A response to Bella Vilakazi’s presentation, by Delia Layton, Department of English, Faculty of Humanities. UJ

Bella Vilakazi 

Bella Vilakazi’s lively and stimulating presentation: ‘Towards a socially just pedagogy: the Affective Turn’ on 23 October, given as part of the SOTL seminar series, stirred up a number of responses for me (see the slides at the bottom of this post). Interestingly, my responses manifested in the domains of mind, body and emotions.  I say this because the relationship or interconnectedness of body, mind and emotions seems to be something that is fundamental to the concept of ‘affect’. Firstly, my bodily (and emotional) response was triggered, by some of the visual examples Bella showed us (e.g. the pictures of prone lifeless bodies after the Sharpville Massacre, juxtaposed with those of the recent Marikana Massacre) which produced a rather visceral bodily response together with a deeply emotional reaction, which Bella described as being examples of ‘affect’ in practice. Secondly, my mental response was an engagement with the content of the actual presentation and the discussion that followed, as well as my realisation, after engaging with additional readings prompted by attending this presentation, that ‘affect theory’ (closely related to the concept of ‘the affective turn’), is highly complicated and quite difficult to understand and required much focussing of the mind.

Feelings or affects are clearly embodied and outwardly expressed in action or reaction to an event or an encounter (e.g. by a visual prompt like a photograph or a political cartoon) or even by how a lecturer shows up to her students in the lecture hall. Nigel Thrift sees affect as ‘a set of embodied practices that produce visible conduct as an outer lining’ (2004:60). While Hemmings, (2005:551) states that affect refers to ‘states of being, rather than to their manifestation or interpretation as emotions’. However,  there is confusion between what separates the concept of ‘affect’  from that of ‘emotion’ since, as Cromby (2012:92)  writes, ‘feeling is… sometimes used interchangeably with emotion, which in turn is used interchangeably with affect’.

Delia Layton

This confusion arises possibly because there are many definitions of what affect is and how it manifests. As Bella mentioned, the varied interpretations have their origins with the ideas of the 17^th century Dutch philosopher, Spinoza who saw the body and mind as interconnected; which ideas were developed further by Deleuze, a French philosopher writing in the 1960’s who in collaboration with Guattari, then focussed on affects and affection; and then with the English translation of their work by the contemporary Canadian philosopher Brian Massumi, who brought together the connectivity between affect and emotion. Many other theorists have added their ideas and developed the theory in a multitude of directions and disciplines.

I realised after immersion in some of the literature around the topic of affect and affect theory, that Bella had done her homework very well and was using the aspect of this theory that best suits her purpose – i.e. as part of her PhD study on formative feedback and socially just pedagogical practice.  This focussed approach made complete sense to me, especially in the light of Bella’s remarks that it is important to find examples in the readings that are meaningful to your own practice.

For me then, as I understand it, the Affective Turn is a new approach to studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences especially, and is also a general approach that takes into consideration the ontology of students (that is, who they are and who they are becoming), that can be applied to one’s pedagogical practice. It is obviously vital to provide students with access to the epistemologies of their disciplines, but this should go hand in hand with enabling ontological access if we want to provide a socially just, meaningful and transformative pedagogical engagement.

We all have the power to affect and be affected through various encounters with one another, and this means that as teachers, we need to be aware of how affect can manifest in the classroom since, as Bella pointed out, classrooms are really ‘affective communities’. This means that as teachers, through our interactions and conversations with our students, when also acknowledging their human dignity and agency in a compassionate manner, we have a great potential for either enabling or constraining transformation.

References:

Cromby, J. (2012) Feeling theWay: Qualitative Clinical Research and the Affective Turn. Qualitative Research in Psychology. 9:88–98.

Hemmings, C. (2005) Invoking affect Cultural theory and the Ontological turn. Cultural Studies 19 (5): 548 – 567.

Thrift, N. (2004) Intensities of feeling: towards a spatial politics of affect. Geogr. Ann.,86 B (1) : 57-78.

The affective turn seminar 2 from Brenda Leibowitz

Dualisms, socio-materialism, doctoral encounters and the affective turn

I am a member of an NRF project led by Vivienne Bozalek at the University of the Western Cape entitled Posthumanism, the Affective Turn and Socially Just Critical Higher Education Pedagogies. We had a seminar last week, with two presentations that had  much relevance for our SOTL @ UJ project, which is why I draw attention to them in this blog.  The first focuses on the work of feminist Val Plumwood and attempts to show how the Community, Self and Identity project dealt with binary dualisms in higher education:

                              

Dualism, socially just pedagogies and shame in South African higher education from Vivienne Bozalek

The second considers the same project briefly, through the lens of sociomaterialism:

                            

Socio-materialism and the Community, Self and Identity Project from Brenda Leibowitz

Regarding exciting seminars, Yusef Waghid from the University of Stellenbosch and prolific author of many interesting books on social justice in higher education, including Pedagogy out of bounds: Untamed variations of democratic education (2014; Sense) will be making a presentation at the University of Johannesburg at Council Chambers on 12 November at 12.00 - 14.00 pm. The seminar is part of a series on the scholarship of teaching and learning, that is being offered jointly by the Chair: Teaching and Learning, Professional Academic Staff Development and the Postgraduate Centre. The seminar will focus on Democratic Education in Motion: Dancing with Doctoral Encounters.

Our last project seminar of this year will be presented by Bella Vilakazi, on the affective turn. This will be at 1.30 pm in B-Ring 5 on Thursday 23 October 2014. The last actual event of this year is the research workshop, which will be toward the end of November. That is where we will really look carefully at how we will be researching teaching, and what we will be researching.