A Meteorology of Learning: Affective Violence at American Settler Universities

• In Event: Affective, Ecological, and Technological Entanglements in Education

Abstract

In this paper, I build a theoretical framework to understand how affective experiences in American settler universities often reproduce forms of racialized and gendered violence. To do so, I work across the fields of critical university studies, affect theory, and decolonial theory in ways that allow for sensing the otherwise obfuscated affective politics in higher education learning environments. In particular, I ask how American settler universities mediate, discipline, and/or obfuscate affective experiences of and through the campus body. I pay particular attention to how settler universities engage in seemingly meteorological mediums - campus climate, learning atmospheres, weathering institutional crises—toward the learning of (dis)passionate, (un)sentimental, (mis)affective political practices that structure and maintain the affective life of their campuses.

Author

• Vandhana Ravi, University of California - San Diego