Folding Migration: Affect, Subjectivation, and Informal Learning at the Museum of Chinese in America

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Theoretical Analyses of Learning Environments

Abstract

This study explores how affect illuminates the cultural investigation of migration within informal learning spaces, focusing on the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) in New York City. Drawing from Foucault’s ethics of the self and Deleuze’s ontology of affect and becoming, it analyzes how affect circulates through curatorial design, archival discourse, and oral history to modulate diasporic subjectivity. Based on historical materials and exhibition, the study shows how language, sexuality, and spatial display act as folds that redistribute affective intensities—estrangement, shame, nostalgia, belonging—as impersonal forces. Reframing museum education as a space of becoming animated by affect, the research proposes a pedagogical approach beyond cognition and representation.

Author

• William Zhou, The George Washington University