Affect as future-making pedagogy: a post-qualitative inquiry in Brazilian primary schools

ABSTRACT

Educational research shows a growing interest in ‘affect as pedagogy’, a concept grounded in feminist studies. This article positions its inquiry at the crossroads of feminist scholarship and the Deleuzian-Guattarian concept of affect. It presents a post-qualitative inquiry that ”experiments with'' an agentic assemblage of 76 public schools in Brazil, 78 qualitative survey responses, 12 teachers' interviews, and fieldwork observations. The result is a collective narrative organized as a Voice without Organ (VwO), which shows interlocking elements of challenging educational scenarios and a teaching practice traversed by affect. The VwO answers the question of how affect becomes pedagogy, describing events that can be characterized as embodied history, affective labor, and the capacity to be affected. This pedagogy shows the capacity to affect, by creating affirmative desires that materialize in alternative narratives for the students’ futures. Affect as future-making pedagogy then, becomes a means of working against exclusion and social injustice.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect as pedagogy
• Deleuze-Guattari
• feminist theory
• Brazil
• post-qualitative inquiry

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. For example, about 30% of Brazilians between 15 and 64 years old are considered functionally illiterate (INAF 2018). That is, they can read but cannot understand or draw basic hypotheses from a simple written text.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brasil (CAPES) – Finance CODE 001