Affective enactments of class: attuning to events, practice, capacity

ABSTRACT

Based on empirical research with working-class students studying in Australian universities, this article frames class as a structuring relation, but also as a series of affective events, through which we emphasise capacities. Putting the concept of class in conversation with two analytics of affect, we show how class is a relational site of struggle in which subjectivities and socio-material arrangements come together to produce emergent yet patterned effects. Lines of inquiry are opened up that go beyond the reproduction of inequalities, which tends to command attention in customary critical class analysis. Class struggle is enacted via events of an affective-discursive-material kind that constrain and capacitate. While working-class identifications are normatively devalued, working-class students hold on to them, enacting classed subjectivities affirmatively. We suggest that expanding class analysis to include affective capacities illuminates new dimensions of class struggle.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• class
• events
• affective practice
• affective capacity
• identity

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the two reviewers and the Editor for their insightful comments on an earlier draft. Thanks also, to those who generously gave their time to participate in this research. We, both authors, acknowledge that we live and work on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri of the Kulin Nations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellowship, Melbourne Graduate School of Education .