‘Green with envy:’ affects and gut feelings as an affirmative, immanent, and trans-corporeal critique of new motivational data visualizations

Abstract

In recent educational reforms, policy papers present students’ desire and motivation for learning as decisive issues. The documents indicate that motivation has become a crucial issue for governmental intervention and results in a number of motivational technologies. Envy, once perceived as a mortal sin, is shown as integral of the ambiguous affective economy following the wake of the motivational technologies used to translate the Danish school reform of 2014 into everyday class rooms. Grasping and following the invidious complex as performative effects of the intra-action of policy, motivational technologies, and student bodies is a way of researching the implementation of a reform beyond the already designed tales of the reform. The point of formulating envy as an affirmative critique is not to debunk visual devices or motivational technologies. Rather, it is to provide a more complex understanding of, and the possible consequences of, certain ways of reforming learning and motivation, and to show how affects and gut feelings are both a motivating force and a disruptive one, that can generate an immanent and hopeful critique.

Keywords:

• Intra-action
• affect
• reform
• environmentaliy
• envy
• data visualisation

Notes

1. Agreement between the government (the Danish Social Democrats, the Danish Social-Liberal Party and the Danish Socialist People’s Party), the Liberal Party of Denmark and the Danish People’s Party regarding academic improvements in the Folkeskole (2013, p. 1).

2. A preliminary analysis of the case was presented at ECER 2016 by the author together with PhD student Kia Wied.

3. Ibid, p. 1.

4. Quoted from the editorial to a special issue on envy in WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly (Katz & Miller, 2006).