Ordinary affect and its powers: assembling pedagogies of response-ability

Abstract

ABSTRACT Defined as the power to increase or lessen the capacity to act, affect is purported to be pedagogy’s first lesson. In this article we explore the work of ordinary affects in relation to oppressive social norms with particular attention to race. Using feminist new materialist concepts, we trace the capacities of these affects as they play into two pedagogic encounters. We show how pedagogies of response-ability form through affective transmission and material practice. Race presents as an affective and material event that plays out differentially through bodies. Responsible pedagogy hinges on maintaining the ability of people in association with objects to respond to the learning possibilities that pedagogic encounters provide. Responsive to the humanand the non-human, pedagogies of responsibility and the affects that attend them matter on several fronts. They engender ethical subjectivity, unsettle dominant structures of power, and loosen the grip of the ontological privilege accorded the human.