"I got new feelings coming in" : drawn emotions and refusing secondly across anti-racist English language arts pedagogies

Given the current and historical context of power and oppression in the United States, English language arts (ELA) scholars have called for pedagogies that directly respond to the racialized violence present across texts, schooling, and society (Baker-Bell, Butler, & Johnson, 2017; Baker-Bell, 2020; Butler, 2018; Johnson, 2018). Scholars have long critiqued the ELA curriculum for its dearth of perspectives across race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability, and especially have called upon ELA teachers and researchers to center literature written by Black and Brown authors (Thomas, 2016, 2019). In this call for anti-racist ELA curriculum, scholars have also encouraged an attention to emotion, highlighting the necessity of not only including texts by authors of Color in classrooms but also the importance of the emotional and affective resonances through which students and teachers respond to literary texts for racial and social justice (Dutro, 2019; Grinage, 2019). This qualitative research project, then, explores the emotional responses of secondary ELA students and pre-service literacy teachers to literature that addresses race and racism. This dissertation builds upon critical (post)qualitative and visual arts-based methodologies centering the emotional and affective resonances present across our socially constructed identities as students and teachers work to deconstruct whiteness and anti-Blackness using anti-racist pedagogies (Sousanis, 2015; Love, 2019; Muhammad, 2019). In particular, this project explores how objects of feeling are drawn across space and time (Ahmed, 2010, 2014) and how readers refuse "secondly" (Adichie, 2009) within two research contexts: (1) a 12th critical media literacy course and (2) a critical young adult literature course for pre-service teachers. Findings from this study demonstrate how secondary ELA students and pre-service teachers might center the already present emotion traced across objects of feeling in literature classrooms committed to anti-racist and anti-oppressive pedagogies.