Enacting affirmative ethics through autotheory: sense-making with affect during COVID-19

Abstract

This autotheoretical paper exploring a collaborative project we engaged in during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic (March–May 2020) is structured as two intertwined stories. The first, a series of autotheoretical vignettes, expresses our process of sense-making about affect as well as multiple affective productions that spurred learning, personal and relational growth, and becomings-otherwise. The second delves into posthuman methodology, autotheory, affect, and affirmative ethics. Together these highlight the ways that our collaborative work of attending to affect helped us enact an affirmative ethics by tapping into traumatic lived experiences of COVID-19, isolation, and academic work, and transforming them into knowledge-producing, connection-creating, hopeful encounters. These encounters gesture to ways that enacting affirmative ethics as a collaborative critical posthuman praxis can help us collectively thrive in neoliberal conditions.

Keywords:

• Affect
• critical posthumanism
• autotheory
• posthuman inquiry

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kathryn Strom

Kathryn (Katie) Strom, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Educational Leadership at California State University, East Bay. She employs critical, complex theories to study teacher and leadership development, as well as advocate for different ways of thinking in education more broadly, with broad goals of disrupting inequities for minoritized populations.

Tammy Mills

Tammy Mills, assistant professor at the University of Maine, draws from complex theories and self-study methodologies to study situated teacher learning broadly and help both preservice and practicing teachers understand the interaction among their geopolitical locations, socio-ethical imperatives, and the dynamic development of their teacher identities.