Affecting belonging: experimental education, cultural resources, and affective cultural citizenship in contemporary China

ABSTRACT

This article explores how Chinese grassroots actors engaged in ‘experimental education’ (EE) practice a new form of Chinese cultural citizenship. Using cultural resources gleaned from grassroots social movements ranging from ‘Chinese Traditional Culture’ (CTC) revival to Steiner education, EE activists establish affectivity, or the embodied sensory capacity to receive and exert influence, as a legitimate education goal and a key criterion of socio-cultural belonging. Using affectivity as a basis, EE activists contest the state’s exclusionary education politics. In their grassroots social networks, EE activists construct radical inclusion for ‘value minorities’ – individuals and groups who misfit normative conceptions of Chinese cultural citizenship. These include CTC educators who promote ‘non-cognitive knowing’, Steiner educators who run illegal ‘Voldemort Schools’ to foster children’s affective development, and neurodivergent children who putatively demonstrate ‘terrifyingly strong affective abilities’. I argue that these diverse EE activists articulate and practice ‘affective cultural citizenship’, ranging from moderate to militant forms. Their contestations amount to community-based cultural citizenship practices, asserting the right to be different and to belong in an authoritarian state.

KEYWORDS:

• Affective Cultural Citizenship
• Experimental Education
• Value Minorities
• Chinese Citizenship
• Chinese Traditional Culture
• Steiner Education
• Cultural Citizenship Practices

Acknowledgments

This research was made possible by the generosity of experimental education practitioners I have encountered since 2017. I am ever so grateful to everyone who took the time to meet with me, answer my questions, and share their affective presences. Special thanks to James Laidlaw, Canglong Wang, Caroline Humphrey, and Teresa Kuan for helpful comments on earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. An exception is seen in Canglong Wang’s (2022) analysis of Confucian education activists’ practices and discourses in the formation of ‘Confucian citizens’.

2. Meeting in main center, November 2018.

3. The name of the spiritualist movement founded by Rudolf Steiner.

4. Translation cited from Wilhelm 1977[1950], 704.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Gates Cambridge Trust and University of Cambridge. Later writing was supported by a Postdoctoral Fellowship at NYU Shanghai.