After-Affects and the Mexican American Studies Ban in Tucson, Arizona

• In Event: Affect in Education

Abstract

This presentation examines the affective residues, or after-affects, of the 2012 ban on Mexican American Studies in Tucson, Arizona. The event and subsequent effects, such as the May 2015 dismissal of a teacher for curricular ‘non-compliance’ with the mandate, has set off a cascade of affective intensities animating students, teachers and media in a range of politicized movements. I see affect as a generative, but oft overlooked, site to explore the political. As Rebecca Wanzo (2009) puts it, affect is “emotion or feeling plus liberalism, plus biopower, plus nationalism, plus any articulation of ideology in action” (p.967). An attention to affect opens up analyses to how intense feelings can move amongst collectivities and animate multiple bodies and in this case proliferate “diverse democracies” (AERA 2016 Annual Meeting Call for Submissions). I track how these affective intensities operate at a variety of scales, from the micromaterialities of the classroom to larger-scale invocations of federal law, as well as speeds, from the paced regularity of daily classroom rituals to swift dismissals of teachers and removals of books and the viral circulation of online information.

Data sources include multimodal data collected from a May 2015 ethnography in Tucson, Arizona at two high schools and one middle school and seven in-depth interviews. Additional data include open source online media as well as video and images of the schools and surrounding areas in an attempt to navigate the “affective geography” (Watkins, 2010) of the Tucson Unified School District ban. During the presentation itself, inspired by the new-materialist methodologies of Renold and Ivinson (2015), I mobilize Pico projectors to entangle the audience’s bodies in light waves of the censored texts. I use these visual and material effects to help theorize after-affects, as intensities that linger, that stir, that make uneasy and animate, and that work to rewrite the world.

Author

• Alyssa D. Niccolini, Teachers College, Columbia University