Panel #2
Affective Spaces Part 1: Structures & Practices

'Exploring teacher-student relations through shame and care politics: Neoliberal ideologies-practices in community college'

Mike Rifino

 

As a dominant ideology in higher education, neoliberalism commodifies nearly all aspects of the educational process, but especially how educators, students, and their peers relate to one another in the classroom. Akin to business-like transactions, teacher-student relationships foreground individualism, rationality, and racist and ableist punitive measures (Annamma & Handy, 2019). Despite increasing literature on teacher-student relationships within the neoliberal university, an emphasis concerning its socio-emotional dynamics, especially among students from marginalised populations, can significantly advance this scholarship. This paper seeks to illuminate these socio-emotional dynamics through reporting on a qualitative study on NYC-based community college students, mostly working-class people of colour. Conceptually, drawing on the feminist politics of emotions literature and queer theories, this study challenges viewing emotions as internal properties to argue that emotions such as shame and care emerge through social practices contextualised in power relations (Boler, 1999). Thematic analysis examined interviews with seven students (the median age 25, four women, and three men). Findings revealed how neoliberal ideologies-practices evoke shame within teacher-student relationships and thus promote “care-less” relations that force students to embrace isolation and individualism within learning-related contexts. These findings support research demonstrating shame’s relationality that operates “as a form of profound misrecognition,” entailing painful sensations often hidden through individualising discourses (Burke, 2017). In addressing shame while fostering care, educators must embrace a “Discrit Solidarity” (cf. Annamma & Handy, 2019) that validates the emotions of students of colour and from marginalised communities, particularly to shaming experiences stemming from interpersonal oppression, while also understanding these emotions as a basis for resistance. This paper concludes with a discussion of implications for the politics of care. Drawing on sociocultural and critical traditions, care is political when its role in challenging “the myth of independence” and associated emotions like shame are illuminated and reorientated toward fostering solidarity and exposing interlocking systems of oppression (Grande, 2004; Motta & Bennett, 2018).

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'Affective and socio-material understanding of urban informality'

Juan Guevara

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In recent years, urban studies have been influenced by the postmodern and affective turn. This influence has resulted in different developments that build on an array of theoretical and conceptual perspectives such as the Rhizome, Assemblage and/or Posthuman Feminism. As one section of urban studies, the research on informality (land or property invasions or squatters that shape the sociopolitical landscapes of different cities around the world) is not alien to this disciplinary turn.

 

Recent studies on informality stress the need to incorporate in the urban analysis a rhizomatic view (Purcell, 2013), while others consider the relevance to understand the complexity of informality through lenses that incorporate human and non-human elements in the informal assemblage (Dovey, 2012; Baptista, 2019; Jayne and Hall, 2019; Cirolia and Scheba, 2019) . However, this crescent interest lacks a Relational Biography Approach (Woodward, 2020) and a posthuman feminist discussion that finally decentres the ethnocentric and masculine perspective and posit the importance of objects, materials and things in the urban landscape and the affective relationships that co-constitute them (Barad, 2003; Gullion, 2018).

 

This paper seeks to highlight the relevance in the constitutive process of informal neighbourhoods and communities of materials, things and objects from a socio-historical and affective perspective. This focus is driven by a Relational Biography Approach of stairs and pathways that shape and co-constitute these neighbourhoods and communities, but also, my perspective is informed by a diffractive ethnography that allows to make visible hidden relationships and operationalises a reassembly of the social elements of informality through a deterritorialisation of coding, experience and language so new forms emerge from it (Latour, 2005; Gullion, 2018). In short, my research aims to understand the historical and socio-political agencies of stairs and pathways, as things and objects, that co-constitute the affective relationships of informal settlements.

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'Forms of Affect: Loss, Nostalgia and Melancholia in Jonathan Coe’s The Rotters’ Club and Middle England

Wiktoria Tunska (University of York)

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‘Forms are at work everywhere’, writes Caroline Levine in Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015). Referring to scholarship on forms of affect, namely works by Eugenie Brinkema (2016) and Alexandra Kingston-Reese (2020), this paper will consider a relationship between affects and forms: I will explore how affects can become forms and how affective formalist methodology may become a productive strategy in the analysis of contemporary literature. I will argue that affects influence not only the content of the literary texts but are also their formal dimension.

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In this paper, I will refer to the concept of ‘amassing loss’, which describes a feeling of loss, developing and accumulating in time. Reading two of Jonathan Coe’s novels The Rotters’ Club (2001) and Middle England (2018), I will explore how such a sense of loss links to and facilitates the development of negative social and political affects, namely postcolonial melancholia and restorative nostalgia. I will suggest that the texts recognise a state of an ‘amassing loss’ as a substantial part of the pre-Brexit structure of feeling, responding to it on all textual levels (content, form, language). Through the close reading of the texts, I will scrutinise how amassing work is represented through the novels’ forms and how it affects the forms of the novels. I will examine, for instance, the illustration of the void after the post-war loss of British manufacturing in Middle England, reading the materiality of the empty factories, wastelands or reorganised spaces, where shopping malls replaced former industrial sites, as a sign of material reduction – the amassing of loss. My analyses will also consider how Coe’s novels depict the accumulation of loss through, for example, fragmentary narrative, agglutinative language or representations of aporia. In doing so, I aim to discover the formal potential of literary affects. 

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