'Affect' is a relatively recent concept that has led to the so called ‘affective turn’ (Clough 2006). It offers a refreshingly new theoretical understanding of the interrelationships that occur in the body and mind. Theorizing with and through affect can be an enabler for change. The usefulness to education and pedagogy is becoming increasingly evident (Hickey-Moodey 2013, Hickey-Moodey & Page 2016, Zembylas 2006).
What is affect? There are several interpretations that map affect’s complexity. By choosing a Deleuzian understanding of affect, I focus on the intensities and capabilities that power the body to move or be moved. This is a stance away from representation.
It appears that Brian Massumi (2002) was first to put forward the notion of the ‘affective turn’ drawing on insights gained from Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari. In Massumi’s (1987) Forward written in A Thousand Plateaus, he defines affect as “a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body's capacity to act”. Massumi (2002:36) asserts that affect is the “perception of one’s own vitality, one’s sense of aliveness, of changeability”. There is an openness to affect that is determined by the body’s potential. Hickey-Moodey (2013:80) offers more detail explaining how affect varies as our “embodied capacities are increased or decreased by sounds, lights, smells, the atmospheres of places and people”.
There seems to be very little that has been published about affect in terms of curricular matters in Health Sciences education. This is not surprising as medicine is a scientific discourse that relies on evidence-based practices governed by clear accreditation standards. Therefore a turn to affect can be problematic, perhaps disrupting ‘business as usual’. In Ducey’s (2006) study with allied health care workers, she noted that “affect is not subject to the usual forms of measurement and analysis, so that the political responses its modulation calls forth are emergent and unpredictable”.
Massumi in conversation with Zournazi (2002) equates affect with freedom and hope, noting how uncertainty can be empowering. He refers to a “charge of affect”, asserting that affect offers “a way of talking about that margin of manoeuvrability, the ‘where we might be able to go and what we might be able to do’ in every present situation” (Zournazi 2002:212). He explains it as the opening of thresholds of potential in which we can experiment. Through our bodies we have the experience of affect, the intensity as well as the experience of the movement.
I have recently chosen affect as a leading theme in my study because it offers a pragmatic approach that foregrounds experiences and movement. My interest is in the process of learning, a continuum of events that can transform individuals and practices. This movement that is affected and can be affected is a shift away from binary thinking such as what is right and wrong, object versus subject and culture/nature dualisms. I am exploring what emerges through the in/determinate teaching process.
In my study an example of an affective response could be the distancing that occurs when a student feels helpless in a difficult situation. Several students have described the intensity of disgust at witnessing disrespectful behaviours in their clinical encounters in Obstetrics and how this has led them to walk out of the room. The seeing and the hearing of abusive behaviour has energised these students to move away.
The image above was drawn on my iPad using iPastels. It depicts a metal spring that has the potential and charge that affect theory conveys. Many new possibilities arise from the intra-actions that influence the affective dimension of learning.
Clough, P. (ed.). 2007. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the social. Durham and London:. Duke University Press.
Hickey-Moody, A. 2013. Affect as Method: Feelings, Aesthetics and Affective Pedagogy. In (Eds.) Coleman, R & Ringrose J. Deleuze and Research Methodologies. Edinburgh University Press. Edinburgh. pp. 79-95.
Hickey-Moody, A. & Page, T. 2016. Introduction, Making, matter and pedagogy. In A. Hickey-Moody T. Page (Eds) Arts, pedagogy and cultural resistance: New materialisms. Rowman & Littlefield. London.
Massumi, B. 1987. ‘‘Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgments,’’ in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Zembylas, M. 2006. Witnessing in the Classroom: The ethics and politics of affect. Educational Theory. 56:3: 305-324.
Zournazi, M. 2002. Hope: New philosophies for change. New York. Routledge.
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