The Contribution of Non-representational Theories in Education: Some Affective,Ethical and Political Implications

This paper follows recent debates around theorizations of ‘affect’ and its distinction from ‘emotion’ in the context of non-representational theories (NRT) to exemplify how the ontologization of affects creates important openings of ethical and political potential in educators’ efforts to make productive interventions in pedagogical spaces. The ontological orientation provided by NRT has two important implications for educational theory and practice. First, it exposes the indeterminacy and inventiveness of affective capacities of bodies, illustrating how diverse socio-materials events are variously enrolled in everyday school life processes of differentiation. Second, it emphasizes an affirmative account of the ethics and politics of affect in which connections and relations forged between bodies, things and spaces constitute the basis of new configurations of affects and emotions in schools.     

‘Working on a rocky shore’: Micro-moments of positive affect in academic work

Neoliberal ideologies, marketization and performative regimes associated with recent reforms in universities have exerted considerable pressure on academic working conditions and subjects in recent years. While analysing these pressures is important, it is also productive to consider the ways in which academics engage in moments of resistance by mobilising resources beyond those of critique. This paper therefore focuses on joy and positive affect in the everyday moments of academic life. It utilises the feminist methodology of collective biography to explore ways of making the restricted spaces of our working day more expansive and finding within them unexpected openings for joy. Our analysis of the stories included in this paper traces the mercurial and ambiguous affective atmospheres of academic work. We suggest that joy is founded upon connections with others, that it arises in different academic spaces and that it can lead to revised knowing of ourselves. We argue that the glimpses of joy evident in this paper provoke affective attunement within the everyday, sensitizing us to other fragments of joy and providing strategies to strengthen that resistance.     

Affective economies of Beyoglu in Istanbul: The construction of ‘Disgust’ and ‘Fear’ in neoliberalization of nightlife

This study contributes to understanding neoliberalism in Beyoglu, by examining how neoliberal discourses create and circulate normative meanings in nightlife. I suggest that neoliberal discourses and practices inform a value structure in everyday life which identifies subject positions in terms of affiliation and marginalization in Beyoglu's nightlife scene, based on the affective economies of Beyoglu. Affiliation/marginalization distil through moments of contact, imbued with various affective dispositions. I argue that spaces of affiliation shape and are shaped by the affective dispositions of (middle-)classed night-time euphoria. Conforming to norms of desirability, attractiveness and safety, they present a cultural and economic model attuned to neoliberal rationalities. Two dominant stereotypes of ‘undesirability’ emerge in affective terms: (i) those of ‘ineligible’ dispositions which produce emotions of ‘disgust’, and (ii) those of ‘fearful’ bodies constantly moving across the night-time leisure places of Beyoglu. By examining the relationship between neoliberalism and affective economies in Beyoglu's nightlife, this study contributes to research on night-time leisure places, providing insight into linkages between emotional subjectivities and rational thinking.     

Dissimilation and differential assimilation in social influence (situations of ‘normalization’)

We have presented two experiments on the processes of normalization (appraisal of an ambiguous stimulus). In the first experiment, pairs of subjects were taken from natural groups whose structure and functioning we had previously studied; the subjects were paired off in terms of (a) sociometric choices which they had put forward and (b) difference in hierarchical position in the ordinary life of the group. In the second experiment a definite image of the other ‘subject’ (an accomplice) was created in the subject such that he appeared very similar or very different to him (in areas in no way connected with the task). Furthermore, in the ‘collective’ phase of the estimation the accomplice replied exactly like the subject or in a way which was remote or very remote from the subject's replies. We did not observe the contrast phenomenon described by some authors, but we were able to show that the patterns of interaction of everyday life, stabilized social relationships or images of the other which are unconnected with the tasks to be performed play a role in the influence that the replies of one subject have on those of another. Apart from differential assimilation we have shown a process of dissimilation, these two phenomena being, in our opinion, rooted in the structures of action of the social agents' lives. Negotiation in influence is rarely something symmetrical, even in situations of normalization where the dissymmetry of everyday life can be transfered. We have shown, too, that in these types of situations the subjects do not always try to minimize conflict since when they are in agreement (there is nothing to negotiate) they can diverge from one another. It can thus be said that subjects are not rational in the usual sense and are quite clearly something different from logicians or statisticians. The explanation which we have outlined shows how notions of social identity, differentiation and otherness are brought into play.     

‘You beat ‘em,we feed ‘em!’: Enfolding laughter and pride

In this article I use the affective politics of laughter as an entry point into broadening understandings of the political potentiality of the everyday geographies of pride, centralizing in my analysis a safe house for women involved in street level sex work. I look to the ways in which the encounters between laughter and pride in this space expose its inextricability from bodily vitality and survival, feelings of collective belonging, and structural realities and inequalities. Using Gilles Deleuze's concept of the fold to structure my analysis, I use laughter as a lens to advance an understanding of pride that emphasizes its entanglement with collective affect and its immanent multiplicity as it is embodied through everyday encounters with difference. I emphasize the affective component of laughter's foldings as a means to think through the way vibrational pulls, pushes, tenors and tones work to move bodies toward or away from collectives, spaces, politics, ideas, relationships and ways of living. Exploring pride through the affective politics of laughter is a way to advance understandings of pride as emerging always in relation to collectives, histories, and spaces, rather than as an individual trait. Such a reframing has implications for understanding affective politics as a resource for social justice projects.     

Along the border: affective promotion or inhibition of conduct in urban spaces / A lo largo de la frontera: promoción o inhibición afectiva de la conducta en los espacios urbanos

Abstract

The concepts of borders, tensegrity and goal-oriented meaningful conduct are used to study the conditions in which affects and conducts can (or cannot) emerge in urban spaces. We assume psychological phenomena are liminal and emerge in the border zones between different individual and collective states. The main focus of the study is the process of affective meaning-making that takes place at specific locations (the border zones) in urban living. Through an example of autoethnography, we try to understand how the symbolic space is used in everyday life to produce, maintain and demolish signs that self-regulate and hetero-regulate complex atmospheres, affects and conducts.     

Affective energies: Sensory bodies on the beach in Darwin,Australia

Emerging debates on anti-racism within white majority cultures centre emotion and affect to explore the visceral nature of racialised encounters that unfold in public spaces of the city. This paper builds on such understandings by conceptualising whiteness as a force that exerts affective pressures on bodies of colour who are hypervisible in public spaces. I show that these pressures have the potential to wound, numb and immobilise bodies affecting what they can do or what they can become. This paper argues, however, that affective energies from human and non-human sources are productive forces that are also sensed in public spaces such as the suburban beach. These energies entangle sensuous bodies with the richness of a more-than-human world and have the potential to offer new insights into exploring how racially differentiated bodies live with difference. The paper draws on ethnographic research conducted in Darwin, a tropical north Australian city at the centre of politicised public debates on asylum seeker policy, migrant integration and Indigenous wellbeing. My attention to affective pressures and affective energies contributes to understanding how bodies with complex histories and geographies of racialisation can inhabit a world of becoming.     

“I get a whiz in my body as I walk past it”: Visceral imaginaries in children's everyday mobilities

This article focuses on how the visceral, sensual and the imagined shape children's everyday mobility experiences and their meaning making around their everyday mobility, thus contributing to the growing field of study on children's emotional geographies and to the field of visceral geographies. By introducing the concept of visceral imaginaries, the role of the imagined in children's spatial and mobile experiences is highlighted and developed. The children further emerge as aged bodies in these visceral processes, as the affective practices and visceral imaginaries position children as aged subjects. The findings are based on a qualitative research project on children's practices and experiences of their everyday mobilities, in which 59 children (7–13 years old) participated, predominantly from white urban middle-class families in a mid-sized municipality in Sweden.     

The everyday dynamics of rumination and worry: precipitant events and affective consequences

ABSTRACT

Rumination and worry are two perseverative, negatively valenced thought processes that characterise depressive and anxiety disorders. Despite significant research interest, little is known about the everyday precipitants and consequences of rumination and worry. Using an experience sampling methodology, we examined and compared rumination and worry with respect to their relations to daily events and affective experience. Participants diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), co-occurring MDD–GAD, or no diagnosis carried an electronic device for one week and reported on rumination, worry, significant events, positive affect (PA), and negative affect (NA). Across the clinical groups, occurrences of everyday events predicted subsequent increases in rumination, but not worry. Further, higher momentary levels of rumination, but not worry, predicted subsequent decreases in PA and increases in NA. Thus, in these clinical groups, rumination was more susceptible to daily events and produced stronger affective changes over time. We discuss implications for theory and clinical intervention.     

The face of the state on the U.S.-Mexico border

In recent years, feminist geopolitics and the turns toward emotional and affective geography have resulted in new perspectives on theories of power, embodiment and subjectivity. Other recent trends have considered non-human objects as important for state theory, insofar as state practice often relies upon the force of objects in everyday life. This article works to bring together object-oriented and emotional geographies for a new perspective on the state. It does so by drawing on another theoretical tradition that has been less familiar for political geography: psychoanalytic theory. Findings from ethnographic research with residents living near the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona help illuminate the presence and spectral circulation of what we call the “face of the state” as a psycho-emotional entity in everyday life for these residents. Surveillance objects enter the psyche through the face of the state, insofar as they are imagined and felt as a visual and embodied experience. The force of the object, then, extends beyond its own materiality and into the psycho-social dimensions of life through which state power operates, thereby empowering the border to gaze at the subject population in powerful new ways.     

“‘Ninja’ levels of focus”: Therapeutic holding environments and the affective atmospheres of telepsychology during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 crisis in Australia led to a rapid increase in the use of telehealth services to offer psychological therapy (often referred to as ‘telepsychology’). In this article, we discuss the intersection of the social psychology concepts of therapeutic holding spaces and containment with more-than-human theory as it relates to Australia's mental health sector during the COVID-19 crisis. Drawing on our recent qualitative survey research into Australian psychologists' use of telepsychology during the crisis, we consider the ways that they worked to build and maintain therapeutic holding spaces and alliances over teleconferencing platforms during this extraordinary time of social crisis and isolation. We explore and contextualise three important findings from our study: 1) the limited viewing area of a flat screen makes it difficult for therapists to read and respond to their client's body language and requires different forms of returned bodily gestures in order to show empathy; 2) most respondents implemented different affective and relational strategies online to ensure they were not missing important non-verbal cues from their clients; and 3) the traditionally ‘safe’ therapeutic holding space created in face-to-face therapy can be easily subverted by client-end interruptions, and concerns around safety or personal privacy in the client's home environment. In bringing these issues to the fore, we highlight the online therapeutic holding space as a temporally and socially situated human-technological assemblage in which a series of affective, spatial, relational and sense-making agencies coverage, opening or closing off capacities for therapists and their clients.     

Does counter-habitual behavior carry psychological costs?

Experience sampling studies have shown that people act out of character a lot of the time. These findings have raised the question of potential costs of counter-habitual behavior. The present experience sampling study (N = 242; measurement occasions = 4342) tested, for five behavioral dimensions derived from the Big Five theory, whether self-reported counter-habitual behavior is related to psychological costs in everyday life. The results mostly supported the view that engaging in desirable counter-habitual behaviors is beneficial, though some evidence for counter-habitual costs was found for self-control. Overall, the results suggest that the state-content significance hypothesis better accounts for everyday life behavioral, affective, and self-regulatory processes than the views highlighting the importance of acting according to one’s “true self”.     

‘They try to avoid.’ How do parents’ feelings about ethnicised and classed differences shape gentrifying school communities?

This article reports on interview-based research into the everyday consequences of gentrification as seen through the prism of local public primary schools in inner Sydney, Australia. We explore the feelings involved in negotiating relations across ethnicised and classed differences within four school communities. Common though contradictory themes across the interviews include: the positive worth accorded to contact with ethnicised difference among white parents; the avoidance of interpersonal contact across ethnicised and classed differences; and the positive worth accorded to classed sameness. Our research finds that the feelings that attend to these themes—discomfort and comfort, desire and disdain—play a significant role in shaping everyday school communities and relationships between parents. We examine the ways in which white parents’ desires for social contact with ethnicised others are frequently disappointed and note the disdain and discomfort involved in negotiating contact with classed others. We conclude with a case study involving a complex mix of the themes and feelings listed above: parental engagement with the schools’ Parents and Citizens Associations (P&Cs). We argue that P&Cs constitute social spaces dominated by parents with a class-based disposition towards entitlement and authority, from which ethnicised and classed others frequently feel excluded.     

Leader–member exchange and turnover before and after succession events

We conducted two studies that investigated the role of leadership succession as a moderator of the relationship between LMX and turnover in organizations. In a sample of 330 employees in 45 veterinary hospitals, high-LMX employees were less likely to leave the organization prior to a succession event but in nine hospitals that experienced a succession event, high-LMX employees were more likely to leave than low-LMX employees following the event. In the second study, we used a between subjects repeated measures simulation of leadership succession in a survey of 496 employed adults across different organizations. We found LMX is predictive of affective and cognitive reactions to succession events, and that these reactions mediate the relationship between LMX and turnover intentions after a simulated succession event. We discuss the implications of finding that succession events can be disruptive to organizations and groups because high-LMX employees may subsequently leave.     

Sound as affect: Difference,power and spatiality

This article considers what happens when sound is understood as affect. It begins by recounting a minor event in which sound moved my body. I use this as a starting point for defining sonic affect as the vibrational movement of bodies of all kinds, moving away from anthropocentric notions of sound based on human perception. The vibration of bodies can be understood as a ‘base layer’ of sound, which may activate or accrue layers of feeling, significance and meaning, but which is not reducible to them. Developing this conceptualisation of sonic affect, I argue that: (i) there are repeating affective tendencies of sound, but these unfold differently in context; (ii) sonic affect exercises power over bodies, sometimes by combining with meaning; and (iii) sound propagates affect through space in distinctive ways, some of which I discuss. These arguments are grounded in numerous examples, reflecting the variety of both sound and affect.     

Identifying the situational triggers underlying avoidance of communication situations and individual differences therein

People are actively involved in the selection and avoidance of the situations they face during everyday life. Moreover, such selection/avoidance behavior is subject to sizeable individual differences. Yet, to a large extent this phenomenon has been underinvestigated, and a full understanding of selection/avoidance remains lacking. In the present paper, we take a first step to a more in-depth understanding of situation avoidance, which is conceptualized in terms of individual profiles or signatures across situations. Two key objectives with regard to those signatures are being addressed, that is: (a) identifying the critical situational triggers that elicit avoidance behavior, and (b) identifying the most important individual differences in the link between these situational triggers and avoidance, along with their underlying process dynamics. To achieve these objectives, we performed an empirical study on avoidance of communication situations. This study revealed a set of person types that meaningfully differ in sensitivity to a few key situational features. These person types further appeared to differ from one another on several dispositional cognitive/affective forecast variables.     

Intrinsic,identified, and controlled types of motivation for school subjects in young elementary school children

Background. There are two approaches to the differential examination of school motivation. The first is to examine motivation towards specific school subjects (between school subject differentiation). The second is to examine school motivation as a multidimensional concept that varies in terms of not only intensity but also quality (within school subject differentiation). These two differential approaches have led to important discoveries and provided a better understanding of student motivational dynamics. However, little research has combined these two approaches. Aims. This study examines young elementary students' motivations across school subjects (writing, reading, and maths) from the stance of self‐determination theory. First, we tested whether children self‐report different levels of intrinsic, identified, and controlled motivation towards specific school subjects. Second, we verified whether children self‐report differentiated types of motivation across school subjects. Sample. Participants were 425 French‐Canadian children (225 girls, 200 boys) from three elementary schools. Children were in Grades 1 (N=121), 2 (N=126), and 3 (N=178). Results. Results show that, for a given school subject, young elementary students self‐report different levels of intrinsic, identified, and controlled motivation. Results also indicate that children self‐report different levels of motivation types across school subjects. Our findings also show that most differentiation effects increase across grades. Some gender effects were also observed. Conclusion. These results highlight the importance of distinguishing among types of school motivation towards specific school subjects in the early elementary years.     

A standardized list of affect-related life events

In experimental contexts, affect-related word lists have been widely applied when examining how cognitive processes interact with emotional processes. These lists, however, present limitations when studying the relation between emotion and cognitive processes such as time and number processing because affective words do not inherently contain time or quantity information. Live events, in contrast, are experienced by an observer and therefore inherently carry affect information. Unfortunately, existing life-event lists and inventories have been largely applied within clinical contexts as diagnostic tools, and therefore are not suitable for many experimental contexts because they do not contain a balanced number of reliably positive, negative, and neutral life events. In Experiment 1, we create a standardized affect-related life-events list with 171 positive, negative, and neutral affect-related life events. In Experiment 2, we show that strength of affect and significance of the event are integral dimensions, suggesting that these two features are difficult to separate perceptually. The implications of these findings and some potential future applications of the created life-events list are discussed.     

Predicting future affective states: How ease of retrieval and faith in intuition moderate the impact of activated content

Prior research suggests that duration bias—the tendency to overestimate the duration of affective states—is due to individuals' inordinate focus on event‐related information. We propose that the impact of focusing on event‐related (vs. unrelated) content is moderated by the ease with which the information is brought to mind. In the present experiment, participants thought about a possible future negative event and made affective forecasts after retrieving either few or many aspects in their life that would be affected (or unaffected) by the event. Participants estimated longer duration of affective consequences when they retrieved event‐related rather than event‐unrelated information. However, this effect was restricted to conditions where the respective information was brought to mind easily. Importantly, results also revealed that individual differences in faith in intuition moderated the effect of manipulated ease of retrieval. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.