Governing through feeling(s): The affective-discursive politics of high school education reform in South Korea

• In Event: Politics of Affect: The Technologies of Governance in Making Normative Subjectivities in Education

Abstract

Objectives
This study critically investigates the affective-discursive politics embedded in education reform policies, focusing on South Korea’s High School Credit System (HSCS)—a curriculum system structured around student choice. The key objectives are to analyze how policy texts mobilize rhetorical and conceptual devices to circulate particular affects, thereby encouraging policy actors—including teachers and students—to invest in the reform’s underlying ideologies, and to examine the political implications of these technologies of affective governance on their subjectivities and modes of action.

Theoretical Framework
Anchored in affect theory, this study conceptualizes affect not as pre-discursive but as deeply intertwined with discourse (Wetherell, 2012). From this perspective, affect is political in that it circulates among bodies, objects, and ideas, accumulating value and creating affective economies aligned with specific forms of power (Ahmed, 2014). We employ the concept of “affective ideologies” (Zembylas, 2022) to elucidate how language in policy texts becomes powerful by engaging people’s affective investments, thereby rendering certain ideologies—concerning the ideal curriculum, teacher, and student—indisputable and governing their orientations to schooling.

Data and Methodology
The data consists of 29 HSCS-related policy documents, including policy plans, manuals for schools, curriculum guidelines, policy brochures, and press releases, published (2017-2024) by the Ministry of Education and its affiliated research institutes. Drawing upon “reading for affect” (Berg et al., 2019) as a methodological framework for analysis, we identified rhetorical—and representational—devices and recurring concepts that invoke affective intensities such as urgency, uplift, and anxiety. We also explored how these affective-discursive technologies may produce political effects by normalizing particular ways of acting and being, thereby aligning policy actors with specific ideological commitments demanded by the reform.

Findings and Scholarly Significance
The analysis reveals that policy texts mobilize three affective-discursive technologies to draw policy actors into the reform process. First, a ‘crisis-innovation’ rhetoric stimulates a sense of urgency by highlighting crises such as the Fourth Industrial Revolution and demographic decline, while simultaneously fostering hope through optimistic visions of a fundamental paradigm shift in high school education. Second, policy texts emphasize ‘uplifting moral values’ such as inclusivity and diversity, tethered to sticky concepts like student agency and personalized curricula to make the reform morally difficult to resist. Third, a ‘normalizing’ rhetoric presents the idealized images of teachers, students, and best practices (e.g., students as ‘agents of academic design’) to invoke both a desire to be seen as ‘normal’ and an anxiety about deviation.

These technologies collectively operate by holding policy actors within optimistic attachments to the promise of a ‘better’ education—an ideal that can never be fully attained. These attachments become cruel as they hinder critical attention to the reform’s potential harms (Berlant, 2011), including intensified precarity and marginalization. This study contributes to critical scholarship by unraveling how the affective-discursive politics of education reform policies work—specifically, how affect operates as a vital driver of ideological production and governance through the linguistic strategies of policy texts that incite its circulation (Matus, 2017)—and by calling for re-imagining how we might intervene in such politics.

Authors

• Soohan Lee, Seoul National University

• Kyunghee So, Seoul National University