The play of risk, affect, and the enterprising self in a fourth-grade classroom

Abstract

As a predominant discourse of the early twenty-first century, the new capitalism (and its companion cultural system, neoliberalism) privilege flexibility, risk, emotional intelligence, and the enterprising self. New capitalist discourses exert powerful and pervasive effects across all dimensions of human experience and activity from personal decision-making to family life to school to the workplace, and they encourage, even demand, that workers become individualized, self-actualized subjects. In this article, we discuss how new capitalist discourses affected talk and social interaction in one fourth-grade classroom. More specifically, we report on how the classroom teacher encouraged students to become more deeply aware of their affective investments in relation to themes in the books they read and to connect these investments to their everyday lives. We demonstrate further that this emphasis on affective investment involved high levels of risk for the students and positioned them as enterprising selves.

Keywords:

• new capitalism
• risk
• affect
• emotional intelligence
• identity