Theorizing ‘affective infrastructure’ in education policy: articulating new political imaginaries for a more equitable future

ABSTRACT

This article explores how the concept of affective infrastructure might offer a productive vantage point from which to theorize the ways that affects condition education policy and politics in education. In particular, the article theorizes ‘affective infrastructure’ to discuss the potentialities that emerge in struggles to formulate and enact new political imaginaries for a more inclusive and equitable future in education. The analysis turns to recent literature in education policy in order to identify the extent to which the notion of ‘affective infrastructure’ is used, and emphasizes the political significance of ‘affective infrastructure’ in education policy. Finally, the article explicates a number of future research trajectories in education policy along two ‘sides’ of ‘affective infrastructure,’ namely, affects as products of infrastructures, and affective conditions as producers of infrastructures. It is argued that an affective infrastructural lens can offer new insights into education spaces, practices, and policies.

KEYWORDS:

• Affective infrastructure
• affects
• education policy
• infrastructural politics
• imaginary

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. In a paper that is considered by many as the inauguration of ‘infrastructure studies,’ Star and Ruhleder (1996, 113) define infrastructure as ‘a fundamentally relational concept.’ Challenging the common perception that infrastructure is something that is preexisting or something that is purely material or technical, Star and Ruhleder argue instead that infrastructure is ‘something that emerges for people in practice, connected to activities and structures. […] It becomes infrastructure in relation to organized practices’ (1996, 112–113). In other words, the notion of infrastructure-as-relation emphasizes both the social and material as equal, inseparable parts.

2. Needless to say, it is not implied here that ‘affects’ are studied independently from people. The two sides of infrastructures gesture to affects and emotions for people; people are part of a relational ontology that does not disavow their agency. In the next part of the paper, I discuss the branch of affect theory that drives my analysis in which I also emphasize the relational ontology of infrastructures.

3. It is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss the growing literature on affect and emotion in education. Perhaps it is interesting though to recognize that there is a much longer history stretching back to theorists such as Spinoza and Locke (whose theories have been influential in education and other fields). For a more detailed discussion of some aspects of this history, see McKenzie (2017), Sellar (2015), and Zembylas (2022).