Affective Attunements in Educational Inquiry: Queering Critique

• In Event: Postfoundational Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

We locate this presentation in the current atmosphere of open attacks on queer/trans youth, the undoing of Roe v. Wade, and their attendant hyper-policing of bodies. The shock to our nervous system of these new laws registers the urgency of the moment alongside its familiarity, its ordinariness (Berlant, 2011). Eric Stanley (2021) argues that in “the ways harm is coupled with, and at times intensified through claims of equality,” we glimpse how central violence is to our concepts of modernity, democracy, and education (p.17). Stanley joins other scholars who identify the limits of critique as the primary aim of scholarship. This presentation builds upon the scholarship on the limits of critique and explores postfoundational openings to inquiring differently within and about violence toward queer/trans and other unimaginable bodies.

Objectives
In the contexts of intensified actions against trans/queer and women’s bodies, this presentation will offer a discussion of Black feminist, queer, and affect theories and their animating of conceptual experiments in qualitative inquiry and in “writing up” research. This talk pursues the following question: “Who, and/or what, helps you to think otherwise?

Theoretical framework and mode of inquiry
Building on post-foundational scholars (e.g. Barad, 2012; Haraway, 2007; Holmes, 2015; MacLure, 2015; Massumi, 2010; Sedgwick, 2003), we utilize affect studies to attend to the rhetorical tone and the limited affects of much critical qualitative inquiry in education. We also draw on speculative work in Black Studies (e.g. Crawley, 2017; Hartman, 2019; Keeling, 2007; Moten, 2003; Nyong’o, 2018; Sharpe, 2016) to broaden our ideas of contingencies, experimentation, and queering (Ahmed, 2022; Berlant, 1998). Our intentions are to think across the impasses (Berlant, 2011) of current, violent biopolitics and standard approaches to qualitative inquiry. The alarming precarities of our times draw many researchers back into a realist mode of inquiry and rhetoric that may offer personal satisfaction but provide few opportunities for contemplating contingencies and more-than-human agencies.
Point of view and significance
We will map out how affective inquiries that privilege queer, feminist, and Black thought contribute to a “new analytic,” or new modes of reading and writing the social that attend to what always exceeds bodily “capture” (Sharpe, 2016). For example, following Ahmed (2021), we attune to “mess” --a kind of queer method that incites openings for wondrous dis/connections and relationalities–while Nyong’o (2018) offers imaginative resources from his use of fabulation that draws from Deleuze and Black performance studies. Bringing these varied conceptual approaches into an intimate relation with public practices that degrade improper bodies and with calls for justice (AERA, 2021) may provoke wild ideas and ungovernable associations (Halberstam & Nyong’o, 2018) that contribute to postfoundational inquiry.

Authors

• Bessie P. Dernikos, Florida Atlantic University
  Presenting Author

• Nancy L. Lesko, Teachers College, Columbia University
  Presenting Author