A Diffractive Exploration of Affect: Learning, Research, and Teaching in Obstetrics

• In Event: 68.061 - Roundtable Session 30
  In Roundtable Session: 68.061-6 - Critical Posthumanism, the Affective Turn, and Socially Just Pedagogies and Curricula

Abstract

Undergraduate medical students’ learning during their clinical encounters is at times disturbed by their exposure to unprofessional practices. For instance abuse, neglect and disrespect to women during childbirth in public health birthing facilities is not uncommon in South Africa, and in other countries (Honikman, Fawcus, & Meintjies, 2015). These social injustices are surrounded by a pervasive silence. I explore how an arts-based mechanism can elicit affect towards developing a socially just pedagogy.

In this paper I draw on affect theory (Clough 2007, Massumi 2015) to investigate how students engage with these unjust practices. Barad’s (2014) diffractive analysis enables me to examine the patterns of meanings that emerge from drawings as they become a pedagogic device towards developing a socially just pedagogy. Data that glows (MacLure, 2013) is pulled forward to explore the effects and affects of different student experiences. Through art-in-the-making, new interpretations of students’ experiences became visible from a learning space that tends to remain silent and secretive.

In this ethics-approved study I address three aspects of student learning. Firstly, the ways in which the medical curriculum appears to obfuscate affect. Secondly, how affect is entangled in student learning, complicating responses to unjust practices. Thirdly, how drawings as data-in-the-making have elicited students’ affective responses to confront difficult curriculum encounters.

Using drawings in the classroom with Year 4 undergraduate medical students and in my PhD research study has revealed how this visual methodology can open up in/determinate educational spaces. While drawings are sometimes viewed as a childlike activity, this undervaluing of the force of the medium is demonstrated as inappropriate. Art-in-the-making is promoting activism against unjust practices.

In the scientific discourse related to medical education, affect appears to be separated out of curricular matters. A collection of drawings emerging through an iterative process ‒ data-in-the-making, creates a process of ‘enabling newness to come into existence; the “more-than” of data’ (Springgay and Zaliwska 2015, 137). The process of students drawing provides an opportunity to break through a pervasive silence and to promote activism against unjust practices that students may witness. The agency of the material has contributed to an improved understanding of student learning often hampered by students’ limited opportunity to express their affective responses. Art-in-the-making that is spontaneous and immediate can contribute an important and valuable affective intensity to promote participatory parity (Fraser 2009), flattening the traditional hierarchy of expertise and acting as a tool to contribute to social justice.

Author

• Veronica Mitchell