This paper follows recent debates around theorizations of ‘affect’ and its distinction from ‘emotion’ in the context of non-representational theories to exemplify how the ontologization of affects creates important openings of ethical and political potential in educators’ efforts to make productive interventions in pedagogical spaces. The ontological orientation provided by NRT has two important implications for educational theory and practice. First, it exposes the indeterminacy and inventiveness of affective capacities of bodies, illustrating how diverse socio-materials events are variously enrolled in (...) everyday school life processes of differentiation. Second, it emphasizes an affirmative account of the ethics and politics of affect in which connections and relations forged between bodies, things and spaces constitute the basis of new configurations of affects and emotions in schools. (shrink)

This paper follows recent debates on the ontological turn in the social sciences and humanities to exemplify how this turn creates important openings of methodological and political potential in education. In particular, the paper makes an attempt to show two things: first, the new questions and possibilities that are opened from explicitly acknowledging the methodological and political consequences of the ontological turn in education—e.g. concerning agency, transformation, materiality and relations; and second, the importance of being clear about how educators and (...) educational researchers conceptualize ontology and engage with debates on the ontological turn in related disciplines. The paper sketches some of the methodological and political implications of the ontological turn for education, focusing in particular on the concept of learning. (shrink)

This article explores how Jean François Lyotard reflects on affect as unrepresentable in relation to contemporary affect theory and specifically post-Deleuzian perspectives and non-representational theories suggesting that we need to invent new theoretical ways of addressing our more-than-textual, multisensual worlds. The essay leans on this conversation to make a political and pedagogical intervention into the terrain of addressing affect in the classroom. It is discussed how Lyotard adds his own contribution to the work of other affect theorists, who are not (...) saying that if we find the right vehicle—literature, art, etc.—we can translate or represent affect, but rather that pedagogy is itself always already an affective event that exceeds representation. Pedagogies of ineffability, as it argued, are those pedagogical practices that do not fall pray into the rhetorics of standardization and homogenization in the name of ‘emotional intelligence’ or ‘effectiveness’, but rather invent affective spaces of learning in which educators and students are opened precariously to the unknown. (shrink)

The point of departure of this article is that hospitality in education has not been theorized in terms of emotion and affect, partly because its law have been discussed in ways that have not paid much attention to the role of emotion and affect. The analysis broadens our understanding of the ethics and politics of hospitality by considering it as a spatial and affective relational practice. In particular, concepts from affect theory such as the notion of affective atmospheres and atmospheric (...) walls are discussed to highlight the notion of affective hospitality. It is argued that a greater awareness of the micro-politics of hospitality in its everyday enactment in various educational settings can show educators how specific practices of hospitality work to produce affective spaces in which the socio-historical context of privilege may be interrupted. The paper concludes with a discussion of the ethical, political and pedagogical implications of affective hospitality. (shrink)

This article explores the psychological logics underpinning key perspectives in the ‘turn to affect’. Research on affect raises questions about the categorization of affective states, affective meaning-making, and the processes involved in the transmission of affect. I argue that current approaches risk depopulating affecting scenes, mystifying affective contagion, and authorizing questionable psychobiological arguments. I engage with the work of Sedgwick and Frank, Thrift, and Ahmed to explore these points and suggest that the concept of affective practice offers a more promising (...) social psychological grounding. Notions of affective practice are more commensurate with trends in contemporary psychobiology, explain the limits on affective contagion, and emphasize relationality and negotiation, attentive to the flow of affecting episodes. A practice approach positions affect as a dynamic process, emergent from a polyphony of intersections and feedbacks, working across body states, registrations and categorizations, entangled with cultural meaning-making, and integrated with material and natural processes, social situations and social relationships. (shrink)

Sociologists usually conceive of emotions as individual, episodic, and categorical phenomena while emphasizing their social and cultural construction. At the same time, the term emotion refers to a wide range of conceptually and ontologically distinct components and is therefore best thought of as a relatively unspecific umbrella term. This article argues that the routes leading to the social and cultural construction of emotion, for example, norms, rules, values, and discourse, are unlikely to be applicable to each of these components in (...) the same way. This is particularly true for an element of emotion that is often portrayed as being most essential and basic and therefore to some extent avoiding the formative forces of culture and society, namely, affect. Although affect is an established notion in sociology, it has remained conceptually underdeveloped. The article therefore discusses different perspectives on affect from cultural studies that emphasize its relational and bodily character. In a second step, it contrasts and reconciles these views with existing theories of affect in sociology and social psychology and considers a number of essential characteristics that can be used to circumscribe affect and its social and cultural correlates. Finally, concepts from relational sociology are introduced and concrete examples to specify the relational character of affect and to develop an understanding of affect, that is both theoretically fruitful and conducive to empirical research, are discussed. (shrink)

This article engages with new materialist posthumanist philosophy to conceptually approach an ethics of outdoor environmental education with the focus on a pupil’s body. Thinking with place-respons...

The article proposes a new way of thinking through truth commissions by discerning the manner in which they usher in new political configurations through voices and vocalizations. It contributes to our understanding of truth commissions by way of proposing a pragmatic ontology of bonds between the body, voice, and testimony by elucidating the central features that make them vocal assemblages, composed of five sub-institutional capacities: they affect and are affected by bodies in a complex topological relation; they are driven by (...) an apology, which itself proffers a non-human body of transformation; they potentiate reconciliation through spontaneous vocalizations; they are ontogenetic openings that reassemble national pasts, presents, and futures; and they are temporally experiential predecessors to political action. While victim testimony is taken as a historical crowning of the edifice for nations seeking to mend their past injustices, I contend that public reparation flourishes only if the state is open to the alternative orientations the voice proffers—that is, following recent observations of transitional justice, truth commissions have the potential to seek out alternative context-specific forms of justice in place of a universal law of reconciliation. By way of a brief discussion of Aboriginal artist K.C. Adams’ diptych series, Perception, the article proposes that voices pose a nuanced figuration of auto-affection as a communicative possibility towards the presentation and invention of the self. (shrink)

Bodily methodologies that engage with the affective, rhythmic, and temporal dimensions of movement have altered the landscape of social science and humanities research. Walking is one such methodology by which scholars have examined vital, sensory, material, and ephemeral intensities beyond the logics of representation. Extending this rich field, this article invokes the concept trans to reconceptualize walking research through theories that attend to the vitality and agency of matter, the interconnectedness between humans and non-humans, the importance of mediation and bodily (...) affect, and the necessity of acknowledging ethico-political responsibility. While theoretical and empirical research about embodied, emplaced, and sensorial relations between moving bodies and space are well developed in the field of walking studies, their entanglements become profoundly altered by theories of trans – transcorporeality, transspecies, and transmaterialities. Taking up trans theories we experiment in thinking-with a sonic art performance, Walking to the Laundromat, which probes bodily, affective, and gendered labour. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the possibility of adopting a representational approach for technoscience, in which representation is considered as a situated process of dynamic “intra-action” (Barad 2007 ). Re-elaborating the recent critiques of representationalism (Thrift 2008 ), my analysis begins by analysing Hayles’s situated model of representation from an early essay where she explains her definition of constrained constructivism (Hayles [ 1991 ] 1997). The essay then discusses the notions of figuration and diffraction and the way they are employed by (...) Haraway in many of her writings for her critique of technoscience (Haraway 1991 , 1997 ). Finally, after considering diffraction through Barad’s reading of this practice in the context of her theory of agential realism ( 2007 ), it shows the links that relate constrained constructivism, situated knowledge and agential realism, and the way all of them work at “diffract[ing] the rays of technoscience” (Haraway 1997 : 16) through an alternative representational practice. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAt the heart of this paper is a desire to queer critical discourse studies a little: jabbing at our norms and wisdoms, poking around our spiritless or dispirited spaces, and perhaps nudging us towards some new possibilities. This impulse is prompted by my collaborative research on elitist discourse and so-called luxury tourism which also serve as the thematic focus of my paper here. Throughout this work, I have struggled to manage the affective, spatial, and embodied nature of status/privilege. For all (...) its fervour, CDS has become a rather cerebral exercise: all very textual and rational. None of which lends itself to the slippery, sensuous ‘new worlds of luxury’ where semiosis and representation are everywhere, but by no means everything. If we are to get our methods and politics right, we must recognize how status anxieties get under our skin as well as into our heads. We must also acknowledge how we are all positioned by the euphoric post-class ideologies of contemporary wealth formation/inequality. To this end, I propose that CDS pay attention to the provocations of queer theory, non-representational theory, im/material ethnographies, and performance studies. As my paper hopefully demonstrates, our scholarship may also benefit from a style of ‘writing’ – of representing our work – that is a little messier and perhaps a little more playful. (shrink)

This study focuses on a series of videos aimed at teacher recruitment in Singapore and how they are used as an ideological tool for persuasion. By adopting a multimodal critical discourse analysis approach to focus on affect, it examines how these videos create and promulgate the ideology of an ideal teacher as one who is caring, encouraging and supportive of students. The analysis shows how affect is not only embodied in and performed by the primary protagonists in the video narratives (...) through their action, facial expression, posture and speech. It is also evoked through various secondary meaning-making modes, such as focus, angle, lighting, background music and setting, through which the narratives unfold. More importantly, it demonstrates how affect is used not only as a means to arouse and engage viewers’ sensibilities but also as a persuasive strategy to manufacture and manage particular social and economic realities in contemporary society. (shrink)

Informed by understandings of affect theory, the pedagogic potential of object itineraries, or simply, the journey of things, is proposed in this case as a form of sensual a-r-tography. A pair of sporty shoes as mundane objects are at the heart of this deliberation, and the mechanism through which to consider the scope of conversations underway about more-than-human perspectives and how objects can be activated as sites of educational inquiry. The embodiment of each step in this walk is an opening (...) to interrogate how the potential materiality of artefacts ‘enflesh’ object-body-space as artist-researcher-teacher. Mapping geographies of self-in-relation, and guided by the betweenness in landscape encounters as relational and contingent, this speculative account with theoretical perspectives is rendered through the entanglements offered by story shoes. (shrink)

This photo-essay highlights the ways in which medicine features in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) and uses it to reflect on the nature of ethical obligation set out by Judith Butler in her work on state-achieved precarity. Although medical infrastructure of even the most basic type is tragically lacking and in some areas shockingly absent in the OPT, it is the particular way in which medicine comes to be needed that we focus on. Leaving aside the rhetoric that has claimed (...) authority over what can or cannot be said of the Occupation, we focus on its geo-technological arrangements. By placing photos and case studies of medical obstruction within an analysis of the Occupation, we forge an encounter between reader and the Occupation to raise questions about the use of medicine in this context and the manner in which conventional ethics can give legitimacy to this use. On the basis of what we show through visual and textual documentary material, we propose ethics be understood as inherent to the geo-technological arrangements that make life possible or, as in this case, undermine, obstruct or deliberately take life. Hence the ethical obligation that Butler calls upon is reiterated in ways that encompass the everyday features of occupation including those active in the emergence of medicine as a tactic of war. (shrink)

What happens when neuroscientific knowledges move from laboratories and clinics into therapeutic settings concerned with the care of children? ‘Brain-based parenting’ is a set of discourses and practices emerging at the confluence of attachment theory, neuroscience, psychotherapy and social work. The neuroscientific knowledges involved understand affective states such as fear, anger and intimacy as dynamic patterns of coordination between brain localities, as well as flows of biochemical signals via hormones such as cortisol. Drawing on our own attempts to adopt brain-based (...) parenting, and engaging with various strands and critiques of new materialism and affect theory, we explore the ways in which the social sciences and humanities might fruitfully engage with neuroscientific concepts and affects. How does science-affected indeterminacy, with all its promises of ontological and experiential agency, help us to observe, wait, bind or hold together volatile mixtures of habit, speech and action? (shrink)

In this essay both the facts/values and facticity/normativity divides are considered from the perspective of global semiotics and with specific regard to the relationships between legal meaning and spatial scope of law’s experience. Through an examination of the inner and genetic projective significance of categorization, I will analyze the semantic dynamics of the descriptive parts comprising legal sentences in order to show the intermingling of factual and axiological/teleological categorizations in the unfolding of legal experience. Subsequently, I will emphasize the translational (...) and enactive cognitive disposition underlying the construction of the second premise of the so-called judiciary syllogism and thereby the untenability of the idea that ‘law makes its facts.’ Hence, I will try to bring to the fore the cultural pre-assumptions encapsulated in the positivistic and therefore also formalistic or analytical approaches to legal experience and the loss of their inner consistency when legal experience confronts the phases and major changes of global semiotics. Finally, I will strive to relativize the opposition between the positivist and non-positivistic theories of law in view of an understanding of legal experience focused not only, or at least not primarily, on what ‘law is’ but also on ‘how’ it unwinds through, and _in spite of_, environmental and semantic transformations. (shrink)

The many constraints of outer space experience challenge the human ability to coexist. Paradoxically, astronauts assert that on the international space station there are no conflicts or, at least, that they are able to manage their differences, behavioral as well as cognitive, in full respect of human rights and the imperatives of cooperative living. The question is: Why? Why in those difficult, a-terrestrial, and therefore almost unnatural conditions do human beings seem to be able to peacefully and collaboratively live together? (...) What is there beyond terrestrial boundary conditions that allows for such a result? And what can we learn from the astronauts’ experience about the effectiveness of human rights on Earth? My proposal is that the a-terrestrial dimension deeply alters the mind/body indexical framework and, in this way, disentangles the human inclination to semiosis from the cognitive and behavioral habits of categorization and territorialization inherent in the experience on Earth. If analyzed through the spectrum of an interdisciplinary approach involving anthropology, semiology, law, and human geography, I think that outer space enterprises can offer many insights into the cognitive and ethical/political hindrances to the effectiveness of human rights and their intercultural uses. Meanwhile the compulsive greed for a possessive territorialization of outer space and celestial bodies is growing by leaps and bounds. It haunts and imbues both astropolitics and space law. The astronauts’ semio-anthropological experience of human rights and cooperative coexistence seems to have been left in orbit. The future requires awareness and action by anthropologists, semioticians, cognitive scientists, geographers and lawyers, working all together in an interdisciplinary effort to move beyond approaching the experiential with a territorial mindset. The hope is that the “dark dream” of human exploitation/colonization of outer space will not turn from a political and legal speculation into a future reality. (shrink)

The embodied creative practice of dance facilitates a particular kind of awareness or attunement which can inform both the therapeutic and the intellectual work of the Health Humanities. This paper therefore considers dance as a way of ‘doing’ Health Humanities in two interlinked ways: dance as a way of healing and dance as a way of knowing. In bringing together carnal and the creative dimensions of human experience, dance offers us a way of making sense of our place in the (...) world that provides us both with much needed existential security and much needed epistemological freedom. (shrink)

Recent social theory that stresses the ‘nonrepresentational’, the ‘more-than visual’, and the relationship between affect and sensation have tended to assume some kind of break or rupture from historical antecedents. Especially since the contributions of Crary and Jay in the 1990s, when it comes to perceiving the built environment the complexities of sensation have been partially obscured by the dominance of a static model of vision as the principal organizing modality. This article returns to some prior historical articulations of the (...) significance of motility in perception, retracing pathways across art history, architectural theory and the history of neuroscience to argue for an alternative model based on the movement of the eye. Along with subsystems that deal with balance and orientation, I offer parallels between spatial motifs of the interior spaces of the body – labyrinths, vestibules, chambers – and those in artefacts and the built environment that contribute to the heightened physicality of the oculomotor subject. (shrink)

Medical schools are among the most important spaces for the history of the body. It is here that students come to know the anatomical bodies of their future patients and, through a process of cognitive and embodied practice, that the knowing bodies of future clinicians are also shaped. Practical and theoretical understandings of medicine are formed in these affective and historied buildings and in collaboration with a broad material culture of education. Medical schools are, however, both under-theorised and under-historicised. This (...) article integrates ‘materialist’ considerations of the body with Henri Lefebvre’s philosophy of space and rhythm in order to compare two markedly different spaces – the 19th-century Anatomy Department at Semmelweis University in Hungary and the mid-20th-century ‘skills laboratory’ at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. This comparison suggests that biomedical bodies are variously shaped by the agential and affective material histories present in the everyday experience of contemporary medical education. (shrink)

The always vexed relationships between philosophy, theory, methodology, empirical work and their representations and legitimations have been thrown into chaos with the belated acknowledgement of the Anthropocene. Unsurprisingly, traditional Western thought may have been complicit, given its underlying anthropocentric assumptions and humanist commitments in education philosophy, theory and practice. The postcritical knowledge ecology developed here is applied to both a modest and responsible form of methodological inquiry in an ethnographic study of nature experience. Our contextualised experiment adds to the nascent (...) literature of an environmentally oriented education now demanded in the Anthropocene. (shrink)

In this article I reconsider the issue of ?transfer? in education. Received views of learning transfer tend to rely upon a version of representation in which the world and the learner are held apart. The focus falls on how this gap can be closed; how learning can be transferred. A sociomaterial perspective, by contrast, puts learner and world back together, making each available to the other. Bringing the materialist sensibility of actor-network theory to bear and drawing on empirical data collected (...) as part of a small-scale qualitative study of the experience of graduate teachers when moving from education into work, it is argued that transfer, and by implication, learning, primarily concerns the practical and takes multiple forms: contingently composed of social, textual and material practices of knowledge production, learning transfer is a relational effect of the intersection of these practices. Empirical analyses point to the practice of two broad patterns of learning transfer, termed here the representational and the relational. Thinking learning transfer as performed through disparate agencies and practices challenges the self-evidences of perspectives on learning which characterize contemporary education. Here, learning is primarily seen in terms of the intrinsic capabilities of people, regardless of the object-dependent qualities of their learning and lives. This human-centricity raises significant epistemological and ethical issues which are addressed by way of a discussion of the embedded normativities and politics of the practices of representational and relational transfer. (shrink)

Set within the socio-political context of standards-based education reform, this article explores the constitutive role of teaching standards in the production of the practice and identity of the ‘accomplished’ teacher. It contrasts two idioms for thinking about and studying these standards, the representational and the performative. Utilising the material-semiotic approach of actor-network theory, it addresses the issue of how the representational idiom of teaching standards has become so authoritative that it readily eclipses other ways to think and ‘do’ them. In (...) tracing the development of a specific set of teaching standards as part of a national research project, the argument is made that standards should be understood as performative knowledge and identity practices. And, accounting them should also be performative. Accordingly, attention is given to key locales in which this development is taking place. Teaching standards emerge as ontologically variable and it is struggles around this variability that can create conditions for a renewed practice and politics of education reform. (shrink)

Starting from the concept of Digital Earth, the article questions the effects that Google’s geo-spatial applications have produced on our daily relationship with information, and the way we experience the spaces around us. Its aim is twofold: on the one hand, I intend to examine the implications that bring Google’s digital maps closer to the invention of the print or telescope; on the other hand, I intend to explain, through a medio-anthropological investigation, how the map, as a medium of perception, (...) falls not only de facto, but also de jure, into the field of aesthetics. (shrink)

Neste artigo faz-se uma descrição do Sistema Global de Posicionamento e dos dispositivos de navegação de uso rodoviário que o constituem, enquanto artefatos, com vista a uma leitura semiótica destes últimos em articulação com a sistematicidade. De uma semiótica tradicional dos objetos passa-se a uma que se centra na sua materialidade, a partir da qual é possível detecar sentidos performativos na tecnologia. Esta abordagem permite uma compreensão mais detalhada do caráter global das tecnologias móveis em articulação com a sua individualização. (...) A tese que se defende é a de que é possível dar conta do que é próprio da materialidade deste fenómeno, explorando, a par dos elementos tradicionalmente simbólicos, aspectos não redutíveis a estes. Não obstante, destaca-se como o material e o simbólico permanecem numa relação que permite identificar mais claramente a complexidade dos sistemas e artefatos técnicos, bem como os elementos que, neste domínio, estabelecem uma interação entre produção e consumo. Deste modo, chega-se a uma semiótica material que permite uma interpretação mais fiel do que é específico da componente funcional da tecnologia, em particular de um sistema e artefatos que se instalam cada vez mais no quotidiano, evitando a redução a uma valoração utilitária. This paper makes a depiction of the Global Positioning System and the navigation devices that are part of it, as artifacts. It aims to develop a semiotic reading of these artifacts in articulation with systematicity. From a traditional semiotics of objects, it goes to a material one, in which it is possible to find performative trends on technology. This approach is an opportunity to understand in a detailed way the global character of mobile technologies in articulation with individualization. The thesis held here is that this is a better way to handle with the specificities of materiality, exploring, besides the traditionally symbolic elements, aspects not reducible to the latter. Nevertheless, both the material and the symbolic layers are in permanent relation. The observation of this helps to understand systems and artifacts' complexity, as well as some of the elements that are involved in the interactions between production and consumption. By doing this, the paper tries to achieve a material semiotics frame that allows an interpretation more faithful to the specificities of the functional aspects of technology, particularly those that are part of a system and artifacts so present in daily life, avoiding a reduction to a utilitarian valuation. (shrink)

What difference does the philosophical revolution of Deleuze and Guattari make to our understanding the early Christianity? In honour of the fortieth anniversary of publication of A Thousand Plateaus, this article argues that the discipline of Christian origins is currently premised on a historically condemned mode of subjectivity, that of subject/object metaphysics. The philosophical processes found in A Thousand Plateaus are particularly apposite to the current dilemma of Christian origins: as a rhizome-book consisting of plateaus, machines, singularities and non-representational concepts, (...) this book models new modes of thinking that can help the discipline rejuvenate itself and accomplish new tasks which are presently beyond its reach – for Deleuzian philosophy privileges the virtual over the actual, becoming over being, machinic transformations over static structures, and semiotics over linguistics. (shrink)

This article explores the role of sustainable living experiments as devices of public engagement. It engages with object-centred perspectives in the sociology of science and technology, which have characterized public experiments as sites for the domestication of technology, and as effective instruments of public involvement, because, in part, of the seductive force of their use of empirical forms of display. Green living experiments, which are conducted in the intimate setting of the home and reported on blogs, complicate this understanding, insofar (...) as they seek to format socio-material practices as sites of involvement. This has implications for how we conceive of the relations between public involvement and everyday material practices. While the latter are often located outside the public sphere, green living experiments extend the publicity genre of `being intimate in public' to things. It also follows that green living experiments do not so much solve but rather articulate problems of public involvement. (shrink)

In a series of non-Western films 13 Time and Winds, A Time for Drunken Horses, Turtles Can Fly and Buddha Collapsed out of Shame 13 contemporary child figures inhabit their world in a manner that demonstrates the child 19s resilience and their intimacy with the land. Drawing on non-representational theory and relating this to feminist theories of affect and subjectivity, the article suggests that these films present child figures for whom mobility has effectively become their ontology and that this demonstrates (...) that there may be a different form of kinship between the natural world and the child. This is not to romanticize this connection or to essentialize the child: this relationship is revealed not to be idyllic but affectively 18open 19 in a way that may be terrifying as well as liberating. (shrink)

The article provides an overview of different approaches to the semiotic study of landscapes both in the field of semiotics proper and in landscape studiesin general. The article describes different approaches to the semiotic processes in landscapes from the semiological tradition where landscape has been seen as analogous to a text with its language, to more naturalized and phenomenological approaches, as well as ecosemiotic view of landscapes that goes beyond anthropocentric definitions. Special attention is paid to the potential of cultural (...) semiotics of Tartu–Moscow school for the analysis of landscapes and the possibilities held by a dynamic, dialogic and holistic landscape definition for the development of ecosemiotics. (shrink)

In this paper, two alternative naturalistic standpoints on the relations between language, human consciousness and social life are contrasted. The first, dubbed “intrinsic naturalism,” is advocated among others by the realist philosopher John Searle; it starts with intrinsic intentionality and consciousness emerging from the brain, explains language as an outgrowth of consciousness and ends with institutional reality being created by language-use. That standpoint leans on what may be described as the standard interpretation of Darwinian evolution. The other type of naturalism, (...) in contrast, making use of the concept of evolutionary niches, suggests that the search for the explanatory mechanisms of language and consciousness should begin with the human community, because that is the cultural niche for everything distinctively human to evolve, including language and human consciousness. (shrink)

This article outlines the main tenets of affect theory and links these to Sloterdijk’s spherology. Where affect foregrounds prepersonal energies and posthuman impulses, spherology provides a lens for considering how humans congregate in constantly reconfiguring socialities in their pursuit of legitimacy and immunity. The article then explores the relevance of “affective spheres” for contemporary social science research. The article’s main argument here is that research of contemporary organisational and professional practices must increasingly be spherogenic, or seeking to build “affective spheres.” (...) The basis of this argument are the in situ complexity and fast-changing nature of practices, and the increasing challenges involved in objectifying or ‘freezing’, and analysing or dissecting such practices. The article draws for its case study on a video-reflexive project conducted in a U.S. health service. The article concludes that the notion of research as spherogenics counterbalances the conventional methodological emphasis on a predetermined stance —whether neutral or political—in our construction and enactment of social science research. (shrink)

This article presents a sociomaterial account of simulation in higher education. Sociomaterial approaches change the ontological and epistemological bases for understanding learning and offer valuable tools for addressing important questions about relationships between university education and professional practices. Simulation has grown in many disciplines as a means to bring the two closer together. However, the theoretical underpinnings of simulation pedagogy are limited. This paper extends the wider work of applying sociomaterial approaches to educational phenomena, taking up Schatzki’s practice theory as (...) a distinctive basis for doing so. The question ‘What is being simulated?’ is posed, prompting discussion of multiple bodies, performances and experiences. The potential of adopting such a framework for understanding simulation as a pedagogic practice that brings the classroom and workplace together is illustrated with reference to clinical education in nursing. (shrink)

This article intervenes into contemporary scholarship on affect by bringing different affect theories into the same analytical frame. Analysing commercial surrogacy in India through three different conceptualizations of affect found in the work of Michael Hardt, Sara Ahmed and Brian Massumi reveals how affect emerges as a malleable state in the practice of, as a circulatory force in the debates around, and as an ephemeral intensity in the spontaneous resistance to surrogacy. Based on this analysis, I suggest that integrating different (...) theories of affect enables more holistic examinations of corporeal regulation by opening our understanding to the multiple lives of affect that operate on the level of political economy, cultural signification and material intensity simultaneously. (shrink)

This article explores how historians of emotions and historians of the senses can collaborate to write a history of emotional experience that takes seriously the corporeality of emotions. It invest...

This article proposes that the propagation of vibrations could serve as a better model for understanding the transmission of affect than the flow, circulation or movement of bodies by which it is most often theorized. The vibrations (or idiomatically ‘vibes’) among the sound system audience (or ‘crowd’) on a night out on the dancehall scene in Kingston, Jamaica, provide an example. Counting the repeating frequencies of these vibrations in a methodology inspired by Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis results in a Frequency Spectrogram. This (...) ranges from the sociocultural frequencies of nightly, weekly and seasonal cycles and circulations of musical style and fashion, to the material frequencies of the amplitudes and timbres of sound itself, with reggae’s signature low-pitched bass-line, to the corporeal frequencies of the flesh and blood of the dancehall ‘crowd’, pulsating with heartbeats and kinetic dance rhythms. The vibration model then addresses the intensities of affect in terms of auditory amplitudes, as with sonic dominance; feelings as frequencies; and the distinctive meaning of affect as timbre. This aims to encourage the radical impulse of the idea of affect to abandon the traditional envelope of the autonomous, self-consistent, rational individual. The meaning of affect is thus located in the ratio, proportions and patterning of vibrations, that is, outside the discourse of emotions or representation of feelings. (shrink)

Building from recent attempts in the humanities and social sciences to conceive of creative, entangled ways of doing interdisciplinary work, I turn to Braidotti’s ‘nomadic ontology’ to (re)vision the human body without a brain. Her exploration of the body as a ‘threshold of transformations’ is put into conversation with Deleuze’s comments on neurobiology to consider what a brainless body might do, or undo, in neuroscientific practice. I ground discussion in a case study, detailing the practices of brain decoding or ‘mind (...) reading,’ re-interpreting Rose’s account. Therein, I argue that the technical-social configurations of brain decoding are unlikely to usher in a radically new ontology, as Rose suggests. To better match Rose’s vision and align with new ontologies in cultural theory, I argue that neuroscience must become nomadic and embrace a body without a brain. I then conclude with six recommendations towards a nomadic neuroscience. (shrink)

This paper interrogates and reclaims clown practices in children’s rehabilitation as ‘foolish.’ Attempts to legitimize and ‘take seriously’ clown practices in the health sciences frame the work of clowns as secondary to the ‘real’ work of medical professionals and diminish the ways clowns support emotional vulnerability and bravery with a willingness to fail and be ridiculous as fundamental to their work. Narrow conceptualizations of clown practices in hospitals as only happy and funny overlook the ways clowns also routinely engage with (...) sadness, despair, discomfort and many other ways of being and doing. Our exploration of clown practices as foolish exposes the ways children’s rehabilitation upholds particular neoliberal models of success and invites a re-centring of rehabilitation and health care research and practice towards relationship building, supporting meaningful projects and a continued nurturing of aesthetic and pleasurable ways of being-in-the-world in the present moment as valuable unto themselves. (shrink)

This paper draws together empirical findings from our study of hackathons in the UK with literature on big data through three interconnected frameworks: data as discourse, data as datalogical and data as materiality. We suggest not only that hackathons resonate the wider socio-technical and political constructions of data that are currently enacted in policy, education and the corporate sector, but also that an investigation of hackathons reveals the extent to which ‘data’ operates as a powerful discursive tool; how the discourses (...) of data mask and reveal a series of tropes pertaining to data; that the politics of data are routinely and simultaneously obscured and claimed with serious implications for expertise and knowledge; and that ultimately, and for the vast majority of hackathons we have attended, the discursive and material constructions of data serve to underpin rather than challenge existing power relations and politics. (shrink)

Due to the simultaneous linguistic and musical quality of voicing, voiced breath poses theoretical challenges to notions of ‘embodiment’, especially as they are used in theatre practice/studies. In this article, I make two intertwining arguments to address questions of the place of semantic meaning and conscious thought in performance practice/theories as they arose in my anthropological engagement with laboratory theatre. Firstly, theatre and performance practice/theories keen to embrace ‘embodiment’ often leave out things like explicit analysis, reflexivity, referential or semantic meaning (...) and so on because, as my ethnography shows, they are judged as secondary, and thus belonging implicitly more closely to disembodied ‘mind’. I engage in anthropological comparison to show how other ways of being/knowing complicate any sense in which practices labelled ‘embodied’ can be seen as primary in contrast to conscious, linguistic or explicit knowing. Instead I outline an onto/epistemology of emergence that offers an alternative imaginary in which no binaries exist a priori. Rather all is a matter of ongoing mutual constitution. Secondly, while the discourses of embodiment in performance practice/theory that I critique may continue to reproduce dualist assumptions, theatre approaches influenced by Grotowski’s anti-method, focusing on continual revision of practice, offer insights for scholarship concerned with the ontological indistinguishability of social, psychological and physical phenomena. Laboratory theatre practices offer a prospective way of knowing, enabling an exploration of the ontological equality of breath, in this case in song, and the sorts of meaningfulness associated with language and analysis. In 2011, my Nanna (grandmother in Maltese) passed away in circumstances that remain traumatic to me. I turned with to my daily practices to find ways to scream, to grieve: to anthropology and to a particular practice of song in laboratory theatre, where encounter is actively sought. Arising from ethnographic and analytic engagement with such practices, in this article, I offer an anthropologically inflected critique of notions of embodiment in performance studies and performance philosophy. I present the alternative imaginary of emergence onto/epistemologies and the prospective investigative practices of laboratory theatre. I do this by weaving autobiographical, ethnographic and anthropological threads to explore my own practice relating to the work of my collaborator Gey Pin Ang, a Singaporean director, actor and pedagogue. (shrink)

The morphological account of landscape aims to overcome the contrast between an objectivist/scientific account of space and the more qualitative/subjective account of place. It does so by actualizing the notion of landscape, which endows a materiality often overlooked in contemporary spatial theories. In this paper, I will discuss what has been called the ‘space-place conundrum’ by referring mostly to the human geography contemporary debate on space and place. In the following, I will retrieve Carl Sauer’s morphological conception of landscape as (...) an alternative framework aimed at rephrasing both the concepts of space and place. Landscape must be freed from the cage of the aesthetic gaze so that it can be understood as a lived and dynamic complex of interacting forms that encompass the embodied subject. In the end, I will outline the main characteristics of a morphological conception of landscape, paving the way for further inquiries. (shrink)

Alongside social anthropology and discursive psychology, conversation analysis has highlighted ways in which cultural forms of perceiving and acting in the world are primarily rooted in socially shared normativity. However, when consideration turns to the origins and purposes of human affect and emotion, conversation analysis appears to face particular difficulties that arise from the over-arching focus on sense-making practices. This paper considers the proposal that psychoanalytic thinking might inform our understanding of how socially shared normativity emerges during infancy and early (...) childhood. First, a framework is sketched out that highlights the fact that from the beginning an infant’s earliest experience is bound up with those practices and social actions that make up what conversation analyst’s call members’ methods. Second, comparisons are drawn between conversation analysis and psychoanalytic accounts of early experience for infants during the first years of life. Discussion then moves to the Kleinian notion of object relations, and the concept of projective identification. Essentially, this is a theoretical account of how ‘what-was-once-one’ (the mother-infant unit) differentiates resulting in the gradual emergence of the ‘individuated being’. What is often glossed over in this account is the discursively embedded nature of projective identification; a process that is itself interdependent with the embodiment that makes up the infant’s lived engagement with the world. Whatever might constitute consciousness emerges from somatic, embodied, material-physical, tactile/affective experience – that is, a fundamentally social milieu. This raises the question of how transformation (i.e., from the social to the individual) occurs. One answer may be Winnicott’s idea of the transitional space, where the ‘good-enough’ parent is said to be somebody who can ‘contain’ both negative and positive identifications coming from the infant, transform and re-project such identifications, but in modified from. In this way the infant begins to recognise/experience what it is they are ‘feeling’. Such projective identifications are conveyed within and through the prevailing discourses that constitute all social practices. Concluding comments note that conversation analysis may find in psychoanalytic thinking a framework for understanding the interdependence between affect and action, as in psychoanalytic thought we find a thoroughly relational conception of human nature. (shrink)

Futuristic fantasy fiction that is produced for female adolescent readers offers a vision of the relationship between the female body, feminine subjectivity and technology that is both unique and ideologically complex because of the way in which it simultaneously interrogates and adheres to liberal humanist conceptualisations of the subject. This article examines three contemporary works of young adult fiction — Uglies by Scott Westerfeld (2005), The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson (2008) and ‘Anda’s Game’ by Cory Doctorow (...) (2008) — in light of Donna Haraway’s emancipatory vision of the cyborg, investigating how such narratives construct the ideological relationship between technology and feminine subjectivity. (shrink)

Sociomaterial theories, including actor–network theory, materialist feminism and posthumanism, are sometimes argued to not be addressing or unable to address sufficiently the political and are therefore dismissed as irrelevant to educational research. Through an extended discussion of writers across the social sciences, this article seeks to counter such a view. Drawing specifically on the work of Latour on the nature of critique and on examples of political analysis from writers such as Barad, Bennett, Braidotti, Marres and Whatmore, we suggest that (...) sociomaterialist approaches to the more-than-human open up extended understandings and productive alternative practices of politics. While recognising that this is a work in progress and not without difficulties and challenges, we argue that there is much to be gained for educational researchers from engaging with such approaches. (shrink)

Across the past decade or so, “politically committed” strains of film studies have undergone a much-vaunted aesthetic turn. It is now widely acknowledged that political struggle is as likely to converge in and around the tangible, audible and/or visible surface of the filmic image as it is to involve forces operating “within,” “beyond” or “behind” that surface. Yet while this so-called aesthetic turn has restored questions of film sound, film form and film colour to the film-political agenda, questions of film (...) lighting are yet to feature prominently in these discussions. This essay addresses this situation through a re-reading of John Ford's The Searchers, a film whose ambivalent engagement with America's troubled settler-colonial history has seen it mortgaged to depth-oriented reading methods. Countering these approaches, I argue that, even before the filmic image signifies or symptomatizes settler-colonial struggle, that struggle is played out across the surface of the filmic image in the form of... (shrink)