Affect theory and policy mobility: challenges and possibilities for critical policy research

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to a growing literature on policy mobilities by proposing that affect be considered in analyses of the movements and transformations of policy over time and space. In particular, collective affective conditions, the role of affect in terms of infrastructures and actors of policy apparatuses and the mediating influences of affective bodily encounters are discussed in relation to why and how policies move. The article suggests that policy mobilities research could be strengthened by further examining how affect is inherent in familiar considerations of policy actors and networks, and tools and infrastructures such as policy documents, meetings, and data, and their contributions to policy flows. In addition, encompassing affective atmospheres and structures of feeling, as well as affect in the specific relationships between people and with place, are indicated as important for the study of policy mobility and immobility, including in shaping policy uptake and resistance. Examples from educational research are used to elaborate these considerations of affect for policy mobilities and to suggest possible topical and methodological implications for critical policy research.

KEYWORDS:

• Policy mobilities
• education policy
• critical policy research
• affect
• emotion
• affect theory
• policy apparatuses

Acknowledgments

My gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers and to Alan Reid for their helpful reviews of the article, as well as to Kalervo Gulson and Colin Symes for editing the special issue on mobility and education. Thank you also to fellow panelists in a policy mobilities symposium at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting in Washington, DC in April 2016, where an early version of this paper was presented.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. While helpful at pointing to this complexity and offering heuristics for fuller analyses, terms such as ‘policy assemblage’ (Prince, 2010; Temenos & McCann, 2013) or ‘network’ (Ball, 2016; Peck & Theodore, 2015) may also convey a singularity – that there is ‘an’ assemblage that travels or ‘a’ network that surrounds the policy, the contours of which can be traced – versus relationships and mobilities that in fact exceed our capacity to ‘follow the policy’ (McCann & Ward, 2012a; Peck & Theodore, 2012).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marcia McKenzie

Dr. Marcia McKenzie is a professor in the Department of Educational Foundations and Director of the Sustainability Education Research Institute at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. She is Principal Investigator of the Sustainability and Education Policy Network (www.sepn.ca), and coauthor of Critical Education and Sociomaterial Practice: Narration, Place, and the Social (Peter Lang, 2016) and Place in Research: Theory, Methodology, and Methods (Routledge, 2015), and coeditor of Land Education: Rethinking Pedagogies of Place from Indigenous, Postcolonial, and Decolonizing Perspectives (Routledge, 2016) and Fields of Green: Restorying Culture, Environment, and Education (Hampton, 2009). Her interdisciplinary research focuses on social theory and education; education policy; critical education; climate change, environment, and sustainability education; place; and the politics of social science research.