge they carry requires them to critically engage with this knowledge and its psychic, social, and political consequences. As Jansen further explains: it is not simply the master narratives of the official curriculum or the controlling ideologies of state examinations or the capitalist interests of the textbook industry that are at stake in the critical classroom; it is also the people there, the bodies in the classroom, who carry knowledge within themselves that must be engaged, interrupted, and transformed. (p. 258) These bodies and the troubled knowledge they carry—as it is embedded in social structures and ideologies—constitute the starting point for an approach that combines psychic and socio-political elements. Our pedagogical approach then needs to move a step further and be attentive and cautious of the increased complexity that troubled knowledge adds to (already) discomforting learning spaces in the classroom. Similar to Dina Georgis and R. M. Kennedy’s (2009) proposition for a psychoanalytic pedagogy of emotions as a method of moving beyond the limits of detached rational critique, Jansen (2009) suggests a critical pedagogy that goes beyond the rational limits of critical social theory and pedagogy. As Worsham (2001) also points out, it is important to constantly question whether critical pedagogy or anti-racist pedagogy and critical race theory might (unwittingly) contribute to sustain hegemonic structures around class, race and gender by ignoring the complex affective implications of transformation and by simply attempting to change students’ rational understandings through replacing faith with reason and belief with knowledge. All in all, the affective turn signals the movement from privileging either psychic sociopolitical elements of emotion to exploring the changing cofunctioning of the political, the cultural and the psychic; from the presumptions of a dichotomy between an essentialized
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‘inter reality’ of the subject and an individual being socially determined entirely (or determined biologically) to engaging the complexity of changes that constitute the social, the cultural and the political, circulating through our bodies and subjectivities, yet irreducible to the individual, the personal or the psychological; from focusing on economies of production and consumption to exploring economies of affect in the domain of biopolitical control (see Athanasiou et al. 2008; Clough 2007). These contributions of the affective turn also enable us to theorize the psychic and the social as interrelated and create openings for a more powerful analysis of ethical and political transformation in pedagogical settings.
Conclusion: how could pedagogy studies benefit from affect studies? Rice (2008) notes that scholars across many disciplines and areas of study have begun to incorporate theories of affect into disciplinary questions and concerns. Pedagogy studies can also benefit from developments in the affective turn. It will be interesting to explore how pedagogy studies in different subject-matter areas take into consideration developments in the affective turn. I want to end by highlighting two ways with which pedagogy studies could benefit from affect studies. First, the affective turn has a significant impact on how we conceptualize the relationship between private and public sphere in understanding pedagogy. Increasing interest in the role of affects and emotions in psychoanalytic, historical, social and political terms makes it easier to explore issues such as: how emotions and affects shape and are shaped by particular educational policies and pedagogical practices in various settings; the production of certain emotional regimes and their consequences; the politics of affects inspired by critiques of the ‘normal’ and the consequences on psychic and bodily history and cultural memory in education. These issues push the boundaries of thinking about what pedagogy means in the context of multiple temporalities and historical changes in local and global power relations, (post)colonial processes, (post)national discourses and biopolitical arrangements (see Athanasiou et al. 2008). The theoretical tools from different approaches in the affective turn enrich our understanding of the possibilities of certain pedagogies functioning as transformative encounters and practices. Second, the affective turn raises new questions about pedagogy and its transformative possibilities: How can explorations of curriculum and pedagogy become strategic sites of ethical and political transformation that pay attention both to non-verbally articulated and embodied elements and to cultural norms that are perceived corporeally? How can pedagogy create possibilities to resignify emotional life in ways that continuously rework and unsettle affective attachments to particular bodies, discourses and practices? How do biopolitics emerge as a crucial feature of pedagogy in the making of modern individuals and communities imagined through the normativity of emotional bonds and solidified through the emotional power and performative force of identity work? These and numerous other questions help education scholars explore the multiple complexities of the entanglements between emotion and pedagogy, while pursuing the transformative possibilities emerging from this interrelation. All in all, theories of affect encourage educators complicate our thinking about pedagogy. In particular this article has argued how the entanglements between psychic and socio-political aspects in teaching and learning seriously reframe our conceptualization of pedagogy. Especially, if our goal, as educators, is to cultivate the tools and prospects for learners’ transformative encounters with emotion, then we need to embrace a wide-ranging analysis of emotion that exceeds the prioritization of either the psychic or the structural
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(socio-political and historical) elements. We need to find ways to avoid privileging one side over the other, creating pedagogical spaces in which each aspect of teaching and learning is taken into account and scrutinized so that learners can grapple with the complexities and uncertainties of how we make sense and relate to others’ emotional lives. In short, this paper has sketched some insights that scholars in pedagogy studies might gain from the affective turn. What I have suggested is the importance of recognizing that the affective turn enhances our vocabulary to theorize the psychosocial complexities that pedagogical work raises for teachers and learners. The attempt to theorize pedagogy in the aftermath of the affective turn may often be invoking the very dilemmas that are hoped to be resolved through this theorization. However, what remains is the (unanswered) question of what we can really learn from pedagogy through this endless spiral of ‘‘the subjection and subjectivation, resignification and subversion, and power and pleasure’’ (Athanasiou et al. 2008, p. 14). An important contribution of the affective turn is precisely this persistent commitment not to settle this question once and for all. In conclusion, the implications of this analysis entail making space for understanding pedagogy in more nuanced terms, a process enabled by ‘‘a pedagogy of strategic performance, in which teachers work to tactically position themselves as conduits of students’ affective responses’’ (Lindquist 2004, p. 189). What this means for pedagogical practice is that all pedagogies are essentially pedagogies of emotions that are inevitably implicated in the way that knowledge operates both as a provocation of transformation and as a way of structuring emotion and affect in a particular social and political context. This interpretation requires a constant reconsideration of new theoretical resources to enhance the potential of pedagogy. Science education as a field can benefit by reflecting on how these new theoretical resources redefine the pedagogical potential of science teaching and learning in ‘touching’ the lives of individuals to become not only more passionate but also more just and critical through science.
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Michalinos Zembylas is Associate Professor of Educational Theory and Curriculum Studies at the Open University of Cyprus. His research interests are in the areas of educational philosophy and curriculum theory, and his work focuses on exploring the role of emotion and affect in curriculum and pedagogy. He is particularly interested in how affective politics intersect with issues of social justice pedagogies, intercultural and peace education, and citizenship education. His upcoming book is entitled Emotion and traumatic conflict: Re-claiming healing in education (Oxford University Press, 2015).
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