Ordinary affect and its powers: assembling pedagogies of response-ability

ABSTRACT

Defined as the power to increase or lessen the capacity to act, affect is purported to be pedagogy’s first lesson. In this article we explore the work of ordinary affects in relation to oppressive social norms with particular attention to race. Using feminist new materialist concepts, we trace the capacities of these affects as they play into two pedagogic encounters. We show how pedagogies of response-ability form through affective transmission and material practice. Race presents as an affective and material event that plays out differentially through bodies. Responsible pedagogy hinges on maintaining the ability of people in association with objects to respond to the learning possibilities that pedagogic encounters provide. Responsive to the humanand the non-human, pedagogies of responsibility and the affects that attend them matter on several fronts. They engender ethical subjectivity, unsettle dominant structures of power, and loosen the grip of the ontological privilege accorded the human.

KEYWORDS:

• Ordinary affect
• pedagogy
• response-ability
• subjectivity
• assemblage
• power

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. As Fox and Powell (2021, 21) explain, ‘this formulation references new materialist scholarship that has replaced separate and stand-alone categories of gender and race with “a thousand tiny sexes’ (Grosz, 1993), ‘tiny races’ (Saldanha 2006) and indeed ‘tiny intersections’ between these multiplicities (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2013)’.

2. In contrast with the more conventional term interaction where entities are thought to each have an independent existence, intra-action assumes that entities co-emerge or come into being together through encounter. They are always already differential and relational.

3. This article is one of four co-written publications whereby the authors diffract empirical material from different research projects using co-writing as a method to produce new lines of thinking with and through data. Based on previously published data, the first vignette extends research by the first author on the politics of affect (Mulcahy 2021).

4. Refer to Tiffany Singh’s website to view a full suite of photographs of the installation https://tiffanysingh.com/the-journey-of-a-million-miles-begin-with-one-step/.

5. The stories are published in the ARCC (2016) book, Beyond Refuge: Stories of Resettlement in Auckland.

6. Steven Hue’s soundscapes are available from https://stevenhue.bandcamp.com/releases

7. Noah’s contribution to the research conversation is not included as his age (6) meant he fell outside the range of our ‘participant inclusion criteria’. While he could not officially participate in the research, he did accompany his mother and brothers who did. He became an inextricable part of their experience of hSOTG and thus entered the research assemblage none-the-less.

8. Susannah is a pākehā New Zealander (primarily of European descent).

9. In (re)use of this term we draw on Thiele (2014), who in turn draws on Karen Barad and Bracha Ettinger.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the McCoy Seed Funding Grant, The University of Melbourne.