Haunted by hope: (Re)tracing the complexities embedded within assemblages of violence

Abstract

Violence is diverging, intra-active, complex, and becomes (re)produced across/within variegated trajectories. In her recent book, Assemblages of Violence in Education, Boni Wozolek lays bare the possibilities of conceptualizing violence as such. She undertakes this task by leaning into post-structuralist (e.g., Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/2008; Foucault, 1976/1978) and new materialist (e.g., Barad, 2007; Delanda, 2016) framings to explore the imbricated and ubiquitous nature of violence and its implications on human and nonhuman bodies in educational contexts. Referring to assemblages as “messy and entangled intermingling of bodies” (p. 64), Wozolek calls for our “attention to the deeply linked bodies that impact and intra-act across distances, resulting sometimes in affects that buttress each other” (p. 55). In particular, she works along the contours of contemporary scholarship (e.g., Ahmed, 2010; Berlant, 2011) that conceptualizes affect as being more-than a complex set of emotions manifesting between (non/human) bodies. According to Wozolek, these intricate emotional webs are precarious insofar that they are susceptible to manipulation and (violent) applications of power. While power and violence can be “nested and knotted” (p. 15) within these intra-actions (i.e., co-constitutive agency that emerges from within two or more bodies [Barad, 2007]), Wozolek is especially interested in how violence reverberates across/within the spaces, times, and matter(ing)s of “two all-too-consistent recipients of violence: girls and women, and LGBTQ+ people” (p. 20). Within this context, Wozolek braids together participant stories from both the United States and India with her interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological approaches that challenge cultural “common sense” (Kumashiro, 2015) and can help educators and researchers as they continue to seek out (re)new(ed) avenues for cultivating (educational) equity, responsibility, and justice.