Situating Affect in Cultural Historical Context: Implications for Inquiries Into Power

• In Event: Grounded in Justice and Joy: Critical Empirical and Conceptual Explorations of Affect

Abstract

This paper calls upon researchers and educators dedicated to justice-oriented education for non-dominant students to shift from traditional constructs of affect towards engaging affect as a social process between human actors. Doing so affords researchers and educators opportunities to attune to students’ engagement with learning and the systems of power always present in learning spaces. This conceptual intervention, which depathologizes and contextualizes non-dominant students’ affect within systems of power, is important to the work of justice-oriented educators and researchers in creating more expansive possibilities, including those material and embodied, for learning.

With the study on students’ affects in learning environments historically the purview of educational psychologists, much of educational research that engages affect has overlooked its relationship to power. Drawing on recent research in clinical psychology suggesting that affect is neither fixed nor universal, but instead can shift based on social and cultural context (Barrett et al., 2011; Mesquita et al., 2016), we push the conception of social and cultural context to bring these ideas into conversation with notions of power. We leverage cultural historical theory (Cole & Engëstrom, 1993) to highlight the ways in which affect is learned and negotiated within particular social and cultural contexts in relation to power. We then thread together theories from cultural (Ahmed, 2004), feminist (Boler, 1999), and critical (Zembylas, 2007) studies of affect to detail how affect as a collective and social process implicates and reflects societal power dynamics. In bringing together ideas from cultural historical theory and affect studies, we present a vital and wide-reaching discussion that offers insight into the manners by which learning, affect, and power are intimately entangled in learning contexts writ large.

The presented framework introduces a way of interrogating and examining power dynamics in the conceptual space of affect and emotion—a space traditionally unconcerned by systems of power such as racism, sexism, and coloniality, and, crucially, student resistance to these systems. In the interest of co-constructing with non-dominant students learning environments that allow for broad, unprescribed, and unpoliced affective and embodied engagement, as well as concomitant expansive learning, this conceptual framework affords educators and researchers a novel theoretical approach that attunes to the entanglement of affect, power, and learning through a cultural historical lens.

Our intervention warrants methodological, pedagogical, and humanizing changes to how affect is conceptualized, researched and designed for in education. We present this framework as an initial consideration of aspects of learning that are often relegated to separate but correlated units of analysis, yet are crucial to expanding the possibilities for educational justice for non-dominant students. By maintaining that all learning contexts implicate systems of power such as racism, sexism, and coloniality, this conceptualization offers a first step into empirical investigations of how affect in learning contexts is patterned by power dynamics and its implications for the learning experiences, identities, and trajectories of non-dominant students.

Authors

• Ashley Zhou, University of California - Berkeley

• Collette Roberto, University of California - Berkeley

• Jorge Eduardo Garcia, Stanford University