This paper draws on the concept of affective atmospheres to theorize how democracy and democratic education take hold and circulate in classrooms and schools. The paper asks under which circumstances affective atmospheres are experienced or even 'engineered', encompassing affective and material features that (de)legitimate democracy, democratic…

This autoethnographic study explores disruptive moments in a multiliteracies English-as-an-Additional Language (EAL) classroom with young adult students. Using a lens of affect theory, the study presents three strategic sketches (vignettes) to shine a light on unexpected intensities in the learning assemblage, initially assumed to be learner…

This essay draws on the concept of "agonistic emotions" and "affects" to think with some of the arguments of Chantal Mouffe's political theory and discusses what this means pedagogically in handling far right rhetoric in the classroom. To show the possibilities of this theorization of agonistic emotions and affects, the essay…

The central argument of this essay is that critical literacy with a rationalistic bent may not enable us to cope with ethical dilemmas in our responsiveness to human sufferings. I argue that critical literacy education would benefit from turning to the recent scholarship on affect/emotion studies. I draw upon the works of Sara Ahmed--one of the…

This paper discusses teacher resistance to recognizing some perspectives of difficult histories. The paper focuses on the following question: How does affect contribute not only to the formation of teacher resistance, but also to its disruption in ways that enable the productive reclaiming of teachers' engagement with traumatic histories? To…

This paper engages with the early childhood-school relationship. The relationship has a long-standing history of being defined by a series of divisions and separations. Research has identified the divisions and separations to be largely determined by differences around concepts of learning and pedagogy. Discursive analyses of these differences…