Learning How to Feel: When Affect Is the Practice in Interest-Based Learning

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session 23
  In Roundtable Session: Navigating Affect and Constructing Identity in the Learning Sciences

Abstract

This paper connects learning research on social movements with literature on interest and affect in learning settings, considering an animal liberation activist network as an informal site of interest-based learning. I describe “guided affect experiences,” in which activists structure opportunities for both other activists and non-activists to experience and practice particular ways of feeling in relation to nonhuman animals. Ethnographic examples in which affect is neither an “external” force to learning in a domain, nor merely an “inherent” aspect of such learning, suggest that affect can itself constitute an important practice that one learns to do with others. This paper enriches prevailing conceptualizations of affect and interest in the learning sciences, with implications for civic life and contemporary political polarization.

Author

• Tanner Vea, Stanford University