Revisiting the notion of critical thinking in higher education: theorizing the thinking-feeling entanglement using affect theory

ABSTRACT

This article argues that paying attention to affect offers new theoretical insights into critical thinking and reflexivity that deepen scholarly understandings of the entanglement between ‘thinking-feeling’ in higher education pedagogies. In particular, this article brings together the literatures on affect theory and critical thinking in higher education to make a contribution to the analysis and sorting through of various conceptions about critical thinking in higher education, and to figure out how those conceptions operate in affective ways. It is suggested that a more refined understanding of the role of affective thinking in higher education can provide new political openings for negotiating sensitive and controversial socio-political issues in universities. To illustrate the potential of this theoretical contribution, this article discusses a concrete example that concerns how students may engage in and respond to political activism involving the colonial legacies of western universities.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical thinking
• affect theory
• higher education
• transformation
• critical pedagogy

Introduction

The last few decades have seen critical thinking become ‘one of the defining conceptions of the Western University’ (Barnett 1997, 3), highlighting that critical thinking is a necessary part of the formation of university students as critical citizens (Davies and Barnett 2015). It is widely recognized among educational theorists, educators and policymakers since John Dewey’s conception of reflective thought (Dewey 1933; Scheffler 1973; Siegel 1988) that critical thinking should claim a prominent place in educational systems (Pettersson 2020). Given the long academic debates on this concept, there are multiple meanings and definitions of critical thinking, therefore, it is not easy to come up with a ‘comprehensive’ or ‘complete’ definition (Moore 2013). While a comprehensive definition of critical thinking does not exist, it is generally understood that critical thinking refers to a diverse set of skills, practices, values and dispositions involving in-depth questioning and reflexivity (Davies and Barnett 2015; Moore 2013).

Importantly, Danvers (2016, 2018, 2021) and other scholars in education (e.g. Holma 2015) have recently turned academic attention to the affective dimensions of critical thinking and the idea that critical thinking is embedded in social, embodied and relational contexts, rather than being a decontextualized and individualized set of skills and competences. This shift towards critical thinking as an affective and embodied process can be interpreted as a reaction to overly ‘rationalized’ understandings of critical thinking in the past or conceptions of critical thinking that focus almost entirely on certain skills and abilities (e.g. reasoning, logic, inference) rather than paying attention to the emotions, values and dispositions entailed in critical thinking as a practice that is both social and cognitive, emotional and rational, material and discursive. As Pettersson (2020) argues, despite the advancements in theorizing critical thinking, the definition and conceptualization of critical thinking remains underdeveloped on the side of dispositions. Hence, it is suggested that new theoretical ideas can create openings to reconsider critical thinking and reconceptualize some of its underdeveloped dimensions. For example, Danvers (2016, 2018, 2021) uses feminist and new materialist theories to suggest that scholars in higher education are enabled to re-think dominant theorizations of critical thinking as ‘rationalized’ and ‘decontextualized’ and move towards conceptions which take into consideration the role of the senses in higher education pedagogies.

This article adds to these theoretical contributions around critical thinking in higher education by drawing on affect theory (Clough 2007; Schaefer 2019; Seigworth and Gregg 2010) and arguing that paying attention to affect offers new theoretical insights into critical thinking and reflexivity that deepen our understanding of the entanglement between ‘thinking-feeling’ (Jasper 2018; Massumi 2015) in higher education pedagogies. In the critically inclined affect theory, affect is described as a force that works not only through cognition, reasonable argument or material incentives, but also operates at a bodily and subliminal level, where people’s embodied, affective responses are entangled with rational, cognitive apprehension of interests and preferences (Barnett 2020). This connection between thinking and emotions/affect or what is theorized as the ‘thinking-feeling’ entanglement by scholars such as Brian Massumi and James Jasper highlights the importance of both thought and feeling in politics, especially in debates around sensitive and controversial socio-political issues such as climate crisis, systemic racism, colonialism, fake news and conspiracy theories. Together, then, the insights from critical thinking literature in higher education and affect theory enable scholars to gain a deeper understanding of how different university students may respond to issues of interest, without privileging reason while also paying attention to the relational, unconscious and affective qualities of thinking and reflexivity (Burkitt 2012; Holmes 2010). This in-depth understanding creates the conditions of possibility for nurturing critical thinking in a course, module or higher education institution as an entangled thinking-feeling practice rather than an individualized set of competences.

In bringing together the literatures on affect and critical thinking in higher education, I do not seek to merely highlight that critical thinking has affective dimensions, or that critical thinking’s past theorization as an individualized activity is limiting; those claims are not new and do not constitute the most important contributions of this essay. The more important contribution is the analysis and sorting through of various conceptions about critical thinking in higher education, to figure out how those conceptions operate in affective ways, and thus a more refined understanding of the role of affective thinking in higher education can provide new political openings for negotiating sensitive and controversial socio-political issues in universities. To illustrate the potential of this theoretical contribution, this article will discuss a concrete example that concerns how students may engage in and respond to political activism involving the colonial legacies of western universities. I argue that the combination of the literatures of affect and critical thinking in higher education creates a different potential to understanding issues of dissent and controversy in relation to thought and affect respectively (see also Vogler 2021), and that these insights can be brought together to better respond pedagogically to such issues.

This article is divided into four sections. First, I present different definitions, perspectives and movements around critical thinking in higher education, while highlighting the recent attention to moral, affective, and emotional dimensions. Secondly, I introduce some basic themes of affect theory, discussing its theoretical contributions to conceptualizing thought, particularly in relation to affect as embedded in social, embodied and relational contexts. Thirdly, the article focuses, in particular, on the entanglement of thinking and feeling, while also exploring its connections to the notion of ‘emotional reflexivity’; this analysis is illustrated through an example of criticality as political protest in universities. The pedagogical implications of bringing together insights from affect and critical thinking in higher education are spelled out in the fourth section. I discuss how recognizing the entanglement between thinking-feeling in higher education pedagogies can benefit teaching critical thinking as a vehicle for personal and social transformation.

Critical thinking in higher education

The origin of the modern conception of critical thinking, according to Ritola (2021), can be attributed to John Dewey’s (1933) philosophy about reflective thinking, which is understood as an active consideration of a belief that leads to knowledge based on grounds. In other words, reflective thinking is a conscious effort involving several processes that aim to establish belief rooted in firm reasoning. Dewey’s thinking has since largely become a starting point by many prominent theorists in education over the decades (e.g. Bailin et al. 1999; Davies and Barnett 2015; Ennis 1989; Facione 1990; Moore 2013; Scheffler 1973; Siegel 1988; Stanovich and Stanovich 2010) to articulate various dimensions and components of critical thinking (Pettersson 2020). It is beyond the scope of this article to provide a comprehensive literature review of this enormous literature that spans across several disciplines. It is sufficient to identify some key perspectives as well as the critical thinking movements emerging in higher education out of these different perspectives. I particularly draw from Davies and Barnett’s (2015) seminal handbook of critical thinking in higher education.

According to Davies and Barnett (2015), ‘critical thinking in higher education’ means different things to different theorists. To some, it may mean a set of intellectual abilities and reasoning skills needed to carry out evidence-based belief formation and reflective judgment; to others it may mean an ethical attitude or a set of dispositions (Pettersson 2020). In his review of ideas about critical thinking in several disciplines, Moore (2013) identified the following definitional strands: (i) as judgment; (ii) as skepticism; (iii) as a simple originality; (iv) as sensitive readings; (v) as rationality; (vi) as an activist engagement with knowledge; and (vii) as self-reflexivity. ‘Traditional’ definitions of the concept of critical thinking usually emphasize the skills and competences (e.g. reasoning skills; metacognitive competences; inference thinking) needed by the individual to make a decision or reach a judgment (Davies and Barnett 2015). However, more recent conceptions of critical thinking largely emphasize that the skills by themselves matter little, if they are decontextualized or they are seen as separate from the values and dispositions through which one approaches issues of concern (Ritola 2021).

In particular, Davies and Barnett (2015) identify three rival perspectives on critical thinking in higher education. The philosophical perspective, which is interested in logical thinking, reasoning skills and epistemic rationality; the educational perspective, which is interested in the broader development of the individual student e.g. how critical thinking can benefit through the development and formation of a critico-social attitude; and, finally, the socially active perspective, which is concerned with how critical thinking and attitudes can transform the society. Although these three perspectives are not separable, according to Davies and Barnett, many times they have been treated in the literature as if their boundaries are non-permeable. Hence, recent theoretical ideas ranging from ‘political critiques of the role and function of education in society, critical feminist approaches to curriculum, the development of critical citizenship, or any other education-related topic that uses the appellation ‘critical’’ (Davies and Barnett 2015, 3) have attempted to bridge the tensions between these perspectives by connecting the more ‘individualized’ perspectives of critical thinking (e.g. skills and competences) with the ‘socio-cultural’ ones (values and dispositions).

The emphasis on different perspectives has led to a number of critical thinking movements that highlighted one or another perspective of critical thinking (Paul 2011 in Davies and Barnett 2015). The first wave (which began in the 1970s) emphasized logical and reasoning skills in the identification of arguments; practically, this implied offering special courses or adding curriculum topics designed to develop skills of logic, reasoning, and argumentation. The second wave (which appeared in the 1980s) had a more explicit educational orientation – drawing from critical pedagogy, feminism and other perspectives – to develop the student as a critical person (rather than as an individual with particular skills). Finally, the third wave (which emerged in the last decade or so) emphasizes the development of a holistic perspective of critical thinking that does not neglect other important dimensions such as ethics and emotions (Davies and Barnett 2015). Davies and Barnett propose a model of critical thinking that combines these different perspectives, that is, one that has both an individual and sociocultural dimension, pays attention to both skills and dispositions, and includes in its scope a sense of actual or potential action that is often missing from traditional conceptions of critical thinking. Broadly speaking, argue Davies and Barnett, ‘criticality comprises – and is a composite of – three things: thinking, being, and acting’ (2015, 15, original emphasis).

While Davies and Barnett’s (2015) theorization of critical thinking recognizes the role of dispositions and emotions, their composite notion of criticality interestingly does not include ‘feeling.’ Nevertheless, the contribution of their theorizing of criticality as the intersection between critical reason, critical self-reflection and critical action turns scholarly attention more towards what critical thinking does or ought to do in contemporary societies, rather than what critical thinking is (see also Danvers 2016). In the remainder of this section, I turn to the work of education scholars who have focused more explicitly on the affective dimensions of critical thinking, enabling us to envision critical thinking as an embodied and affective process with important pedagogical implications for higher education. In light of the lack of much empirical as well as conceptual work in this area, I focus on the research and theorizing of Holma (2015) and Danvers (2016, 2018, 2021) to identify both the advancements that have been made as well as the openings created for further explorations of affect/emotion in relation to what the practice of critical thinking may accomplish in higher education.

In her theoretical paper, Holma (2015) suggests that critical thinking includes both emotional and moral dimensions, thus critiquing the views that focus only on ‘skills’ and effectively argues that understandings of critical thinking that fail to consider these dimensions are narrow. She grounds this theorizing on two respects: first, emotions have a direct epistemic function, which is to say that emotions play important roles in cognition, hence a sharp emotion/reason dichotomy makes no sense; second, emotions can strengthen or weaken one’s moral agency, a fact that ‘has enormous educational significance’ (Holma 2015, 23) for ‘the motivational function of fulfilling the moral command of thinking critically’ (Holma 2015, 23). This is to say that the motivation to think critically or act morally, according to Holma, derives, at least partly, from emotions. Hence, critical thinking skills, disconnected from their moral and emotional basis, can lead to self-deception or morally wrong action. From this perspective, an individualized or psychologized perspective of critical thinking fails to capture the social and political complexities involved in thinking and making a judgment. This implies, she writes, ‘that contributing to the growth of persons, or education, must take both psychological and political, or individual and social dimensions’ (Holma 2015, 28).

While Holma recognizes the entanglement of the social and the individual, she seems to ignore the embodied and materialist dimensions of critical thinking. Drawing on the theoretical tools of feminist politics of emotion by Sara Ahmed and the new materialist theories of Karen Barad, Danvers (2016, 2018, 2021) re-imagines critical thinking as an affective and embodied process, and theorizes the critical thinker as a subject embedded in unequal gendered, classed and racialized hierarchies of knowledge production. The empirical questions she raises in her research are relevant more broadly to scholarly efforts that seek to explore the entanglement of affect and criticality: ‘What are the affects of becoming critical? How do those affects circulate around and through bodies and educational institutions and practices? Do some bodies become more visible or valued as critical than others within educational spaces and places?’ (Danvers 2016, 284). Danvers’ theorizing of criticality as an affective and material practice in higher education opens up new ‘pedagogical and philosophical imaginaries that refocus attention on how critical thinking feels’ (Danvers 2016, original emphasis). As she explains:

Being, speaking and doing criticality in educational contexts produce affects that circulate through bodies. The students in the research did not simply do critical thinking; they felt it. Indeed, critical thinking was always an affective experience of some kind, even if it seemed tempered or even neutral. These feelings were not simply emotional reactions to isolated performances of critical thinking […] Students articulated the complex affects they felt in response to critical thinking’s discourses and practices. (Danvers 2016, 285, original emphasis)

In sum, this brief overview of different perspectives on critical thinking in higher education highlights two crucial insights that demonstrate the necessity for further theoretical and empirical work in this area. First, if critical thinking is not a disembodied practice of individualized bodies but rather a set of affective and embodied practices (Danvers 2016), then more research and theorizing is needed to explore the entanglement of affect and criticality, and especially how affect theory may contribute to critical thinking scholarship. Second, if critical thinking is reconceptualized as an affective and embodied process, then there are important pedagogical implications, particularly in relation to how teaching critical thinking in higher education can either become a vehicle for personal and social transformation (Shpeizer 2018) and/or a technology of regulation that fails to encourage the diverse student body to reimagine themselves as critical thinkers in a volatile and precarious political environment (Danvers 2018, 2021). The rest of the essay pursues further the exploration of these two insights, beginning from how affect theory may enrich critical thinking scholarship.

An affect theory approach to critical thinking

Since the early 2000s, the affective turn in the humanities and the social sciences has led to the uptake of ‘affect’ as a concept that theorizes the body and the mind in ways that overcome a number of traditional dichotomies, notably between cognition and emotion, or thinking/reason and embodied, affective knowledge (Ahmed 2004; Clough 2007; Seigworth and Gregg 2010). An important dimension of the affective turn has been an ontological orientation to affect, as a response to poststructuralism and its focus on text, discourse, and deconstruction; this orientation is rooted in critical materialist perspectives to affect that conceptualize bodies as emerging through the entanglement of material-discursive practices (Vogler 2021). Although there are different (but sometimes overlapping) orientations (Seigworth and Gregg 2010) or approaches to affect (Schaefer 2015, 2019), it is broadly understood that emotions circulate between bodies and ‘stick,’ establishing or sustaining attachments to particular ideas, values and objects (Ahmed 2004).

The fundamental understanding of affect is that it denotes the ‘capacities to affect and be affected’ (Clough 2007, 2). In this sense, affects are attributed to bodies and their capacities to engage in social, cultural, material and political relations. This means that affects and emotions are not strictly ‘individual’ or ‘social’ but rather both, namely, the embodied and discursive dimensions of affects and emotions are entangled, making a firm distinction of the boundaries between these aspects deeply problematic (Ahmed 2004). Since affects and emotions are central in relations, groups and communities, they become essential tools for political purposes (Protevi 2009). As noted by Protevi (2009, 50), ‘affect is inherently political’ which implies that relations, emotions and power are intertwined, thus affects and emotions can be used either for political manipulation or to challenge the ways that certain affective relations are created between ideas, objects and individuals. In other words, how affects and emotions are felt is socially, politically and culturally conditioned (Blackman and Venn 2010); in this sense, affects and emotions are associated with the (re)production of certain social, moral and political norms and values (Ahmed 2004; Anderson 2014; Jasper 2018; Massumi 2015; Protevi 2009).

The approach to affect and emotion taken in this article is informed by feminist politics of emotion (Ahmed 2004, 2010) and a critical materialist orientation to affect (Anderson 2012, 2014). Both of these orientations highlight how affects and emotions are historically, politically, spatially, and socially situated and reproduced. Each orientation is briefly discussed below, highlighting its contributions to re-visiting the notion of critical thinking as an affective, embodied and material practice that has important social, political and pedagogical implications. Together, both of these orientations draw attention to the idea that it no longer makes sense to conceptualize critical thinking as an individualized, psychologized or decontextualized practice or a set of skills and competences. The approach suggested here provides multiple theoretical tools to explore what critical thinking does without adopting binary perspectives.

Ahmed’s (2004, 2010) feminist approach emphasizes how affects and emotions entail embodied processes of affecting and being affected that create ‘affective economies.’ In these economies, ideas, values and objects circulate and attach to certain bodies that generate different affective responses in one context compared to another. For example, as Danvers (2016) shows in her research, certain practices of critical thinking in higher education circulate and stick to certain bodies, and the implications of this for specific (e.g. feminized) bodies is that they are reproduced as (il)legitimate critical beings. As particular affects gain value (e.g. scepticism for feminized bodies), they further their power to shape and move discourses and practices about critical thinking in higher education. In this sense, certain ideas or concepts (i.e. who is a critical thinker; what makes one a critical thinker) evoke certain affective responses that are attached to particular bodies. This idea is perhaps best illustrated in Ahmed’s discussion of ‘the stranger’; her analysis helps us clarify how certain practices (in the case of this article, practices of critical thinking) become affectively invested:

To recognize somebody as a stranger is an affective judgment: a stranger is the one who seems suspicious; the one who lurks. I became interested in how some bodies are ‘in an instant’ judged as suspicious, or as dangerous, as objects to be feared, a judgement that can have lethal consequences. There can be nothing more dangerous to a body than the social agreement that that body is dangerous. (2014, 211)

Ahmed’s point is that what makes a body to have a certain value – e.g. what makes someone a critical thinker – is socially constructed and reproduced, therefore, we cannot only focus our attention on a set of individual skills or abilities. Instead, we must pay attention to the historical trajectories of embodied, affective responses to certain individuals, objects and ideas (e.g. critical thinking). Affective processes, then – both between and within bodies – are already social, cultural and political, which means that what constitutes critical thinking in university spaces is not a ‘neutral’ enterprise, but rather it is an expression of particular relations within the context in which the name ‘critical thinking’ is used. This brings me to the second orientation of the approach to affect suggested here, namely, a critical materialist orientation.

A critical materialist orientation theorizes affect as ‘simultaneously an object-target, bodily capacity, and collective condition’ (Anderson 2014, 17). This means that the affective life of individuals and collectives constitutes an ‘object-target’ for ‘apparatuses of power,’ namely, techniques, infrastructures or arrangements that mobilize affects for particular ends in society or education. For example, what constitutes a critical thinker may be an expression of broader collective conditions which circulate in certain contexts, thus the practices and bodily capacities of critical thinking are initiated or further established through encounters and relations. By paying attention to the ways that affects are manifested in specific social conditions, we are able to understand the influence and possibilities under which critical thinking operates, as well as the role of critical thinking (as it is entangled with affects) in fostering such conditions.

Teaching critical thinking in higher education, for example, can be considered a certain ‘apparatus’ of power, operationalizing affect, consciously or unconsciously, through the arrangements of policies, teachings, networks, and so on that comprise critical thinking as an affective, embodied and material practice (cf. McKenzie 2017). To that end, Anderson’s (2014) theorizing of apparatuses in terms of the affective forms of power embedded therein offers three important advantages: first, it shows how each apparatus emerges in response to specific collective conditions (e.g. anxiety, hope) that influence the trajectory and impact of the apparatus; second, each apparatus is composed of different affective, material, historical, sociocultural and political elements, therefore, there are different complexities and contingencies involved in how an apparatus (e.g. critical thinking) is manifested contextually; and third, if the processes of apparatus formation are malleable, it means that there are possibilities for the apparatus to become a part of normative discourses and practices or to generate personal and social transformation.

Bringing together Ahmed’s and Anderson’s theoretical considerations to the study of critical thinking in higher education has important implications for how to conceive the entanglement of affect, thinking, and criticality. Three insights from these considerations are valuable to understanding this entanglement. Firstly, feminist politics of emotion and a critical materialist orientation to affect provide a political understanding that explains the tenacity of certain social norms, namely, how particular affective and embodied practices get reproduced. Secondly, these theoretical considerations show that concepts, individuals and objects never act upon the world without being influenced and shaped by that world; in this sense, affect, thinking and criticality are not ‘individual’ acts but they are sustained by relations of power that are situated in particular contexts. Thirdly, the theoretical considerations presented here enable scholars in higher education to open up spaces for thinking, feeling, being, and acting differently – to expand Davies and Barnett’s (2015) motto; by using affective thinking as a conceptual tool that sparks the desire to challenge normative power apparatuses, whether these are conscious or unconscious, it is possible to unpack the ‘structures of feeling’ around critical thinking in higher education. In the next part of the essay, I examine how this political understanding of affects and emotions reframes the concept of thinking-feeling in higher education pedagogies.

Thinking-feeling in higher education

Brian Massumi (2002, 2015) is one of the leading interpreters of affect in terms of the entanglement between thinking and feeling, as is visible in his concept thinking-feeling (Vogler 2021). Although he promotes a version of affect that is exterior to cognition, language and emotion – it is beyond the scope of this article to engage in the long debates about this strand of affect and its limitations (for these details, see Schaefer 2019) – Massumi’s (2015) concept of thinking-feeling nevertheless highlights the idea emphasized by other theoretical accounts of affect, namely, that reducing thinking to a mind or feeling to a body reproduces Cartesian dualisms. Massumi’s account of affect, then, is in line with the theoretical considerations discussed in this article when it comes to theorizing affect as entailing affecting and being affected. In the following, I will draw on Massumi’s theorization of thinking-feeling and then discuss how thinking-feeling can be useful in higher education pedagogies, especially in relation to nurturing emotional reflexivity as a manifestation of thinking-feeling, focusing in particular on how students and academics may discuss sensitive issues such as political protests at the university.

Massumi (2015) emphasizes that a mind is embedded in networks, encounters, and relations, therefore, thinking cannot be attributed merely to the brain (Vogler 2021). As he writes, affect theory ‘does not reduce the mind to the body in the narrow, physical sense; it asserts that bodies think as they feel, on the level of their movements. This takes thinking out of the interiority of a psychological subject and puts it directly in the world: in the co-motion of relational encounter’ (Massumi 2015, 211). Massumi also argues that the concept of affect pertains more fundamentally to events than to objects or subjects (2015, 91, 94). This means that thinking-feeling is not something that can be reduced to the individuals or the objects involved, but rather it is a process that is constantly becoming, therefore, it cannot be captured in fixed terms. Hence a suitable approach to understanding the entanglement of thinking-feeling, according to Vogler (2021), is to focus on the unfolding of an event rather than insisting on attributing feeling or thinking to certain individuals. Importantly, this event-focused and relational notion of thinking-feeling, argues Vogler, does not necessarily deny the role of subjectivity; in other words, focusing on events, as Massumi suggests, does not imply that subjects cannot be engaged in emotional reflexivity, which is politically important, especially when subjects reflect on sensitive and controversial socio-political issues.

Burkitt’s (2012) and Holmes’s (2010) conceptualizations of ‘emotional reflexivity’ offer a good point of departure towards an account about the entanglement of thinking-feeling as a reflexive process that recognizes the central role of emotions in thought processes (and vice versa) without drawing firm epistemic or ontological boundaries between the two. In Holmes’s view, for example, emotion and reason, affect and thinking, are not separate, but rather she develops a model of reflexivity that entails both feeling and reflecting self. Holmes proposes reflexivity as an emotional, embodied and cognitive process that includes bodies, practices and feelings of people as those are situated in specific environments. Reflexivity, then, is not merely an ‘internal dialogue’ of an autonomous and decontextualized individual, but ‘a juggling of emotions within imagined and real interactions, in which interpretation can be difficult’ (Holmes 2010, 145). It is difficult, she explains, to determine empirically how interpretation of others’ and one’s own emotions is involved in people’s reflexive practices.

Burkitt (2012) takes Holmes’s line of thought further, arguing for a theory of emotional reflexivity that entails a process of thinking and feeling that is irreducible to the individual but rather is relational. As he explains, reflexivity is an essential capacity for interactions and relationships for which emotions are central to reflexive thought:

If […] we understand emotion as a motivating factor to reflexivity, coloring and infusing reflexivity itself, we can also put emotions back into the context of social interactions and relationships in which they arise. Emotion is not just something that we reflect on in a disengaged way, it is central to the way people in social relations relate to one another: it is woven into the fabric of the interactions we are engaged in and it is therefore also central to the way we relate to ourselves as well as to others. Emotion, then, is about the way we engage and interrelate with others and with ourselves, and cannot, therefore, be separated from reflexivity. (2021, 459)

Emotional reflexivity, then, bridges the personal and the social, the individual and the structural levels; it is an ongoing process of dialogue whereas people act and interact based on the changing interpretations they make, the ambivalent feelings they experience, and the negotiations they constantly engage of the conflicting feelings that surround their reflective thinking (Holmes, Jamieson, and Natalier 2021).

From these contemplations on emotional reflexivity as a manifestation of thinking-feeling, I suggest that attending to the ways ‘critical thinking in higher education’ shapes affective discourses – as well as the ways in which affects and bodies circulate in relation to criticality, producing some bodies as ‘critical’ while excluding others – is a crucial part of the project on how to nurture reflexivity in higher education pedagogies. The entanglement of affect and thought, feeling and thinking, then, is shown by highlighting reflexivity’s relational character and its inherent emotionality (Vogler 2021). To illustrate the potential value of this idea in higher education pedagogies, I will further theorize an example that is mentioned by Danvers (2021) concerning critical thinking as a form of socio-political activism, drawing also connections with student protests against the colonial legacies of western universities (e.g. see Dancy, Edwards, and Earl Davis 2018; Hayes, Luckett, and Misiaszek 2021; Heleta 2016; Luckett 2016).

Danvers (2021) writes that one of the dominant definitions of critical thinking found in her research on neoliberal higher education is exemplified by ‘students engaging in and responding to socio-political protest, thinking critically about building arguments in their assessments and meta-reflecting on their lives and futures’ (653). In other words, critical thinking is understood as a political engagement or a form of political education that enables students to embody a critical spirit for transformation. This idea is related to ‘critical thinking as critical pedagogy’ as discussed by Davies and Barnett (2015), who emphasize that the aim of educators who adopt this understanding puts critical thought at the service of transforming societies and addressing inequitable power structures. In using this example as my point of departure, I wish to bring the insights on thinking-feeling outlined earlier together and identify their potential in relation to re-thinking criticality and reflexivity as a form of engaging in and responding to socio-political protest for transformation – such as the case of student protests against the colonial legacies of western universities.

In particular, I argue that the concept of thinking-feeling is helpful in contemporary times, especially in relation to concerns around how students and academics could engage in and respond productively to student activism in movements such as Black Lives Matter in the US or Rhodes Must Fall in S. Africa. To this end, I find the work of Jasper (2018) on emotions and protest to be valuable, because he uses the neologism of ‘feeling-thinking processes’ (xi) to highlight how ‘emotions’ and ‘thought’ come through our bodies as ‘reactions to and beliefs about the social systems in which we live, especially outrage, indignation, and other feelings tied to our sense of justice’ (Jasper 2018, 129). A political reaction to injustice and domination, explains Vogler (2021), is a mode of thinking-feeling that taps into the moment when events emerge by challenging what is taken for granted.

For students and academics committed to forms of criticality in higher education, for example, an important aim is to challenge the perceived logic of neoliberalism, racism and coloniality and develop little, practical and strategic measures that help students expand their emotional register as well as their thinking (cf. Vogler 2021). For these measures to work, ‘given affect’s fundamentally situation, relational character, the collaborative potentials must be explored within a given context’ (Vogler 2021, 13, original emphasis). It becomes evident, then, that affect theory’s attention to the entanglement of thinking-feeling is an important way of not only understanding but also enacting practices of critical thinking in higher education that are politically salient. Practically, a careful attention to thinking-feeling the way theorized here, could be ‘translated’ into a range of teaching activities in the university classroom such as: historicizing how critical voices are being legitimated in different socio-political settings (e.g. US and S. Africa); developing a supportive emotional atmosphere and a trusting, open relationship in the university classroom that allows students to reflect critically on their emotions concerning these protests, while recognizing and examining others’ feelings, perspectives and interpretations; and, exploring how criticality in everyday life at the university is a deeply collective process, produced in and exemplified through political protests and social movements. Teaching activities such as these aim to bring out both individual and social dimensions of feeling-thinking processes, including different emotions and thought clusters that are associated with reflexivity in a given context. In this manner, student protests against university colonial legacies can become a source of critical learning that offers opportunities for reflecting on the emotional, political and other consequences of students’ political activism.

Conclusions and implications for teaching critical thinking in higher education

In this article, I have suggested that taking seriously the idea of thinking-feeling entanglement offers two crucial insights for re-thinking critical thinking in higher education: first, a focus on thinking-feeling highlights the relation between the cognitive, moral, political, and social dimensions of critical thinking; second, a recognition of how thinking-feeling processes work, including how emotions ‘stick’ to certain thoughts, emphasizes that an important element of criticality is emotional reflexivity as an ongoing process of navigating through possibilities for personal and social transformation. The last part of the essay elaborates more on the pedagogical consequences of these insights for teaching critical thinking in higher education.

As Danvers (2018) has shown through her empirical work on critical thinking in higher education, criticality is not an act of generic ‘critical beings’ with particular ‘rational’ skills but a product of ‘critical bodies located in the particularities of their social characteristics and differences and the multiple intersecting impacts of these upon their own experiences’ (558). The present article has considered more specifically how affect theory intersects with critical thinking, affirming the need to pay more attention in higher education to critical thinking as not a disembodied, rational or individualized act but rather as a set of affective and embodied practices situated in the world (see also Danvers 2021). In particular, this article has moved the discussion a step further by focusing on how theorizing critical thinking as a form of thinking-feeling brings together affect theory and theory into reflexivity in ways that open possibilities for dealing pedagogically with sensitive socio-political issues in universities. This means that enacting critical thinking in higher education as a vehicle for personal and social transformation (Shpeizer 2018) demands that academics go beyond engaging students in meeting certain learning objectives that (supposedly) require a specific set of skills and dispositions. Rather, this entails creating pedagogical spaces so that academics and students interrogate the social, political, cultural and affective conditions of public life’s experiences, including the experience of ‘critical thinking’ itself.

A skeptic may wonder at this point whether the notion of thinking-feeling, as theorized through affect theory, criticality and reflexivity in this article, differs from the critical pedagogy school. Indeed, a fundamental venue for the promotion of critical thinking education has come from critical pedagogy (Davies and Barnett 2015; Shpeizer 2018). In fact, several scholars over the years have made attempts to overcome the history of antagonism and the tensions between the discourse of critical thinking and that of critical pedagogy and connect the two in pedagogically and politically productive ways (e.g. see Burbules and Berk 1999; Davies 2015). On the one hand, there seem to be major differences between the two schools such as the opposition between the sociopolitical and moral orientation of critical pedagogy to change society and the ‘neutrality’ of critical thinking that focuses on skills and dispositions; for the former, epistemology is inseparable from politics, whereas for the latter, this approach is dangerous because it is ‘political’ (Shpeizer 2018). On the other hand, both schools invoke the term of ‘criticality’ that requires both reflection and action, both interpretation and change (Burbules and Berk 1999), hence it might be argued that there could be common ground for reconciling the two pedagogically, if the goal of education is to challenge what is taken for granted in society and public life.

In accommodating both schools, this article offers a point of departure to reconcile their differences by theorizing affect, criticality and reflexivity as entangled in pedagogy and politics; this implies that the cultivation of critical bodies who can better themselves and society under an expanded notion of ‘critical education’ (Shpeizer 2018) highlights the embeddedness, openness, and relationality of thinking-feeling. What this means practically is that pedagogies of thinking-feeling are inevitably implicated in the way that critical thinking operates both as a provocation of critical pedagogy and as a way of structuring affects in particular socio-political contexts (Zembylas 2013, 2021). For example, a critical pedagogy approach that operates as a pedagogy of thinking-feeling recognizes that oppressive forms of power largely work through disciplinary techniques at the affective level. This means that pedagogically it is crucial to create affective spaces for alternative ‘counter-conduct’ practices against neoliberalism, racism and coloniality in higher education – that is, practices that combine criticality in reflection and action for personal and social transformation. In other words, recognizing the affective dimension of critical thinking in critical pedagogy creates openings for forms of criticality that have the potential to transform students’ and academics’ capacities to affect and be affected.

In considering the theoretical and pedagogical approach I am suggesting here to affect and critical thinking in higher education, several questions might be raised for future investigations such as: How could teaching critical thinking function as an ‘apparatus of power’ (Anderson 2014) which uses affect to mobilize certain political ideas or actions? To what extent would this form of ‘critical education’ become transformative or problematic in universities, especially in relation to student movements and protests? How do students’ and academics’ practices of thinking-feeling in the classroom challenge or reproduce certain mobilizations of political protest? These questions are important to explore, because they highlight the notion of critical thinking as complex, contingent, embodied, affective and material practice that is manifested differently in different socio-political contexts.

Needless to say, as Moore (2013) reminds us, teaching critical thinking in higher education does not take the form of ‘telling’ students different ways of being critical. There is certainly a range of teaching activities that could be used such as providing students opportunities to express their emotions in relation to specific situations and events and encouraging them to reflect on the thinking-feeling processes they experience. Hence, I would argue that a viable theorization of critical thinking in higher education – also in relation to critical pedagogy – needs to pay attention to the affective conditions in which criticality emerges, circulates and is transformed to interrogate or reproduce existing socio-political conditions. Better acknowledgment of how universities play a fundamental role in the affective conduct of students will renew theorization of critical thinking in ways that disconnect criticality from psychologized and individualized perspectives or perspectives that reproduce Cartesian dualisms of emotion-reason.

In conclusion, the theoretical and pedagogical approach proposed here would mean highlighting that critical thinking is not a set of individualized skills and dispositions but rather it is very much embedded in the affective infrastructures of higher education institutions (Zembylas 2021). This would essentially imply that nurturing critical thinking in higher education is about inventing new affective practices that instigate empowerment in students to raise their ‘critical voice’ and take collective action to change that which they think ought to be changed. Re-considering critical thinking in this way entails deepening our understanding of the thinking-feeling entanglement and its pedagogical implications in higher education by further exploring the myriad feeling-thinking processes that guide students and academics in their everyday contexts.

Disclosure statement

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