The ‘Affective Place-Making’ Practices of Girls at a High School in Cape Town, South Africa

Abstract

This article focuses on the affective place-making practices of girls at a private high school on the outskirts of Cape Town. The article responds to the question: How do high school girls' affects and social bodies contribute to their place-making practices and to the type of place they make of their school? Our focus is on understanding the affective, emotional, and interactional dimensions that constitute 5 girls' strategic interactions in the out-of-classroom spaces of their school. Drawing on theories of affect, the article is based on a 6-month ethnographic research study at Mount Valley High (pseudonym). We present 3 specific incidents from our data to illustrate each of the key dimensions that we believe relate to the girls' affective place-making practices. We develop the idea that spaces such as schools become places as a result of the interaction between the expressive institutional culture of the school, on the one hand, and the vigorous interaction of the students' engagement with each other in the various spaces of school, on the other. We present the 3 critical incidents to advance a conceptual argument about the link between affect and place-making in the light of the school's expressive culture. We argue that the girls in our study interpret the culture of their school and act in response to its discourses. They go on to make place in highly specific ways by recreating the school as a place through a combination of individual, group and strategic place-making practices, turning the school into a particular place.

Notes

1. We understand affect from a sociological perspective as an embodied process that takes place before thought and before emotion, but that influences thought and emotion, and as a result people's actions (Zembylas, 2007).

2. This article uses the pejorative apartheid-created racial categories black, colored, white and Indian (from the Indian sub-continent) in reference to South Africa's four race groups. However, using these terms makes us (the authors) uncomfortable. We hope that our analysis points to these labels as entirely socially constructed, understood in the contingent world of space, relation and other discursive processes. The term ‘charras' is a derogatory word in South Africa that refers to Indians. It is used here by Hannah somewhat inaccurately to racialize this situation.

3. The correct epithet would have been the highly derogatory word ‘kaffir’, which has historically been used to refer to black Africans in racist manner.