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