Unsettling feelings in the classroom: scaffolding pedagogies of discomfort as part of decolonising human geography in higher education

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses the tension between the need to create spaces for unsettling feelings as part of a decolonisation of the curriculum in Higher Education, and the need to create a sense of safety in the classroom. Decolonising the curriculum, here, means exploring how histories of coloniality structure educational institutions, established canons, and socio-natural relations, and cultivating collective practices that move beyond oppressive patternings. As part of this process, as we find ourselves imbricated in the struggles of others and as our emotional grip on the world is unsettled, we – students and teachers alike – may find ourselves experiencing discomfort. This raises an important question, for it is clearly part of the responsibility of an educator to create spaces that feel “safe” for students, and do not induce or trigger trauma. Drawing on experiences in the university classroom and lecture halls, this paper develops the concept of “scaffolding” as the basis for an ethos for embracing discomfort pedagogically. The affordances of physical theatre, film, and visual culture are considered alongside particular tactics as ways to foster the transformation of “settled” fabrics of feeling in care-full ways.

KEYWORDS:

• Decoloniality
• embodiment
• emotion
• affect
• scaffolding

Introduction

Thinking about colonial history and geographies in the classroom is complicated and messy, not least for the complex emotions they stir by implicating us, as teachers and students, in oppressive systems (Boler & Zemblyas, 2003). How can we facilitate engagement with such unsettling feelings without fetishising them, and how can we elicit some necessary moments of discomfort with pedagogical care? As other papers in this special issue argue, understanding how emotion and affect are brought into play in different kinds of educational contexts reveals much about both what constitutes, effective learning and how subjectivity may be meaningfully transformed (Amsler, 2011; Zembylas, 2018a). However, choosing to spend time focusing on difficult feelings also risks cultivating disengagement, disillusionment, or division among students. To engage with this issue, Amsler (2011) draws on recent work by Megan Boler, Sara Motta, and Michalinos Zemblyas to elaborate what she – after Zembylas and Boler (2002) – refers to as “pedagogies of discomfort.” A pedagogy of discomfort engages explicitly with such questions by valuing emotional states that unsettle and challenge patterns of feeling that render oppression or racist ways of seeing either invisible or “normal.” However, such a pedagogy also seeks to structure the classroom through an ethos of care and responsiveness to support the safe navigation of such states in the classroom, and cultivate literacy around them. A pedagogy of discomfort is not about making everything uncomfortable, but about how to make it possible to experience and learn from discomfort productively and safely.

This paper builds on such work to explore how a pedagogy of discomfort might be scaffolded into the Human Geography curriculum in a Higher Education context, as part of broader concerns to “decolonise” the curriculum. Decolonising the curriculum, here, means exploring how histories of coloniality structure educational institutions, established canons, and socio-natural relations, and cultivating collective practices that move beyond oppressive patternings (Motta, 2014; Wekker et al., 2016). This is a continuous process because colonial power relations and ways of seeing persist long after the official dismantling of Empires or the granting of independence to formerly colonised nations. Within such a project, the term “pedagogy” references practical projects that have sought to address oppressive and power relations in the classroom across the past century precisely by engaging with it as a power-laden space where broader social relations can be perceived and reworked. In this article I recount the trajectory of the conversations among activists and academics in these terms, making clear the increasing emphasis placed on emotions and emotional work by those working to develop critical capacities in Higher Education, especially as feminist theory has entered dialogue with critical praxis.

To contribute to these conversations from my own pedagogical practice and experience, I develop the concept of “scaffolding,” which refers to the arts of teaching and learning that make it possible to experience discomfort either gradually, or in a way that does not result in sustained disengagement. The term might be used to capture any pedagogical context that requires the creation of “safe” spaces through a series of smaller steps – for example, supporting young people to re-enter education after periods of disengagement, especially where students feel very cautious of appearing weak or vulnerable Millner et al. (2006). Building on Lave & Wenger’s (1990) use of scaffolding, Patchett (2017; 2016) discusses craft and apprenticeship in these terms, emphasising that communities of practice provide vital social and material contexts for the transmission of skill, and that craft practices are “grown” (ibid,37) through gradual training and immersion, rather than being innate or suddenly acquired.  Others have used the term to explore the ways that critical thinking might be phased in (Wass et al., 2011); that students’ transition to Higher Education might be eased (Hultberg et al., 2008); or how curriculum content might be introduced. Examples of the latter often draw on the social psychologist Lev Vygotsky (e.g. Vygotsky, 1978), who uses the term to describe how children might be encouraged to enter zones of learning that are close to their current experience and skill-set, but offer progressive challenges (Berk & Winsler, 1995). My use of the term resonates with such examples, but I focus on the tools available to the Higher Education educator to scaffold an engagement with unsettling feelings, as part of decolonial pedagogies. I use the term “unsettling” here to signal explicitly both the personal discomfort of such emotional experiences, and their capacity to enable reflexivity about the role of “Settler” – which is to say colonial and neo-colonial – institutions, narratives and fabrics of feeling.

Scaffolding in teaching is therefore centrally concerned with acknowledging the inherently emotive and emotional aspects of critical and post-colonial education⁴, as with crafting spaces that are safe without being too safe – i.e. where nothing really changes. After setting the scene for this pedagogical question through literatures exploring geographies of emotion and affect in the contexts of decoloniality and critical education, I develop my concept of scaffolding through reference to two courses that I have (co-)curated at the University of Bristol. By staging a dialogue between theories and practices of pedagogical discomfort, I offer several tactics for navigating unsettling feelings as future decolonial pedagogical projects.

Radical pedagogies, emotion, and affect

The language of pedagogy generally refers to the arts of teaching in relation to learning, as applied to the structuring of learning environments and educational relationships. Within the social sciences the term has a more specific sense: for at least across the last fifty years, pedagogies have been explored in the context of “critical” or “radical” agendas for learning, which cultivate practices for transformative social change. Such agendas emerge against a backdrop of widespread acknowledgement of the “pedagogisation” of everyday life, wherein citizen subjectivities are increasingly formed and managed through an array of “educative” sites and practices (Watkins et al., 2015, p. 1). Critical pedagogies draw their educational philosophy from critical theory, especially as developed by the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School from the 1930s, where critique consisted in cultivating consciousness of the power relationships that structure social inequality, including an understanding of the ways that subjects are formed and managed (Geuss, 1981; Piccone, 1978). Such ideas also inspired radical educators and social movement thinkers, such as Freire (1970/1996) in Brazil, who combined adult literacy programmes with tactics to “read” unequal power relationships as part of wider social movements from the 1960s. In contexts marked by authoritarian suppression of dissent, this movement led to the creation of a collective vernacular for naming and transforming socially oppressive systems.

Such pedagogies cannot be seen as product of the European critical imagination, however. Crucially Freire’s work was also situated by the development of liberation theology – a bottom-up re-reading of the Judeao-Christian scriptures developed in the 1960s that broke with the idea that social authority could not be challenged because it was “God-given,” instead observing throughout the Bible an insurgent “preferential option of the poor.” Re-read through this perspective, the Christian gospels are seen to challenge authoritarianism and the oppression of the poor, invoking social action that transforms these conditions (Smith, 1991). These ideas led to the development of networks of lay actors, priests and clandestine study groups across Latin America and beyond through the 1970s and 1980s, which played central roles in revolutionary uprisings against oppressive regimes (Hammond, 1999). Over time such movements entered dialogue with other kinds of radical and autonomist praxis, such as those fomented by Indigenous resistance to neo-colonialism, leading to hybrid collectives (Motta, 2014).

The forms of naming and codifying social change that undergird critical/radical education – sometimes referred to as “popular education” – have, however, been subjected to considerable criticism. In particular, the notion of aspiring to a “true reading” of power relations has been lambasted for its epistemological arrogance. Following Gramsci and Marx, this idea implies the need to see through the veil of ideology, which keeps most actors, including the poor “duped.” Not only does this render critical theorists the guardians of true understanding, argued feminist thinkers and educators, but it also privileges rationality and reason as means to achieve this, downplaying other forms of knowing, such as feeling, intuition and emotion (Ellsworth, 1989). At the same time, Freire’s emphasis on class can be seen to downplay racialised, gendered and other forms of oppression (Zembylas, 2018c). Rather than debunk and abandon the ideas of critical pedagogy, however, such interventions proposed different ideas about how they worked, with notable commentators such as bell hooks, Patti Lather and Henry Giroux emphasising the importance of feeling in collective processes of reflecting on and naming forms of social oppression. The terminology of praxis remains central within these adaptations, referring to the capacity and know-how cultivated through cycles of theory and evaluation, that forms the basis to take action against oppression. Feminist reinterpretations of critical/radical pedagogies emphasise emotional literacy; a diversity of possible interpretations (rather than one true reading), and the importance of disagreement in the classroom (Amsler, 2011; Boler, 2004; Pedwell, 2008; Zembylas, 2018a).

Geographers and social scientists have, across the same period, emphasised emotional and affective dimensions of learning as being central to both effective learning (Watkins, 2011) and embedding social justice into learning (Askins, 2009; Streck, 2015). Emotions must, of course, also be seen as an important part of the repertoire of social movement practices more generally. Pointing to the role of body-emotion practices like the role of liturgy in the small groups that comprise liberation theology movements; the “mística” (a public, expressive dramatic performance drawing on Christian mysticism) central to the Brazilian Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST), and popular art in general, Streck (2015) emphasises that it is emotion, more than reason, that cultivates meaningful collective action, often via embodied forms of ritual (see also Hammond, 1999). Indeed, even the supposedly rational Freire (2000) chose words like lovingness and joy to describe dispositions conductive to conviviality and collective learning. This makes sense because in many cases the ritual aspects of such pedagogies, devised to build collective resistance, arise in the context of oppression – such as the violence of militarised capitalist coloniality in Colombia (Motta, 2014). On the other hand, as Wijnendaele (2014) points out from her action research with youth gang members in El Salvador, emotions must be understood as central to the reproduction of cultures of violence as well as cultures of transformation. The political potential of pedagogical interventions is anchored within specific normative contexts – which is to say, the scenarios where specific affective habits are acquired – which are in turn constituted through corporeal and affective performances (see also Zembylas, 2018a).

As these examples begin to show, the conceptual vocabulary for describing the changing terrain of embodied practices has multiplied as the social scientific literatures responding to them have burgeoned, leading to some increasing blurriness. While feminist theories and collectives had a significant influence on drawing attention to the role of embodied experience and emotions in learning, especially during the 1990s, other philosophies have also impacted disciplines like human geography, influencing how we understand the relationship between individuals and collectives; pre-cognitive and post-cognitive intensities in the body. Following these shifts (see, for example, Dawney, 2011; Pile, 2010; Sharp, 2009), within this paper, when I use the language of emotion, I refer to aspects of embodied feeling that are experienced in a personal register, often implicating an individual’s own biography and history of experience. By affect, meanwhile, I refer to aspects of transpersonal feeling, which is experienced in the form of embodied intensities before cognitive thought. Developed in geographical and philosophical thought in relation to contemporary philosophers of embodiment, space and the arts/film, such as Gilles Deleuze, Brian Massumi, and historical proponents of affect and corporeal embodiment such as Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), affect has become a philosophical terrain allowing geographers and social theorists to think through the ways that what we feel is configured in pre-personal, pre-cognitive and relational ways (Dewsbury, 2003; Pile, 2010). Thought through affect, what makes pedagogical interventions potentially transformative is their capacity to (re)make everyday life at the level of the body, and to interrupt the way that everyday life is constantly being composed at the level of the body – not the fact of feeling nor the personal intensity of emotion. This helps constellate, out of oppressive conditions, what Cvetkovich (2012) refers to as “public feelings projects.” Cvetkovich points out that what sustains oppression – which also takes place on an affective level (see also Boler, 2004; Zembylas, 2018b) – is a repetition of patterns in the body – a form of entrainment – that comes to frame our feelings in advance. Over time this leaves no room for variation in terms of our intersubjective relationships. “Hopeful” pedagogies are no more and no less emotional or affective in this sense: what is different about them is that, through the way they bring us into relationship with excessive feelings (such as discomfort), they interrupt the usual ways that experiences is framed to us, and make it possible for us to experience – even if momentarily – the world a little freshly.

This observation is important, because emotions are involved not only in radical pedagogy, but in the structuring conditions of neoliberal capitalism, neo-colonialism, and nationalism. Concepts such as emotional engineering or technology of the self point to an understanding of emotions as what Streck (2015) terms “biocultural processes” that, through their malleability, can be employed equally in the service of production, consumption or solidarity. It is for this reason that pedagogues like Boler and Zemblyas (2003) emphasise the importance of discomfort within the repertoire of critical and radical pedagogies, as in transformational public feeling projects. Namely, emotional discomfort provides important indicators about where limit-points are in terms of feelings of belonging between groups, and where very deeply held affective scripts are being interrupted or challenged. When they write about processes of transformation in the classroom, Boler and Zemblyas (2003) use the language of emotion in dialogue with that of affect, being careful to emphasise that our experience of personal, even intense emotions often come framed to us in advance. We might be encouraged to be sympathetic, compassionate, or “soft” in some contexts, but believe we must be “strong” or “loyal” in others. This may be understood as a kind of affective (collective, pre-cognitive) training. In this way, the affective habits and repetition that frame our everyday come to illuminate and obscure our (personal, individual) emotional responses – except where the latter form a kind of interruption that open the former with a fresh question mark. In such instances, the interruption provided by an emotion like discomfort (for example), exceeds the affective training or “fabric” of feeling that wants to frame it, and so structures a way in to repeating the same scripts differently, and potentially, to transforming them.

With these pedagogues of affect and emotion, along with McDermott (2014), I therefore seek to ask: what does it mean to remain in spaces of discomfort, or what can discomfort do? In this paper, I do not mean to contribute to theorising the relations between affect, emotion, and embodiment, but to draw on these ideas to flesh out a pedagogy of discomfort specific to a decolonial curriculum. The terminology of these wider ideas do, however, inform the way I write about these experiences and the ways that they land in the body, especially via atmospheres, events, and materials that are not only cognitive, and never only individual (Dewsbury, 2015; Lapworth, 2019). To talk about affect in educational spaces is to address aspects of teaching and learning that invoke pre-personal intensities laid down in bodies prior to individual experience.

The idea of a “fabric of feeling” I have used here to describe the hinge between emotion and affect also gestures toward the way that affective responses are structured and trained through time – for affect is not only involved in moments of interruption in the everyday, but in disciplined and engrained ways of thinking and feeling. Yet, precisely by structuring everyday habit, fabrics of feeling also provide the material for experimenting, or folding out, into new ways of knowing the world (Dewsbury, 2015). When I refer, in my practice, to moments of “affective interruption” I mean the events that happen suddenly and bring new information into a situation via an unexpected feeling that resonates between more than one body in the room. Drawing in turn on feminist engagements with embodied experience, more recent engagements with affect and space suggest that such openings can be fostered and learned from through practices like teaching (Pile, 2010). In the following section I explore how such affective interruptions can be scaffolded into a pedagogy of discomfort in the context of decolonising the curriculum. With this I aim to encourage conversations about teaching that seek to unsettle dominant narratives and fabrics of feeling, in a way that also feels safe for individuals.

Scaffolding pedagogies of discomfort with care

A pedagogy of discomfort is different, then, from bringing emotion into the classroom (Boler & Zemblyas, 2003). Indeed, from a decolonial perspective it is important to notice that social and educational life are always composed through affective patternings – or fabrics of feeling – that usually keep anything from substantially changing. For example, Zembylas (2018b) critiques the dominant ways that human rights are talked about and talked, precisely for the ways they lean on an overt manipulation of sentimental atmospheres and emotions in public spheres. Pedwell (2008) makes a similar point about empathy, which seems like an important emotional step toward engaging with the experiences of others. However, she points out that, at the heart of many Eurocentric calls for empathy is an imagined subject with class, race, gender, and geopolitical privileges who encounters difference and then chooses whether or not to extend empathy and compassion. Meanwhile, both Zembylas and Pedwell take issue with the imagined victim positioned by empathy and pity responses, who waits passively for the rescue of empathetic subjects. Rather than eliciting empathy for others, decolonial pedagogies therefore need to allow for pause on felt responses. Pedagogies of discomfort invite us to notice and unsettle the affective rules we will have learned through our upbringing, which sediment in particular ideas of entitlement, otherness, and legitimacy – which is to say, which emotions it is appropriate to feel, and when (Boler & Zemblyas, 2003).

For such authors, what I have termed an affective interruption may form a vehicle for unsettling dominant fabrics of feeling and opening them to question in pedagogical terms. An affective interruption is an event where an affective quality surfaces that makes it possible to think and feel differently. Affective interruptions – for example, an argument between two students; a felt revelation about one’s privilege; the surfacing of anger in the classroom between bodies – can be disruptive, but they can also serve as moments that reveal the fabrics of feeling that underpin everyday life, and what they systematically exclude. If we can slow down; develop vocabularies for; apprehend; talk about; and even structure in engagements with, affective interruptions, they may open out onto new ways of thinking and feeling the world collectively.

First, however, it is important to mention briefly the importance of differentiating a pedagogy of discomfort from a teaching style that wants to make students uncomfortable, or to elicit traumatic memory. Newstead (2009, p. 80) suggests that we might here embrace care as a concept that “embraces responsibility yet […] usefully forces attention to the mediation and embeddedness of responsible relations in the interpersonal contact zones of the classroom.” A caring pedagogy might be seen to extend beyond the transmission of knowledge to include nurturing relations through which students dare to imagine how to reconstruct their world in new ways (and relatedly, see Hill et al., 2019, on the elements of a compassionate pedagogy). Likewise, drawing on her decolonial feminist commitments, Motta (2014, pp. 170–71) describes a commitment to co-constructing spaces of communion “through nurturing safety and recognition. […] These [pedagogies] do not deny the importance of pain, grief, or anger in the coming to voice and agency but rather suggest the development of practices of emotional alchemy that are ‘difficult … painful’ but which enable their transformation into joy, courage, and love, ‘without which there can be no wholeness’ (Hooks, 2004, p. 156).” Pedagogies of discomfort need to be sensitive to differences in positionality; enact respect for the dignity of all participants; and trace guiding parthways for those experiencing discomfort, as much as they may still aspire to facilitate the emergence of new senses of collective feeling and acting-in-common. In the next section I explore two dimensions of such a pedagogy through my concept of scaffolding: firstly, the importance of third objects, or boundary objects, in collective inquiry; and secondly, the use of the arts and embodiment in education.

The examples offered in this section are taken from two courses I have taught over the past 10 years – an MSc level unit Conflicted Environments (15–30 students) and a second-year undergraduate half-unit Cultures of Nature (60–90 students).¹ In presenting examples from my teaching practice, my intention is not to present “best practice”, but to illustrate how and why scaffolding is a) important and b) requires constant reworking through reflexivity and attention. Like others, I emphasise that this work of responsiveness as part of decolonisation cannot replace reading texts by Indigenous, Black, and Brown scholars about anti-racist practice and decoloniality (e.g. Daigle & Sundberg, 2017; Todd, 2016; Tuck & Yang, 2012).

Scaffolding via boundary objects

What I mean by scaffolding is creating spaces that feel “safe enough” for students to enter and try out new ways of being or feeling, such that they are encouraged to take further risks, and expand the range of ways they feel safe to appear, be seen, and heard. Scaffolding involves developing a series of engagements with emotional discomfort as part of collective conversations about how what feels “natural” to us has been structured. Personally, I first began to use the term when – prior to becoming a lecturer – I was employed to adapt a curriculum for use with young people who had disengaged from formal education. This process was later credited with producing diverse and wide-ranging learning projects demonstrating high-level learning from students who had never taken GCSEs (see Millner et al. (2006)). While the coordinators of the project attributed these “successes” to the focus in the new curriculum on connecting with the internal curiosity and experience of individual learners, I also learned through this experience that even risk-averse students will feel able to present personal ideas and feelings in their work, if they are supported to do so in ways that feel initially low-risk and safe.²

In the context of decolonial agendas, where the risks concerned include engaging with embodied privilege and institutional racism, scaffolding is about creating “practice zones” that expose students to some vulnerability without leaving them overwhelmed, traumatised, or stuck for more than small moments. In other words, scaffolding situates uncomfortable emotions in caring, “held” environments, where literacy around the sense of difficulty is collectively crafted. Rather than avoid high-risk activities, scaffolding involves the design of a process that incorporates low and medium-risk activities to gain practice with dealing with difficult emotions, as well as pre- and post-processes of reflection, to prepare and encourage the integration of new thoughts, difficult feelings, and unresolved questions. Additionally, however, scaffolding refers to the emergent process of “frame-shifting” that takes place in individual and collective understanding as fabrics of feeling are progressively rewoven. On the one hand, then, scaffolding is about careful crafting of curriculum to include reflective pauses, support, and integration. On the other, it is about educational processes that progressively validate the experience and questions of the learner/learning community, such that at the end of the process, they are confident to lead and conduct their own inquiries independently. Both aspects concern social, pedagogical and affective skill – and yet, as I shall go on to emphasise in section 2.2, both crucially also concern the material ecologies of the classroom (or field encounter), which mediates the scaffolding process. Attending to the material situatedness of learning processes also opens up the properties of the physical learning environment as a resource for experimentation with practices such as listening, attunement, and becoming comfortable with discomfort (Williams et al., 2019).

To link between these two ideas – scaffolding and the open inquiry – via this concern with materiality - I use a third term, the “boundary object.” Drawn from Science and Technology Studies, boundary objects are “things” that exist in the worlds of multiple social actors, but which are invested with very different meaning³ s. In my own work I rethink the boundary object through decolonial ideas to show how it also can be used to understand disagreement. By this I mean that boundary objects reveal how – in Rancière’s (1999) terms – when two people say “white” (as opposed to one saying “white” and the other saying “black”), what they mean by white may actually be quite different things. Studying the “ontologies,” or knowledge contexts, that animate different understandings of seeing the world via such objects allows us to see how conflict arises, for example, in relation to different ways of “worlding” natural resource environments. The boundary object supports different forms of scaffolding because it allows fabrics of feeling to appear indirectly, in relation to contexts and situations, rather than being (initially) located in particular individuals and their emotional experience.

One way that I use boundary objects to scaffold encounters with emotions of discomfort is through coursework projects structured as “object-led, context-driven” inquiries. The idea here is that disciplinary learning is often abstract and removed from students’ experience, meaning that it can be difficult to incorporate within students’ existing experience. Educational psychology suggests we find it easiest to learn when we have a motivation to learn about something, for example, we feel personally connected to the subject matter or we understand clearly why we are learning what we are learning (Jaros & Deakin‐Crick, 2007). In object-led inquiries, students choose an “object” that fits particular course-specific criteria and feels personally relevant, then go through a process of describing it meticulously; situating it in a particular context; devising questions to interrogate it; designing an inquiry; and – through the support of an educator – mapping the questions onto existing disciplinary fields to develop a personal inquiry. In the two courses under discussion, I/we use a version of this inquiry as the main mode of formal assessment (up to 80% of the total grade). While this means each student completes a distinctively different assessment, I find that it produces deeper understandings of the taught material than other modes would allow.

In the undergraduate course, this inquiry has taken various forms. In the process of co-designing the year 2 unit More-than-Human Geographies in 2013, Merle Patchett and I devised a “Cultures of Preservation” project, which asked students to select an object (such as a stuffed animal, a museum artefact, a botanical manual, a piece of art) that resonated with the course themes and embodied ideas of “nature preservation” in some way. While my motivation for this task stemmed from my educational background, the idea was just as much shaped by Merle’s historical geographic research practice and archival studies – for example, her own work tracing the layered histories of practice embodied in specific preserved artefacts, such as taxidermy specimens (Patchett, 2021; 2019; Patchett & Foster, 2008). We found compatibility between the mode of inquiry I had used with young people and her own practice of tracing backwards from the object to explore different layers of (crafting, preservation, scientific) practice. From the beginning, we scaffolded this process by visiting sites where example artefacts could be located (e.g. Merle led a trip for many years to the Bristol Zoological gardens, in association with historian Andy Flack); discussing related films; and working on example artefacts in class “practicals.” We also discussed students’ ideas in one-to-ones and ran workshops on how to conduct and write up this distinct form of inquiry. More recent iterations of this form of coursework have included a version that asks students to instead choose an object that embodies a “way of seeing” (after Berger, 2008) the environment, which has tended to bring students into the domain of the history of art, film, literature, and architecture. Students have consistently evaluated the coursework as an important moment in their learning experience, while the essays regularly impress with a depth of engagement, reflexivity, and passion that does not always characterise undergraduate coursework.

The key reason the boundary object helps structure engagements with dominant fabrics of feeling is that it approaches topics sidelong, via personal interest and connection, and through a set of criteria that elicit affective material, but without entering via personal emotion. Additionally, because attention is directed away from the framing of the lecture material, and toward inquiries arising from personal questions, instead of reproducing what the educator has said, students have to find a new route, a new argument, and a distinct “genealogy” of ideas. Of course, many students do rehearse lecture materials or make statements about “Indigenous people” that reveal they have not fully understood key ideas or histories core to decolonial theory. However, the “aha” moment that many students encounter may be associated with the way the object asks them to engage with specific contexts of production, dissemination and preservation via their own embodied experience. For example, one student told me that it was the process of visiting the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, London – her chosen object – and walking through the gardens that had enabled her to grasp the ideas of taxonomic ordering we had studied in relation to changing centuries of botanical thinking and (post)coloniality. Meanwhile, while visiting the archives, the student stumbled across a series of paintings displayed by the Victorian botanical painter Marianne North, who was unusual for choosing oil paint as her medium and as an established solo woman traveller. The student felt a personal connection with North because her grandmother had been a botanical painter, but also came alive to the textures of botanical discovery, gender and scientific relationships in new ways. The final essay focused on North’s work painting plants that were relatively unknown to botanical science at the time, which the student emphasised helped her understand that taxonomy was not something fixed or eternal, but a system of knowledge production forged through particular kinds of relationships.

Through such experiences, coloniality becomes a way to describe the way that sense experience is framed and reframed – whether through the sound and imagery associated with an island paradise, or in the tactile form of a preserved object displayed in a museum. How histories of racism informs the making of “nature” and “natural” environments is then revealed through histories and geographies of materials and practices – for example, as embodied by a seed-bank, a menu from a “natural foods” restaurant, or a film that explores geographies of paradise – that subtly question and transform everyday sense experience. As in the example described above, however, it remains important that each example remains a reminder of the contingency of social relations – a reminder that things could have happened differently, and could be recomposed in more just and equitable ways.

This point on the politics of knowledge is drawn out explicitly in the Master’s unit, where I use the concept of the boundary object to encourage students to explore conflicted environments via case studies. Social anthropologists such as Marilyn Strathern (2007) have adapted the boundary object concept to address what we might call fields of “partial connection” within a broader politics of knowledge – aggregates that can’t be reduced to one another, or ways of knowing place and personhood that overlap, albeit not completely. Strathern (2007, p. 131) cites her colleague Corinne McSherry to explain that a boundary object is an object that consequently “holds different meanings in different social worlds, yet is imbued with enough shared meaning to facilitate its translation across those worlds.” In the coursework we approach a contested geographical territory as a boundary object. This helps us to explore how different actors invest place and space with different senses of political rights, ethical value, meanings of citizenship, etc. From here, students can better understand what constitutes conflict in the production of that specific environment, and thus, to show which versions of the territory are being constituted as legitimate (legal, dominant, visible, scientific, etc.), and which are excluded, or rendered as “primitive.” These themes of partial connection, translation and the politics of knowledge have become important to the work of geographers, decolonial anthropologists and social scientists seeking to trouble the way that universal regimes of meaning have been imposed over diverse, non-modern ways of knowing, often under the guise of “scientific” legitimacy. For example, anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena draws attention to the way that objects are “produced in that mode of partial connection that suffuses the complexity of multiple Indigenous and non-indigenous worlds that live together in the Andes” (de la Cadena, 2013, p. 58). This is a key way into ideas like political ontology, which makes the way we see and know reality (“ontology”) a matter of political contestation, emphasising that there is more than one way to know the world. Boundary objects allow the difference between these worlds to be explored, via case studies, not only in research but in pedagogical practice.

Working with emotional discomfort cannot be managed by such tactics alone, however, for it requires both a personal practice of slowing down to notice and attend to what arises in the body, and the cultivation of a set of affective tools for doing this collectively in the classroom. The two areas where discomfort has arisen most consistently across my years of teaching the MSc course is in discussions around race and whiteness in relation to the history of environmental politics, and secondly, in terms of the distance students can feel from some of the struggles that we study in Latin America. To enable us each to process our feelings around this topic I encourage students to keep a class journal and to write for a class blog bringing in personal experience and questions that arise from them. All participants write a weekly “redux” of the key readings, in which they are invited to respond about what was elicited in them as well as what they understood, and each student gives an individual presentation based in a personal interest in the final session. We also have a practice of “pausing” in class – where myself or any student can ask the class to stop speaking and attend to what is alive in their body at a particular moment. This has been especially useful in moments of heated discussion, where a few voices have been resounding very loudly, with some students noticing after the moment of pause that the feeling of defensiveness that arises in them defuses an urgent need for an answer or a verbal response.

For example, in one class, based on geographies of terror and conservation in Colombia, one section of the class were feeling moved and upset by learning about the history of conflict in the country, via the account of an environmental activist in particular. Meanwhile, several students were questioning the validity of their engagement with the issue at all, as white students in a university in the Global North. There was a sense of fracture in the room, and emerging conflict as different students wanted to focus on different topics. One student elicited the “pause” option and we took ten minutes to stop and journal on our immediate embodied reactions, myself included. I noticed myself feeling the tension between the two groups of students as something that it was my responsibility to resolve, and as something deeply uncomfortable. I attempted to pause with the discomfort itself. After the pause, other students described pausing with their own discomfort: with feeling disempowered; with confronting terrifying and systemic corruption; with the sense of complicity involved in being white or being enrolled in our university; with not knowing how to act. Voicing these feelings brought a fresh sense of common connection into the room. Sometimes we have found silence and listening the most useful activities to help us move beyond what feels like an impasse. At other times, I have been brought to recognise that there are different bodies of feeling within the same classroom, positioned differently by the geographies of colonialism of racism under discussion, and sometimes my pedagogical tactics fail or leave a space where only a one-to-one with a student who has been upset by my class is adequate. In such moments it is staying with my own discomfort that matters.

Despite such tactics, then, – and in this moment itself – as an educator I have sometimes felt overwhelmed by the spirals of questions that arise around topics of coloniality, whiteness and an ethos of response, which felt “too big” for the classroom and the time allotted. However, building a shared literacy in the politics of emotion by sharing selected readings mentioned in the literature review, as well as blogs on the practices of embodied listening, also means that we were constantly expanding our vocabulary for naming what is emerging in the classroom, and owning our own fears and discomforts in relation to broader feeling fabrics that have lodged a sense of privilege or defensiveness into our bodies. This fits with the ethos of feminist articulations of critical pedagogy in terms of fostering a common language based on the exchange and the sharing of personal experience and feelings as a basis for dialogue. Through discussions about the nature of discomfort and emotion in the classroom, my Master’s students and I also co-produced the process (Figure 1) as one way to process feelings as they arise, both in personal journals, and when we notice that a class is experiencing a disturbance. Each year we explore and rework such principles afresh.

Figure 1. Process for working with discomfort.

Affect, embodiment, and the arts

Because the materiality of the learning environment matters to pedagogy, moving outside the classroom can also be important to unsettling pedagogical relations and geographies of expertise (Stein, 2019). Since beginning both courses, field visits within Bristol were an important way to have conversations in an informal way; to explore the way that geographies of coloniality or decolonial practice become embodied in material places; and to acknowledge as “guides” actors who are considerably experienced but are not always considered relevant as academic sources. In our undergraduate visits to the zoological and botanical gardens we were able to explore the historical transformation of physical spaces of display and exhibition, as a basis to think through aspects of animal and botanical geographies discussed in lectures, and to work with physical artefacts that embodied the ideas of “nature” and “preservation” we had been exploring. Students consistently reported experiencing “aha” moments of understanding through such visits, while coloniality became “less abstract” and more tangible through our journeys into place-making. In the Master’s unit I organised various visits around Bristol including a regular excursion to “Feed Bristol”, a food-growing site run by Avon and Bristol Wildlife Trust, where Humphrey Lloyd, a salad-grower, scholar-activist, and member of the Landworker’s Alliance, convened a “practical” exploring both the physical space of the growing site, and an alternative history of food justice through coloniality, focusing on the UK. Being a listener in such practicals, rather than a facilitator, has also allowed me different kinds of conversations with my students, marked by ease and more frequent questions arising from deep uncertainties, as well as an affective movement toward eagerness and curiosity.

Another, more recent, intervention, has been to bring collaborators into the classroom. I am grateful for the support of my School, which has, to date, valued such activities highly enough for me to remunerate those coordinating such practicals. This is important, as my desire to value the expertise of those who have long worked in fields like food justice activism would be compromised if I needed to ask such individuals to offer their labour time for free. One important collaboration has been with Mama D. Ujuaje, a food justice education facilitator based in London, who uses performance arts to bring alive the botanical journeys, colonial histories, and contemporary injustices of food. As food already played a central role in rendering the colonial themes of my unit tangible, it felt important to me to explore food practices at a more embodied and material level. Thus, we hosted Mama D. for a “food journey”: a blindfolded narrative experience involving the senses of smell, taste, touch, and sound, which takes its audience on a participatory journey from the West Indies, via histories of slavery, to the UK. Mama D. and a collaborator created a viscerally evocative space in the lecture theatre using coloured fabrics and background sound to transform its atmosphere and open up a fresh sense of material possibility. Meanwhile, students, who had completed an online consent form before the day, entered the room blindfolded (unless they had opted out) and were seated on chairs for the experience. A table full of carefully prepared foods to provide taste and smell experiences (that students could also opt out of) were then brought into layers of the narrative, which also involved sounds like the clinking of chains aboard a slave-ship, storytelling, and sometimes the invitation to stand up or taste food.

The food journey was unlike any classroom experience I had ever had, partly because I had ceded control of the learning space and was on hand as an assistant rather than playing a direct facilitator role. Early in the process I confronted my own considerable discomfort as I witnessed the students settling into the blindfolded experience, negotiating their own vulnerability to the situation, inability to predict what would happen next, and deciding whether to laugh, participate, listen or walk out of the lecture theatre. I noticed myself wanting to intervene, to stop the scenario and explain what was happening, or to ask the performers to “tone it down.” Instead, I tried to attend to my own sense of discomfort in the way I had discussed with my students, to tune into it, and to notice my need to feel in control of the situation. I still felt I had a role to witness what was happening; that I could and would intervene if any ethical boundary were being crossed; but I also decided to trust the experience of my collaborators and lean into the experience. I was extremely glad that I did. Through the process of individual reflection and small group discussion that followed, it became clear that it was partly the experience of vulnerability and loss of control that had enabled the students to reflect and develop inquiries in new ways.

The sample feedback summarised in Figure 2 offers a sample of the reflections that students offered through this process, although comments on the process were also repeated in informal discussion and end-of-term feedback. Emotional discomfort was described in various ways – for example, as a sense of vulnerability, guilt, feeling “apprehensive” at first, “confused about my own power,” “naïve to the past terrors of colonialism” or even having experienced moments of fear. Yet most students explained that this had been part of an embodied journey into subsequent reflection. Following the theory outlined in the early part of this paper, the emotional discomfort elicited on purpose through being blindfolded in this case encouraged students to tune into other senses, to take in huge amounts of other information, which also included the dramatic and narrative information provided by the theatrical experience: smells, tastes, sounds, music, and historical detail relayed through dialogue and story. Afterwards, piecing this together through a discussion around food, students used their personal emotional discomfort to ask bigger questions about the food system and its history, and their place within it. I found this far more effective pedagogically than any lecture I had given on the same content.

Figure 2. Sample reflective feedback from food justice practical.

In the food journey, the students credited the discomfort the blindfolding created in them with much of the inner process they were then able to go on individually and collectively. Some explained how much they realised they relied on visual information to make sense of the world, with one student explaining that elements had been “intimidating” at first, but the loss of sight had “heightened” other senses. Others explained that this had been a very different kind of learning experience than their usual classroom learning – it allowed them to feel “connected with the history of coloniality”; “inspired”; “closer to the sensations of emotions and history”; “reflective”; “immersed”; or “switched on.” One student explained that the process made them “realise how profound the history of food and globalisation is – an embodied rather than just an economic process.” This comment reminds me of the point raised earlier about the affective nature of a public feelings project: to work on a system of oppression that is constructed out of habitual feelings and feeling fabrics, one must also work with and on those feelings. What was so unique about this experience was that it allowed us to wake up to the way that our bodies are already participating in such a system; that we are involved, and the experience was uncomfortable. However, it was also energising, in that it moved us all somewhere new.

One reason that the Food Justice practical allowed us to work on the fabric of feeling that tends to keep coloniality abstract and colonial relations undisturbed was the way the experienced facilitators took the students through moments of experience into reflection on the ways feelings had arisen in them, and what these “affective interruptions” allowed them to see differently. Megan Watkins (2006), who elaborates her own conception of pedagogic affect through notions of affect and Vygotsky’s ideas of “zones of proximal development” (see footnote 3), links such effects in her work with an increased power to act among students. In other words, despite emotional discomfort, students felt an enhanced sense of capacity to move in new directions and see themselves with fresh eyes. Nevertheless, in our debrief, Mama D. and I agreed that in our next iteration of the Journey we would extend the pre-reflection process further to extend the notion of consent in play. While the feedback we received through conversations afterward was very positive, it occurred to be that the themes of colonial trauma and also of withholding the senses to experience others, warrant some scaffolding of their own. In a future session I would take care to scaffold a series of stages, from before the performative event to afterwards, enabling students to incorporate even more of what they had experienced.

For Rancière (2006) and others, the visual arts, performance, and film work on the senses in such a way that allows us to attend to what we may already perceive, but not be aware of. Performance is not exactly different from everyday embodiment, but placing embodied acts in a new frame; withholding certain senses or perspectives; or arranging scenes into a kind of montage effect in a film may allow us to make new connections that are almost, but not quite, familiar. For similar reasons, many note that novels, like film, are particularly useful for introducing students to non-Anglo-American contexts about which, and from which, academic texts tend to be much less common (Ansell, 2002; Newstead, 2009). They can expose students to alternative ways of representing different places and often hint at the political and social aspirations of others. Novels can also relate a diversity of stories, and often from perspectives that are marginalised or made-invisible in textbooks (ibid., Nixon, 2011). In the context of decolonial pedagogy, such “third objects” can also serve as a useful resource to mediate the experience of others moving through discomfort or encountering injustice, further helping to mediate discussions around difficult topics. Although I lack the space to unpack this theme in further detail here, for these reasons I have also sought to incorporate novels, poems, and film-based discussion practicals into my teaching. As Nixon (2002, p. 6) so eloquently notes, literature can help students “vanish with engagement into other worlds … [and] discover those points of passion that plunge them, like Alice, down a bolt-hole into a kind of astonishment that is also a kind of recognition.”

Conclusion

In summarising his decolonial approach to peace education, Zembylas (2018c) summarises his key tactics as involving, firstly, a strong emphasis on the geopolitics of knowledge production and the (social, epistemic, political) consequences of coloniality; a pedagogical emphasis on action-orientated empathy and solidarity relationships that engage with the demands of decolonisation without merely paying lip-service to multiculturalism; and thirdly, a curricular emphasis on the inclusion of histories and experiences of colonised people as well as subjugated knowledges. Being inspired by the writing of Zemblyas, Boler, and others on the pedagogies of discomfort, I have attempted to improvise tactics that work in my specific teaching contexts. Each of these tactics in different ways works on making room for an “affective interruption” – by which I mean a disturbance within accustomed fabrics of feeling – to take place, with sufficient space, safety and also risk, for students and their teachers to move through discomfort and into new senses of awareness. Like Rancière’s “ignorant schoolmaster”, when we experience such an affective interruption, we might just continue with business as usual. But, when the conditions are right, such a disturbance, and the attention it directs toward our own feelings of comfort/discomfort and what orchestrates them, can allow us to move on a new journey, that also involves others in our context(s).

While imperfect and representing only one set of possible interpretations of decolonisation principles, in this paper I have consequently proposed some key ways to scaffold engagement with discomfort into Higher Education. These can be summarised as:

1. working with “boundary objects” to open up different perspectives on fabrics of feeling;

2. object-led, context-driven inquiries to allow personal experience to ground and deepen questions, doubts and concerns;

3. engaging with literature, the arts and performance in the classroom, with time to reflect on what arises;

4. involving actors outside the academy in and beyond the classroom to unsettle hierarchies of expertise;

5. acknowledging the classroom as a place where feeling fabrics are already in play, and may be rewoven.

My concept of scaffolding, adapted from the work of others, is also offered to think through emotional discomfort – recognising its high value in the work of decolonisation, but also the need to create spaces of safety, pre- and post-reflection, and guidance, to ensure that interruptions occurring on learning journeys can be effectively integrated. I hope that colleagues will continue to expand and critique and modify these tactics, as I feel that these improvisations only scratch the surface of what is possible in terms of working with emotions as part of a decolonial curriculum, and knowledge exchange through dialogue is one way to ensure that the burden on labour for those who wish to participate is not onerous. Meanwhile, I would like to conclude by proposing that the most important “tool” available to us within the repertoire of decolonial pedagogy is an attunement to affective interruptions, and a disposition toward improvisation to work with them as they arise.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. The objectives of the two units are different: the first seeks to introduce students to the interdisciplinary field of political ecology, with a focus on understanding how conflict emerges and is reproduced in particular sites in Latin America, especially in relation to themes of the conservation of “nature” and the environment. We study social movement practices, concepts, and pedagogies as part of the course and I invite the relatively small class to feedback, individually and collectively, on my pedagogical repertoire, which I introduce as part of the first class in the year. The second half-unit aims to ground contemporary interest in “more-than-human geographies” in historical debates surrounding what counts as nature/the natural and how these concepts have become entangled in material landscapes, for example, via practices of conservation, the movement of plant genetic material (e.g. seeds) around the world, the enclosure of rural areas (e.g. “land-grabbing”), the preservation of ruins, and eco-tourism.

2. My use of the concept in this sense is somewhat inspired by social psychologist Vygotsky (1978)’s use of the term “zones of proximal development.” These zones are domains of practice where a child is stretched and challenged, but not overwhelmed. Without wanting to translate more prescriptive ideas of a child’s development into Higher Education, the idea here is that educational objectives are thought of in relation to zones of high to low risk, where high risk refers to experiences that are extremely difficult to process personally, and those that are low risk are those that are relatively easy to experience. If a student encounters too high a level of risk too early on, there is a higher possibility of disengagement, non-learning, or non-integration of the new experience.

3. Star and Griesemer (1989), who are credited with devising the concept, were interested in how, in scientific practice and applied science, finding these “third terms” allow for cooperation between experts of very different backgrounds. For them, a boundary object is any object that is part of multiple social worlds and facilitates communication between them; it has a different identity in each social world that it inhabits (Star & Griesemer, 1989, p. 409). Examples of boundary objects cited in their research at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology include specimens, field notes, standardised forms, and the state of California itself (Star & Griesemer, 1989, pp. 408–409).

4. It is important to note that scaffolding may also refer to the scaffolding of institutions that a decolonial critique seeks to dismantle, such as (neo)colonial institutions. Although it is beyond the scope of this paper to deal with this aspect of critique, I do come to the narratives and fabrics of feeling holding together coloniality in my discussion of affect in the following section.