AFFECT AND SOCIAL STUDIES TEACHING By Peter M Nelson A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education—Doctor of Philosophy 2021 ABSTRACT AFFECT AND SOCIAL STUDIES TEACHING By Peter M Nelson Historically, social studies teaching (and teacher education) discourses have focused on the cognitive registers, both in how teachers teach—their inquiries, objectives, and aims—and in how social studies teaching lives are imagined to be lived (and felt). This study departs from these discourses to focus on the affective registers, aiming to explore how the affective attachments of teachers are brought to bear in their work. Indeed, we feel before we think, and I am interested in how these embodied feelings, what I call affects, play a role in the everyday practice of social studies teaching. This dissertation opens with an introduction to my conceptualization of affect, situating it within broader conversations about how affect works within discursive practices like teaching and also how issues of affect, emotion, and feeling have been taken up in prior scholarship in the field of social studies education. The next chapter discusses my methods and methodology, and I detail the theoretical framework and qualitative research methods guiding this study. This chapter concludes with an introduction of the study’s four participants: practicing secondary social studies teachers at a large urban high school. Following this, four data chapters share my findings. Chapter 3 looks specifically at an affective research at my research site, and I draw connections between this moment of affectivity, the affective attachments of the participants, and their approaches to teaching about protest and democracy in Civics. Chapter 4 explores affects of shame in both social studies curricular texts and in the participants themselves, and I show how shame can be a positive and motivating affective force, especially in how issues of Whiteness and racism might be critically interrogated. Chapter 5 looks at the textual, aesthetic attachments of the participants, and I call for approaches to social studies curriculum and teaching that are more prepared to facilitate meaningful aesthetic experiences in social studies classrooms. The final data chapter (Chapter 6) looks at how affects are embodied by the participants during a teacher discussion (a Focus Group), and I show how gendered and raced affective structures position particular affective identities in different ways. This dissertation concludes with a chapter that discusses my findings and offers implications for the fields of social studies teaching and teacher education. Copyright by PETER M NELSON 2021 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It is over a year now since I have seen my friends and mentors at Michigan State, and opportunities to embody thanks—to smile, hug, laugh, or give a look—are long overdue. Until then, thank you, Avner, for your honesty and encouragement. You made executing and writing a dissertation during a pandemic possible. Anne-Lise, thank you for your unfailing support and kindness. I would not be at Michigan State without your inspiring work, and I look forward to our next beer in The D. Kyle, thank you for your openness and guidance. Our conversations at Hop Cat and elsewhere generated ideas for this study and other projects. Margaret, thank you for your wisdom and generosity. Every time we talk you help me see my work in new ways. Jim, thank you for your mentorship and your ideas. I am not sure where I would be without your work. B. “Scooter” Scott Durham, you are the smartest of collaborators and an even better friend. Adam Grimm, thank you for leading me through Chongqing, Beijing, and for your hospitality. I look forward to our next hot pot. Rachel Lockart, thank you for the countless meals and rides, and for always disagreeing with me. Jarvie, you are my academic big brother, steadfast in your support and encouragement. Adam Schmitt, you are my academic uncle, and while our chance to be the “princes of Maine” social studies education will have to wait, I look forward to continuing to learn from you. Kyle Chong, thank you for your beautiful earnestness and friendship. Alecia Beymer, thank you for your poetry. You obliterated what I thought scholarship can feel like. To Chicago (and beyond) friends: Luke and Becca, Tim and Whitney, Craig Popper, Jon and Jenna, Jake and Kelsey, Garrett, Will and Lizzi, Ryan and Janie, Brendan and Meghan, Matt and Kristin, Brian and Lindsay, Myq, Shaun and Hillari, Mark Linder, Alejo and Lizzi, Emma and Sam, Juan and Kort, Joe and Sarah, Jessi and Rob. And finally, to a few places v filled with memories: The Roadhouse Pub, The Avenue and Ruckus Ramen, Dagwood’s, Peanut Barrell, Sparty’s at Erickson Hall, and Espresso Royale. To Mom and Dad for the unceasing phone calls, patio cookouts, and gin and tonics; to my brother Michael for the last minute copy edits, and for Homestead; to my sister Sarah for the visits; to my sisters Genet and Alyssa and my brother Josiah for making me feel like time doesn’t move—like we’re stuck in the good place. To Lizzy for your love and bottomless support. To Daisy and Grover for the joy. To James Snyder, one casualty of 2020. May you rest in peace. And to my former students in Chatham, North Lawndale, and East Lansing. We are all a part of this. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES……………………………………………………………………..……......x LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………………………..xi INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………..……………..1 CHAPTER 1: SITUATING THE STUDY—AFFECT AND SOCIAL STUDIES TEACHING………………………………………......................................................................11 Conversing with Prior Scholarship…………………………………………………………14 Affect, Emotion, and Social Science……………………………………………………...15 Theorizing Affect and Emotion in Social Studies Education Research…………………17 Affective Attachments……………………………………………………………………….20 How Affective Attachments Come to Matter……………………………………………..22 Pushing the Field: Exploring the Affective Attachments of Social Studies Teachers….25 CHAPTER 2: METHODS AND METHODOLOGY—AFFECTIVE METHODOLOGIES IN EDUCATION RESEARCH………………………………………………………………..31 Methodology………………………………………………………………………………….32 The Dissertation as an Affective Text………………………………………………………34 Me, Myself, and I: Playing the Role of Researcher and Participant……………………..36 As a Researcher…………………………………………………………………………...38 As a Participant………………………………………………………………...…………39 Research Questions…………………………………………………………………….……41 Theoretical Framework……………………………………………………………………..41 Affect………………………………………………………………………………………42 Affective Attachments and Cruel Optimism………………………………………….......44 Political Depression……………………………………………………………………….45 Methods………………………………………………………………………………...…….46 Initial Interview………………………………………………………………………...…46 Research Modules on Zoom………………………………………………………....……47 Research Module 1………………………………………………………………...……...50 Research Module 2………………………………………………………………...…...…52 Research Module 3…………………………………………………………...…………...53 Research Module 4………………………………………………………...……………...55 Research Module 5…………………………………………………………...…………...56 Focus Group…………………………………………………………………………...….57 Written Response………………………………………………………………………….59 Data Analysis……………………………………………………………………………...59 Participants………………………………………………………………………………..61 CHAPTER 3: AFFECT IN CIVICS—PROTEST AND DEMOCRACY……………….....65 Framing Protest: Worlding in Civics…………………………………………………...….67 vii Feeling Democracy…………………………………………………………………...……...74 Cruelly Optimistic Attachments…………………………………………………………..75 Interlude: Garrett’s Affect……………………………………………………...………...76 Democracy Does Not Exist………………………………………………………...……..77 Democracy (Dis)Embodied…………………………………………………………...…..81 Feeling Democracy in Teaching…………………………………………………...…….88 Concluding Thoughts………………………………………………………………...…..93 Interlude: Affect on the Level of the Teacher…………………………………………...96 CHAPTER 4: REFUSING TO RENOUNCE ONE ANOTHER—MODULATIONS OF SHAME IN SOCIAL STUDIES TEACHING……………………………………………….98 Curricular Shame……………………………………………………………………………99 Interlude: Reflections on Embodied, Aesthetic Experiences…………………………...108 Modulations of (White) Shame in Social Studies Teaching……………………………...114 Motivating Shame………………………………………………………………………..116 Monitoring Shame……………………………………………………………………….124 Interlude: Clodagh’s Affect……………………………………………………………...134 Shame-less Teaching………………………………………………………………………..136 Interlude: Caravaggio’s Shame…………………………………………………………142 Weaponized Shame in Social Studies Teaching…………………………………………..143 Interlude: Turning to Texts……………………………………………………………...147 CHAPTER 5: AFFECTIVE, AESTHETIC TEXTS IN SOCIAL STUDIES TEACHING…………………………………………………………………………………....149 A Matter of Attachment: Aesthetic Textuality in Social Studies Teaching……………..158 Findings……………………………………………………………………………………...160 Detached Attachments…………………………………………………………………...164 A Proper Time and Place………………………………………………………………...165 Interlude: Sahar’s Affect………………………………………………………………...175 Bad, Sad Worlds………………………………………………………………………….177 Aesthetic Attachments: A Matter of Experience and Complexity………………………182 Aesthetic Experiences and Teaching Lives……………………………………………...184 Complex Aesthetic Experiences………………………………………………………….189 CHAPTER 6: AFFECTIVITY IN TEACHER DISCUSSIONS…………………………...192 Interlude: Jake’s Affect…………………………………………………………………….195 Social Studies Teachers Talking About Affect……………………………………………197 Affective Structures in Teaching Social Studies: Examining Gender and Race………..199 Hesitant Deference……………………………………………………………………….203 Withholding Disagreement………………………………………………………………208 Disrupting Gendered and Raced Affective Structures……………………………....…..217 Interlude: Taking Stock………………………………………………………………….221 CHAPTER 7: DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION—THE (CRUEL) OPTIMISM OF SOCIAL STUDIES TEACHING……………………………………………………..….222 Summary of Data Chapters……………………………………………………………….225 viii Implications for Social Studies Teaching and Teacher Education…………………...…229 Affect and Civics…………………………………………………………………………229 Teaching About Democracy……………………………………………………………..231 Negative Democracy in Civics…………………………………………………………...233 Slowing Down and Attending to Affect in Teaching……………………………………235 Affective Aesthetic Texts in Social Studies Teaching…………………………………...237 A Final Note……………………………………………………………………………...239 REFERENCES……………………………………………………………………….…..……241 ix LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Participants’ Aesthetic, Textual Attachments, and Length of Time Speaking Uninterrupted……………………………………………………………………….…………..160 x LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: An Assembly of Bodies in Chile…………………………………………….……..….94 Figure 2: White Civil Rights………………………………………………………………...….131 Figure 3: The Denial of St. Peter by Caravaggio, 1610………………………………………...142 Figure 4: Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument in Kelly Ingram Park…………….....189 Figure 5: Garrett and Clodagh with quick thumbs up…………………………………...……...204 Figure 6: Sahar with a hesitant thumb down, Clodagh reconsiders, Jake unsure………...….…205 Figure 7: Sahar reconsiders, Clodagh unsure, Garrett and Jake resolute………………...….….205 Figure 8: Dead Federal Soldiers on Battlefield, Gettysburg, PA, July 1863……………..……208 Figure 9: Garrett holding forth on “shock value” and the use of a photograph of dead bodies; Clodagh withholding with eyes down, mouth covered………………………..……….213 Figure 10: Garrett continues with Clodagh’s eyes looking upwards, her hand covering her mouth; Jake on his phone………………………………………………………....213 Figure 11: A moment of disagreement; Clodagh leans back and to her right as she disagrees; Jake on his phone……………………………………………………………......214 Figure 12: Taken .5 seconds after Figure 11, Clodagh’s embodied disagreement continues downwards to her right; Jake on his phone……………………………..………..….214 Figure 13: Sahar speaking forcefully about an “affective Civics” that helps students see themselves…………………………………………………………….……...……219 xi INTRODUCTION The hand of the LORD was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the LORD, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones…and, lo, they were very dry. He said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord GOD, thou knowest….and thus saith the Lord GOD unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live: And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the LORD…so I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet. –Ezekiel 37:1-14 And even the wind lay still. Our essence was fire and cold and movement, movement. Oh, if they ask you for the sign of the Father in you, Tell them it's movement, movement, movement and…repose. —mewithoutYou, Paper Hanger There are a handful of questions human beings have always asked, and, beyond some unprecedented revelation, we might assume such questions are woven into what has been called the human condition. What animates, propels, or vitalizes that which is alive? What separates the living from the nonliving, the human from the increasingly-complex and human-like machines of our own design? And what makes their similarities affectively uncanny? Is it a soul, spirt, or the breath of God, a life-giving force? Flesh and bones are made to move, to strive towards life (or driven towards death?), and this human action—in an existential, ontological sense—constitutes what we call “a life.” For Arendt (1958/2013), the past and future are entangled with two essential human actions: unfixing the past by forgiving past wrongs and fixing an unfixed future by opening it up to a necessary promise; better worlds are immanently possible, and it is by moving in new ways, acting in new ways—radical, as-yet-unthought movements—that we might reimagine, and thereby shift, what life can be—what an embodied life feels like, and does, while 1 it is being lived. Future possibilities, new worlds; these imagined landscapes are brought to life through movement, and the layered, multiplicitous futures available—a sort of bringing forth via human action—cannot be numbered because human action itself is always open to new embodiments and possibilities. For Arendt, this is one promise of natality, what she called “the miracle that saves the world” (p. 247); with each new child, there are ever-forthcoming new actions—new ways of being-, knowing-, and feeling-in-the-world that might bring about more just, better futures. Spinoza’s (1677/2002) view is similar in his embrace of the potentiality of the human body’s capabilities; as he famously put it, we do not yet know “what the body can and cannot do” (p. 280), and his conatus—what Ezekiel might have called the breath of God—is inexorably entangled with affects that “increase or diminish, assist or check” (p. 284) the actions we have the capacity to embody. In this sense, it not simply a matter of doing; any doing, any action, emerges from a complicated assemblage of affects, desires, agencies, and imaginations, a hodgepodge of actants we might start to disentangle, and explore, in any investigation of a particular human action. In the context of this dissertation study, one of these actions is teaching, an everyday practice that, like any other movement, is “filled up,” and driven, by affects. Crucially, both of Arendt’s (1958/2003) “essential” human actions carry implications for teaching, and situated within standard forms of curriculum (and today’s larger education discourses), I argue the work of unfixing the past and opening up the promise of the future is significantly relevant to one field in particular—social studies education. This study, then, is driven by a number of questions that aim to explore the movements of teachers from a variety of vantage points, movements that, in my view, are entangled with issues of affect. Perhaps one of my goals in forefronting movement in this introduction is to offer one initial conceptual difference between affect and emotion; to 2 demonstrate how my commitments to better futures and embodied actions (like social studies teaching) are not only intertwined but conceptually opened up—and provided a unique interpretive freedom—by looking at affect as a relational force that is qualitatively different from emotion. For example, upon an “affective landscape,” an individual’s experience of an identifiable “emotion” is put into relation with other bodies, texts, and larger “affective structures” (Berlant, 2020) or “structures of feeling (Williams, 1977); this is a different way of looking at how something like an emotion is, perhaps, an entangled experience that is simultaneously “individually” felt and “affective” in its emergence alongside, and with, other actants we live with—forces that truly “affect” our actions and the ways we move, and feel, in the world. In other words, affective landscapes undergird—and even produce—emotional experiences, and just as poststructuralism shed light on how the individual subject is constituted by ever-shifting identities and experiences, an “affect theory” can show how the actions of social studies teachers, for example, their movements, are entangled with affect in ways that, as Spinoza (1677/2002) said, “cannot be numbered” (p. 310). In this sense, I am trying to both broaden and adjust the affective/emotional phenomena the field of social studies education research might explore. On the one hand, a larger focus on affective landscapes places the subjective emotions of teachers into a rich sociopolitical context that is ripe for analysis, while on the other hand, studying affect requires a certain style of noticing, a researcher embodiment that slows things down and is interested in the quiet moments of affectivity that occur in relation in the field, in the classroom (Stewart, 2007). I offer my own theorizations of affect (like the one above) throughout this dissertation’s seven chapters, both explicitly (in particular chapters you might expect) and implicitly. In no small way, my use of affect as a concept takes shape within my interpretations of the data I 3 generated with this study’s four participants: Clodagh, Garrett, Jake, and Sahar. There is no single page or chapter that describes affect in full; rather, it was only through a sort of “embodied writing” alongside and beyond the affect theory I have been consuming—affect continuing to elude my grasp, remaining at once conceptually-sticky and frustratingly-slippery—that my own affect theory began to take shape—a theory that glimmers within this dissertation’s interpretive findings. Much has been written about the difficulty of affect, its tendency to shape-shift and, too often, remain opaque and undertheorized in how it is used as a conceptual tool in empirical qualitative studies (like this dissertation) (Dernikos et al., 2020; Strom & Mills, 2021). To avoid this, I have aimed to be both clear and demonstrative in my use of the concept undergirding this study, and each chapter tackles affect from a different vantage point. Moreover, this is a novel empirical engagement for our field; as far as I am aware, this study is the first of its kind—an exploration of affect as a phenomenon of study in social studies teaching. Of course, this study reinforces and extends numerous studies on affect, emotion, and feeling (whether these three concepts are blended or theorized separately) in social studies education more broadly, but the absence of theorized conceptualizations of affect in relation to social studies teaching provides this study with a few things at once. First, there was a degree of freedom I felt in analyzing and interpreting my findings, a sort of affective production that is, perhaps, attached to what it means to do something new. Second, my methodological intuitions as a researcher are interdisciplinary and very much invested in what might be called conceptual polyamory. I enjoy reading research and literature in education research and beyond, and so while my methods were not guided by prior scholarship in our field of social studies education, per se, they are far less “new” in the fields of qualitative inquiry, comparative literature, philosophy, and even curriculum theory. I say all of this to couch my offering of this study as “new” in the first place; of course, this is a 4 rather silly and relative term to begin with (and entirely dependent upon one’s context), but I want to emphasize, and credit, the scholars this study uses as conceptual trail guides, a family that is conceptually-diverse in discipline, training, philosophical orientations, and ethical commitments. I will touch on this work in more detail in Chapters 1 and 2, but the work of Lauren Berlant (2008, 2011) is one key touchstone for my conceptualization of affect and, more specifically, my approach to training a lens of affect upon one particular, discursive, everyday practice: teaching. I will highlight “everyday,” here, because the scholarship of Berlant and her frequent collaborator Kathleen Stewart (2007; Berlant & Stewart, 2019) is intently focused on the affects that glimmer, whisper, and vibrate in our ordinary, everyday lives. Located in relation, “ordinary affects” (Stewart, 2007) can be glimpsed, and attended to, by adjusting our lenses of attunement, and one hope is that by noticing how, and where, ordinary affects are produced in relation, we might see how particular attachments (and the affects they produce in relation) sustain us, harm us, etc. In researching teaching, this style of re-attunement might provide new understandings of teaching life, and practice, as an issue of affect, as a felt and embodied practice that necessarily takes place upon a multiplicitous affective landscape. Of course, the subsequent lines of inquiry we might pursue are numerous, and perhaps this is one instructive point; attending to affect ought to be deeply contextual work—the affective attachments of the participants I worked with on this study are, simultaneously, unique to them and entangled with the larger “affective landscapes” we live upon, landscapes experienced (and felt) differently according to affective identities, hegemonic affective regimes, and other concepts I introduce throughout my analysis and interpretation. Third and finally, I offer this “novel” study to the field of social studies education as one initial example of what attending to issues of affect in social studies teaching (and teacher 5 education) can not only provide, but “look like.” In Chapter 7 I discuss this study’s implications for social studies education and teacher education at length, but I am also offering this dissertation as a productive disruption of research methods in social studies research. Throughout this study’s chapters, I offer—and aim to embody—a research method that requires slowing things down, a sort of embodied noticing that is attuned to one’s own (the researcher’s) affective inner-life and also the ever-emergent affects that are being produced in relation during data generation, whether human-to-human (researcher and participant), human-to-text, or whatever else. This is a poetic approach to qualitative research that, while increasingly-common in the fields of English or Arts Education, is relatively rare in social studies education research. For example, because Berlant and Stewart are not only sociocultural theorists but also poets, their work is rendered in ways that are, in their own right, affective texts—a poetics of affect that functions on various levels, both affecting the reader who is reading about affect while also introducing the reader to strategies of adjustment, how they themselves might learn to adjust themselves to issues of affect. I aim to follow Berlant and Stewart (two expert trail guides) in this work; through the use of various interludes, aesthetic figures and images, humanities-oriented approaches to data analysis and interpretation, and other poetic digressions, I have tried to make this dissertation an affective text, full stop—an exercise in writing about affect that is intentional in thinking about the affects I am producing as a researcher and writer. So, if one through line holding these chapters together is a vision of social studies teaching that is more sensuous and aesthetically-filled up—in short, more human—then this final point highlights my aim in doing the same for qualitative research in social studies education—a style of knowledge construction that is, perhaps, moving, aesthetic, and affecting. In the final section of this introduction I will outline what is to come in the dissertation’s seven chapters. Starting by situating this study 6 within the field of social studies education—specifically research on social studies teaching—I move from a discussion of my methods and methodology through four data chapters, each of which approaches affect in social studies teaching from a different vantage point. I conclude with a larger discussion of this study’s implications for both social studies teaching and teacher education. Chapter 1. In Chapter 1, I discuss how this study reinforces and extends prior scholarship on affect, emotion, and feeling in social studies education (and specifically teaching). I begin with an example from my own secondary social studies classroom to demonstrate, from the very first page, how I am conceptualizing affect—and its movements—in relation to teaching. From there, I place this study into conversation with prior scholarship in our field. Part of this will be a literature review of sorts, but I will build with, and from, prior scholarship to make a case for why this study will be an important contribution to the field of social studies education. Chapter 2. Researching affect has been approached in numerous ways across diverse disciplines, and separating affect from emotion conceptually can help to clarify the phenomenon under study. In Chapter 2, I aim to help the reader understand how I am using affect as a conceptual tool in my work before discussing the methods and methodology I used to explore an embodied phenomenon like affect. Through this, I am also “working through” (by writing) the limitations of this study, an empirical exploration of affect that took place in a virtual, pandemic- ridden world. I conclude this chapter by introducing this study’s four participants. Chapter 3. A moment of affectivity occurred at my research site (Lakeside School) at the beginning of this study, and so this dissertation’s data chapters start there, by exploring the affective landscape(s) of the school and how this singular moment—an affective rupture, if you will—reverberated in the participants’ teaching of separate Civics courses. Chapter 3 looks at 7 affect on broad larger societal/institutional level before analyzing how “structures of feeling” at Lakeside are navigated by the participants in their approaches to teaching. In this sense, I am moving from an exploration of affective “structures” (Berlant, 2020; Williams, 1977) to looking at how the affective attachments of the participants are brought to bear, through teaching, upon Lakeside’s unique affective landscape(s). Chapter 4. Chapter 4 looks closely at one particular affect: shame. In most education discourses, affects of shame are framed as “negative affects”; they are strenuously avoided and resisted against. Using Tomkins’s (1962/2008) unique conceptualization of shame as a positive inverse of contempt—an affect that, unlike contempt, is capable of moving us towards love and communion—I start by tracing affective movements of shame in two “social studies curriculum”: The 1619 Project (Hannah-Jones, 2017) and Trump’s “1776 Commission.” I do this to lay the groundwork for the participants’ complicated attachments to shame, both as a motivating affective force and as a toxic affect they encounter in their work as teachers. This chapter is ambitious in its conceptual offering of shame as a potentially-positive affective force that has the potential to disrupt hegemonic affective regimes, specifically affective structures of Whiteness. Chapter 5. Having explored affect on three levels, (a) school landscapes, (b) the participants’ embodiments of affect, and (c) textual affectivity, Chapter 5 delves more deeply into the affectivity of texts. Generally, the participants use aesthetic, affective texts to garner an initial burst of engaged attention from their students, but this chapter moves beyond this initial finding to explore how, and why, the aesthetic attachments of the participants are largely separated from their work as social studies teachers. This chapter draws heavily from the work of Maxine Greene (1978, 1995) and John Dewey (1934/2005) to call for a more affecting and 8 sensuous embrace of aesthetic texts in social studies teaching, and I figure affect as a force that might “bring teachers and students to life,” thrusting them out of the classroom and into the world in authentic, autonomous ways (Greene, 1978). Chapter 6. In the final data chapter, I build from Garrett’s and Alvey’s (2020) method of tracing “affect on the move” to analyze the participants’ embodiments of affect during a Focus Group. In doing this, I show how gendered and raced affective regimes are brought to bear in relational, everyday teaching experiences (like four social studies teachers discussing affect). If the over-arching question guiding this study positioned the affective attachments of the participants as one primary object(s) of inquiry, then this chapter shows how gendered and raced affective regimes work to enable, suppress, delegitimize, etc. the deeply-held attachments of the participants. Significantly, this chapter builds from Garrett and Alvey (2020) to offer novel methods of data generation and interpretation in researching social studies teaching. Chapter 7. Lauren Berlant’s (2011) concept of “cruel optimism” shows how affect moves, and becomes sticky, within attachments. The objects we are attached to that hamper our flourishing are cruel attachments, and for Berlant, the job of politics (in the most democratic sense) is to provide us with “good objects” we can attach to, objects that can better sustain us in trying to live the good life. Chapter 7 concludes this dissertation on the affective attachments of social studies teachers by analyzing my findings through a particular heuristic: What is the cruel optimism of social studies teaching? Crucially, my discussion of the cruel optimism of social studies teaching is a starting point—a sort of broader discussion of my findings—before I move into this study’s implications for the fields of social studies teaching and teacher education. In doing this, I conclude my dissertation by worlding new social studies teaching futures. I call for 9 approaches to teacher education that are more attuned to issues of affect and I offer a vision of teaching lives that are humanizing, aesthetically-filled up, and sustaining. 10 CHAPTER 1: SITUATING THE STUDY—AFFECT AND SOCIAL STUDIES TEACHING In my first year of teaching high school social studies I issued 1,143 demerits. I averaged a little more than six demerits per day, a rate that put me in the top five for teachers at my high school but left me out of the top three. I was one of ten teachers—nine White (including me) and one Black—in a newly-opened public charter school on the West Side of Chicago; our student body was 99% Black. I wore a suit coat, a tie, and polished brown shoes every day. I thought of myself as strict but fair, stern but kind. My class was titled “World History,” but it was really a reading course; my performance as a teacher was measured by my students’ test scores on the reading portion of the ACT. They took the test at the start of the year, once each quarter, and again at the end of the year. The history content I taught was irrelevant to the administration; I could teach whatever I wanted as long as it was aligned to a reading standard, a skill. Two weeks before school started, Michael Brown was shot and killed by Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. Protests increased and spread to Chicago. Black Lives Matter was formed and some of my students attended protests downtown. In mid-October, I decided to do a lesson on Michael Brown’s murder and the movement that was still unfolding. I gave my students 3 articles with different perspectives on the shooting, Black Lives Matter, and the role of police. I modeled “expert reading” on a document camera, annotating one of the articles as I thought aloud and determined the main idea and supporting details. Next, we started the second article and they completed the third on their own. At the end of class, we had a discussion, but my students were quiet and generally unresponsive. Finally, a student said, “Mr. Nelson, you on the side of the police, right?” I do not remember what I said, but the surprise still lingers, echoes that land like a punch in the gut. This moment reverberated inside my teaching life, bouncing 11 around and following me like a phantom; disappearing for months, it would reappear during periods of deep reflection—a resonant, affective rupture, a dilemma of practice I continued to think about even as I started my graduate work at Michigan State. Within the situated space of my former classroom—a very particular locality I have aimed to paint—my student’s question glows with unexpected significance (MacLure, 2013); as Kristeva (1984) might put it, the normal discourses of my classroom were ruptured by affectivity, an embodied gesture standing in excess of surrounding texts and bodies (Timm Knudson & Stage, 2015). In this sense, the affectivity was produced not simply by my student’s question; rather, it seems to arise from the assemblage of it all—fluctuating intensities, fleeting and immaterial nods, an ineffable in-betweenness of meaning and intention, the assumptions and perceptions generated within that classroom space. An ever-shifting phenomenon whistling between entities, between bodies (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Gregg & Seigworth, 2010). I would wager every teacher has embodied memories like this, remembrances of affectivity we might struggle to describe with words, with anything but what we often call a feeling, a mood—the faint reverberations of a movement that will never be replicated. And perhaps because this is true, because phenomena of affectivity are intertwined with social studies teaching, we might investigate them, not only to embetter our pedagogical practice but also to provide fuller, more life-giving and vibrant accounts of the world, ones that are newly-attuned to the invisible but powerful, the unspeakable but present. I find the moment of affectivity in my classroom to be a powerful example of how teaching and learning so often move within unseen territories, between bodies and underneath deafening silences, echoing the unspoken but felt, a space of resonance and embodiment eluding the measurable and ordered demands of contemporary classroom life. This moment reveals the 12 assemblage of the classroom, a space that is constantly producing, swelling, and intra-acting, a mangle of bodies and affects moving over skin, compelling, silencing, and nudging with small intensities. This singular anecdote is sticky in its double-sidedness; on the one hand, I cannot shake the very embodied memories of that moment; the atmosphere of my classroom, the affective regimes I had erected to sustain a particular status quo. And following Raymond Williams (1977), many of these “structures of feeling” preceded me, shaping and working through my own attempts to foster particular moods (Hsu, 2019). I can still feel—even taste—the swirling affects of that space, one I imagined to be primed for the disciplined and rational mastery of learning outcomes. On the other hand, my student’s question—his assumption—was cultivated by these very same affects; I speculate that his response to the policed and ordered mood of my classroom became entangled with a variety of affects, emotions, and objects—the texts themselves, the traumatic topic I aimed to discuss, my positionality as a White male authority figure, and the lived experiences of my students. How, then, did my own emotional attachments produce certain knowledge and understandings? What understandings, questions, or alternative ways of being, not only in my classroom but in our school, in the world, were precluded or erased by the affective and emotional commitments of my classroom? What affects were being produced within this classroom assemblage on the West Side of Chicago, and how did those affects open up or close down possibilities for better worlds? What affects attached themselves to the explicit curriculum I saw myself teaching, and which affects furthered the implicit or null curriculum that were also bound up in my pedagogy? This series of reflective questions regarding my own teaching practice are foundational to this study’s guiding inquiry, but before I detail my research questions, methods, and 13 methodology in Chapter 2, I want to place this study into conversation with prior scholarship in our field. In no small way, attendance to the affective registers in education research more broadly is burgeoning, and new projects (Dernikos et al., 2020; Zembylas & Schutz, 2016) are charting how affect is being taken up theoretically and empirically in the field. I offer this study as one contribution to this recent attunement towards affect, and I will show how this study, in social studies education research specifically, offers novel ways forward for research on social studies teaching. Conversing with Prior Scholarship Writing in 2015, Sheppard et al. found only thirty-nine publications in the four largest social studies research journals that explore affects or emotions in social studies classrooms, and both concepts remain undertheorized (Sheppard & Levy, 2019) and used interchangeably, two issues that compound one another (Helmsing, 2014; Keegan, 2019; Sheppard & Levy, 2019). In most cases, undertheorizing “affect” or “emotion” obscures their utility as a conceptual tool, and this becomes an issue of clarity as opposed to arguments over the “correct use” of a particular concept. For example, Ahmed (2004) uses emotion and affect interchangeably, but both concepts are deeply theorized and carefully explained (in how Ahmed is choosing to use them). Still, this tendency to undertheorize concepts like affect and emotion notwithstanding, the recent literature suggests (even since Sheppard et al. conducted their study in 2015) both researchers and P-12 teachers in social studies education are attending to issues of affect and emotion more frequently. For example, Sheppard and Levy (2019) showed how teachers view their classrooms as inherently emotional spaces, and the emotional and psychical components of a classroom discussion, for example, have been centered as objects of study, a verification of their inevitable presence (Crocco et al., 2018; Garrett, 2020; Journell, 2016; Lo, 2017b). Along 14 with this focus on classroom discussion and the emotional passions of political life, there is a deep interest in the affects embedded in curriculum itself (e.g., texts, narratives). A plethora of studies have explored “difficult knowledge” (Garrett, 2011, 2017, 2020; Sonu, 2016), “sensitive pasts” (van Boxtel et al., 2016), “difficult history” (Levy & Sheppard, 2018), and resonances of trauma within curriculum (Boler, 1999; Zembylas, 2005). It is evident, then, that our field is engaging with the affective registers in meaningful ways, but I want to draw a few distinctions before moving forward. First, I will briefly show how issues of affect and emotion have been largely dismissed (historically) in social studies education. While recent scholarship has challenged these discourses, they are still pervasive in how many teachers think about the relationship between affect, emotion, and knowledge construction in social studies. Second, I will address the issue I raised above: How affect and emotion are conceptualized in social studies education research. In doing this, I am highlighting particular articles and studies this study is in explicit conversation with, both reinforcing and extending. Affect, Emotion, and Social Science Historically speaking, issues of affect and emotion have been viewed as antithetical to the mission of social science. Evans, Avery, and Pederson (1999) argue the majority of social studies classrooms prioritize neutral, objective examinations of curricular content, an approach that serves to deemphasize the emotional, subjective dimensions of teaching and learning. My own prior scholarship (Nelson, 2019) reinforces this finding 20 years later, showing how the emotional opinions and beliefs of teachers and students are imagined to be relegated outside the classroom so dispassionate objective learning can proceed within. Connecting this desire for emotion-less classrooms to the work of professional historians, Berry et al. (2008) suggest professional historians are generally wary of considering emotions, believing they will invariably 15 cloud their ability to conduct sober and accurate social analysis. Over time, this fear of emotionality trickled down into some social studies classrooms, spaces in which “young historians” are encouraged to train clinical, objective eyes on primary sources (Wineburg, 2001). Paradoxically, pedagogical attempts to preclude affect and emotion from social studies classrooms highlight their disruptive capacity (Garrett, 2017). Indeed, affective or emotional ruptures are capable of turning a lesson on its head, ushering in moments of “post-truth” and uncomfortable confrontations between deeply-held emotional opinions and “objective facts,” an anxious matrix of self-censure many social studies teachers would rather avoid (Nelson, 2019). It seems a focus on empathy has been one conceptual attempt to broker peace between the numerous “controversies” of the past and a sort of humanistic appeal to the feelings and difficult situations of particular historical actors. Scholarship on empathy in history education and teaching (Blake, 1998; Davis et al., 2001; Endacott, 2010; Foster, 1999; Riley, 1998) is interested in the interior emotions of both historical figures and present-day students, specifically how students make sense of oppression, suffering, unspeakable violence (Baum, 1996), and mass killing (e.g., Holocaust education). On the one hand, this focus on empathy has cultivated a diverse collection of pedagogical strategies. Students are encouraged to engage in perspective taking (Barton & McCully, 2012; Blutinger, 2009; Kohlmeier, 2006), imaginative identity constructions (Kloehn, 2009), and highly-structured debates (Parker, 2011) over controversial issues (Hess, 2009). But in no small way, many of these approaches are shot through with particular affects; knowability, consensus, certainty, and a seductive sentimentality that usually replaces real action (Hsu, 2019; Zembylas, 2018). On the other hand, scholars have struggled to define empathy (e.g., Boler’s (1999) differentiation between “passive empathy” and a necessarily-active testimonial reading, Zembylas’s (2018) critique of a sentimental empathy he 16 finds prevalent in human rights education), wondering not only what qualities make a particular historical actor deserving, or not deserving, of our empathy, but also what happens when attempts at empathy break down, leaving the individual psyche mired in an anxious mixture of ambivalence and aggression (Boler, 1999; Britzman, 1998; Garrett, 2017). It seems many attempts at historical empathy run up against the radical alterity of the other, an emotional impasse lurking beneath all human science inquiry (van Manen, 2016). This ought to make us pause; perhaps affects and emotions are not as easy to decipher, imagine, and manipulate as some (Berry et al., 2008) might assume? More critical work does not foreclose a focus on empathy, per se, but other scholars (Britzman, 1998; Farley, 2009; Garrett, 2017) have argued teachers and students might benefit from adding uncertainty and unpredictability to the messy amalgam that is affect, emotions and social studies teaching. Importantly, though, this prior scholarship on empathy shows how an emotional phenomenon, or feeling, can be centered as the object of study (or concern) in social studies education research, and Endacott (2010) in particular takes the time to deeply-theorize empathy as a concept he utilizes empirically. Theorizing Affect and Emotion in Social Studies Education Research There have been few deep, conceptual engagements with affect and/or emotion in social studies education research. Sheppard et al. (2015) conducted a count (locating only three recent articles (Endacott, 2010; Garrett, 2011; Reidel & Salinas, 2011) that “explicitly address the conception of emotions guiding their research” (Sheppard et al., 2015, p. 157), but I am less interested in a quantitative conclusion than I am in the opportunities this “gap” in the literature provides future research (like this study). With regards to affect specifically, recent work by Zembylas (2018), Helmsing (2014), Niccolini (2016), and Garrett and Alvey (2020) are four articles this study cites as conceptual and empirical touchstones, and all four challenge the 17 boundaries of social studies education in generative ways (Zembylas and Niccolini in particular are writing more broadly about classroom life and the affects produced therein). A scholar of international education, Zembylas (2018) interrogates human rights education (a field that very much overlaps with the concerns of social studies curriculum) by analyzing HRE curriculum through an affective lens of sentimentality and political depression, two concepts I utilize in this study and address more fully in Chapter 2, while Niccolini (2016) explores how affects of fear and threat are used to discipline gendered and raced bodies in classrooms, simultaneously reinforcing hegemonic, normative understandings while foreclosing others. The articles by Garrett and Alvey (2020) and Helmsing (2014) are firmly situated in social studies education research, and I am offering this study as an extension of their work. Helmsing’s (2014) article looks at affects of pride and shame in Civics Education, arguing these affects (and others) are bound up in the development of social identities in social studies classrooms. Helmsing’s conceptual work informs my empirical work in Chapter 3; an exploration of how the affective attachments and identities of social studies (Civics) teachers are brought to bear in their classrooms. Garrett and Alvey (2020) bring Boler’s and Davis’s (2018) conceptualization of emotion as “affect on the move” into their interpretations of how affect is embodied during classroom discussions, and their methodological use of classroom video stills to analyze affect informs my methods in Chapter 6. Recent collections (Dernikos et al., 2020; Zembylas & Schutz, 2016) have shaped nascent researcher/theorist/teacher communities in education research, communities that are invested in how diverse theories of affect might disclose new understandings about teaching and learning. Again, the majority of this work is located outside the social studies education research journals Sheppard et al. (2015) surveyed, for example, but these collections demonstrate a recent 18 upswell in how researchers across disciplines are attuning themselves to affect. Following this, I argue recent scholarship in social studies education (see above) shows how concepts like affect and emotion are being used more intentionally and carefully in research (a shift that, in my opinion, only increases their legibility and utility across diverse contexts), and in the next chapter I will do just that: Discuss how I am using affect (and emotion) in this study’s methods and methodology. But first, I want to be more specific about how this study’s focus on the affective attachments of social studies teachers will be generative to our field. In other words, I will narrow my focus on the concept of “affective attachment” to show how, and why, exploring the affective attachments of teachers is important—how it comes to matter—and what it provides the vision of social studies teaching I am offering in this dissertation, a vision that builds with, and upon, the prior scholarship I reviewed above. I will begin by explaining how I am conceptualizing “affective attachment” and how such attachments have the capacity to shape future worlds. From there, I will make the case for attending to the affective attachments of social studies teachers in education research, and I conclude by situating this study specifically within the context of civics education, arguing that the affective attachments of teachers are inherently political; by this I mean that the affective attachments of teachers are inseparable from who they are and from their work as teachers—their diverse identities, imagined pasts, and visions of various futures. In other words, the affective attachments of teachers are entangled with these imagined futures—in no small way they produce them—and exploring the affective attachments of teachers can tell us a lot about futures they invite, or allow to be opened up—to be imagined—in their classrooms. In this time of remarkable political partisanship and polarization (I say this knowing full well the GOP’s capitulation to the far right, Trump, and 19 QAnon—along with the racist, xenophobic, and transphobic discursive baggage attached—is nearly complete, making past (imaginary) notions of “bipartisanship” seem quaint in today’s context), I argue it is imperative we explore—both in social studies classrooms and in social studies teacher education—the affective attachments (e.g., texts, fantasies, methodologies) that constitute teachers’ perceptions of the past, the relational present, and the multiplicitous futures they are positioned to help their students imagine and bring into existence. Affective Attachments My theorization of “affective attachment” follows Felski (2020; Gutkin, 2020) and is, in turn, relatively straightforward (and therefore productively capacious in what “counts” as an affective attachment). In short, an attachment to an affective text is a tie, and this tie “can be emotional or intellectual or political or institutional” (para. 12). For example, appreciation is one type of attachment, but Felski’s (2020) larger argument is that this sort of attachment is unavoidable; we are invariably affectively attached to a wide range of texts, and these attachments are formed in numerous ways. Following this, there is, of course, a degree of chance involved; we do not necessarily choose, especially when we are young, the affective, aesthetic experiences (and texts) we are made, or allowed, to encounter, encounters that form the “ties” we feel to particular novels, films, paintings, or whatever else. And crucially, one implication here is that within “aesthetic texts” are real truths; the “stories” they tell are “real” in how they affect our being in the world (I expound on this below). Felski suggests that the immediacy of these aesthetic experiences—along with the ways in which they are mediated, whether by chance or social background or temperament—is a powerful, affecting phenomenon that is sticky; they stick with us, literally, in how they begin to form a sort of constituting ontoepistemology that affects how we move in the world with the others in it. Felski’s (2020) work focuses on three 20 specific affective attachments—identification, attunement, and interpretation—but there are, of course, many more; my interpretive analysis of the participants’ affective attachments in this study builds from Felski’s three attachments to offer other affective attachments I position as germane to the practice of social studies teaching. For example, an “identification attachment” is interested in what it means for a person to identify with a character in a text: How might this affective (imaginary) identification with a “fictional” or “historical” character change a person’s being in the world? In later data chapters I show how the identification attachments of the participants are brought to bear in their teaching in impactful ways, a dynamic that complicates assumptions about student-centered pedagogies and teacher decision-making. In short, it seems teachers are often guided by their own affective attachments as opposed to the identities or interests of their students. Similarly, Felski’s (2020) exploration of interpretation shows how we can become affectively attached to a text even as we imagine ourselves detaching from it, a sort of counterintuitive attachment to a method (close reading, for example) that is simultaneously tied to the text it is critiquing. Following this, I also look at the affective attachments of the participants that, while not textual, are methodological; ways of teaching and managing a classroom to which they are tied—methods of teaching social studies that not only produce particular affects and ways of being (and feeling) for their students, but can also be traced to the prior affective experiences of a given participant. So then, it is evident the affective attachments of social studies teachers can be formed in a wide range of ways, and Felski’s (2020) conceptualization of “affective attachment” is one I build from to provide my interpretive analysis with both a rigorous theoretical foundation and a generous openness to what might “count” as an affective attachment as I analyzed the data I generated with the participants. In the next section, I will move towards explaining why, and 21 how, affective attachments come to matter in everyday practices like teaching, making the case for why they are one worthy object of study guiding this dissertation. How Affective Attachments Come to Matter Recently, Salman Rushdie (2021) published an essay in The New York Times about books and love; or, to use the language of this study, the ways in which our affective attachments to particular stories and tales—the books we love—play a significant role in shifting (or reinforcing and/or confirming) how we move in the world and live with one another. Rushdie’s essay cites a wide range of tales from ancient India, Persia, and England to exemplify the affective power of the books and stories, tales and fantasies we fall in love with, and he argues the imaginaries these texts conjure make us who we are. In no small way, they shape us—the self that is continually unfolding—and they “become a part of the way in which we understand things and make judgements and choices in our daily lives” (2021, para. 4). After disclosing and discussing his own affective attachments to texts like Günter Grass’s “The Tin Drum” (1961/2010), the tales of Hans Christian Anderson, and epic stories from the Mahabharata, he pivots to the sociopolitical landscapes of the present, showing how many of the same stories are being used by right-wing ultra-nationalist parties (specifically Modi’s BJP in India) to sow division, paranoia, and hatred of others. In all of this, it is evident one’s powerful “love” for a story runs far deeper than a matter of preference or taste. Using the BJP as one example, Rushdie argues they “use the rhetoric of the past to fantasize about a return to ‘Ram Rajya,’ the ‘reign of Lord Ram,’ a supposed golden age of Hinduism without such inconveniences as members of other religions to complicate matters” (2021, para. 14). Of course, it is not difficult to locate parallel phantasmatic textual touchstones in the United States, the stories and visions that constitute a vision of Making America Great Again; from the cisgender, heteronormative visions of White masculinity 22 embodied by John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart (with the vast majority of Black and Brown characters relegated to marginal, type-cast roles) to the paranoid, capitalistic novels of Ayn Rand—a sort of hyperventilating vision of ruthless individualism standing its ground in the face of an ever-advancing Red horde of collectivism (and the numerous “vices” churning within its violent rip tide (e.g., urbanism, queerness, and other non-normative ways of being))—these tales provide their purveyors not only with dramatic, contested pasts on which to stand but they also produce imaginary futures to move towards and, in some cases, fight for. And this is the case with all texts, with all affective attachments; it is not only the tales and stories embraced by the right that have the capacity to make real cuts in the present. For example, the incredulous and convicted reporting of Upton Sinclair, the murals of Diego Rivera, and the early films of Tarkovsky all offer diverse, imaginary worlds, disparate visions of more equitable and just Utopias that seem to beckon us forward from behind the veil of the future, the just-ahead. Stories like “Bleak House” (Dickens, 1853/2003), while labeled as “fiction,” a work of imagination, is simultaneously “true.” The “truths” within, truths about love, power, fear, bravery, hatred, and death fuel a particular politics, particular convictions and visions of “what can be,” visions that anchor our movements in the world with one another. Within the entanglement that is too-simply labeled a “story,” an affective attachment is forged, a phenomenon that is itself agentic; one’s identities, past experiences, and imaginations about the future are affected—and able to be shifted—by the affectivity of the (textual) attachment. Herein, the boundary between what is fiction and what is “truth,” what is “real,” becomes impossible to decipher. In other words, and as Rushdie (2021) put it, “the magical and the real ceases to exist” (para. 11), a paradigm shift that can work (critically and productively) to call into question our obsessions with genre, for example (obsessions that loom large in how national and state Social Studies standards 23 differentiate between various texts, drawing implications for how particular genres are deemed reliable and trustworthy while others are relegated (implicitly) to the English classroom or elsewhere as unrealistic and/or unreliable (i.e., fiction)). And imagination is always lingering here, a practice that ought to be inherent to the classroom lives of teachers and students but is too often superseded by another set of (related) obsessions: classroom efficiency, measurable learning outcomes (and the necessarily unimaginative tasks and assessments required by the demands of what it means to “measure” learning), and predictability and structure as opposed to spontaneity and unpredictable possibilities (Greene, 1978, 1995). In short, the imaginaries that spring forth from the infinite and diverse affective attachments of teachers and students to texts we might call “fiction,” “speculative,” “futuristic,” “surreal,” or whatever else are filled with various “truths” about the world, about what it might mean to live with one another in ways that are more humanizing and just (just as they might, however implicitly, work against such commitments). The affective texts we are attached to have the capacity to not only shift how we think about the past in social studies but also how we imagine the future being able to look and feel. As Snaza (2019) puts it, affective texts matter because they are capable of rearranging our desires; in short, reading, listening to, looking at, or watching affective texts can change us. The potential, here, is for empirical work that can shift how social studies teaching lives are embodied and how teachers (and pre-service teachers) perceive—and imagine—the relationship between their aesthetic attachments and their work as teachers. In other words, researching the affective attachments of teachers—exploring (and subsequently interpreting) the desires entangled within—can offer new visions of social studies teaching lives: teaching lives that are aesthetically filled-up—and perhaps less hesitant—about what it means, or feels like, to invite one’s attachments into the relational work that is teaching; teaching lives that are reflexively 24 aware of the entanglement that is one’s desires, imagined pasts, visions of the future, and affective attachments, making teachers more self-aware and critical; and finally, teaching lives that are radically interested in forging new affective attachments, attachments that imagine alternative future worlds that are more just and equitable, democratic and humanizing. In this way, I argue the inherently political process of creating, locating, and/or cultivating new affective attachments ought to be a central focus in social studies education and teacher education (Berlant, 2020); because the affective attachments of teachers are constitutive of what they feel matters, and because what teachers feel matters is entangled with both what and how they teach, it is imperative we attend to the attachments themselves. Subsequently (and herein lies the dynamic futurism of this project), we, as a field, might begin to world, to dream up and create, new objects (e.g., stories, aesthetic objects) we can grab hold of, attachments that are capable of ushering in new worlds. In the following (and final) section of this chapter, I will look at how prior scholarship has attended to this particular matter of “affective attachment” in social studies education, and I will continue to show how this study pushes the field, anchoring it specifically—as just one example—in democratic civics education. Pushing the Field: Exploring the Affective Attachments of Social Studies Teachers Earlier in this chapter I reviewed how affect, emotion, and feeling have been explored in prior scholarship. This section will consider how this dissertation’s focus on the affective attachments of teachers will reinforce and extend the field of social studies education. In short, I will explain why looking at the affective attachments of teachers matters, why it is important. As far as I know, this study’s use of “affective attachment” as a central conceptual tool is new to the field of social studies education research. While scholars in English education (Snaza, 2019) and 25 broader literary fields (e.g., comparative, literary criticism) (Berlant, 2020; Felski, 2020) have used “affective attachment” to explore the affectivity of texts and the ways in which human beings are entangled with aesthetic texts and experiences, my review of the literature above shows how the majority of the work on affect, emotion, and feeling in social studies education has been detached from the particular attachments of teachers. To be sure—and as my review of the literature exemplifies—issues of affect and emotion have been explored in critical and innovative ways in civics education and social studies education generally. Moreover, “affective attachment” is not completely absent from prior scholarship; while it is not theorized as a central theoretical concept, research by Garrett & Segall (2013), Helmsing (2014), Garrett (2017), and Garrett et al. (2020) explores how psychical, emotional, and affective “investments” (p. 314), for example, in particular narratives, stories, pasts, or futures are ever-present in classroom life. In this sense, their use of “investment” is conceptually similar to how I am utilizing “affective attachment,” and there other examples of this sort of conceptual overlap I will touch on below. On the one hand, research in civic education on affect has focused on how citizenship is a matter of feeling; how affects, emotions, and feelings are produced and mobilized by the state and other institutions (like schools) to shape citizens in certain ways; and how the state cultivates affective landscapes upon which particular ways of embodying citizenship are acceptable while others are not (Ho, 2017; Keegan, 2019; Jaffee et al, 2014). This body of work looks at what I would call affective attachments, but in a broad sense. For example, in their exploration of the affective (citizenship) landscape of Singapore, Ho (2017) traces the storytelling habits of the state, showing how the Singapore state weaves a myth of racial and religious harmony that is constituted by its underside, what it silences: past episodes of violence and current methods of suppression. Ho’s work concentrates on how institutions like schools collaborate with the state to 26 propagate a story of harmony, and in reading their work it is evident that affect is at the center of it. However, the article does not conceptualize the foundational issues of affect—of feeling—nor does it dig deeply into how teachers and students are themselves (affectively) attached to the story of harmony they recognize so well (in a fascinating complexification, it is a story students are attached to both loving and hating). To be sure, my study (in particular Chapter 3) looks at affect from a larger societal and institutional level, and I build from the work of Ho (2017) and Keegan (2019) to think about how these larger affective productions affect teachers and students at my research site. Still, I would argue my work extends this prior scholarship both conceptually and empirically by looking at affect from multiple levels, not only from a discursive vantage point but also individually—the affective attachments of the participants themselves. In doing this, I try to explore how affective landscapes and hegemonic structures of feeling are embodied in intimate, personal ways. My conceptualization of “affective attachment” allows me to work in between macroscopic affective structures and the contextual stories of the participants; the actual affective attachments they are bringing to their everyday work as teachers. On the other hand is the body of work I briefly mentioned above, research that is invested in the psychical, inner-lives of teachers and students, the dimensions of classroom life that are often quiet and secret but powerfully felt. I position Garrett’s and Segall’s (2013) work, along with Garrett’s (2017) book and Helmsing’s (2014) conceptual article as seminal, recent scholarship that built initial bridges between theories of affect (e.g., psychoanalysis, amorphous affect theories) and social studies education, and while “affective attachment” is not a guiding concept in all of this work, it is a through line (albeit implicit, or differently titled) this study builds upon. With regards to civics education, this body of work is less interested in the machinations of the state than it is in the inherent affective and emotional components of 27 classroom life. In short, what it means to live in this world with one another in more just and humanizing ways (Garrett, 2017), an approach to civics education that is far less concerned with students memorizing democratic governmental processes and structures than it is in helping students think critically about our own “democracy” while also showing them how we might imagine futures that are more democratic and equitable. It is a vision of a civics education that is relational, entangled, wide-awake, and necessarily embodied and lived in school and classroom communities, whether through discussions, student mobilizations, protests, or unexpected sparks of solidarity and friendship. This study works alongside this vision, and I offer the “affective attachments” of teachers and students as worthy of investigation because of how they are brought to bear in how we think about the past, each other, and imagine the future. In other words, how they affect the “outer-lives” of teachers and students, the very grounds of civic life. Again, while this prior work does not conceptualize “affective attachment” explicitly, theoretical frameworks like inner-life (Garrett, 2017), investments (Garrett et al., 2020), or civic identity (Lo, 2017a) are similar in their conceptual and empirical commitments. For example, Garrett’s and Segall’s (2013) article looks at what I might call the affective attachments of White pre-service teachers, exploring how their attachments to White-washed historical narratives (essentially White fantasies) are used to shield themselves from the difficult knowledge of racism, White supremacy, and other forms of violence. Similarly, Lo (2017a) is interested in how the inner-lives of teachers and students are constituted by diverse and varied identities, and their article shows how a “civic identity” is not something that can simply be realized and embodied without an attentiveness to students’ closely-held attachments to particular stories of the self, stories that are steeped in family histories and experiences and, in turn, produce diverse identities (e.g., race, sex, gender, religion). Finally, in researching 28 classroom discussions on issues like immigration (the classroom being a sort of practice-grounds for what deliberation might look like in adult civic life), Garrett et al. (2020) argue the boundaries between affects (like passion), facts, opinions, and evidence are inevitably blurry, and they show how “the affective aspects of learning or not learning impact our desire and ability to consider new information that might trouble our views about the world” (p. 321). In no small way, the “affective aspects,” here, are a matter of attachment; the participants in their study are affectively attached to very specific narratives, sets of facts, lines of argument, and other methods of proving themselves “right” in a given deliberation—yet another example of why the affective attachments of teachers and students are a crucial object of study for social studies (and civics) education researchers. In other words, more democratic, equitable, and humanizing futures will not arrive if we separate facts from the affective ties that secure them, the ties that make facts felt—a matter of feeling, of affect—and passionately defended. To conclude, I will pose a question: After tracing some ways in which affect—and specifically matters of attachment—have been taken up in civics education research, what is unique about my theorization of “affective attachment,” and what does it provide this study that is different from the research above? As I have stated, my use of “affective attachment” is purposefully capacious, a methodological strategy that aims to be radically open to the wide range of unexpected attachments I hoped to uncover in my work with the participants. Following this, my answer is rather straight-forward: I build upon the scholarship above by inviting aesthetics into the conversation, and it is my interest in the aesthetic affective attachments of social studies teachers that provides this study with its experimental vision, a vision that is concerned with at least two things: first, it is a vision of a social studies teaching life that is reimagined as being open and fueled by aesthetic experiences that are, quite hopefully, always 29 changing us. This is a vision that works against the teaching lives imagined (and reified) by the demands of hegemonic discourses in education—accountability, measurement, burn out—and it is a conceptual move that pushes beyond a participant’s affective attachment to a particular narrative of the past, for example (though I do, of course, attend to those attachments as well). I aim to demonstrate this commitment in Chapter 5, a departure from prior chapters through its focus on the aesthetic attachments of the participants, and I conclude by articulating ways in which social studies teachers might open themselves up to more textual, aesthetic experiences that are filled with affectivity, experiences that are capable of supplying entirely new objects that are available for attachment. Second, a focus on the aesthetic affective attachments of teachers can open up alternative visions of what a social studies teaching life can feel like, how it can be embodied in ways that are more generative, aesthetic, sustaining, and life-giving. In short, this conceptual focus concentrates on imagining better, more livable futures, embodiments of a teaching life that are attentive to inner-life, to aesthetics, to experiences, and to relationships in ways that aggressively work against other embodiments of teaching lives: busyness and exhaustion, objectivity and erasure of the self. In the next chapter, I will extend this discussion of the concepts guiding this study by looking more deeply at affect, emotion, and feeling, and I will explain how they are brought to bear in my methods and methodology. 30 CHAPTER 2: METHODS AND METHODOLOGY—AFFECTIVE METHODOLOGIES IN EDUCATION RESEARCH As I discussed in Chapter 1, how affect in social studies teaching is explored through qualitative inquiry is very much an open question. A handful of studies have used classroom videotape stills (De Freitas, 2015; Garrett & Alvey, 2020; Tobin & Hsueh, 2007) to examine how teachers and students embody particular affects upon the affective landscape that is the classroom, but the aims and contexts of these studies are diverse (Garrett’s and Alvey’s study being the only one firmly situated within a social studies classroom). In addition, a number of studies (Reidel & Salinas, 2011; Sheppard & Levy, 2019) have explored the self-reported subjective emotions of teachers, a methodological orientation this study builds from by inviting the participants to reflect upon affective (felt) experiences in teaching. Initially, I aimed for this study to extend the methodological use of classroom videotape to explore affect and social studies teaching; using a range of “affective methodologies” (Tim Knudson & Stage, 2015), I designed a study committed to generating in situ data with the participants—data generated in the moment, in their respective classrooms, within particular affective embodiments and felt experiences. However, due to the covid-19 pandemic, my methods had to be significantly reconfigured; in other words, I had to figure out how to explore affect from afar—through the medium of Zoom. I do not want to spend excess time on what this study was going to be. To be sure, I am looking forward to carrying out future qualitative studies on affect in situ, in classrooms, through videotape and other methods, but those studies will have to wait. For now, I want to explain the study that was, and the methods I used to explore affect in the strange contexts of this past year. I will start with my methodology and theoretical framework—a few of the conceptual tools I 31 utilized to interpret the data—before providing the research questions guiding this study and moving into my methods of data generation. I conclude this chapter by introducing the participants, an introduction that is intentionally initial in how it is followed by various interludes throughout the remaining chapters that aim to humanize and “bring to life” the four social studies teachers I worked with on this dissertation. Methodology Parting ways with my initial methodological focus on generating data in situ—coming to terms with the fact I would be carrying out the majority of this study from a small front room in my apartment—was difficult. There was a period of embarrassingly-privileged mourning. After deciding to press onward, I took the time to think deeply about how I could still trace “affect on the move” (Boler & Davis, 2018) outside the participants’ classrooms, outside of Lakeside (the research site), and outside of a body; indeed, the ironic paradox of studying an embodied phenomenon through a disembodied, dehumanizing medium—Zoom. Before the pandemic, I already knew I would be exploring a phenomenon (affect) the participants themselves might not conceptualize—or see, feel, or interpret—in the same ways I was. This is not new to qualitative inquiry, especially in work that uses deeply-theorized concepts and frameworks (like psychoanalysis for example) (J. Garrett, personal communication, November, 2019). Conceptual tools can help researchers see, and notice, phenomenal movements that might not otherwise be legible. But in reflecting on how to reconfigure this study, I realized my manner of talking about affect with the participants on Zoom would have to be open, loose, and responsive to their own conceptualizations of what they meant—what we meant—in constructing knowledge of social studies teaching together. No longer a matter of observing affect on the move in situ by providing the participants the opportunity, through various methods, to report their embodiments 32 of affect while teaching; it became a matter of making the space for the participants to both reflect upon prior affective embodiments and talk about how they saw affect, emotion, or feeling—whatever concept(s) they wanted to use—in relation to their work as social studies teachers—both abstractly and grounded in particular teaching tasks I designed for Zoom. This necessary attendance to reflected-upon affective experiences provided me with an opportunity to consider overlaps between affective methodologies (Tim Knudson & Stage, 2015) and phenomenological investigations of lived (affective) experiences. Onto-epistemological differences notwithstanding (many “affective methodologies” share poststructuralism’s wariness of “lived experience” as an object of study), I am deeply interested in how the reflected-upon affective experiences of the participants can be simultaneously interpreted (and taken at face value for what they are) and “opened up” in an affective sense, an attunement to the resonant and unspoken, the ineffable and mysterious. In doing this, I am aiming to interpret the reflected-upon lived (affective) experiences of the participants through an affective lens; just as psychoanalysis is attuned to the silences, digressions, half-thoughts, and jokes that litter any account of an experience, an affective interpretation embodies a particular style of noticing, a slowed-down approach that is attentive to the sticky vibrations and resonances I feel (as the researcher) in relation to the participants and whatever objects (like texts) and ideas we are entangled with inside the “apparatus” (Barad, 2007) of inquiry. Aside from in person Initial Interviews with each participant, this study’s data were generated remotely through a series of five Zoom activities I designed, along with a remote Focus Group and brief Written Response to conclude our work together. With regards to data analysis and interpretation, I aimed to follow Stewart (2007) by “slowing down the jump to representational thinking” (p. 4). In other words, because I could not generate in situ data with 33 the participants, I considered the affective embodiments of the participants in my analysis by opening up my data to the participants’ micro-gestures (De Freitas, 2015) (tone and volume of voice, facial expressions, body posture, etc.). I took note of this embodied data in both my Field Diary (Punch, 2012) and during data analysis, providing a particular affectivity to the representational data I transcribed, coded, and made sense of using Nvivo (Punch, 2012). In carrying out this methodological attentiveness to affect, Ahmed’s (2006) and Wetherell’s (2013) theorization of how affect is embedded and embodied within discursive practices (like teaching) was helpful. It is a lens that helped me (in my interpretations of data) to push beyond the reflected-upon and verbalized experiences of the participants towards what is embodied, felt, and perhaps unspoken. To be clear, I am not undercutting the importance of the rich verbalized data I generated with the participants; indeed, these data form the bulk of this study’s findings. However, in discussing my methodology, it is important to share the underlying desires and commitments guiding this study, orientations that nudged me towards particular noticings and interpretations and, inevitably, away from others. The Dissertation as an Affective Text Just as exploring affect is necessarily attentive to its layers and folds, so too is the endeavor of writing about affect; indeed, writing or reading about a relational, embodied phenomenon is at capacity with potentialities—alternative ways of creating texts, of reading, of curating—and entering into—a different sort of feeling in relation to “scholarship.” On the one hand, we might write about affect like any other phenomenon, producing journal articles that are familiar and comfortable. On the other hand, journals like Capacious have made use of affect on numerous levels; the website’s interface is warm and vibrant, and the articles are often accompanied by alluring graphics, videos, photographs, and other texts that enter into the 34 assemblage that is the article and its reader. Capacious aims to actually embody some of the truths attending to affect provides, an embrasure of the multiplicitous future worlds that are always available to be imagined, ushered from the virtual into the real; the truth that scholarship does not have to simply replicate the status quo, further solidifying disciplinary divisions; the truth that there is no list of acceptable or unacceptable methodological approaches to exploring affect; the truth that affective scholarship that is layered and imbricated can be messy in its creativity but also revelatory in what it uncovers and discloses—Capacious is a space that aims to “foster and promote rambunctious bloom-spaces for those who study affect over the dulling hum of any specific orthodoxy” (Capacious, 2021, n.p.). These commitments resonate with my approach to writing this dissertation; of course, I am thinking about affect in the sense that I am writing about affect and social studies teaching, but I have also aimed to create a dissertation text that is itself an affective text. While all texts are affective in relation to a reader (moving us to the edge of our seat, nodding off in an armchair with a book on our lap), I have attended to the affective folds of this text in a few intentional ways: writing with a “voice” that is, perhaps, less than conventional in “scholarship”; challenging disciplinary boundaries by weaving in epigraphs and interpretive lenses from literature, philosophy, and history; littering this text with images that aim to surprise the reader with unexpected encounters; using interludes and digressions to invite myself and the participants into the text itself, positioning us as human beings with desires and attachments as opposed to sterile empirical subjects. In all of this, I am thinking less about the reader (you) than I am about the multilayered textual experience I am creating; I am imagining this dissertation text as a vibrant thing, a thing with the capacity to affect, to act upon, and to perhaps shift our embodiments of “a teaching life” in more sustaining ways (Bennett, 2010). And as with any challenge to the “dulling hum of specific orthodoxy,” there is risk involved; perhaps 35 my attempts to be rambunctious do not always resonate, or “work.” But even then, the affective text that is the dissertation is still blooming, and it is this embodied praxis of affective scholarship that is interesting to me, a direction this study aims to both push towards and open up for our field of social studies education research. Me, Myself, and I: Playing the Role of Researcher and Participant In the section above, I draw connections between my writing “voice” and the dissertation itself as an affective text. The disembodied voice within a text is filled with affectivity; a voice can compel us, move us, startle us, or make us stop in our tracks. In short, a voice—whether spoken or written—has the capacity to affect those who hear it in powerful ways. The affective capacity of a voice is limitless, irreverent of spatial or temporal boundaries. Spinoza’s voice stretches across five centuries to me in my study in Chicago, while the prophet Ezekiel, whose voice opens this dissertation in an epigraph above, “spoke” those words more than 2,600 years ago. And right now, beside my laptop on my desk, rests The Mirror and the Light (2020), the new novel by Hilary Mantel, a more recent voice channeling and imagining, inventing and ventriloquizing the phantom voices of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell, a family of voices that, at the conclusion of Mantel’s (2020) trilogy, feel warm and familiar, a Tudor world I anticipate entering—and communing with—at the end of each day. It is the affectivity of particular voices that draw us to novels like Mantel’s, or certain television shows, films, theater productions, or even our friends or partners. Voices can seduce us and draw us in; voices can convince us, dissuade us, or make us suddenly feel as though all we thought we knew might be wrong—the ground shifting beneath our feet. And crucially, of course, a voice requires a speaker; someone to utter, to write, to preach, to exhort, to inspire—a vessel through whom the people might be warned, rebuked, or led astray. The power attached to a voice, its capacity to 36 affect, to change people and shift landscapes, necessitates an attention to ethics, to murky issues of accountability, responsibility, and intent. The relationship between the speaker and the listener—or reader—can be filled with ambiguity and suspicion (or perhaps a more productive attitude of critique), but it can also be enthralled and head-over-heels, a dangerous surrender of the listener’s discernment, a sort of capitulation to the most troubling potentialities of what Cicero called rhetoric. In other words, to speak—to not only speak one’s voice but to also shape it, curate it, practice it, and hone it—is one facet of what it means to be human, a part of living in this world with one another—and communicating—that is at capacity with complex issues of power. So then, to research, to pursue qualitative inquiry, requires the researcher to consider the issues of power attached to voice, to what it means to commune with others, learn with them, and then speak on their behalf, to bring their voices into being. My voice looms large in this dissertation study, as does my physical, affective/emotional, and intellectual presence, not only in the text itself (my writing voice) but also in how I generated data and engaged with the participants on a regular basis. This study’s chapters do not pretend to offer an objective, god’s eye view of the data I generated with the participants; rather, and as I touched on above, I am aiming to make this dissertation text an affective text, and I have embraced the opportunity to write with a voice that is, perhaps, uncommon in social science research. In writing, we talk about writing with a voice that is “strong,” or “unique” and “distinctive,” but the genre that is social science research is not known for writing that could be described in these ways. Instead, in my view, the majority of social science research (and specifically social studies education research), produces affects that are cold and clinical; there is an ineffable desperation as well, a sort of jealous attempt to produce affects of certainty and objectivity that are so commonly 37 attached to research in the natural sciences—an attempt to bring clear-eyed empiricism to working with diverse, unpredictable, and delightfully contradictory human beings. A weird voice-less voice predominates, a voice that is lacking in personality and recognizability—in short, humanity—in order to further the delusion that truth and knowledge can only be produced by adhering to strict rules of sterile objectivity. To counter these genre norms, the hegemonic voice-lessness in social science research, I would add “playful” and “eclectic” to the aesthetic I am trying to build within this text. My writing voice is actively trying to affect my readers, to interest them, to draw them in by using a wide range of texts, experiences, and data. So my writer’s voice is one way my “self” enters into this work, and while this dissertation is about social studies teachers, it is also about me; not only as a researcher but also as a participant. Below, I outline other ways in which I am truly a participant in my own dissertation study. As a Researcher As a researcher and writer, my “self” shines through these written words you are reading in a variety of ways. Yes, I wrote every word of analysis, but there are other words in these chapters not spoken by me, words I am borrowing and curating in particular ways. Epigraphs, for example, produce a certain tone or shade at the start of a chapter; they linger in the mind as one reads, providing at least an initial idea of where a chapter—or my line of argument—might be heading. The spoken words of the participants are rendered as chunks of words—sentences or even entire paragraphs—that can appear to have fallen out of the sky. And yet I am there, my invisible words serving as a backboard that not only responded to each teacher in real time, but I also asked the question(s) that worked alongside many other things (or what we might call factors) to produce the given answer I have included as a “finding.” It is impossible to remove 38 myself from this role of data producer, and this truth lead me to replace the common term “data collection” with “data generation,” a way of more accurately reflecting the ways in which this study—and its findings—are co-produced—co-generated between me and my participants—an entangled process that is more about collaboration than it is about a lone researcher constructing knowledge about a phenomenon under their observation1. Indeed, this model is a myth of modernism, a methodological orientation I bring to this study and one I discuss in more depth below. In my analysis of this study’s data, my “self” is unapologetically present. While other methodological orientations might require the researcher to bracket their own experiences and commitments (or as I would call them, their affective attachments) from “contaminating” the data with bias, I use my past experiences as a K-12 social studies teacher, for example, to not only make sense of the data—drawing parallels, insights, and spotting recognizable moments from a social studies teaching life—but also to feel with the teachers, to empathize with them in a way that is deeply tied to my own work as a former K-12 teacher and current social studies teacher educator. In this way, I am aiming to embody my deep interests and commitments, the affective attachments guiding this study; a vision of social studies teaching lives that do not erect boundaries between the “self” and a teaching life. Similarly, I bring this approach to qualitative inquiry, to my invitation of my “self” into my research, analysis, and writing. As a Participant As I sit here now—revising and completing this dissertation—the world is opening up and the pandemic seems to be concluding. If I were to carry out this study now, I would be 1 I owe my use of “data generation” to my adviser Dr. Avner Segall. In my third year of doctoral studies I took a course with Avner on critical ethnography, during which he said something along the lines of “You collect trash, not data. You generate data with your participants…you cannot remove yourself from this process as a researcher.” This remark stuck with me, and it serves as one guide to my approach to research in relation to the self. 39 allowed inside Lakeside (my research site) and I would be permitted—by both Michigan State and Lakeside’s administration—to meet with the four participants in person. I could observe classes, chat with students, and form different sorts of relationships with the participants. The bottom line is that my role as a participant-researcher in this dissertation study would look differently. Rather than designing an array of Zoom Modules—Modules that required me to work one-on-one with each participant in a manner that was truly collaborative, an approach to co-constructing knowledge that was entangled, blurring lines between the self, the other, and the knowledge produced—I would have observed 24 lessons, videotaping each lesson and conducting interviews with each participant afterwards, allowing them to engage with the video while I observed. On the one hand, the Zoom Modules allowed me to enact a robust participatory approach to data generation. During each Module (they are outlined in detail below), a given participant and I would work through 2-4 activities, and, crucially, they were not one-sided activities; I was there, on the other side of the Zoom universe, questioning and prodding, nudging and listening—a presence that could not help but affect the varied directions the participants and I meandered towards or away from. On the other hand, the pre-pandemic version of this study would have seen my “self” participating in alternative ways. While it might have been a more passive, observatory approach to participatory research, my presence would still, nevertheless, be a part of the research assemblage, an entanglement that is just as tricky to parse. I am highlighting the differences between at least two research personas, different embodiments of what it means to move, feel, and act within the research assemblage, because it is imperative to acknowledge the role I, as a participant in this research on social studies teaching, played in generating the data I analyze and write about in the coming chapters. In this sense it is a matter of disclosure, as well as a methodological orientation I explain more deeply in 40 the rest of this chapter. The bottom line is that I, my “self,” is a constant, intentional presence throughout this dissertation’s chapters, and it is a role that I not only embraced in writing this dissertation, but one I hope to maintain in future projects, just one more way of pushing the field of social studies education research to expand its normative assumptions about genre, voice, and the place of the “self” in research. Research Questions Specifically, this study explored one broad research question: What are the affective attachments of social studies teachers? Or, using Berlant’s (2011) term, what are the “clusters of promises” teachers are attached to, and what do these tell us about social studies teaching in this moment? To address this broad question, this study will explored five threads: (1) Investigate how social studies teachers make sense of the relationship between affect, emotion, and their practice, (2) Explore how social studies teachers feel about teaching and curriculum (e.g., why they do it, what they like about it, what they are passionate about, what they hope for, what they imagine), (3) Investigate what affective attachments manifest themselves in social studies classrooms, looking at embodied affective experiences and examining how reflections on these moments might effect social studies teaching practice, (4) Explore how social studies teachers produce, shape, wield, manipulate, and utilize affects in their teaching (i.e., how affect moves in social studies classrooms), and (5) Investigate aesthetic texts social studies teachers are attached to and why. Theoretical Framework I utilize a wide range of conceptual tools throughout this study, particular lenses that help me make sense of the data I generated with the participants. The interpretations I offer in the four data chapters (3-6) draw from the interdisciplinary fields of affect studies, critical theory, and 41 philosophy, and this Theoretical Framework is not exhaustive in the sense that there are concepts I use, and discuss deeply, within the upcoming chapters. Still, it is important to clarify particular concepts at the start, so in this section I will discuss three concepts I view to be foundational to this study’s methodology: affect, affective attachments/cruel optimism, and political depression. Affect Defining affect, and separating it conceptually from emotions and feelings, has been approached in many ways, and in this study I draw from Spinoza (1677/2002), Deleuze and Guattari (1987), Williams (1977), Berlant (2011), and Tomkins (1962/2008) to offer my own theory of affect. When I talk about affect, I am talking about a force that is necessarily embodied, a force that is prior to, or beneath, emotions and feelings we routinely recognize and name. Affect is everywhere, then; we do not move without affect, but affect can also shut down or inhibit movement, open up or sever relations, and reinforce or foreclose particular understandings. Just as no thought can be abstractly lived (Williams, 1977), there is no embodied movement that is not fueled by affect (Spinoza, 1677/2002). Indeed, the lived-ness of experience is constituted by affect, and every formal idea or concept is, in turn, embodied in affective ways. Returning to the anecdote from my classroom in Chapter 1, the affects in my room reinforced particular knowledges and ways of being, and while I embodied some of these affects, they also moved beyond my students and I, structuring our experiences at school. In this sense, affects are different from emotions and feelings in how they are relational and shared in unconscious or preconscious ways. Affect moves on a variety of levels. If a feeling is the subjective perception of one’s affective system—its embodiment of affects—then an affective landscape stretches beyond the individual human (Williams, 1977). Societal affects and political affects, for 42 example, provide affective landscapes that shape ways of being, knowing, and feeling, and so this study aims to explore both the participants’ individual embodiments of affect (and their sense-making of such embodiments) as well as the affective landscapes they teach upon. Moreover, not all affects are the same, and neither is affect simply a “good” force; affect constitutes human movement, and so affect is neither good nor bad (Tomkins, 1962/2008). For example, it is evident affects are manipulated and overproduced by the state and other institutions (like schools) to wear us down, depress us, and make us feel as though just getting by is the best we can do. In this sense, normalcy becomes utopic, but in my view the most exciting projects in affect studies aim to disrupt such hegemonic affective productions (Berlant, 2011). Investigating Affect. Affect is not a thing, something one can hold; it arises between bodies—here, there, and then gone, a phenomenon, a contagion that can charge us full with intensities (Kølvraa, 2015). Representing affect is elusive, and its embodiment, its feeling in the gut, in the senses—which can also contradict one another—is open to what Staunæs and Kofoed call performative interpretation (2015). In this sense, empirical data on affect is indexically linked to the body, either in situ or reflected-upon, and this “reporting” of affectivity can be done by the affected body (emic) or an observer (etic). This reporting can happen in diverse ways, and this is where the inventiveness of affective methodologies is brought to bear. Participants might dance in situ, responding to embodied affects (To, 2015), speak into recorders as they’re walking around and having felt experiences (Waterton & Watson, 2015), or researchers might intentionally produce affects with their participants, recording their own embodied, felt experiences (Bøhling, 2015). By training an empirical eye on affect itself, my aim is to uncover ways in which the affective lives of teachers—and the landscapes they teach upon—might be shifted towards more 43 just, life-giving futures. And herein lies one promise of affect: our ways of being and feeling, our ontological orientations, are not static; rather, affect itself demonstrates the multiplicitous possibilities inherent to human movement—as Spinoza (1677/2002) said, we still do not know what the body can do. In this sense, I am positioning this study as one method of illuminating how teachers might feel and move in alternative ways, affective embodiments that are more sustaining and life-giving. Another promise of investigating affect is that is opens up our affective attachments and the landscapes we live upon to shifts and reconfigurations. Importantly, and as is the case with all qualitative inquiry worth its salt, there is the potential here for research on affect itself to be affecting, to enrich the lives and everyday practices of other teachers, perhaps shifting their norms, habits, and definitions of happiness, health, and the good life. In research on social studies teaching, issues of affect and how we feel are not always at the forefront, but this larger study aims to center such questions. Perhaps attending to affect will help us imagine teaching lives that are more livable and humanizing, illuminating relations that are hurting us and uncovering alternative attachments that can better sustain our attempts to live the good life. In this sense, it is not a matter of telling people what to feel, but exploring how people feel and how such feelings can be changed (Grossberg & Behrenshausen, 2016). The participants’ cynical frustrations with democracy (see Chapter 3), for example—assemblages of affective and political feeling—shape their teaching, for better or worse. I aim to trace these patterns and lines of flight to see if more life-giving approaches might be uncovered. Affective Attachments and Cruel Optimism This study’s broad research question is intentionally focused on affective attachments, a concept that draws from Berlant’s (2011) “clusters of promises” and “cruel optimism.” Berlant 44 theorizes we are always catching up to how we feel; that we feel truths long before we know them, and she brings this to bear in her analysis of life in late-capitalist America, a society flush with fantasies of success, wealth, and promise but woefully behind in what is actually felt and lived. Berlant cites the American Dream as one common example of a fantasy that is disconnected from the majority of American lives; it is an affective attachment that provides us with footing in the world, but it is cruelly optimistic in how it works to reify the affective structures that make its realization unlikely, a sort of “tomorrow will be better” optimism that makes a utopia out of just getting by—a (cruel) affective politics that forecloses the possibility of significant (and meaningful) change. Following this, exploring the affective attachments of social studies teachers might tell us something about the “cruel optimism” of social studies teaching. In other words, this study works to highlight the cruelly optimistic attachments we (as teachers) might work to disentangle ourselves from while also showing how more life-giving and sustaining attachments are not only possible but are also already being embodied by the participants in various ways. Political Depression I use the concept of political depression (Cvetkovich, 2012) as a tool to explore how the participants make use, or disuse, of affects that are usually thought of as “negative.” It is a concept that was developed as a response to the pathologization of social problems, a critique that is grounded in an attention to affect and relationality. We do not live in isolation; rather, we are entangled with one another, material things, nonhuman beings, and an array of social, public problems. Within this affective assemblage, embodied orientations and feelings towards others and the world are produced and habituated. For example, it is common to embrace definitions of happiness that center wealth accumulation, gated communities, and sentimental narratives of 45 social problems “out there” beyond our single family homes. Political depression, then, is a countersentimental embrace of our entanglements, and it is a concept that trains a critical eye on an affective politics that peddles sentimentality, hope, and change while doing nothing but providing feelings that comfort and not much else. In this sense, an affective politics is a political landscape of systems, institutions, and actors that overproduce affects to anesthetize, soothe, or wear us down (Zembylas, 2018). Political depression provides an alternative way of approaching social problems; it is a rejection of sentimental responses to the violent injustices we live with, are complicit in, and continue to be perpetrated. One example in education research is Zembylas’s (2018) critique of human rights education (HRE), wherein he offers a vision of HRE that refuses sentimental platitudes, instead training an eye on the “cultural, social, political, and affective conditions that make possible the perpetuation of rights violations” (pp. 2-3). It is an attempt to depathologize negative affects like depression, anger, and disillusionment so they might be used as a resource to bring about meaningful political action and reparative justice. Methods This study’s data were primarily generated through a series of “Research Modules” I designed for Zoom. In this section I will describe the methods undergirding each Module, along with the three other activities I conducted with the participants: an Initial Interview, a Focus Group, and a Written Response. Initial Interview The Initial (one-on-one) Interview with each participant focused on the intellectual biographies of each teacher. I asked them discuss how they make sense of the relationship between affect, emotion, feeling, and teaching practice, and how they generally feel about 46 teaching and (particular) curriculum. I asked them to tell me why they teach, what they like about teaching, what they feel passionate about in life and in teaching, what their favorite parts of their curriculum are and why, their least favorite parts of curriculum and why, what they hope for as teachers, and what they imagine for their future teaching lives. Each interview lasted between 60-80 minutes. Following Holstein and Gubrium (1995), these were active interviews, an approach that treats “interviewing as a social encounter in which knowledge is actively formed and produced…the interview is not so much a neutral conduit or source of distortion but rather a site of, and occasion for, interpretive practice” (p. 151). The relationship between my participants and I (the researcher) is invariably imbued with issues of power, and my goal was not to do the impossible—flatten or reduce the in-between fluctuations of power; rather, an active interview approach aims to build knowledge intersubjectively, opening up both sides of the interviewer/interviewee relationship to opportunities for interpretation, analysis, and knowledge construction in the moment (1995). Research Modules on Zoom Before I discuss each of the five Modules, I want to say a few things about my broad approach to creating the Zoom activities. In many ways, I felt as though I was doing something novel, a sort of congealed collection of pandemic affects I hope we only experience once. This sense of novelty was, of course, completely wrong; thousands of doctoral candidates in countless fields were in the same predicament—figuring out whether, or how, to carry out an empirical qualitative research study during a pandemic. However, this false sense of novelty also produced affects of freedom and license, an uncanny sense of, “Well, this is an unparalleled crazy time so I am going to get creative, do my best, and try to go with the flow the best I can.” Far from a 47 fatalistic or depressive vantage point (though I have felt these affects strongly throughout this past year), the sentiment above captures a glimpse of how the weirdness of the pandemic’s early days were at once scary and destabilizing while also free, a strange cultivator of methodological creativity and innovation. I am not attempting to frame my Zoom activities as particularly innovative or creative. I was “flying by the seat of my pants,” as they say, and while I thought deeply about each Module and spent a lot of time in design and development, there are numerous components I would change if I was to carry out this study again (as is always the case with any study’s methods). In designing the Modules, I continually pushed myself to think about how I could produce affects within the Zoom space (a decidedly dehumanizing, unaffecting space by nature (but a space not without its own flat, inhuman, disembodied affects)), whether through questioning, textual encounters, reflections, or whatever else. I used Tomkins’s (1962/2008) list of discrete affects as a guide, and each Module delved deeply into one or two particular affects (e.g., pride, shame). I thought broadly about textual affects, and I aimed to position diverse texts as producers of the particular affect(s) we would be exploring in a given Module. These “affective textual encounters” would generally start each Module, a methodological strategy I used to try and surprise the participants, nudging them out of the “teacher space” that is inundated with particular discourses and ways of speaking, thinking, and answering questions about teaching. In short, I wanted to push them outside of what they expected from me—the “regular” questions about teaching and its relationship to affect, emotion, and feeling they assumed were coming and, in turn, had already prepared for, consciously or not. Following these initial encounters we would move into a “teaching activity,” some sort of task I designed to simulate their approaches to social studies teaching and their embodiments of particular affects. These tasks aimed to 48 replace the six videotaped observations I had planned to conduct with each participant, but it became painfully (and obviously) clear there was no replacing the phenomenon that is teaching students in a classroom. Because of this, much of my analysis and interpretation of these teaching tasks focuses on the decision-making and extended conceptualizations of the participants; in short, how they discussed their imagined teaching of whatever task they were completing. Finally, each Module carved out numerous spaces for the participants to reflect upon prior affective (felt) experiences as teachers. Again, I aimed to transcend pasts, presents, and multiplicitous futures in my analysis of these reflections, thinking about what affective attachments their reflections disclosed while also propelling their articulations of imagined teaching into future worlds to come. During the Modules and afterwards I took copious notes in a Field Diary (Punch, 2012), a style of field notes that aims to be especially attentive to the affects, emotions, and feelings I was both noticing and embodying (myself) during our work together. I asked: What is the participant holding onto here, what is the affective attachment anchoring this approach or idea? And conversely, what are my own attachments? What affects are being produced in this moment on Zoom? I followed Bøhling (2015) in conceptualizing my Field Diary as an assemblage, a methodological distinction that attends to the ways in which the knowledge produced in the field is an entanglement between concepts, affects, bodies, phenomena, and the researcher. As Bøhling argues, conceiving of a Field Diary in this way “urges us to critically reflect upon the many forces shaping research results while maintaining an ethical responsibility to highlight the possibilities of the phenomena under study to be(come) something else and better” (p. 162). I want to highlight my Field Diary because, in many ways, it is a leftover from this study’s former pre-pandemic life; my thorough development of numerous affective methodologies went 49 unrealized in this study. Due to the pandemic, I was forced to adjust my methods of exploring affect and social studies teaching, and the Field Diary is one simple methodological example of how I maintained a clear focus on the phenomenon under study, attempting to create Research Modules on Zoom that would, however incompletely, provide an alternative space to explore the affective attachments of the participants. Research Module 1 Module 1 focused on the affects of pride and shame in social studies teaching. I started the Module with a set of 20 photographs from United States history, all of which produced (in my encounters with each text) affects of pride and/or shame (along with other affects). I made a slide show out of the photographs and I showed them one at a time to the participant. I said, “I am going to show you an image. Describe the image, what it is about, and talk about how it makes you feel.” During the participant’s response I took notes on their embodiments of affect in my Field Diary. Next, we moved into a mapping activity using the website Miro. I said, “Please map the 20 photographs however you wish. I’d encourage you to take your time. You can write on Miro and/or make sticky notes using different colors.” When the participants completed their maps we had a discussion: “Can you explain your map? Why did you organize the photographs this way? What were you feeling while you were mapping? Or, how did this activity make you feel? What were you thinking about? How were these registers—thinking/feeling—working in conjunction, or in opposition, to one another? In considering the affective power of these photographs—how they act upon us—what sticks out to you? What affects did you notice to be most, or especially, active during these activities? After discussing these questions for roughly twenty minutes I asked the participant to choose 1 photograph they would like to discuss more deeply. Through this, we discussed both the affects of the photograph (their conceptualization of 50 its affects) and their imagined use of the photograph in social studies teaching; one of the teaching tasks I mentioned above. I asked, “Why did you choose this photo? What about it makes it more ‘sticky’ than the others? How does this photograph make you feel? What affective power might it hold, or how does it affect you, act upon you? Thinking about your students, what could this photo invite them to feel? Could this photo be used in your teaching? How so? What affects are produced by this photograph? Some would say affects can steer us towards, or away from, particular understandings; do you see this photograph acting in this way?” In discussing these questions, the participant was encouraged to conceptualize their pedagogical use of the photograph and to consider its affective resonances, an initial glimpse of their theory of affect and affective attachments to particular pedagogical approaches. To conclude Module 1 we had a larger discussion about shame and pride. I asked, “It’s fair to say that shame is one affect we’ve talked about. Moreover, we’ve seen the affectivity of shame within our work together with the photographs. What other affects did you feel or notice during these activities? As a teacher, how do you think about shame in social studies? What are the most shameful topics you teach? In your class, how do you see shame functioning? Where, or how, is it produced? With what topics? How does this look? Can affects of shame be a pedagogical strategy? Is it a positive affect in what it can compel the body to do? Or is it inhibiting? Are there things you don’t teach that you feel shame about for not teaching? How about affects of pride—when do you feel pride in teaching? How does this look? What topics/texts produce these affects of pride? Is pride a positive or negative affect in teaching? Does it impel or inhibit?” This discussion concluded Module 1. 51 Research Module 2 Module 2 focused on the affects of joy and surprise. Starting with joy, I asked the participant, “What does joy mean to you, and what are the most joyful aspects of teaching for you? What does surprise mean to you?” If I felt as though the participant was struggling to make connections between joy, surprise, and teaching, I was prepared to delve deeper into whether or not these two affects are ones they encounter in social studies teaching. If not, I wanted to discuss why that might be. Following this opening discussion we started Activity 1, a free-listing activity. I shared a Google Document with the participant and asked them to make a list of topics, events, or concepts they had taught over the course of the current school year. Then, I asked them to choose one of the listed items; the one that gave them the most joy to teach. I provided the participant with 5 minutes to complete this task, and afterwards we discussed their list and their choice of one item. I asked, “How does this (topic, event, or concept) produce affects of joy? What do, or did, these affects provide your students? In your mind as a social studies teacher, how might affects of joy be helpful? Do they compel us towards particular movement? Is learning joyful? Is teaching joyful?” After discussing these questions we moved towards discussing surprise on a larger scale: “When are you surprised as a teacher? How do these moments feel? Are affects of surprise disruptive to your practice? Would you say these are positive or negative affects? Are there moments in your teaching, your curriculum, when your students are surprised? Do you expect these moments? How about times that you’re surprised by their surprise? What do affects of surprise do to students? How is this different from what they do to you as a teacher?” Activity 2 followed this discussion, a sorting task on Miro. In preparing for the Module I created 30 sticky notes on Miro, each with an “affective attachment” on it, what I framed for the participant as an “anchor” or “identity marker” for them as a social studies 52 teacher. For example, some of the notes read Fear, Joy, Beauty, Routine, Art, Stress, and Challenging. I said, “I’d like you to sort the sticky notes however you wish thinking about your felt experience as a social studies teacher; your life at school and your practice, your identity as a teacher. You can use all of the notes, you can delete some or leave some unused, and you can even make new notes; whatever you create, in the end, is up to you. We’ll chat when you’re done, and I’ll give you about 15 minutes.” Maintaining a methodological commitment to active interviewing (Holstein & Gubrium, 1995), I responded to each individual sort accordingly, and I attempted to have an authentic, collaboratively-constructed discussion with each participant about their respective attachments. I used the following questions to guide my discussion if necessary: “Are you surprised by the story this sort tells about you? Would you have told a different story about yourself in a different activity? How would you title this sort? What does it capture about you as a teacher?” This post-sort discussion concluded Module 2. Research Module 3 Module 3 focused on the affects of interest and excitement. I started the Module by asking the participant, “As a teacher, what gets you up in the morning? What’s exciting? What drives you?” In my protocol, I had a note: If they bring up students and relationships with students, steer it back to content. “What is a social studies ‘topic’ you’re really interested in, one that gets you really excited?” After this opening discussion we started Activity 1, a social studies teaching task. I created a Google Slides file for the participant and shared it with them, providing the following prompt: “Using Google Slides, I’d like you to design a lesson ‘hook’ for the topic you chose (during the opening discussion). You can imagine I’m a student; use any variety of texts—in the broadest sense—and you can have me read or engage with these texts however you see fit. I’ll give you 15 minutes.” Once the participant was ready, they “taught” their hook, and 53 this was followed by a discussion: “Talk to me about your approach to this activity—how were you thinking about conveying this topic you’re interested in and excited about to me? Where does your excitement for this topic come from? How does this differ from how you design lessons or present other new topics to your students?” Following this, I segued into a broad discussion about interest and the relationship between affects of interest and excitement: “Are you normally interested in what you teach? Do you see a relationship between the two; interest and excitement? People talk about “outside interests”; that’s a common work term—what are these for you, and how do you think about your interests that are ‘outside’ your practice as a social studies teacher? How are those ‘outside’ interests related to your ‘inside’ interests, or are they the same? How about the interests of your students? When are your students most excited during your class? And how, if at all, do you consider the interests of your students when you plan for teaching and as you teach? To what degree, and in what ways, do you feel that your interests and the things you are excited about do/don’t drive your teaching?” Following this, we moved into Activity 2, a social studies teaching task on Miro. In Module preparations I created a board of 30 different flash cards on Miro, each with the title of a World or U.S. History textbook chapter (e.g., Westward Expansion, World War II). I said to the participant, “Sort these cards in terms of interest/excitement, placing the most interesting/exciting at the top and the least at the bottom (I noted in my protocol that if there’s a difference between the one they are most interested and excited about they should put two at the top and explain).” I provided the participant with 10 minutes to complete this activity and afterwards we discussed the following questions: “Let’s talk about your sort. Why this/these particular topics at the top/ bottom? What do we notice? (I noted in my protocol to look at the top, the bottom, and then patterns).” We moved from this discussion into Activity 3, a final social studies teaching task. I said, “Pick just 54 one of the topics you sorted, the one that generates the most interest/excitement for you. Are you able to trace your interest/excitement in this topic? Any specific texts, experiences, etc.? Talk to me about teaching this topic: What’s your approach? Texts? Aims? What is the dynamic between your own interest/excitement in this topic and that of your students? This teaching task and discussion in Activity 3 concluded Module 3. Research Module 4 Module 4 shifted slightly from Tomkins’s (1962/2008) affects to political affects like patriotism (Activity 1), democracy (Activity 2), and diversity (Activity 3). For each Activity, I designed a slide show of 4 photographs. In Activity 1 for example, I asked: “Do you see patriotism in these images? If you do, how so? As I show you an image we will stop and discuss.” In doing this, I was aiming to draw out the affective attachments of the participants by exploring how they conceptualized patriotism, democracy, and diversity as more-than-concepts that might be embodied, both in their own affective lives as citizens and in their work as social studies teachers. Moving through Activity 1, I told the participant that I am interested in the affective, emotional dimensions of patriotism, and I asked: “What does it feel like to be patriotic? What do you take pride in as an American? Is teaching a form of patriotism? Do you see affects of patriotism as being produced within your teaching practice? Which of these five images most resemble the patriotism you produce in your classroom? How so? In Activity 2 I showed 4 more photographs, asking for each, “Does this image (as we go through the slides) align with your conception of democracy? Why? After we looked at the photographs we discussed the following questions: “What does democracy feel like? Can it be felt? When do you see it? In teaching? Can democracy be produced in teaching? Does democracy relate to patriotism? How so?” We repeated this process for Activity 3, and I asked 55 the participant, “How does this image make you feel about diversity? How does this align, or not align, with how you conceive of diversity?” Following this, we discussed affects of diversity more broadly: “How does diversity, even addressing it, create affects and emotions? Do you think of diversity as part of patriotism or not? How about democracy—what’s the relationship there? Can diversity be felt? Is diversity patriotic?” This discussion concluded Module 4. Research Module 5 In Research Module 5, I asked each participant to complete the following task before our meeting: “Thinking about aesthetic texts in teaching, I would like you to reflect upon aesthetic texts and the concept of ‘attachment’ we have discussed. What are aesthetic texts you feel attached to, and how do you (or might you) use these texts in your teaching? Please create a small “text set” comprised of the aesthetic texts you are thinking about and bring them to our next meeting.” Activity 1 centered on the participant’s text set, and our discussion was guided by the following questions (this discussion followed the participant’s “introduction” of their text set to me, an opportunity for them to share their texts and their affective attachments to each of the texts): “Tell me about these texts: When were you first introduced to them? What’s their connection? Why do you like (this) text? How does it make you feel? Where do these affects or feelings come from do you think? Have you used these texts in your teaching before? Why or why not? If yes, tell me about it. If not, could you use these texts in your teaching? What affects does this (or these) text produce? Why so? What do these texts do? How do they move you or me or your students? What do they teach us? What new relations might they open up, reveal, or disclose? What stories do these texts tell? What ideas do they reinforce or emphasize? Ignore or preclude? What do these texts invite students to feel, and how do you insure they feel them?” I allowed for this discussion to take up the majority of Module 5, but we concluded the Module 56 with Activity 2, a brief focus on workplace affects. Using a series of 7 photographs, I said, “I’m going to show you a series of ‘scenes’ from life at school as a teacher. I’d like you to say how each particular scene makes you feel, along with how you might characterize your experiences in those sorts of scenes.” Following our work with the photographs we had a concluding discussion regarding workplace affects: “These photographs only capture a fraction of your practice as a teacher—what’s missing that affects you? How do you think about affective or emotional labor in relation to your practice as a social studies teacher? How would you characterize the affects or atmosphere or mood that are generally produced in your school?” This concluded Module 5. Focus Group The Focus Group was the last Research Module I designed and carried out for this dissertation study. Composed of five Activities, the Group meeting ran over 2 hours, and it was the last time I “saw” the participants (due to covid-19). I want to start by sharing my aims for the Focus Group, a series of methodological goals I carried into my final opportunity to generate data with the participants. I wrote this paragraph at the top of the Focus Group protocol. Peter: The methodological aim here is to have the teachers constructing knowledge together through discussion and five activities. This is NOT a Q&A or me leading a discussion. So, how can I create the space for this knowledge construction to occur, on Zoom nonetheless? Over the course of this study, I’ve used various elicitation techniques for multiple reasons, two of which stand out: 1) To try and move beyond the normative teacher-speak regarding practice and other issues and, 2) To surprise them, to produce affects myself as the researcher and sort of see where those lead us. How can I continue this into the Focus Group? What are my goals? (a) Create moments of creative and constructive dissonance and/or disagreement, (b) Allow the teachers to demonstrate shifts in practice or new understandings that have occurred during our work together, and (c) Cultivate space for the teachers to define, or differentiate, their different conceptions of affect and its (perceived) role in their practice. To achieve my goals, I designed 5 Activities for the participants to engage with during the Focus Group. In Activity 1, I shared the classroom anecdote from my own practice that begins this dissertation, a moment of affectivity that has continued to resonate with me over the 57 years. I emailed the written anecdote to them one week before our meeting, asking them to read it, and I used three questions to generate discussion (as needed): 1) Where do you locate affect in this text? 2) Have you had a similar moment in your own classroom? 3) If so, what was it and how did it impact you/your teaching? In Activity 2, I showed the participants 6 aesthetic texts from the Civil War and I asked them to choose one text that “would produce the most affects in teaching.” After the teachers settled on a text, I asked them one question to jumpstart their discussion: How could this text be used in your teaching? As needed, I was prepared to ask, (a) What does this text invite your students to feel?, (b) What would be your pedagogical aims in using this text?, (c) What stories does this text tell?, (d) What ideas does it reinforce and/or ignore, and (e) What new worlds does this text open up for students? In Activity 3, I displayed 4 phrases, one by one, on the screen, and I asked the participants to hold their thumbs up, down, or sideways to convey agreement, disagreement, or ambivalence. I provided the participants with time to discuss their answers with one another after each slide. Four phrases were included on the slides: 1) One should consider affect and emotion while planning a lesson, 2) In a classroom, emotions need to be checked (or reeled in) by evidence/facts, 3) Students ought to have encounters with art in social studies, 4) My personal opinions could be considered affective/emotional and teachers should thus try to keep them out of their classroom. In Activity 4, I provided the Group with the following prompt: Imagine you’re at a professional development for social studies teachers. As a group, discuss how you might best demonstrate the relationship between affect and social studies. Using Google Slides, design a brief presentation, using any variety of texts you’d like. The participants took about 40 minutes 58 to complete this task and they created a 7-slide PowerPoint Presentation. Shifa and Garrett led the presentation while Jake had to leave early; the participants’ presentation lasted approximately eight minutes. Written Response Activity 5 occurred after the Focus Group had dispersed, but it was the final method of data generation in this study. I asked the participants to complete written responses to five questions: 1) At the end of our work together, how do you, (a) conceptualize affect, and (b) the relationship between affect and teaching? Has your thinking on this relationship changed since beginning this study? If yes, how so? If no, why not? 2) What is the difference, if any, between affect and emotion? 3) Having gone through this study with me, do you think any of the issues we’ve talked about might shift your practice in any ways? Or to put it slightly differently, is there anything you might do differently next year because of this study? 4) We’ve talked about how affects are produced by teachers in numerous ways, including through and with texts. At the end of our work together, how would you characterize your productions of affect as a teacher? How has affect (and what kinds of affects) produced you as the teacher you are? 5) Depending on how you responded to questions 1-4 and looking back at your own teacher preparation program, what could have been done better in terms of preparing you for issues of affect? The Written Response concluded the Focus Group and data generation for this study. Data Analysis I transcribed the Initial Interview and the recorded Research Modules on Zoom, including the Focus Group. Using Nvivo, I followed Saldaña (2013) by conducting initial “focused coding” before working through multiple rounds of “theoretical coding”; in doing this, I used the phrase “affective attachment” as the primary theoretical explanation guiding my coding and 59 analysis. In analyzing and interpreting the data, I looked for tensions and dissonances between the formally stated and the privately held; what the participants taught (during the various teaching tasks) and what they felt—one example of how I defined and made sense of my theoretical explanation (affective attachment). In addition to the transcribed data I coded and analyzed with the aid of Nvivo, I analyzed and interpreted the video recording of the Focus Group (rendered in Chapter 6 in individual frames) to delve more deeply into how the participants embodied and produced particular affects in our work together. We know affect is embodied, and affective embodiments convey meaningful messages. They are tools of communication. Tomkins (1995) called the face the primary location of affect, but the entire body is a signifier of affective experience, a “particular expression of psychic” and affective reality (Chodorow, 1999, p. 17; Hayashi & Tobin, 2015). In following Garrett and Alvey (2020), “A close reading of embodied movements…through the lens of video footage provides an opportunity to analyze signified non-linguistic communication” (p. 6) in social studies teaching and learning, so I will analyze both “what” was said and “how” it was said, attending to the tone and volume of voice and the bodily movements/posture of the participants. Núñez (2009) argues the micro-gestures captured on video “reveal aspects of thinking and meaning that are effortless, fast, and lying beyond conscious awareness” (p. 319), a way of complicating linguistic accounts. Moreover, the textuality of the video itself—its representation—can be productively disrupted. Most approaches to analyzing video conceive of the human body as a unitary and rationale whole, but attending to micro-gestures can disclose noteworthy dissonances and contradictions between affective embodiments and spoken language. 60 Furthermore, disrupting conventional approaches to video can position the video itself as an aesthetic text that “blurs genres that are simultaneously social scientific documents and works of art” (Tobin & Hsueh, 2007, p. 79), an object that is multi-layered and more capacious than simply—in the case of my study—representing the participants speaking to one another from their own separate Zoom boxes. In analysis, I watched the Focus Group videotape 3 times, often rewinding and zooming in on the screen to look more closely at the participants’ facial expressions, eyes, and bodily postures. At the same time, I aimed to be reflexively ultrasensitive to my own affective embodiments, my noticings of affectivity’s vibrations. Through this, I am tracking what Boler and Davis (2018) call “affect on the move” (p. 76), its hopscotching across bodies in relation (Garrett & Alvey, 2020), a non-linguistic form of communication in social spaces. To conclude, in carrying out a study on affect and social studies teaching via Zoom, it is imperative I experiment with various methods of observing the affective embodiments of the participants. Originally, this study’s methods were going to use videotape data towards similar ends; videotaping the participants teaching before analyzing their embodiments of affects over the course of a lesson. My analysis of the Focus Group videotape frames attends to similar phenomena. Through this, I am slowing things down, a methodological through line supporting this study, and attending to the micro-gestures of the participants adds an additional layer to this exploration of affect. Participants All four of the participants I worked with on this study are practicing secondary social studies teachers. They all teach at Lakeside High School (all proper names are pseudonyms), a large public high school on the northeast side of Chicago. Recruiting the participants for this 61 study was truly an organic process. A close friend of mine is an Assistant Principal at Lakeside and we taught social studies together in Chicago for 3 years before I started the program at Michigan State. In fact, I worked with him on my first research study as a graduate student, and since then I have continued to rely on him as a connection piece between myself and practicing teachers in Chicago. For example, in 2018 I was a Research Assistant on a large qualitative study directed by Dr. Maribel Santiago. Seth (the AP) put me in touch with Jake (one of the participants on this study) to participate in Dr. Santiago’s study, and in my work as an RA I met with Jake and visited his classroom, eventually observing and videotaping his teaching of a lesson. From there, snowball sampling occurred; I kept in touch with Jake and when I was starting to recruit participants for this dissertation study I reached out to him to see if he would be interested in participating, and also if he had colleagues he thought might be interested. Seth helped in this process too, and by November 2019 I had grabbed a burger with Garrett and coffees with Clodagh and Sahar to discuss the study with them and determine their interest in participating. In fact, I did not meet with any other “potential participants”; all 3 agreed to participate during our introductory meetings. Jake Jake is in his 15th year of teaching and he teaches World Studies, Civics, and Latin American Studies. He is from the Chicago suburbs and he attended the University of Colorado Boulder where he studied History and Education. After substitute teaching in Colorado and working part-time at various ski slopes, he moved back to the Chicago area to start teaching in the city. He has spent the large majority of his teaching career at Lakeside, and he is an active member of the Local School Council, an alliance of folks in the neighborhood and Lakeside staff. In addition, Jake’s wife is also a teacher at Lakeside, and the two of them live with their 62 two children about three blocks from the school. Throughout our work together Jake emphasized how important it is to live in the neighborhood he is teaching in, a subject that is heavily-debated in a city like Chicago, a city with neighborhoods and neighborhood schools that reflect de facto segregation with teachers that are mostly White. Jake self-identities as a straight White male and as Jewish. Clodagh Clodagh is in her 10th year of teaching and she teaches World Studies, Civics, Global Politics, and World Religions. She is originally from the Chicago suburbs and she attended university at a small private Catholic school in Indiana where she was certified through a teacher preparation program. Returning to Chicago to teach, she started at a K-8 Catholic school in the South Side suburbs before being hired at Lakeside. She recently bought a home on the northwest side of the city and she mentioned gardening throughout our conversations together. Clodagh self-identifies as a straight White female. Sahar Sahar is in her 2nd year of teaching and she teaches World History and Civics. Sahar grew up in the Lakeside neighborhood, and she went to Loyola University Chicago where she majored in Social Studies Education and became certified as a teacher. Lakeside was her first teaching position after graduating, and she is passionate about dance, contemporary art, and Bollywood films. She self-identifies as a straight Pakistani-American female and as Muslim. Garrett Garrett is in his 19th year of teaching and he teaches U.S. History and Civics. He grew up in rural Ohio and attended the University of Toledo, majoring in History and Education and receiving his teaching certification. After living and teaching in New York City for six years he 63 moved to Chicago, first teaching at a public high school on the West Side before teaching at a different school on the South Side. In 2016, and through his relationship with Jake, he secured a position at Lakeside. Garrett, his wife, and three kids live in the city, and he self-identifies as a straight White male. 64 CHAPTER 3: AFFECT IN CIVICS—PROTEST AND DEMOCRACY “Do you want Mexico to be saved? Do you want Christ to be our king?” “No.” –Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, 1947 Soon after I started this dissertation study in December 2019, my research site experienced an affective rupture, a sort of breaking point in its saturation of larger societal affects being produced in Donald Trump’s America. During an all-school Hispanic Heritage Assembly in early-February, a White male teacher observed a group of students sitting during the National Anthem. He approached them, and, in that exchange, he told a Latinx student to go back to her country and asked her Black peer if she received free lunches from the school. In the following weeks, the students involved in this encounter organized multiple student body protests and the teacher was fired. All of these movements—from the teacher’s initial comments to the Latinx student’s social media posts about the incident to the assembly of student bodies in protest to the decision of the principal to fire the teacher—were made possible, driven and fueled, by affects, what Berlant (2017) calls “a scene, a convergence of moods, atmospheres and complexities” (p. 15), an assemblage of competing and contradictory felt forces that impelled or inhibited particular embodied responses, a flammable concoction of affective phenomena. There is a resonance of tragedy within this sudden welling up of unexpected and violent feeling. The sickening manifestation of White supremacy within, what ought to have been, an everyday, even banal, teacher-student interaction; the failure of reason and normative habits of professionalism to inhibit the teacher’s affective response to the sitting students; the remarkable harnessing of affect to move one’s peers as an embodied response to harm; the discovery of 65 power’s accessibility; the unfolding structures of feeling that produce assumptions and mistaken identities—the gym teacher as a White supremacist and the sitting student on her phone as a resolute activist. My interest in tracing the movements within this moment and beyond (some of the actions, decisions, and judgements of people involved) is to show how movements are inseparable from feelings—from affects—and, in this sense, the “failure of reason and normative habits,” for example, becomes less surprising. Importantly, this is not to render the concept of reason obsolete, neither through a collapsing of the mind/body, cognitive/affective binaries nor by placing affect against rational thought. Rather, this moment illuminates the ways in which all meanings and values are actively lived and felt, an ushering of formal concepts like “ideology” or “worldview” into the everyday as they are actually brought to bear upon the affective landscapes of a school or gymnasium, for example, what Williams (1977) called the always-unfolding “structures of feeling” (p. 132) of social experience. So then, it is not as though the formally held (and stated) beliefs of the teacher or students in this moment are not important. Rather, it is a matter of affect, a concern with the affective components of consciousness and the relationship between formal assent and private dissent, what Williams (1977) described as “thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity” (p. 132), the movements of tone, impulse, and restraint that define live interaction. What affect theory illuminates, then, is the inherent contradictions and ambivalences between our practices and attachments, a way of seeing how affects—which are neither good nor bad—are overproduced by institutions and individuals to not only forge new relations, inspire, and compel but also to overwhelm and wear down, habituating particular ways of living, of teaching (Berlant et al., 2017). The thinking goes that if we are able to attune ourselves to the affective structures that make us feel stuck, we might 66 be able to shift them, perhaps forming new relations with more life-giving objects. Crucially, this practice of noticing can occur in teacher education. For example, in the moment above, the teacher’s and students’ stated commitments to pluralistic democracy, peaceful protest, and a school environment that is safe and welcoming are only as good as they are felt and lived within their relationships with one another. What was intended to be a school assembly to produce affects of pride and community was twisted into an emotionally-violent production of affects of shame, threat, and White supremacy, a poignant example of how “structures of feeling” in Trump’s America are in ever-emergent tension with social formations that are already manifest, a confluence of disturbance and modification that is borne out in culture and schools, in relationships and feelings. In this way, our affective attachments, what we feel deeply and hold close, what we use to navigate the complicated and volatile affective landscapes we live upon, landscapes that are increasingly weaponized politically, especially by the right, these attachments matter, and they are brought to bear in everyday practices like teaching. In this chapter, I will explore some of these affective attachments and tensions in social studies teaching, the dissonances between what is thought to be taught, formally, and what affects are produced, embodied, and felt both in and out of classrooms. Framing Protest: Worlding in Civics Unsurprisingly, Jake, Sahar, and Garrett mentioned this incident, and their feelings and sense-making of what happened at their school over the course of a month are examples of how affect is entangled with our judgements and values as teachers. My first meeting with Jake took place a few days after the assembly, and the details of what happened were still unfolding. Jake: I came back to school on Monday and my kids were like, ‘What if we sign a petition?’ And I said, ‘Yeah! If you’re upset, do something about it. Don’t just stay upset, find an outlet for your 67 anger. Find an artistic interpretation or a piece of writing, do something with that emotion because if you don’t it’s going to control you and your actions.’ While Jake’s description of the incident is appropriately measured, he is unguarded in encouraging his students to “do something about it,” an acknowledgement of their emotional and felt reactions to the incident that is both validating and humanizing. In the last sentence, we glimpse an early illustration of Jake’s theory of affect. In his figuring, an emotion like anger is unwieldy and dangerous, possessing the potential to “control you and your actions,” and this rings true: centuries of novels and films have documented the affect of anger and its destructive potential. Interestingly, though, I think Jake misrecognizes the affect of anger in this instance, or at least the possibility of anger being paired with other, more positive affects. By positive affects I mean other forces that are often intertwined with anger, intensifying or modulating it, and perhaps leading the affected body towards flourishing rather than destruction. Anger is what Tomkins et al. (1995) call a hot affect; it distorts and reddens the face, quickens the pulse, and it cannot be satisfied in isolation. Moreover, anger is uniquely abstract in its tendency to flare up and affect us, and it is not uncommon for one to not know why one is angry. In short, it is an affect that is complex, contextual, and necessarily entangled with other affects, and in this moment with Jake’s students, most of whom are Black and Brown, I will speculate that initial affects of anger were productively conjoined with surprise, shame, distress, and then perhaps deeply-felt affects of interest, ones that moved them, with the embodied excitement Jake encountered upon his return to the classroom, to create a petition and actually “do something about it.” Jake’s misrecognition of affect is crucial in how he, as the teacher, attempts to modulate what he perceives as anger. It is a theory of affect that is problematically reductive in its approach to emotion; for Jake, our affect tanks must maintain an equilibrium, and if there is a 68 sudden increase in affect, we must “find an outlet” to burn the excess off so it does not overflow and “control” us. One issue, here, is the outlets Jake offers to his students, and I argue his off- hand suggestions disclose Jake’s affective attachments to order and normative classroom practices, attachments that guide his pedagogical response to this moment of affectivity in his classroom. To be sure, artistic interpretations and writing in response to harm are not bad, but it is what they prevent that interests me—that is, how Jake’s attachments and subsequent responses seal off the possibility of meaningful action. Rather than helping his students move forward with their petition idea, for example, he offers a route for his students that remains unfinished in its attendance to action and change. In a strange paradox, the outlets Jake offers are designed to produce emotions and feelings that touch his students but serve only as a sentimental salve in place of a petition or other actions (Berlant, 2008). And here we see the double-sidedness of affect, an example of how affect can both move us and pacify us, a dynamic Jake is familiar with, however unknowingly, as his attachments to classroom tasks that foster engagement and produce sentimental feelings simultaneously steer students away from disruptively meaningful action. And despite Jake’s initial response to his students, the affects produced by the incident in the gymnasium seeped out well beyond the doors of Jake’s classroom. Sahar and I discussed the students’ mobilizations and subsequent protests within the context of her deeper purpose as a teacher, the values and felt commitments to which she is affectively attached. Sahar: My purpose is to show students they have autonomy and power, to give them tools and show them how to use power to make, and I know this sounds cheesy, but to make a positive impact in the world. Peter: And those are the moments that fill you with affects of joy too. Sahar: Definitely. So the teacher told my student from last year to go back to her country, and she organized a sit-in, and I think her intentions were good and she organized it really well, but 69 other students sort of turned the situation into…well, a little bit of a shit show. But that being said, I was really proud and I told her, ‘Hey, I’m really glad to see that you are making your voice heard.’ Still, I’m a very idealistic person and I think that’s why I’m so unsatisfied with so many things. I would like for there to be a fulfilling result, but I also have to remind myself that this is my second year and I’m still learning about the politics of schools and what teaching in a school is like. Sahar’s purpose is grounded in helping her students recognize their autonomy and their ability to access, and wield, power. This work, the moving of students towards action that makes a “positive impact in the world,” uses affect in different ways than Jake did, and her attachments to student empowerment and autonomy is two-sided: their movement produces affects of joy and purpose within Sahar, a remarkable interplay that fuels her own work as a teacher. Here, affect is not used to comfort and pacify, but to move bodies toward action. And for Sahar, a Brown woman and the grandchild of Pakistani immigrants, her affective attachments to empowering her Black and Brown students are entangled with her own affective identities. All of her White colleagues mentioned their affective, emotional investments in their students, but I argue Sahar’s investments are shaped, and secured, by her own affective experiences. Raised in the neighborhood in which she now teaches, Sahar sees herself in the Black and Brown students she is now teaching, and their recognition of power’s accessibility becomes her own. Sahar: If you look at the demographics of Lakeside and look at me compared to a teaching staff that is mostly White, it’s fair to say I can speak on behalf of Lakeside students because of my connections to the neighborhood, the school, and my family history in this area. Generations of my family have gone to this school. I went to elementary school a few blocks from Lakeside, and I know and understand the backgrounds of most of these students, more so than most of my colleagues, and I feel comfortable saying that. I know what it feels like to feel supported or not feel that. A big part of why I became a teacher here is that I knew I wanted to give back to a school like this. A lot of students go under the radar. I went under the radar my entire schooling experience. I never really had a teacher who was invested in me, and that’s why I became a teacher: so those students can feel invested in and know I’m rooting for them. Here, Sahar speaks to the felt landscape of schooling, and she reflects on her own affective navigation of school as a Brown female student who went “under the radar” and never 70 felt as though a teacher was invested in her. These memories drive her work as a teacher at Lakeside, and even though it is one of the most diverse schools in the district, for Sahar it is still a White affective landscape, and she has struggled to carve out space for her voice and vision as a young Brown female teacher. Ultimately, she is concerned for the humanization of her Black and Brown students. Sahar: Being the only Black or Brown teacher in my department and being a teacher of color on a staff of over one hundred teachers—and you can count all of the teachers of color in the school on two hands—well, that’s something that doesn’t sit well with me. I see a lot of hypocrisy with regards to what is being messaged to our students and what is being messaged to our staff. All of the things they tell us to do, like how to interact with our Black and Brown students, this and that, I feel like it’s hypocritical because they don’t come to any teachers of color for input. All of our teacher teams are led by White people and I think it’s frustrating and I have had some really uncomfortable moments, many micro- and macroaggressions where people say things that are completely appalling and they don’t realize how much it hurts. Or they just say things that I don’t think they would say if things were different. Sahar’s description of her perception of Lakeside’s affective landscape throws the incident at the assembly into stark relief; we can see how different, even competing, worlds coexist in school spaces, and how affect shapes and moves bodies, things, and ideas within these affective assemblage-worlds. Looking at affect affords us a glimpse of the multiplicitous and ever-emergent worlds that linger upon fields of possibility (Stewart, 2017), and we might figure Sahar’s Civics classroom as one such space. In this sense, Sahar and her Black and Brown students are worlding, and their co-construction of an emergent alternative to habitual ways of being in Lakeside’s White affective landscape is entangled with Sahar’s identities and experiences, ones that shape her unique purpose in teaching her Black and Brown students. The joyful return of her student from the previous year, the pride Sahar felt in seeing her mobilize through meaningful and risky action, demonstrates one such emergent world within the habits and norms of Lakeside. This is one subversive potential of exploring affect; it is an empirical return to the sensed, felt, and materialized; work that opens up different ontologies and modes of 71 being; the noticing of the prolific generation of difference and multiplicity in a landscape of ever-emergent possibilities (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Stewart, 2007, 2017). Returning to Jake’s sentimental attempts to soothe and dispel this potentiality of affect, I will call Sahar’s purposive worlding countersentimental in its commitment to bringing about sentimentality’s unfinished business: real action and change (Berlant, 2008). Worlding is what Greene (1978) called praxis, a refusal to withdraw from the world and submit to the affective structures and landscapes that make us feel insignificant, powerless, and stuck. It is a practice that thrusts the self out into the world, “the self as participant, inquirer, as creator of meanings” (p. 12), as creator of worlds. Now, how this action looks or feels is another issue, and I was struck, too, by Sahar’s ambivalent description of the protest her student organized. She felt proud of her former students, and I will frame the protest as one manifestation of her purposive worlding in Civics class. While the protests left something to be desired (they were a bit of a “shit show”), Sahar’s reflexive acknowledgement of her own idealism brings us back to the ever-unfolding structures of feeling we are entangled with, the situated, lived and felt experiences that do not necessarily align with formal, idealized thought or worldviews. In this way, our attention shifts from an idealized and “thought of” form of protest towards the embodiment of protest, what it actually looks like on the ground. It seems Sahar’s dissatisfaction “with so many things” is a reference to this frustrating dissonance between form and matter: how we think of things, as opposed to how we feel them and live them. The protest, then, in all its imperfections, is a reminder that life in schools is ever- unfolding, an example of what worlding in Civics might look like. And crucially, Sahar’s and her students’ worlding in Civics is resistant to the hegemonic affective regimes that shape the landscape and habitual ways of being in Lakeside. Attending to affect helps us see that it is the 72 imperfect nature of the protest itself that is filled with affectivity: in this instance, the lines of flight extending from the mobilization of students was unpredictable and messy, but filled with countless possibilities. From another angle, if different affects shaped the protests, they might have been more orderly and acceptable, but it is unlikely the students would have succeeded in bringing about their demands: the sacking of a racist teacher. Garrett also had misgivings about the sit-in, and we happened to meet for our first interview the evening of the same protest Sahar and I discussed. I asked him when had last felt affects of anger or frustration in his work as a teacher, and he brought up the day’s events. Garrett: Today actually. During the protest. I felt like it was sloppy. The kids could have done so much more and it accomplished a very narrow goal, basically, ‘We’re angry and people need to know it.’ I feel like we let them down in Civics because at the beginning of the year there could have been places where active protest or activism were more clearly defined. Instead, we pushed it to the end of the year, so we lost an opportunity to make this not what it was, to have more articulated goals, to have more mobilization that was coordinated as opposed to what happened. There is an affect of embarrassment in Garrett’s assessment of the protest. As the Chair of the Civics Department, the day’s manifestation of civic affectivity ran counter to his definition of “active protest or activism.” I am especially struck by his desire “to make this not what it was,” a fascinating and undisguised wish to have had control over the development and execution of the students’ protest, a desire that discloses his affective attachments to “articulated goals,” coordination, and control. Again, I offer this protest as one example, however brief, of how worlding in Civics is always possible because, in a virtual, affective sense, other worlds exist alongside ours, other ways of living and feeling with one another in school and society, and we can see how affective ruptures like the incident at the assembly can open up teacher and student bodies to previously-unthinkable modes of being. I argue this potential of affect to usher in the unexpected ought to be one exhilarating component of teaching social studies, and in this sense, one job of the social studies teacher is to resist against the hegemonic affective regimes 73 that provide normative orders, shapes, and embodiments to the “thought of,” and instead helping students access the virtual plane in how they imagine changing the present. I want to delve deeper now in exploring how other formal concepts are known and felt by the participants. In the next section, I will examine how the participants’ conceptualize and feel democracy, looking at dissonances between the “thought of” and the felt and how these contradictions appear in their approaches to social studies teaching. Feeling Democracy This section centers on how democracy is felt and lived by the participants. In discussing democracy, all four of the participants shared feelings of hopelessness and cynicism. A through line of political depression (Cvetkovich, 2012) manifested itself in different forms over the course of this study, lending an uncanny bleakness to a dissertation taking place amidst a global pandemic and roiling protests over police murders of Black people. It was as though the social studies concepts under discussion were deflating before our eyes, leaving us feeling embarrassed for having believed in the first place. I felt fraudulent in those days, a White social studies teacher educator and researcher in the land of a would-be autocrat and unrelenting White supremacist violence. What could I do, and how am I complicit in this madness? And what could Clodagh, Garrett, Jake, and Sahar do? We pressed on, imagining the return of better feelings tomorrow, an affective landscape that has framed normal, everyday survival as utopic, what Berlant (2008) diagnosis as an affective matrix of social antagonisms, compromised intimacies, and exploitation. It is not as though the overproduction of these affects, the forces that make us feel the way we do, are accidental; on the contrary, an investigation of societal affect, its production and distribution, is an inquiry social studies teachers can take up. In doing this, we might both notice and attend to 74 these affective structures, the first crucial step in figuring out how new affective worlds might be imagined and brought about. Cruelly Optimistic Attachments While all of the participants struggled to relate positive feelings of democracy, their sense-making of this paradox—the vast distance between definitions of democracy and how it is lived and felt—did not suggest their political depression is a resource they are using in their teaching. While affects like depression and disillusionment might be used to fuel meaningful political action (Zembylas, 2018), the participants demonstrated what Berlant (2011) calls a cruel optimism in how they both feel about democracy and embody it in their teaching. A cruel attachment is one that threatens our ability to flourish, and in my work with the participants, their stated optimism about democracy and Civics curriculum was generally contradicted by their embodiments of anger and disbelief. On the one hand, the participants—however cynical they were about the state of our democracy—were affectively (and cruelly) attached to forms, systems, and ways of being (and ways of teaching) that fail to actually speak to, in any real sense, the very problems they located in our democratic society. On the other hand, the participants did not generally teach sentimental Civics lessons; they all demonstrated commitments to a Civics that is engaged with local community problems, commitments that might be called countersentimental in their rejection of approaches to teaching about violent inequities that do not forefront action. However, I argue the movements imagined by the teachers remain cruelly optimistic in their normative design, and the implications, here, are that embodied experiences—the assembly of bodies in Civics—might transcend cruelly optimistic attachments to letter writing, mock city councils, or other admirable but sentimental distortions of meaningful action. In this sense, being “critical” as a teacher, for 75 example, moves beyond a “lens” that is used in class; it compels an embodied praxis, a movement, that necessarily follows. Interlude: Garrett’s Affect In all of our meetings, Garrett’s affect was flat, blunt, and, at times, produced a feeling in me that he would rather not be talking with me. And yet, this sense on my part must have been wrong or imagined, at least partially, as he was consistently the most “present” of the four participants. On Zoom, we have all learned to detect when our interlocutor is doing something else while pretending to listen or talk to us (in fact, it is rather astounding how quickly people forgot about the human’s remarkable ability to detect affect in the face, to read one’s face, an essential product of millions of years of evolution disappeared within 6 months of covid-19 and Zoom life), but Garrett was always there, fully, staring back at me and ready for each Research Module, brow furrowed, full beard turned down in a scowl. Perhaps the stickiest affect I registered in my work with Garrett was that he loved to feel as though he was teaching me, and he was as at times; the power dynamics between me, the researcher, and him, a teacher for nineteen years, seemed to be a target for him—one he was not only aware of, but aiming to flip in his favor. To this end, his frequent digressions ranged from Fanon and postcoloniality to Heideggerian aesthetics, and, of course, I loved these conversations; they filled me with intellectual joy—a palpable excitement was attached to their unpredictability—and it was not long before I realized I was anticipating my work with Garrett in a unique way. The intellectual rigor he brought to the table, almost combative in its affective appearance, provided a wonderful liveliness to what was an otherwise cloistered and depressing spring. As we concluded our work together, Garrett made sure I knew he would be reading my dissertation in full, requesting the final copy as soon as it is approved. I smiled at this, assuring him my work is an open book, and I 76 was reminded of an MSU professor’s snarky quip in my first year: At most, 3 people will read your dissertation in full. Regardless, I have no doubt Garrett will be one of my readers, and I look forward to his comments, questions, and of course his critiques, over a beer in future normal times. Democracy Does Not Exist From the start, Garrett seemed especially affected by the notion of democracy as felt. I wrote in my field notes, “Garrett didn’t have time for democracy as a feeling, and it actually seemed to piss him off a bit. Seems hostile to the feelings democracy conjures within.” Before we arrived at the felt-ness of democracy, I asked him to articulate his understanding of it as a concept. Garrett: Um, democracy is, ‘We should have a say in this! Not just a certain group of people but everybody should have a say in it! And then as soon as I’m elected we don’t need democracy anymore. I’m in charge and my son’s going to be after me so you can all fuck off. Thanks for all your help, but I’ve got it from here.’ That’s what we are in right now, and that’s democracy…If anything, Trump has a team in place to do what they want to do and they’re masterful at it. I mean, for as much of a dunce as most people think he is, his team has changed the judicial system in the United States for our lifetimes. You and I will die and it will still be like this. And Obama couldn’t get that done. That wasn’t his first concern. Peter: So, just to cohere what you’re saying here, democracy is a consolidation of power, of influence? A sort of manipulation of institutions? Garrett: Democracy is about people feeling as though they have some say in it, but they only have a say in it once. Once a year, once every four years, once however often they vote they have a say in it, but then they just throw their hands up in the air at the end of the day and say, ‘I don’t really make those decisions.’ Like, I guess I’m not very optimistic, I guess that’s just the way it is. Nothing’s going to change, and I feel like it’s 364 days of moping and one day of, ‘I’m going to do something about this.’ And I feel like that’s democracy pretty much across every country right now. This moment with Garrett is capacious with affect. Fury, frustration, anger, sadness, and hopelessness were palpable, and while he is the Department Chair of the Civics Team, Garrett cannot bring himself to regurgitate a sentimental, familiar definition of democracy. In no small 77 way, it has been rendered useless by Trump and his Administration, and Garrett’s outburst of feeling, an assessment of the political landscape that resonates with ferocious judgement, is an example of how affects of cynicism and hopelessness, how he feels about democracy, is as important, if not more so, than how he knows democracy. There are many implications within this moment for teaching Civics and other social studies courses: How do Garrett and other teachers who feel this way about our democracy teach about democracy? Can Garrett’s political depression and disillusionment about our democracy be used a resource in his teaching? Or, is it more likely that “negative” affects of cynicism and hopelessness will be sublimated into a rigorous output of frantic, “positive” teaching that counteracts what the teacher is feeling in the present? And lastly, is it possible for positive representations of democracy to avoid sentimentality and foster felt democracy, or are negative affects like political depression and disillusionment more effective in bringing about meaningful change? Of course, there is no zero-sum answer to this. In the multiplicitous worlds that are Civics classrooms, there is dissonance and contradiction between the feelings of teachers and their practice, a phenomenon of the self we see across human experience. But it is the affective structures of a school or classroom that can make teachers feel as though their opinions or felt beliefs are insignificant, a (dis)embodiment of agency Greene (1978) argues to be endemic to contemporary society. And at the crux, here, are issues of affect. Of course, the excerpt above does not show Garrett’s teaching about democracy, but the other participants (all members of the same Civics team at Lakeside), echoed Garrett’s negative assessment of our democracy. When Clodagh and I examined a political cartoon critiquing money in politics, she responded forcefully. Clodagh: I want to write in all caps: REPEAL CITIZENS UNITED. This shows the dark side of our democracy and the ability for money to influence elections more than it should, and having 78 PACs influencing elections and everything like that. It’s terrible, this extreme influence of money in our government. Interestingly, the “dark side” of democracy is our reality, and Clodagh does acknowledge the “extreme influence of money in our government” as something that is “terrible,” not simply an aberrative example of our democracy veering from its usual adherence to formal ideals. In her engagement with the same photograph, Sahar offered a more cynical conclusion. Sahar: I think this is the reality of life. Money talks. Now, I don’t think that aligns with what true democracy is, because in my eyes a true democracy is an ideal, this idea that normal people like this guy here in the cartoon reading the newspaper, somebody like him, could have his voice heard, but the reality is that money talks, and so that takes away from what a true democracy could be. Sahar is disillusioned by democracy’s form, it’s “thought of,” and she recognizes that our democracy is constituted by norms that run contrary to “a true democracy.” The possibility of a normal person having a voice glimmers with naivete in this rendering, and Sahar exhibits her willingness to see through the charade of “true democracy” that is perpetuated by affective political regimes. In this sense, the definition of a “true democracy” loses importance, and what matters is that we recognize how things really are. And Sahar seemed alright with this; in her response, I read an attitude that said, “We ought to smarten up, shed our ideals, and start playing hardball in order to win. If we don’t, the other side will.” While Sahar aimed to navigate this paradox between “true democracy” and the democracy we have with a cynical eye, Jake struggled to articulate his felt response to the photograph of housing inequality. Jake: I don’t see democracy here. I see privilege, oppression, but not democracy. I’m thinking about democracy as…which is not necessarily the way to think about it, but as equitable and representative of all…and if that’s how I’m thinking about it, I don’t see this as representative of democracy. I mean, I think it’s very representative of our country, the disparity, that gap in wealth for sure. In a fascinating work around, Jake tries to find space for what he is seeing and feeling within his encounter with the photograph and a definition of democracy he knows, a complicated 79 dance he finally gives up on. It is as though the elephant in the room is absent; the participants call our society a democracy, but when they looked at it, empirically and critically, it is impossible to spot. Unsurprisingly, Garrett embodied a more provocative and sarcastic response to the housing photograph, a response fueled by affects of rage and disillusionment. Peter: So we’ll start with this photograph. What do you see here? What is your felt response? Garrett: Democracy. Peter: What do you mean? Garrett: So, the people on the bottom right, they don’t want to live there. The people on the left do. That’s democracy. Me: How about the top right? Garrett: They don’t deserve to live there but they do. Also democracy. And chances are that’s probably in Florida and that house is probably vacant. Me: Say a little more about how this shows democracy. Garrett: It’s not equitable. Like I said, you have one day to say something about it and then you have to let other representatives take care of it, and I think that this girl who’s walking in the street wishes that her alderman would do something about this, and is just resigned to the fact that he, or well it probably is a he, that he or she is not. And she’s throwing her hands up in the air on most days just saying, ‘This is the way it is, it’s not going to change. But then maybe one day I’ll be able to be the president,’ like she’ll have that fleeting aspiration once or twice in her young life, an ‘I’ll change this’ moment, but for the majority of the year she’s just going to understand that this is the way it is. And then this person on the left, all of that junk in the yard was collected and earned honestly. And that person believes that all that junk is there for a reason and, ‘I’m okay living in this squalor and this is mine, like, stay off my property.’ Like, that’s democracy, right? ‘I pay my taxes so you can’t tell me what to do on my property. Stay off my property, I like my privacy.’ Which is weird because that’s a very liberal idea and I bet that person is probably conservative. Garrett has thrown out definitions of democracy. The “true democracy” Sahar mentions and the democratic values Jake recites are obsolete within his affective engagement with this photograph. I will suggest that Garrett has not rejected his commitment to Jake’s democracy that is “equitable and representative of all,” but he is analyzing inequity in our society through a lens 80 that is comfortable in sitting with, and naming, our miserable paradoxes and contradictions. As Garrett spoke, his customary flat, blunted affect shifted to an energetic excitement tinged with anger and disgust, perhaps a manifestation of attachments and experiences from growing up in what he described as “racist poverty” in northeastern Ohio. I would call Garrett’s response an outburst of sorts, a productive and exciting example of a countersentimal refusal of the empty feelings produced by certain affective politics. His analysis rejects an approach to Civics that is ahistorical, apolitical, and acritical in its adherence to ideals and the “thought of”; instead, he demonstrates the potential of political depression and an embrace of “negative” affects—a clear-sighted and activated assessment of our affective landscape. So, on the one hand, we have ideals and concepts that are “thought of,” the currency of sentimentality, and on the other hand we have what is felt and lived but not renamed, a cruelly optimistic refusal to acknowledge that no, this is not a democracy, that what we are clinging to is a far cry from what we have named it. Garrett discloses this ugly attachment, the (mis)known of the felt, as he refuses to name democracy as anything but what he sees in the photograph: the inequitable lived-in homes of four families in the United States. I argue a turn to affect in Civics could offer a different approach to democracy, a “negative democracy” that is responsive to embodied, lived-in affects as opposed to phantasmatic, ideal affects that obfuscate the real. Democracy (Dis)Embodied When I discussed how democracy feels with the participants, they all began by focusing on what it feels like to vote, and voting became equated with what democracy is, or can be. And again, they struggled to balance democracy’s ideals, its flawed manifestations in our society, and their felt experiences. When I asked Clodagh how democracy felt for her, she struggled to make sense of the notion of a concept being felt, and she started by simply defining democracy as, “A 81 system that gives people the voice to make change.” When I asked if she could explain what she meant, she said, “I mean democracy is pretty straightforward. You go and vote.” Sahar took a similar angle, “Yeah, it’s that feeling of voting, 100%. The ability to vote, that 100% shows what democracy is. It is people making sure their voices are heard, somehow, someway, to choose people to represent them.” And Jake echoed these sentiments, drawing a distinction between voting and serving as an elected representative. “When I feel democracy, it’s voting. I’m not going to run for office, but I want to have a say in who is making the decisions that lead to the disparity we saw in that housing photograph.” Jake’s attention to the affectivity of voting overlooks the fact that whoever is representing him has played a role, however indirectly, in producing the very same situation depicted in the housing photograph, an ineffective kernel of representative democracy all of the participants accepted as an unchangeable reality. The participants’ reports of democracy being felt as voting centers the embodied act of voting, and this draws attention to the “positive” affects of interest and joy that are produced in casting one’s ballot. Especially in a Democrat-run city like Chicago, I argue the affective experience of voting is itself the base value of the participants’ four votes, and I do not mean this cynically; rather, I am interested in what an acknowledgement of affect’s role in the embodied act of voting might tell us about our democracy—how might an embrace of affect reveal other modes of feeling democracy? On the other hand, I am wary of voting as overly-affective, an infrequent action that is at capacity with overproduced and misleading affects of agency and empowerment. If we are satisfied with feeling democracy every four years, how is our democracy being nourished in the interim? Furthermore, I will offer the participants’ attachment to voting as one example of a cruelly optimistic attachment to a process they already feel is rigged. Clodagh and Sahar articulated their frustrations with the role of money in politics, and in 82 Garrett’s response to how he feels about democracy, or whether it can be felt at all, he added to this theme of felt discontent with voting in our democracy. Garrett: Can democracy be felt? I think the short answer is no. I mean, when democracy goes your way, you don’t feel it. But when democracy doesn’t go your way, it’s very felt. The binary in this country, I mean you have to be in one camp or the other, and the people that choose a different camp, the Green Party or the Libertarians, they don’t matter. They don’t. There aren’t any politicians that will represent them and that will get elected. And so it’s funny, you have to pick a camp and that means there’s a 50% chance you’ll feel horrible, and 50% of the time half the country will be upset with every democratic action and the other half is elated. So yes, I think it is felt, but it’s felt when action is present once every few years. I did this democratic thing, and I’m either really happy about it or I’m incredibly upset or frustrated about it. Garrett’s examples of felt democracy center on voting and voting alone, a reduction of democracy’s felt-ness that overlooks embodiments of democracy from the outside; mobilizations of suffragists, Black and Brown people, and others our system has, and continues to, restrict from voting are one example of this, and in this way, feeling democracy can be voting, but it also far more capacious—it can be inclusive of the system’s antagonisms, the embodiments and movements that function on the outside, the excluded. Garrett continues by saying that democracy is “felt when action is present once every few years,” and so, invariably, democracy is not felt in everyday life; in fact, it is only felt once every two years (at the most) if your side happens to lose an election. For Garrett, “when democracy goes your way, you don’t feel it,” and I am struck by the felt-ness of democracy being relegated, not only to voting, but to losing an election. During Research Module 1, Garrett reflected on the embodied excitement he experienced at Grant Park in Chicago following the election of President Obama in 2008, a moment I read as felt democracy, and a moment that is qualitatively different from casting a ballot. Moreover, it was an experience of democracy going Garrett’s way, and it is one he felt, powerfully. While 83 looking at a photograph from that night, he reflected on the affective experience of being in the park for that moment. Garrett: I was there for this, and I felt so proud and happy. Just being in Chicago when that happened, and at that time, and up until this year, I lived in Hyde Park, just three blocks from his house. I felt incredibly proud that day. Garrett’s feelings of pride are the result of representative “democracy going his way,” but I will wager that his strong reaction above to democracy being un-felt is also a response to “his side” losing an election to Trump in 2016. This is compounded by what he judges to be gross abuses of power by the current Administration, ones that are further eroding his ability to feel democracy in any positive sense. While I am surprised Garrett did not mention the scene in Grant Park as an affective moment of felt democracy—it seems to be a memory he is attached to in a number of ways—I will argue that his sense-making around embodied experiences of democracy is constrained by both his reductive view of “democracy as voting” and a certain unfinishedness to his formulation of a negative democracy. Alas, once we are disillusioned, what comes next? And while Garrett maintains the attitude of criticality he exhibited in his articulation of a negative democracy, and his framing of voting is far from sentimental, he does not envision subsequent action, for example, that uses the negative affects of disillusionment or frustration he produced in our conversation. Clodagh’s eventual articulation of feeling democracy works within Garrett’s parameters of winning and losing elections, but she lent an agency to democracy I find to be both interesting and insightful. For Clodagh, democracy has an essence, what she referred to as the “soul of nation” throughout our work together, and she recalled a moment of feeling democracy within a recent attempt to silence the voices of voters. In Clodagh’s figuring, democracy is necessarily lived and felt; it is not an empty, impartial concept, but one that must be defined within moments 84 of embodied contestation. And to further complicate this idea of “feeling democracy,” the recent events of January 6th at the Capitol loom large. Remarkable reporting (Mogelson, 2021) has shown how the rioters were motivated by the affects produced by President Trump and particular media outlets, and many of them were convinced—with deep feeling—that they were rescuing democracy from ruin. Again, we see how productions of affect in politics is far from simple, and Clodagh spoke further about how she saw affects mobilizing citizens towards different ends. Clodagh: So feeling democracy…I mean, the recent controversy over these primary elections during the virus, and watching democracy face attempts to destroy democracy. The Wisconsin Supreme Court election is one example, and how terribly they treated Milwaukee voters, only opening a handful of voting centers, and when I learned about what was happening I was sure the Republicans were going to win that Supreme Court seat, leading to further gerrymandering and then I woke up and a day or two later they’re like, ‘Oh, the Democrats won!’ But it was tough because all those people who went out and voted probably exposed themselves to the virus. The 2020 primary election in Wisconsin is a moving example of voting as an embodied action, one that Clodagh smartly characterizes as brave, a sort of “against all odds” victory of democracy against anti-democratic attempts to limit voting and silence voters, especially Black and Brown voters. This Democratic victory in Wisconsin produced affects of democracy in Clodagh, and it did for me as well; I remember the early spring, quarantined, and being captivated by a photograph in the Chicago Sun-Times—a long line in Milwaukee, a cold morning, some masks, but not enough, waiting for hours to cast their vote. I felt both inspiration and anger, a growing bafflement that this was how it had to be. And those affects, that feeling of democracy for me, led me, that same morning, to finally sit down and request my Michigan absentee ballot. In this small way, it led me towards an embodiment of democracy. In Clodagh’s reflection, I see an alternative affective rendering of democracy and voting, one that builds from the participants’ initial equations of feeling democracy and voting with an ineffable vibrancy, a reclamation of voting’s contested, affective history to breathe life into a practice that is sticky 85 with cynicism and apathy. If a certain affective politics produces bland bi-partisan appeals to voting (e.g., MTV’s “Get Out The Vote!” campaign), these productions are qualitatively different from the affective landscape Clodagh experienced at a distance; in her rendering, felt democracy is contested, it is facing off against attempts to destroy it. Moreover, voting itself has become a “partisan” issue in the past year. It is evident one major party in the United States wants to maximize public access to voting while the other major party wants to limit voting access. Here, new affects are being produced upon this affective landscape, and the culture’s structures of feeling are constituted by affects of suspicion, distrust, and a sort of perpetual incredulity; a general inability to recognize an electoral loss as a legitimate outcome within a pluralistic democracy. I am not aiming to produce an affective, apocalyptic scene, here; such renderings are neither ahistorical nor acultural, but deeply contextual in their awareness of the presence of affects that are anti-democratic, invested in silencing and intimidating rather than voting. One has to look no further than President Trump’s (and GOP-controlled state legislatures nationwide) serious attempt to steal the 2020 Presidential Election to see examples of such affective productions. In this sense, Clodagh’s feeling democracy through its “win” in Wisconsin reflects the embattled affective landscapes we live and vote upon, and it is one small example of how an embrace of affective and embodied dimensions of voting might revitalize the practice itself. Both Jake and Sahar moved beyond feeling democracy as simply voting, and they discussed similar feelings of democracy as collective togetherness and solidarity. Jake’s articulation of what democracy feels like captured the inherent antagonisms Clodagh felt, as he described a felt democracy as, “It is a feeling of collectiveness. Togetherness. But, at the same time, opposition and divisiveness. I think they all run together, they have to. We’re different.” In 86 his reflection on feeling democracy, voting is unmentioned, and Jake moves towards describing an affective landscape constituted by solidarity and conflict, an agonism he figures as inherent to felt democracy. Jake’s worlding looks slightly familiar, and yet feels miles away within our current context. Returning to the Capitol as an example, it is difficult to reconcile the current political affective landscapes of Trumpism and QAnon with Jake’s resolute faith in deliberation and agonistic solidarity. This is not to say Jake’s vision is not admirable, but I am interested in what other worlds are foreclosed in teaching Civics when this dissonance between one’s attachments and real political landscapes continues to widen. In my discussion with Sahar, she offered a felt experience that speaks to the tension Jake located, sharing an embodied moment of felt democracy that resonated for her, and she talked at length about how it informed her production of affects of democracy in her classroom. Peter: Let’s talk about feelings of democracy. What do you make of that—can democracy be felt? Sahar: I think it can definitely be felt. When we went on strike back in October, that feeling, that sensation of comradery—I’d never experienced that before. I’ve felt comradery to a degree in other areas of my life, but nothing like that. We were a united cause, a cause in which there was so much at stake. So standing on that sidewalk, banging drums, singing the union song: That was the feeling of democracy. My favorite was ‘Tell me what democracy looks like!’ and then we would respond, ‘This is what democracy looks like!’ And so yeah, I was definitely feeling democracy in that moment. Sahar’s experience of felt democracy is an embodied assembly of power and agency, a necessarily antagonistic mobilization of teachers with “so much at stake.” Electoral politics stand a distance, here, and democracy is figured as an embodied action; the feeling of democracy, and the affects produced within the affective assemblage of teachers, signs, chants, and whatever else, is an emergent structure of feeling, one that offers an alternative definition of what democracy can be. And this unfolding structure of feeling is felt; as the teachers’ chant, ‘This is 87 what democracy looks like!,’ Sahar could have changed it to, ‘This is what democracy feels like!,’ a sensation she had never experienced before. I am struck, too, by the dissonance between the participants’ initial equations of affects of democracy with voting and their later, albeit gradual, articulations of what democracy does, and might, feel like, visions that are nuanced, contextual, and embodied. It is not as though affects of democracy were absent; rather, they remained obfuscated by the participants’ habitual use of formal definitions of democracy, ones that are far removed from how our democracy looks and feels in everyday life. In this sense, it is not a matter of sustaining affective relations not being available; rather, it is through explorations of affect itself that allow us to recognize, and even remember, the relations and experiences we might reattach to, attachments that shape practices like teaching, replacing the cruelly optimistic attachments that produce ugly feelings within our habits and normal modes of being (Ngai, 2007). Feeling Democracy in Teaching A similar dynamic was present in how my participants’ located feelings of democracy in their teaching, a divide between felt possibilities and norms, the cruelly optimistic attachments that structure their teaching practices. For example, the potentiality of Garrett’s political depression was rerouted back towards cruel, optimistic attachments to the ways things are usually done in Civics class, and when we discussed how affects of democracy are produced in his teaching, he maintained an antagonistic orientation towards the possibility of any democracy that is not simply virtual or artificially felt, let alone in his classroom. Me: How are feelings of democracy produced in your teaching? Do you think about democracy as experienced in your classroom? Garrett: Sure. I could make things equal by taking points away from all of my highest-achieving students and give them to lower-achieving students, have everyone get Cs, or some get Cs, and all Fs are raised to Ds and say, ‘Doesn’t everybody feel better now? That’s democratic!’ And it’s 88 like that one day of voting, they will have these intense feelings in response, but I bet that by the end of the week it would blow over. Our intense feelings peter out. Democratic feeling is an ebb and flow for a couple of days but then it just evens out. It’s intensity for a small amount of time and then you get back to the other, regular shit you’ve got to get done. I just think people have other things to worry about other than feelings of grandeur or utter dismay as a result of democracy. For Garrett, democracy is not a lifestyle; it is not felt; it is not embodied; it is not lived. It is an occurrence—the result of voting—that happens rarely and produces “intense feelings” that will eventually “peter out” and “blow over.” He supposes that the implementation of a “true democracy” would demand a redistribution of assets to create an equal society, but he uses the feelings of outrage he imagines this would produce as one example of the public’s inability to feel democracy in meaningful ways. He posits that “people have other things to worry about other than feelings” that are the “result of democracy,” a sort of disillusioned take on democracy that, unfortunately, does not glimpse the multiplicitous possibilities of the virtual, alternative ways of feeling and living that worlding might offer. Indeed, the feelings and worries of people are inseparable from the affective political landscapes we live upon, and the “results of democracy” (the election of Trump, for example) do not simply end; they shape the affective worlds we feel and experience on a daily basis. Jake, Clodagh, and Sahar were more eager to produce feelings of democracy in their classrooms, but they struggled in worlding new possibilities for what this might look like. While they talked about centering student voice and choice in learning tasks, their productions of affects of democracy reflected their own attachments to normative routines and formal definitions of a democratic classroom. Peter: So these affects of democracy, how do you produce them in your classroom? Jake: It’s when students have voice, when they have a say, when they’re creating and owning the class and participating in class. Now, I don’t see a lot of democracy on an exam day or on a 89 lecture day, but during discussions, students have a voice, they’re participating, they’re coming in with questions they’ve constructed, and they’re taking the power. Jake’s commitments to producing affects of democracy are thought to be evident in his provision of choices for his students, and he is intentional about making space for them to “have a voice” and access power. And still, the students’ embodied experiences of democracy are contained to class discussions, and Jake concedes that on other days, affects of democracy are marginalized in favor of the routine tasks we have come to expect in school. This is not to say exams or lectures will be left behind any time soon, but I am curious about how Jake’s students would characterize their affective experiences in his classroom: Would they talk about feeling democracy? What I mean is, perhaps the normative equation of student voice with democratic classrooms has been drained of its affective potential; indeed, it is a vibrant concept critical teachers ought to embrace and work towards, but Jake’s reflection demonstrates one way affective productions are often felt so much more, or so much less, than we might imagine them to be. In this way, it is a worlding that fails to glimpse the multiplicitous possibilities in what a democratic classroom can actually feel like. Clodagh and Sahar also discussed issues of voice and choice, what I will call the normative attachments of teachers in their visions of a democratic classroom, but both of them aimed for their productions of affects of democracy to move outwards too, and they hoped their productions of felt democracy would compel their students to act. Specifically, Sahar discussed her attempts to cultivate a classroom environment that reflects her own embodied experience in the picket line, a method of worlding that is interested in the classroom as an atmosphere, a scene, that might be co-constructed by teachers and students. Sahar: I think about feelings of democracy in my room as an environment we make. I strive for community, that felt sense of community, and I want students to feel like they can access power 90 to change things, suggest anything, or bring up something to critique. For me, that’s one sort of democratic feeling. Yes, Sahar’s productions of affects of democracy center voice, opinion, and anything they want to critique, but I want to focus on Sahar’s crucial attention to the environment of her classroom, the “felt sense of community” she is building with her students. In this worlding, her students are taught that power is accessible, that they can “change things,” and for Sahar, this epitomizes “democratic feeling.” Returning to the incident in the gymnasium, I will suggest that a felt sense of community, an environment, a world within Lakeside, experienced great harm in what was said, and crucially, it is likely that the democratic feeling produced by Sahar and other teachers at Lakeside was one affective force that mobilized the students to protest and actually change the landscape of their school community. Moreover, it is worth noting (again) that the student who led the student mobilizations was Sahar’s student from the previous year, but she sought out Sahar to share her actions; in doing this, she locates Sahar as a particular affective impetus for her own affective commitments and subsequent actions—the organization of student protests. Clodagh reflected on producing affects of democracy in her classroom that centered on voting, but I am struck again by her insightful attention to the affective experience of voting itself. Clodagh seemed to transcend the normative, ubiquitous affects that frame voting as an unequivocal (and uncontested) good, a sort of strange attempt to idealize the practice of voting and remove it from the fraught sociopolitical (affective) landscapes it is inherently embedded within. Clodagh’s attention to the affectivity of voting is, in this sense, prescient; as the GOP works to suppress the votes of the Black and Brown voters it presumes will vote for the Democratic party (folks like the majority of Clodagh’s students), Clodagh is preparing them to claim an embodied, affective voting practice as their own, a practice that is laced with affects 91 that provide democracy with just one of its feelings. In this way, my work with the participants demonstrated how an acknowledgement of the affects that are intertwined with the embodied act of voting might be one method of revitalizing it as a practice of citizenship. If there is an affective politics that makes us feel as though our vote does not matter—or that is simply assumed one can vote, and vote easily—then Clodagh is engaged in worlding different possibilities and other ways of feeling about voting. For her, affects of joy are productively entangled with the felt democracy she aims to create in her classroom. Clodagh: Democracy is most felt in the act of voting, it’s so powerful, and in my Civics class with my seniors I have them register to vote, find their voting place, and I have them get on computers and actually see where it is, and we talk about why their vote is so important. I give them space to talk about why they want to vote, and we talk about why it matters who the President is, but it matters more who your governor is, it matters more who your mayor is and your aldermen are. Especially in Chicago, and we talk a lot about the alderman and the city council and the mayor and how important it is to elect someone who controls your section of the city to be someone who is invested in you as a person. And then on election day they come back and they are so excited, all of them, ‘I voted! Amazing!’ And Lakeside is a voting place so students actually volunteer in the voting process, they’re down there during the day and it’s really cool for them. So there are a few ways we might tackle this quote from Clodagh. It’s certainly engaging in its own sort of affective politics that can be interpreted as naïve or sentimental, and these affects can be dangerous in their ability to equate democracy simply with voting, as though feeling democracy is not open to diverse experiences Civics teachers might explore with their students. But still, I am struck by Clodagh’s insightful commitments to the practice of voting in her work as a teacher, what I see as an affective attachment of hers that was also brought to bear in how she sees the rise of anti-democratic affects upon our political landscapes. I suggest that what Clodagh is doing above with her students is fundamentally affective work; she is helping her students form affective attachments both to their community and to the positive affects that accompany the embodied act of voting. She is trying to show them why they should feel as 92 though voting matters, and this matter of feeling is essential, not only to whether we vote or not, but how we come to attach meaning and mattering to our own values, practices, and place in this world alongside others. I argue Clodagh’s attention to the felt components of the voting experience provide Civics teachers with another avenue through which the formal, as-yet unfelt concepts in Civics might be taught. By centering the affective landscape of their school community, Clodagh appeals to the affective registers of her students, encouraging them to think critically about candidates that are invested in them as people, a vision of a reciprocal, relational politics that resists nihilism and is countersentimental in its emphasis on embodied political action: voting. Concluding Thoughts As I sit here on December 12, 2020 making revisions on this chapter, protests continue in Chile for the 423rd consecutive day. Since October 2019, hundreds of thousands of Chileans have mobilized in response to local harm at the hands of the state and its hired cronies. What began as protests over a hike in bus fare has blossomed into something much larger: mobilized efforts to detach from a variety of bad relations. And Santiago is a microcosm of similar movements around the world. There is an unsettling synchronicity to the global trend of enfeebled states ceding responsibility for the public interest to private companies, market-based solutions for public problems (the creed of neoliberalism). Through this, the potential of politics to sustain life by providing new, life-giving objects for people to attach to is abdicated, reshaped and consolidated towards authoritarian aims: maintaining control, squashing resistance, and lubricating the pillaging of the public for the wealth accumulation of a few. I am painting in broad strokes here, but it is undeniable that around the world democracy is being both challenged and weakened. Derrida’s (1992) la démocratie à venir seems further off than ever, and daring 93 work that showed how it really can happen here, before World War II, reads prophetically in the wake of an unprecedent attempt by a defeated President to maintain power (Lewis, 1935/2014). Figure 1: An Assembly of Bodies in Chile Note: Protests in Plaza Baquedano, Santiago, Chile, October 25, 2019 In this context, Civics education in the United States is receiving a lot of attention, and potentially a lot of money (perhaps $1 billion of federal funding) (Sawchuk, 2020). All of this is good. In any healthy democracy, Civics education ought to be well-funded and prioritized, but in this chapter I have demonstrated how such an education, an education with a curriculum and standards and desired learning outcomes, must attend to how the abstract—the concepts and the thoughts of teachers and students upon the landscapes of Civics teaching learning—is felt and lived, and how such embodiments hold the potential to world alternative visions for what Civics 94 can actually do (Williams, 1977). In short, how can the la démocratie à venir edge closer to how teachers and students feel and live within their everyday lives, and how can Civics teachers help their students locate objects that might sustain them rather than hurt them? This chapter has demonstrated how Clodagh, Garrett, Jake, and Sahar struggle in this work, reminding us that teacher practice is always filled with ambivalences and contradictions, love and hope. The journalist Daniel Alarcón (2020) has been embedded in Chile during the protests, and he visited a secondary Civics classroom, observing a discussion about democracy. I will share this power anecdote at length. At one point, the teacher asked the students if they thought their country was a democracy. The entire room of young people shouted “No!” I watched the adults in the room exchange confused glances. Sergio, the teacher I’d been chatting with, had answered yes, and now stood with his arms crossed, smiling awkwardly. Fuentes later admitted that he’d been surprised by the unanimity and the vehemence of the response to what he thought of as a simple question with a simple answer. Chile is a democracy, an imperfect one, but a democracy nonetheless. Then he said, ‘But we have to distinguish between formal democracy, elections, and so on, and democracy as a sense of belonging, a feeling that your decisions matter.’ In light of that more elastic definition, it was easy to understand the students’ response. In Chile, ‘there is no connection between the representatives and the represented,’ Fuentes told me. He hoped for a big turnout at the referendum in October, for a convincing victory; otherwise, he feared, the moment and the opportunity for building a more authentic democracy would be lost (p. 34). In this stark example of the unfeeling distance between abstract concepts and ideals like democracy and how such thoughts are lived and (dis)embodied on the ground, we see how the affective structures of everyday, classroom life—whether in Chicago or Santiago—position teachers and students to feel at odds with the formally taught (Williams, 1977). The teacher Sergio makes the point that we must distinguish between the formal and the felt, and this rings true, but by attending to affect we might also realize this is where the work begins. It is not as though continuing to build a more authentic democracy is futile, but rather that this building must reorient its priorities and unfelt forms back towards a “sense of belonging, a feeling that 95 your decisions matter,” work critical Civics teachers and teacher educators have called for and this chapter has aimed to deeply theorize and extend through my findings. Interlude: Affect on the Level of the Teacher This chapter explored affect and movements of affectivity on a large scale, examining one specific rupture which occurred at my research site, and I explored how the participants both interpreted and responded to this rupture in their Civics classes. I also investigated how particular concepts are imagined, embodied, and actually taught, looking specifically at protest and democracy in Civics. By starting broadly, I have aimed to show how societal affects, what I refer to as affective regimes or structures of feeling, are produced by institutions and this chapter has shown how teachers conceptualize such landscapes and teach upon them. In the next chapter I draw more closely to the teacher participants themselves by tracing how they relate affects of shame to their work as social studies teachers. Through this, I am aiming to do a few things. First, as a “negative” affect, shame is usually dismissed in education research as an affective experience to minimize and avoid. This is not completely wrong, but I am intrigued by scholarship in affect that offers new interpretations of shame (specifically Tomkins et al., 1995, a sort of queer/feminist approach), and by using this unique theoretical lens I am hoping to bring new insights to bear on how affects of shame are approached in social studies teaching. Specifically, in this chapter I explore how shame motivates and moves teachers towards different ends, potentially reinforcing our commitments to living with one another in more just and equitable ways. And second, I want to emphasize that my use of certain theoretical concepts is fluid and in motion. My use of interludes in this chapter exhibits this by offering scattered, poetic renderings of shame and other affects that playfully, but instructively, offer competing and/or parallel reports of what it might feel like to embody one thing, a mix of the 96 same things, or a hodgepodge of unfolding things and feelings. In any case, it is an approach that aims to add affects of pleasure to any reader’s engagement with this dissertation. 97 CHAPTER 4: REFUSING TO RENOUNCE ONE ANOTHER—MODULATIONS OF SHAME IN SOCIAL STUDIES TEACHING Shame, pride, purpose. These words sum up my mission as a teacher. I come from a place of bigotry and I try to use affect to do better. –Garrett Growing up in a small town in northeast Ohio, Garrett learned racism at the family dinner table. In his telling, it was relational experiences that counteracted the bigotry of his relatives: the friendships he made with Black and Brown peers at summer basketball camp in Youngstown; the Wadley’s moving to town—the lone Black family—and Garrett’s friendship with their son Michael; reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe, 1852/2019) as an 8th-grader, the first assigned book he read in full. In the epigraph above, Garrett connects the bigotry of his hometown to his mission as a teacher, and he cites shame as one affective force he uses “to do better.” I am intrigued, here, by Garrett’s “use” of affect, a framing that suggests he is not only aware of affect, but understands how affect can be used to world new futures that are “better.” Garrett mentions three affects or feelings—shame, pride, and purpose—that comprise his mission as a teacher, and this equation provides us with a glimpse of Garrett’s emergent theory of affect, a theory that figures his “mission” as felt rather than known. In this sense, his mission is not a philosophy of teaching he can simply regurgitate; rather, it is embodied, perhaps ineffable, felt knowledge—a matrix of affects. Garrett’s past experiences, the racism he works to reject, and the relationships he discussed with me are intertwined with his teaching, and this entangled assemblage of Garrett’s affective memories, experiences, and identities takes shape when we train an empirical eye on affect. In this sense, the multiplicitous possibilities of who Garrett might be, how he might teach, and how he might feel in a given context is always an open question, and Garrett’s “use” of motivating affects like shame, pride, and purpose is one example 98 of how the participants conceived of affect’s potentiality, its pragmatic utility in teaching. Most often, the participants’ “uses” of affect were textual, teaching practices that stem from an acknowledgement that classroom encounters with aesthetic texts constitute affective experiences for students. In the next section I dig a little deeper into how curricular texts produce affects, like shame, that move in step with, and beyond, the intent of a teacher2. Curricular Shame Shame is one affective motivation for Garrett, and it is a feeling—albeit vast in how it might be experienced—I explored with the participants. Previous scholarship in social studies education (Helmsing, 2014) cites shame as one affective substance common to social studies curriculum and teaching, and I argue current discourses surrounding U.S. History teaching are, at their roots, concerned with shame. For example, right wing critics of curricula like A People’s History of the United States (Zinn, 2006) and The 1619 Project (Hannah-Jones, 2019) accuse the left of “shame tactics,” labeling what many would call critical representations of U.S. history “a cult of victimization” (Masnov, 2020). It seems the affectivity of such lenses, perspectives, and texts is triggering, to borrow the parlance of the right, and President Trump has not avoided being triggered himself. Predictably, his response to a summer of protests over police murders of Black people and monuments to White supremacists was to double down on “the miracle of 2 This chapter will touch on a few of the current debates over the appropriate place of shame in teaching and learning. As states are writing—and starting to pass—legislation that limits teaching critical race theory in schools, I position affects of shame and guilt as a central issue: Ought White students experience “negative” affects in social studies classrooms? This chapter will engage with these contemporary debates by analyzing two texts that are at their core: The 1619 Project (Hannah-Jones, 2019) and Trump’s “1776 Commission,” a patriotic curriculum that will surely assume more concrete (and dangerous) forms in the near future. I say all of this because this chapter does not engage with another prominent “shame discourse” (indeed, affects of shame seem to be embedded in the culture right now): cancel culture. Dr. Kyle Greenwalt asked me about cancel culture—and its relationship to affects of shame—during my dissertation defense, and while I agree that there are connections between my attempts to redeem affects of shame in certain positive pedagogical ways and the generally (in my view) unproductive appearances of cancel culture, I think that to do justice to cancel culture—to engage with it, in relation to my findings—would move beyond the purview of this chapter. For what it is worth, I plan to write about cancel culture in the future (it is certainly an urgent issue with which social studies researchers and teacher educators ought to engage), perhaps even returning to portions of this chapter, and my findings, to further my theorization of affects of shame in social studies. 99 American history,” declaring nation-wide mobilizations the product of “left-wing indoctrination in schools” and offering the “1776 Commission” as a “patriotic” and “pro-American curriculum that celebrates the truth about (the United States’) great history, the real miracle of American history” (President Trump, quoted in Balingit & Meckler, 2020, para. 1). Issues of affect underlie these curriculum debates; they are about how a collection of texts and perspectives, a history curriculum, makes us feel about ourselves, our neighbors, and our place within the mythology of a nation, and the idea that students in the United States, especially White students, might feel ashamed in U.S. History class is a notion that produces affects of nervousness and willful ignorance, feelings that both teachers and students resist against (Garrett & Segall, 2013). In short, it seems as though feeling in social studies is assumed, at least in theory, but the feelings felt, the affective landscape produced through and within curriculum and teaching, are the grounds of contestation. To put it another way, should the project of social studies education produce affects of comfort and stability or ambivalence and a productive, relational shame that is entangled with hope, love, and reparation? Perhaps none of the curricular examples above are capable of producing the latter, but I am interested in how texts produce, or deflect, affects of shame. On the one hand, we have Trump’s “1776 Commission” that is shamelessly patriotic (an Executive Order issued the day before he lost reelection, but a curriculum that will surely appear in other future forms), and on the other hand we have the Project (Hannah-Jones, 2019), a text set that is at capacity with competing affectivities, triggering feelings of shame, pride, and anger that reveal both the contingency of all historical narratives and the stickiness of affect within any story of the past. If it is obvious the “Commission” is primarily interested in reclaiming a victorious narrative of American exceptionalism from the claws of critical historiographies that center marginalized 100 voices and oppressed identities, then it is less clear how the Project works, or does not work, as a historical text. It is not shocking that conservative critics like Bret Stephens (2020) were scandalized by the thesis of the Project (Hannah-Jones, 2019), but it is evident, too, that Hannah- Jones (2019) and the Times ignored numerous historiographical issues flagged by both Black and White historians (Harris, 2020) before moving ahead with publication. And so perhaps the incendiary discourses surrounding the Project (Hannah-Jones, 2019) are less about historiography and more about a misidentification of genre, a misdirection that has both discredited the work and undercut its underlying aim: worlding new landscapes. In this sense, the authors’ disregard for disciplinary expectations gains focus through a lens of affect. Even in their marketing of the Project (2019), the Times hinted at worlding, albeit accidentally: “The Truth Can Change How We See the World” (The New York Times Company, 2019). This sort of cross-discourse appeal to modernist conceptions of Truth is malleable enough to imply the presence of multiple truths, truths that are co-constructed within “changed” ways of seeing and feeling. By tracing slavery and White supremacy to the nation’s roots, the Project (Hannah- Jones, 2019) both distorts the reproduction of hegemonic worlds and worlds new worlds. At its core, then, the Project (Hannah-Jones, 2019) is an exercise in freedom, a demonstration of how affect can be rerouted away from hegemonic narratives and towards new ones, narratives that can change how we feel and live. Contrary to its labeling as an anti-American project, I argue Hannah-Jones’ (2019) willingness to sift through the most shameful chapters of United States history is an example of how shame is linked to investment, love, and reparation. And by this I mean that shame is not contempt, although both “negative” affects are difficult to disentangle before they settle on an object. While shame is tied up with identification and love, contempt is entangled with hate and individuation, and from her opening essay on her father’s love of 101 country, Hannah-Jones produces the ambivalent, contradictory affects attached to any investigation of the past. And while her demonstration of the United States’ 400-year-long failure to live up to its ideals might stumble here and there, her thesis, that slavery is foundational to America’s past and present, is a conclusion that is at capacity with shame, and it is how this shame is felt and acknowledged, or resisted against, that links it to other affects, a complicated process that has produced both vitriolic backlash and enthusiastic embrace.3 In this sense, the discourses surrounding the Project (Hannah-Jones, 2019) are troubling in familiar ways; functioning within an either/or logic, earnest concerns and critiques of a text are summarily dismissed (as violent or worse) while this same habit of dismissal fuels accusations of anti-intellectualism and illiberalism on both sides of the political spectrum. The Trump “Commission,” like many things he speaks about, does not exist, but its sentiments and values form the affective landscape of an adjacent world, an example of how reality is constantly making itself, up for grabs in how it unfolds and which stories are told and what feelings are felt (Tomkins, 1962/2008). It is a world in which shameful histories are not only ignored but warped into something other, a sleight of hand that is pugnacious in its paradoxical desire to offend through brash conspicuousness, a sort of shameless reveling in an alternative historical-present known to be both false and affectively toxic in its potential to antagonize. The vision of community here is exclusive and allergic to difference, an affective politics that refuses to feel shame, instead generating contempt for a long list of fellow citizens who do not sufficiently feel the rightness of American providential progress. If looking at affect helps us see how new relations might be created, Trump’s phantasmatic curriculum shows how old investments are renounced, and if one tenet of democratic political theory is that every 3 It is estimated the Project (Hannah-Jones, 2019) is used in 3,500 classrooms nationwide (calschoolnews.org). 102 person is an available object of identification (Tomkins et al., 1995), then the question of what these separate projects do, what worlds they world and how persons are identified with or othered, becomes crucial. In this way, studying the affective politics (and textual productions) of both the left and right is not about articulating why the former is superior to the latter (or vice versa); all of our projects are limited, however admirable our aims (Berlant, 2020). Rather, exploring affect helps us see how affects undergird such political and textual projects, producing particular affective experiences while resisting against others, and perhaps reinvesting in frayed relationships rather than renouncing them altogether. Accordingly, I have aimed to trace affects of shame in what these texts “do.” Shame can be toxic and extremely painful, an affect that produces humiliation and other felt experiences human beings strenuously avoid. Tomkins (1962/2008) said that of all the affects, “shame strikes deepest into the heart of man” (p. 351), and its complex ambivalences resist any simplistic model for how shame moves, what it does, and how it might be productively acknowledged in such doings. In this study, my exploration of how affects are embodied and subsequently “appear” in affective-discursive practices like teaching and learning is entangled with investigating how such affects are produced in the first place, and “curricular” text sets like the Project (Hannah-Jones, 2019) and the “1776 Commission” show how affects of shame can do very different things. The shallowness of Trump’s phantasmatic “1776” curriculum is exceeded only by its shameless contempt for Americans interested in a U.S. (his)story that is pluralistic and appropriately messy in its representation of how diverse subjects have experienced life in the United States. And the Project (2019), just like any collection of rich, provocative texts, is open to a number of critical readings; I am not suggesting it is beyond critique. Rather, within this 103 chapter’s interest on shame in teaching social studies, I offer the Project (2019) as one curricular example of how affects of shame can be modified by other positive affects, producing futures constituted by desires for community and reparative justice. For example, in the initial edition of the Project (2019) published on August 14, 2019, essays by Nikole Hannah-Jones, Matthew Desmond, Linda Villarosa, Trymaine Lee and others examined democracy, capitalism, health care, and the racial wealth gap in the historical-present through the lens of slavery’s legacy and White supremacy. Using various disciplines and techniques, the writers try to reveal the racist roots of American culture and sociopolitical institutions and norms; for example, Jeneen Interlandi demonstrates how anti-Blackness is caught up in why the United States, the richest nation in the history of the world, does not ensure all of its citizens have health care. Each essay is brief and pointed, both a hallmark of the Project’s (2019) accessibility and a source of criticism. Feelings of White implication within the violent inequities of the historical-present are hardly implied, and affects of interest and surprise might be quickly modified by shame and humiliation. And so within the phenomenon that is reading a text, affect is present, affects that might pass unnoticed while others stick. For White readers like myself, such texts might produce uncomfortable affects, embodied forces we have developed scripts for dealing with. Just as I might avoid playing an album that is saturated with the pain of a past relationship, our methods of affect regulation generally aim to diminish or avoid negative affects and to increase the production of positive affects (Tomkins et al., 1995). I read Wesley Morris’s essay “Why Is Everyone Always Stealing Black Music?” (Hannah-Jones, 2019) on a long train ride, and I remember a rush of affects that precipitated a series of interested, excited movements. Reading the essay while listening to the band TV on the Radio, I bounced between Spotify and Morris’s 104 essay, downloading artists Morris located as central to the genealogy of Black music in the United States. Other documents were opened, and I would read a paragraph before opening an article on affect, taking notes on Morris’s beautiful rendering of what music can do, its ability to world by producing alternative sonic landscapes. He says, “What you’re hearing in Black music is a miracle of sound, an experience that happens once — not just melisma, glissandi, the rasp of a sax, breakbeats or sampling but the mood or inspiration from which those moments arise. The attempt to record it is a fool’s errand. You’re not capturing the arrangement of notes. You’re catching the spirit (Morris in Hannah-Jones, 2019, para. 8).” And I was caught by this spirit, not only the affects of excitement the texts (e.g., the article, the music itself) produced within me, but also affects of deep interest in the history and the concepts Morris used to make his point. It took me more than thirty minutes to finish the article, and by the end I was listening to Robert Johnson while figuring out how I could use Morris’s essay in an upcoming methods class with pre-service teachers. And there is something embarrassing about writing this down. I feel ashamed for my exuberance, what I recognize as a sort of naïveté in my comportment I am recalling and describing. While the affectivity of the texts in this story initiated new perceptual and affective experiences, new actions and new ideas—a clear demonstration of what affect can do—I want to explore the function of shame in this story (Tomkins et al., 1995), how it formed my experience on the train and led me towards positive, relational ends. And this is where Tomkins’s unique conceptualization of shame is helpful. While shame and contempt are both negative affects, they lie on different sides of the same coin. For example, when shame is paired with positive affects like interest and excitement, it becomes a modifier; shame shapes experience, ending it, and thereby providing a cessation of otherwise boundless interest and excitement. In this sense, it is 105 affects of shame that provide necessary limits to our pursuit of affects like joy, excitement, and interest, and they are usually small, barely-perceived acknowledgements of an affective stir, a halting millisecond of self-awareness that helps us stop and take stock. Just today: Closing two social media tabs on my laptop so I can focus on this chapter; writing a note to myself to finally respond to an email from my uncle; resolving to walk an extra mile this afternoon after indulging in two donuts with my morning coffee. Such affects of shame are ubiquitous and inevitable, and their primary role as an auxiliary of positive affects positions shame as a force that interrupts positive affective experiences to capture our attention. And within this moment of cessation we are able to train our attention on the problem at hand. Here, in moments like these, the contrast between shame and contempt as auxiliaries of positive affects is made stark, and interest plays a crucial role. In responding to affects of shame, the self remains, at least somewhat, interested in making future investments of positive affects in the person, text, activity, circumstances, or whatever else led to the interruption of communication, of experience. Tomkins (1995) puts it beautifully: As opposed to contempt, shame demonstrates a continued “unwillingness to renounce what has been or might again be of value” (Tomkins et al., 1995, p. 138), entangling shame with love and identification rather than hate and division. Contempt is positioned on the other side of Tomkins’s affect system, a negative auxiliary affect like shame, but one that lacks the interest and investment that might propel shame towards future communion. For example, in a society like the United States that imagines itself to be a democracy, “curricular” text sets like the Project (Hannah-Jones, 2019) might help reconfigure contempt into empathic shame, an affective experience in which the suffering of the other is not only acknowledged, but produces affects of distress that, as affects do, might move bodies towards redress and reparation. 106 Again, I am not positioning the Project (2019) as an exemplar of this work, but I argue its productions of shame possess the potential for future worlds that are invested in reparative justice and some sort of democratic communion, however difficult it might be to envision such worlds in our current moment. Juxtaposed to the Project (2019), the “1776 Commission” is literally shameless. Fueled by contempt, Trump’s phantasmatic miracle of American history cannot redress wrongs it refuses to see, and this blindness, one that is emblematic of the entire Administration, forecloses the possibility of future love and communion, a blatant display of anti-democratic desires for a population that is further divided by violent inequities and prejudice. Returning to my experience on the train, Tomkins’s (1962/2008) theorization of shame discloses its quiet movements. In this sense, the affective power of shame, its potential as a positive force, can be glimpsed by exploring where the text took me and how it moved me. In short, what it did. First, shame limited my enjoyment of the texts I was experiencing. In this sense, it provided form to my affective-textual experience. I did not simply continue reading and listening to music; instead, affects of shame compelled me to stop, feel, and think. As a White man, and as a musician, Morris’s analysis of cultural appropriation—what he calls the theft of Black music— produced affects of shame within me, affects that became recognizable feelings of implication and empathic shame. And second, through shame’s interruption, affects of interest led me to invest in future communion with the text. My resolution to include the text in my future classroom stems from a productive entanglement of affects: shame, joy, interest, and a commitment to love and identification through teaching. I do not mean to position myself a model of White engagement with the potentiality of affects of shame I find to be inherent to the Project (2019). Rather, I am aiming to show how shame, while not a positive affect per se, is capable of moving us towards new resolutions, new 107 actions, and new projects that are invested in reparative justice and community. And before I conclude this interlude, I will state the obvious: no structure is perfect, including Tomkins’s system of affect, a system I draw heavily upon in this chapter. Poststructuralism helps us see how structures are limited and can be reductive in the lens they train on phenomena, but I follow Sedgwick and Frank (1995) in finding Tomkins’s theory of affect, however “structuralist” it might be, helpful in its commitments to clarity and observation. Similar to the earnest diagrams of Levi-Strauss (1955/2012), there is an ineffable elegance to Tomkins’s attempts, however incomplete and contingent (a fact he readily admitted), to interpret human experiences of affectivity. And in the context of affect studies, an interdisciplinary field that has received its fair share of critiques for embracing an irrational rejection of both positivism and any hope for postmodern meaning-making, prioritizing instead the inarticulable, preconscious judders of affect (Wetherell, 2013), I am aiming to build from and extend explorations of affect that are committed to poststructural inquiry that is both aware of its own contingencies and deeply invested in constructing knowledge that matters to how we feel, think, and act (Britzman, 1995). Interlude: Reflections on Embodied, Aesthetic Experiences Clodagh and I first met at a Starbucks on the far northwest side of the city, the places you reach if you simply sit on buses and trains until they stop. Jefferson Park, a Blue Line hub towards O’Hare, and the dizzying maze of Milwaukee Avenue, Elston, the Kennedy Expressway, and the Northwest Highway, all diagonal, disrupting an otherwise orderly grid. I delivered pizza in these neighborhoods 15 years ago, pounding the wheel as I drove west and learning to smoke cigarettes, even attempting to speak into existence a smooth navigation and drop off before what became my inevitable failure amidst one-way streets, and even streets that just ended, kaput. 108 My freshman year orientation at North Park University in 2005: “Our area code is the second most diverse area code in the country (60625);” “There are more than 80 languages spoken at Olofson Middle School up the street;” “More Poles live in Chicago than any other city in the world, aside from Warsaw of course.” Where was I, this kid from Maine, the second most of nothing more than Whiteness? North Park is a legacy school because the children of alumni return from primarily California, Minnesota, and the Chicago suburbs to attend. Academically and athletically, its notoriety extends to a top 10 nursing program and a respectable DIII soccer team filled with Swedish exchange students. And this is because North Park is affiliated with the Evangelical Covenant Church (ECC), formerly the Swedish Evangelical Mission Covenant of America, the result of Swedish immigrants in Chicago breaking with the Lutheran State Church of Sweden in 1885. My dad, the grandson of Swedish immigrants, grew up attending an ECC in Boston, and so North Park was an expected choice. My mom, the daughter of a preacher who marched with King, grew up in the South Side Chicago neighborhood of Roseland, and she went to North Park for the nursing program. They met on an intramural volleyball team. And I went to North Park because they went to North Park, but also because when I visited my senior year of high school I encountered people, voices, smells, and ways of living I had never felt or seen. To put it most simply, those early encounters with diversity filled me with emotions and feelings that are still difficult to articulate. But I do know I was compelled to move. The affects I experienced my first weekend in Chicago as a prospective student thrust me out into the world in new ways, and over the next four years I experienced many of the lived experiences that have become a trope of university life: I lost my faith, found it in a different form, and then lost it again; I inundated my parents with the words and opinions of my professors and favorite writers at the holidays, my own voice slow to take shape; and I became 109 increasingly active in various “ministries” run by the university, primarily feeding homeless folks on Lower Wacker on Friday nights and tutoring the children of a refugee family from Somalia, the Johnsons, on Tuesday afternoons. Over time, these actions became my faith. I still enjoyed debating my conservative friend Jon about dogma, theology, and metaphysics on our late night drives to Taco Burrito King in his truck from back home in Southern Illinois, but the circuital intellectualization of faith felt tiresome. And this worried me, because the rich intellectual traditions of Christianity had revitalized my aesthetically-starved evangelical experiences in the church. Textually, I latched onto the theological philosophies of Augustine, Origen, Aquinas, Calvin, and Chesterton I encountered in courses, and bodily, through affect, I realized how church, the embodiment of rituals within a particular space, a reverent space, a beautiful space, might be a sensuous experience. Never had I felt so much at church. The Eastern Orthodox services I started attending overpowered me: the colorful icons; the swinging gold censers emitting sweetness and warmth; the flowing red robes; the impossible alter. Dewey (1934/2005) discussed this. Over the course of human history, the majority of aesthetic experiences have been grounded in religious ritual, a natural spring of everyday beauty and meaningful experience. And how thirsty I was for these experiences, a confused young person entering the narthex from a barren evangelical landscape, a structure of feeling and being that has largely embraced an autoimmune rejection of the beauty that is its inheritance. Now, as we can see in the rise of sterile megachurches built with the blueprints of corporate convention centers, a new style of idolatry has replaced the old, an exchange of one style of aesthetics for another: stadium-size screens, concert-quality audio, and a weekly bourgeois fashion show. Of course, such developments produce affects within the megachurch. There is no doubt that 110 evangelical religious rituals are saturated with affects. Watching Paula Dunn, President Trump’s pastor, is its own sort of affective experience. But is it aesthetic? Crucially, the sound, the visuals, and whatever else is part of the megachurch aesthetic experience is never claimed. While in practice they matter—evangelical affective structures move bodies to lift their hands, cry, shed money, and even roll—in theory they do not. Over a holiday break back in Maine, I told my former youth pastor about the joy I felt during the liturgy at the local Orthodox church. In response, he rolled his eyes, questioning whether my judgement had been clouded by “the things of the flesh, the danger of the carnal.” For him, the icons, the smell of incense, and the larger aesthetic experience of being in the space of the church, a space that is special and different from elsewhere,4 had clouded my reason, and thereby, somehow, my faith. In this counterintuitive reversal of how the mind/body binary is usually positioned in relation to faith, belief moves from something we might feel to something we can figure out and know. Doubling down on Descartes’s (1641/1993) separation of the mind from the body, the felt cannot be trusted, a version of Christianity that is as old as Paul, but one I no longer felt, nor knew. And what a sad verdict against our own bodies. To be sure, Christianity is sick in many ways, sick with anti-Semitism, xenophobia, homophobia, racism, nationalism, Trumpism, and whatever else, but one thing I have realized over the past ten years is that the affective structures of Christianity, my attachments to particular ideas and imaginaries, are woven into the fabric of who I am. Commitments to justice, equity, and love are, in a horrifying sense, as much a part of Christianity as pogroms, imperialism, and genocide, and this fills me with great shame. But it is a 4 The willingness of evangelicals to have church anywhere—living rooms, campgrounds, mountain tops—is a proclivity that reflects the lack of importance they place on the aesthetic value of the church space itself, a practice that is generally ahistorical (of course, there are cases in which Christians have been forced to meet unofficially, but the cathedrals of western Europe provide an indisputable refutation of evangelical claims that their rejection of church aesthetics is somehow “pure” or “historical” in any sense), but finds footing in the words of Jesus: “…Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20, KJV). 111 shame I have not always been open to acknowledging and feeling, and remembering my embodied, felt experiences with Christianity has involved a delicate balance between shame and contempt. Ten years ago, my commitments to social justice and equity led me to teaching in Chicago, and if there was anything left of my faith, it was sublimated into my work at Saint Dorothy School with my 3rd grade students. But over the course of my three years at Dorothy I grew to disdain the religion of Christianity—its hypocrisy, its hoarded wealth—and affects of contempt grew within me. In conversations, I would routinely take critical positions towards people of faith, repressing memories of my own aesthetic experiences of belief in order to make a tired point: religion needs to go—its divisive, it feeds hate, and whatever else. Such points are not untrue per se, religious affective structures can be, and do, all of those things, but my growing contempt for Christianity itself served to sunder my felt relations with aunts, uncles, and even my mom and dad. In many ways, I had, without realizing it, adopted the position of my former youth pastor: the value of faith is found in belief itself, an articulable, rationalized, and explainable belief. Because I found the very possibility of this idea to be ludicrous, I abandoned the unexplainable, ineffable aesthetic experiences I had had in my early years in Chicago, the very ones that led me out of evangelicalism and towards a necessarily embodied expression of community and what it means to work for justice. So perhaps shame is helpful here, an affect capable of opening up future returns as opposed to strengthening divisions. What I am interested in is not cinematic shame, but the small affects that nudge, asking us to take pause. At some point I cannot locate, affects of shame led me to curb my combative excitement and take stock of my investments, the entangled relationships that are a family, friends, and the myriad memories that constitute our complex 112 pasts. And my time at Michigan State was a part of this, along with texts I encountered and difficult discussions with colleagues and mentors. So because affect constitutes all relations, the task becomes recognizing what and how we come to feel, how affective structures position us to feel stuck and frustrated or sustained and in movement. Moreover, the “I” here is a demonstration of how I have been affected by my place within a social whole, and following Greene (1978), I am aiming to position this reflection as a critical exercise in how the “I” is capable of reclaiming the agency and spontaneity that are so often removed from the “Me,” a practice she cites as foundational to what an emancipatory education might look like. And while Greene does not frame this work as affective necessarily, her language of landscapes and continued, active movement into the world is really about affect, about how an attendance to the affective structures and landscapes we live upon ought to constitute an approach to teaching and learning that is reflexive and participatory, helping future teachers and students “recognize openings in one’s life situations, openings that permit some kind of action or transcendence, that allow one to go beyond what one has been” (p. 36). So then, it is not as though my meandering journey in and out of faith led me to study affect. Such conclusions only serve to constitute a sense of self, a “Me,” that is a stagnant product lacking agency. Rather, the point is that through critical reflection, my work as the “I” that is writing this, the “I” that is a teacher educator, might be continually remaking itself through the agency of the “I,” and my attempt in this interlude to explore past movements of affect and embodied, aesthetic experience in my life stems from the conviction that such reflections possess the capacity to shift my future projects, how I choose to thrust myself into the world as a teacher educator and researcher (Greene, 1978). I have aimed to show how the objects we are attached to (beliefs, ideas, things) might undergo relational self-examination. Berlant (2020) talks about how the world ought to give us 113 better objects to attach ourselves to, and she says this is what politics is for, to generate those objects. Since moving to Chicago, my affective attachments to Christianity, to aesthetic experience, and to embodied justice work have shifted: feelings change. But my reflection demonstrates how exploring affective relations and attachments is a slowed-down practice of re- attunement, an onto-epistemological undertaking that can help us rehabilitate and repair old interests and experiences that enrich our lives. For me, the embodied, aesthetic experiences of church, of being a part of a community, were sustaining, and while such desires have morphed in accordance with how my attachments to other objects (like Christianity) have changed, I suggest it is shame’s entanglement with other positive affects that can help us reassess what we think we know, how we feel, and how our attachments are either hurting us or enabling our flourishing. In no small way, this is the difficult, but essential and ongoing work, we ought to be helping future teachers undertake in teacher education, teaching them recognize and embrace the radical agency of the “I” and its capacity to shape new worlds through emancipatory education (Greene, 1978). Modulations of (White) Shame in Social Studies Teaching The 3 White participants discussed affects of shame in their teaching during every Research Module. It could not be avoided. For example, in Research Module 1 we examined twenty photographs of recent United States History, and the words “shame,” “ashamed,” and I am “sad(dened)” appeared most frequently. Every meeting was punctuated by affects of shame about President Trump, the covid-19 pandemic, and other current issues, and how could they not be: the participants are social studies teachers. And affects of shame were embodied: Jake’s exasperated silence as he shook his head, unable to articulate how his school community was suffering, neglected by state and federal governments, at the beginning of the pandemic; during an observation of Garrett, he pronounced the results of the previous night’s Democratic primary 114 election: “And once again, we’re left with two old White guys like me,” his head down and shoulders slumped as his 100% Black and Brown students looked on; and Clodagh described a Zoom call she had had with her extended family in Ireland over the weekend, her eyes bugged out, arms outstretched, as she screamed into the camera: “I am so fucking embarrassed every day!” And I felt affects of shame too, affects that constantly brought my enthusiasm for this study back to Earth as the pandemic spread and the death count rose, a frustrating but needed reminder that my worries as a researcher, my inability to do exactly what I wanted to do, paled in comparison to the concerns of my participants’ for their students and their families, the majority of whom were either losing their jobs or continuing to work in industries deemed “essential” by the governor: grocery store clerks, health care workers, Uber drivers, and food deliverers. But I found, too, that the 3 White participants had very different conceptions of shame and how it relates to their teaching. I will note that this section discusses my findings that stem from my work with the White participants, primarily because I found their shame to be inextricable from their Whiteness. To start, Clodagh, Garrett, and Jake all agreed that much of United States history is shameful, and all three said they felt deeply ashamed by a number of topics they are expected to teach in both Civics and U.S. History, ranging from slavery and Jim Crow to Trump and the recent events in Charlottesville. However, my findings show that how shame is used, how it is internalized and allowed to work alongside positive affects, or resisted against and bracketed from the practice of teaching, is a complex and often contradictory phenomenon. Garrett and Jake both discussed how affects of shame shape their motivations for teaching, but they demonstrated different conceptions of how shame moves in their own classrooms, particularly in relation to their Black and Brown students. Specifically, Jake talked about how cognizant he is of how the affects of shame he might experience in teaching certain 115 topics can, in turn, produce affects of shame in his Black and Brown students, while Garrett imagined his embodiments of shame as contained, an affective force he draws from in order to teach critically and reflexively. Contrary to Garret and Jake, Clodagh rejected the idea that shame plays a role in her teaching practice. While she acknowledged that certain topics produce affects of shame in her as a White woman, she took a unique position: From experience, she knows affects of shame can shift how we move and how we teach, so she attempts to suppress affects of shame so they do not negatively affect how she teaches. Through this approach, it seems she both acknowledges the potential of shame to shift our practices while also resisting against such potential in order to maintain a resolute hope in what I will call objective, affect-less teaching, an understandable attempt to ward off the unpredictability of affectivity in a social studies classroom. Motivating Shame Over the course of our work together, Garrett was insistent upon referencing the hateful and bigoted environment he was raised in, a refusal of his “I” to be reduced to a “Me.” So his past was past, but its presence, and the affects of shame attached to it, played a role in how he continued to shape his “I,” an active and agentic force in his unfolding future (Greene, 1978). In this way, affects of shame in Garrett both motivate his teaching practice and signal his interest in future communion with his family. He described tense family gatherings, the heavy weight of resentment and blind hatred consuming his relations with his father and his uncles. Upon those landscapes, Garrett cited affects—and the emotions they produce—as an inhibitor to understanding, and he talked about how he has been given “the job of checking their emotional outbursts, their hatred, with evidence and facts, but it’s tough.” Garrett continues to be a teacher 116 to his family, unwilling to renounce them. He described his shameful relations as “a chip on his shoulder,” a motivator in his work as a critical, anti-racist teacher. Garrett: Growing up in Youngstown, OH, my family members are racist, it’s embarrassing, and I carry a chip on my shoulder: How did no one teach me alternative points of view? I wasn’t given the opportunity to think about that when I was in school, and so in my work at Lakeside, it’s important for me to be critical and present multiple perspectives. The tone of Garrett’s voice here, his affect, is angry, and the power of negative affects in motivating Garrett’s work as a teacher cannot be overstated. That he maintains an invested interest in his familial relations prevents his shame from turning to contempt, and here we see how negative affects can lead teachers towards positive, meaningful action. But we also see the pain attached to children being socialized into regimes of Whiteness, the psychical violence that accompanies one’s earliest encounters with racist discourses, especially when the perpetrator is a parent or family member (Lensmire, 2017). Garrett’s quiet fury extends to his teachers, too, and he is astounded he was never taught how to think about things in different ways. In our work together, Garrett repeatedly described his own affect as “flat” and “unemotional,” and this aligns with my observations of his teaching. He is not a typically “joyful” teacher, and other positive affects like excitement or interest are difficult to spot in his embodied practice. Instead, Garrett embodies a sort of furrowed urgency in his work. Far from unkind or harsh, his matter-of-fact approach was resolutely critical. Every answer provided by a student was met with another question, and his tendency to constantly critique and question carried over into our work together, even to the point of frustration. My point, here, is that the shame Garrett mentioned as a primary motivator of his teaching permeates his work on a number of levels, not only through his commitments to include multiple perspectives in his lessons, but also in how he embodies an attitude of critique as a teacher. He told me, “I’ve been doing this for my whole career, this priority of being critical, helping them learn the skill of finding the limitations of whatever 117 they’re encountering,” and once more he commented on how affects of shame have honed this critical focus; Garrett’s affective experiences of shame hover like a cloud that, in his view, serves as an instructive reminder of what he does not want to be. Garrett: The affects of shame I carry from childhood or other painful memories motivate what I do. My personal experiences are in me, they inform my teaching, and teaching gives me the chance to engage with these issues over and over again. I’ve had disagreements with teachers I work with, and I wonder how much of it stems from how their own personal experiences shape their pedagogy. I think it’s a lot. In this powerful quote, Garrett articulates his perception of how past affective experiences shape his pedagogy and inform his commitments as a teacher, and he locates shame as being central to this affective structure. He suggests (however implicitly) other teachers’ lack of criticality, their lack of interest in “these issues” of race and Whiteness, might stem from a lack of affects of shame, affects that motivate his own investments in such issues. Here we see how horrific negative affects of shame, affects produced by racist violence and White supremacy, are, in a way, rehabilitated through their entanglements with Garrett’s own interest in, and love for, a critical pedagogy and his students. Garrett’s acknowledgement that his experiences “in” him inform his teaching is a quiet but powerful example of the sort of critically conscious “wide-awakeness” Greene (1978) demands of teachers. For Greene, landscapes of learning in contemporary schools are characterized by affective regimes that produce feelings of alienation and powerlessness in teachers. She calls on teachers and teacher educators to come to life, realizing both the constructedness of such landscapes and their agency to bring about change in meaningful ways. Garrett’s reflective analysis of his past experiences, his “baggage,” is a style of reflection that is wide awake, and his affective experiences, identities, and relations are imbued, too, with affects of shame that ground his pedagogical desire to engage with issues of power, race, and Whiteness “over and over again.” His mention of having disagreements with 118 teachers he has worked with suggests his critical consciousness is one that is engaged, “thrusting out” into the world, a glimpse of everyday teaching practice that is filled with participation and distinctiveness rather than passivity and accommodation (Greene, 1978). Instead of submitting to the vertical power structures that constitute a school, teachers like Garrett and the other participants might engage in worlding, creating horizontal infrastructures that function from the bottom, what Berlant (2020) calls “commoning,” an embrace of the collective generativity that is available to groups of people who share common attachments and relations, like teachers. Imagine a school community of teachers in which relationality and collaboration is a priori, in which demarcations between in-school, out-of- school, and home-school are blurred, fostering pedagogies and curricula that are actively responsive to the concerns of an emergent common. Imagine a common teaching space in which Garrett’s affective attachments, experiences, and identities, including Garrett’s motivating shame, shape “a common continent” that is diverse and multisided in its perspectives, constituted by the commitments and affective attachments of other teachers (Greene, 1978). For Greene, this is what teaching and learning landscapes ought to look like, led by a diverse coalition of teachers that are assertive and engaged in the world in authentic ways. And while Garrett cited shame as a primary motivator of his teaching practice on a number of occasions, affects like shame, and the structures and movements they constitute, are not solidly in place. Built on sand rather than on a rock, Garrett’s self, like all of us, is loosely knotted, a collection of productive, psychosocial desires, relations, and attachments that generate fantasies of the good life, love, and communion (Berlant, 2020; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). This is important because I am not aiming to frame Garrett’s experiencing of affects of shame as necessarily unique. Indeed, one finding of this study confirms what we already knew: affects of 119 shame are entangled with Whiteness and privilege, whether they are acknowledged or resisted against (Crowley, 2019; Matias, 2016, 2019). Rather, I argue it is Garrett’s explicit articulation of the relationship between affects of shame and his teaching practice that is so intriguing and worth exploring. The shame attached to Garrett’s childhood is a force he brought up in every Research Module, our Focus Group with all of the participants, and in a post-observation interview. At one point, I asked him whether he felt as though affects of shame had led him to teach at Lakeside, one of the most diverse schools in CPS according to the district’s metrics. He returned to northeast Ohio in formulating his answer, his hometown of just over 2,000 people, a continuation of Garrett’s reflexive and thoughtful approach to conceptualizing how affects of shame move him. Garrett: I went to an all-White school until a Black family moved into town. We didn’t celebrate MLK Day until the Thomases moved to town, but we celebrated MLK the next year and then every year after that, and so the Thomas’s moving changed what happened, you know? And I imagine the Thomas’s had a hard time…again, I carry this stuff with me. Like we’ve talked about, it’s fucking sticky, and the affects of these memories still move me now thinking back on them. This quote from Garrett is filled with affect. There is so much happening on a variety of levels. First, we see how our bodies matter, how the brave arrival of the Thomases, an embodied presence in a White town, actually affected the practices of the people already there. And how could they not? This is how affect moves and affects other bodies—through relationality—and the example of MLK Day, what might seem at first glance to be a trite anecdote, gains power through a lens of affect. Crucially, shame is central here. A White town of just over 2,000 people had, shamelessly and hatefully, ignored a nationally-recognized holiday for decades,5 a decision that Garrett, as a young boy, realized. Once the Thomases arrived, the town’s decision to start 5 Forty-eight states celebrate MLK Day. Alabama and Mississippi are the only two states to still celebrate King-Lee Day, a joint recognition of MLK and a Confederate general (Gore, 2019). 120 celebrating MLK Day signals a few things. Whether through affects of shame, contempt, or humiliation, the powers that be in Garrett’s White town decided it was time to start celebrating MLK Day, however this might have looked. Affects, moving through new relations in a neighborhood, at school, the grocery store, or wherever else, moved a small town towards some semblance of communion and relationship, however weak this affective, social desire might have been. Garrett’s awareness of these affective movements, even as a young boy, speak to the power of relationality in all aspects of life, especially schools, and the embodied presence of diverse perspectives and experiences within a classroom, for example, is capable of “changing what happens.” But I also want to be careful here. There is a common and instructive trope that Black and Brown people are always, painfully, put in a position to suffer and endure racism in order for White people to “learn” and “grow.” As Garrett suggests, the Thomases undoubtedly experienced the pain of racist violence and White supremacy after they moved to town, and at this point in our conversation, he has no words; the affects attached to the memories he is discussing start to fill him up, visibly moving him to pause, close his eyes, and clench the bridge of his nose with his head down, breathing in and out. In Garrett’s telling, this “stuff” he carries is “fucking sticky,” and I interpret his breakdown of sorts, a moment of visible emotion, to be a complex manifestation of affects of shame, love, and investment, a matrix of feeling that is both embarrassed by, and grateful for, the outsized and unfair role the Thomases were made to play in the formation of his own critical consciousness. And in some ways, this is one symptom of our unjust society, the ways in which within relations, some bodies are affected towards flourishing while others are hurt, affected with the violence of racism. Second, Fortier’s (2010, 2016) work on affective citizenship helps complicate our interpretations of how cohesive communities are shaped, and how affect is used as a tool of 121 governance in dealing with “bad feelings” like White unease and outright racism. In Garrett’s hometown, let’s call it Riverside, the very simple, commonsense decision to start recognizing MLK Day is a direct response to the arrival of the town’s first Black family. Here, affect is used to “cleanse” Riverside of its racism; through the town’s sudden reversal regarding MLK Day, an alternative economy of feeling is produced, an affective design and distribution of “legitimate feelings” that usher citizens towards codes of conduct, or scripts, a “good affective citizen” ought to embody in encountering difference. In this sense, through symbolic accommodations like deciding to celebrate MLK Day, the White affective citizen of Riverside is encouraged to have fun and breezy, cool and meaningful interactions with the Thomases, but steered away, through affect, from tackling the problem that persists: racism. Importantly, such neoliberal productions of “good affective citizens” are constituted by conceptions of racism that remain individualized and autonomous rather than structural and endemic. Fortier’s research on governmental uses of affect in England to accommodate White unease and racism in response to immigration shows how discourses like cohesion and integration are “post-political” in their renunciation of adversarial political actions positioned to actually tackle racism (e.g., public demonstrations or protests, signing a petition, public meetings) (Fortier, 2010; Mouffe, 2005). In this way, simple affective productions leading to good feelings drive out, or even censure, the possibility for meaningful political action. Rather, communities like Riverside might engage in messier forms of political discourse that are open to ugly, negative feelings and combine anger, sadness, and ambivalent confusion (Cvetkovich, 2007; Fortier, 2010). Following Mookherjee (2005) and Fortier (2010), such visions of a more critical affective citizenship seek “a fuller engagement with cultural difference without reifying it, one that recognizes people’s multiple attachments and their significance in supporting individuals’ autonomy” (p. 28), an approach to living with 122 one another that is radically open to the difficulties that make any community, inherently, “a scene of emotional contestation” (Berlant, 2005, p. 47). While Garrett’s repetition of these sticky memories did not touch on whether, or how, “good affective citizens” were produced in Riverside, this chapter’s focus on the political potential of negative affects and feelings, like shame, is attuned to how affect is also used to generate economies of good feeling that are empty of real action, a theme I connect to social studies teaching and teacher education below. Finally, we might use a literary lens to analyze Garrett’s repetitive mention—his use—of childhood memories and experiences in discussing affects of shame. As I have mentioned, he brought up this “stuff” he carries in seven of our eight formal interviews, whether during a Research Module, the Focus Group, or following an observation. Just as an author might use repetition as a literary device (Greene et al., 2012), I suggest Garrett’s repetitive return to affective memories paired with shame and other affects serves to reinforce their role as a motivating force in his work as a teacher. In our work together, Garrett is authoring his story, a creative exercise that assumes a different shape through each telling. As a storyteller, Garrett is aware of his audience, cognizant of what he thinks I am hoping to hear and what commitments he desires to articulate, commitments he positions as emerging from his childhood experiences and constituting his purpose as a teacher. In this way, Garrett’s reference of shame as a motivating force is not simply a story he repeats; rather, it is an example of how his “I” is continually embracing its freedom to reshape his “Me,” how the individuality and immediacy of concrete existence is entangled with the “meaning, substance, and content of what is embedded in the self from the past” (Dewey, 1934/2005, p. 74). What is crucial, here, is that Garrett insists upon reencountering a cycle of shameful memories embedded within him, memories he refuses to renounce and suppress. Garrett hates the racist bigotry of his family, but his refusal to separate 123 himself from them and even previous iterations of his “Me” works to knit together just one of many “possible Garretts.” It is easier—whether psychically, emotionally, or cognitively—to try and suppress the affects of shame attached to certain experiences, relations, or memories, but I offer Garrett’s persistent engagement with such affects as one example of what this type of affective labor might provide White teachers who aim to be allies in critical, anti-racist social studies teaching. Monitoring Shame In many ways, Jake and Garrett took similar views towards the ubiquitous presence of shame in social studies curriculum, especially within the U.S. History course they both teach. I wrote in my field notes that Jake and Garrett embodied similar reactions to my questions about affects of shame in social studies curriculum and teaching, remarking that a sort of “sheepish sense of inevitability” was attached to any critical summary of shame’s movement in United States history. Both teachers addressed shame “slumped, eyes down, and voice lowered,” an embodied reverence I felt to be expected when any White teacher(s) address the shameful history of racism, exploitation, and genocide included in U.S. History curriculum. As I have argued in this chapter, such embodiments of affects of shame are useful in how they compel us to stop and take (critical) stock, curbing an otherwise unbridled excitement and interest in the past. In this sense, it is hard to imagine a critical social studies that is divorced from affects of shame: they deal in the same currency. As opposed to Garrett, Jake did not locate shame as a motivating affective force in his work as a teacher. His conceptualizations of shame in relation to social studies curriculum and teaching were both less personal and more nuanced; throughout our work together, Jake worked to intertwine the shame he found to be inherent to U.S. History with positive, “productive 124 affects” that demonstrate the “progress we have made as a country.” In discussing the more shameful topics of the past, Jake aimed to demonstrate the instructive shame/pride dynamic he aims for in teaching. Jake: Shame topics are frequent in social studies. I teach the treatment of Native Americans in U.S. History, the treatment of Blacks in U.S. History, and I want to teach those shameful topics to lead to pride. Not pride in the events that happened, but helping them recognize the shame and horror of the terrible things we have done to work towards the pride that makes the country strong. Jake’s sense-making of shame and pride is open to diverse angles of interpretation. It is evident Jake is attached to some semblance of progress narratives, but he also demonstrates an awareness of how “recognizing” shame can be one important step in learning about the past. It is a recognition that is paired, productively (from his perspective), with affects of pride, affects that stem from subsequent recognitions of what makes “the country strong.” In a sort of roundabout way, feelings of pride are one end goal for Jake; rather than sitting mired in shame, Jake moves his students (quickly) from “shame topics” towards “things we have done to work towards the pride that makes the country strong.” Here, it is not clear what objects of pride (e.g., stories or ideas) Jake is providing his students. It is almost as though we ought to be proud the “shame topics” themselves are in the past, with pride functioning as an embodied belief that, yes, we are able to speak the truth of progress into existence simply because the “shame” and “horror” of how Native Americans and Blacks have been treated in this country is routinely historicized in social studies. While affects are always entangled with one another (Tomkins et al., 1995), and negative affects like shame are able to be steered in various directions depending upon such entanglements, it is not clear if Jake envisions affects of shame and pride as actually being intertwined. Instead, it is as though they function separately for Jake, a sort of rational and intuitive hop, skip, and a jump from initial affects of shame towards more positive and prideful 125 endings. In short, what one might expect from a social studies class that is uncomfortable with the idea of staying with the trouble (Haraway, 2016). But it is also the case that Jake is conceptualizing shame as an unavoidable, felt component of his U.S. History course. The pride he is aiming to foment is a far cry from the affects produced by Trump’s “1776” curriculum, for example, a collection of affects characterized by contemptuous and shameless pride. On the contrary, Jake’s use of shame, while less of a personal, motivating force than it is in Garrett’s teaching practice, is paired with pride in ways that lend insights into Jake’s own affective attachments and commitments. Repeatedly, Garrett cited shame as a central force—an affect that actually moves him—fueling his commitments to “being critical” and “presenting multiple perspectives,” but for Jake, shame was less embedded in his immediate sense of self, and any felt perceptions of shame seemed to necessitate a more “positive” next step. And in many ways, this makes sense. Shame is undoubtedly a negative affect, and it is an affect we avoid; following Tomkins et al. (1995), human beings are constantly attempting to regulate our embodiments of affects, as much as we can, increasing our experiences of positive affects and decreasing our experiences of negative affects. As a social studies teacher, Jake seems to be aware of the affective power he holds, what is the capacity to produce particular affects attached to his subject-position. However, and contrary to Garrett, he never conceptualizes affects of shame as a potentially positive force, and he was adamant that affects of shame should only serve as a brief starting point. Jake: For me, shame can’t be a teaching move by itself. Teaching topics that are not rosy and sunny can foster a belief that nothing is good, and that’s not what I want. So I compliment the shame moments with pride moments, achievement moments, making the shameful topics easier to stomach. In this fascinating explanation, a few of Jake’s competing affective attachments are brought to bear. On the one hand, Jake demonstrates remarkable insight into how shame, as a 126 negative affect, must be intertwined with other, more positive, affects in order to lead him and his students towards life-giving ends. And he is right: “a belief that nothing is good” is not a pedagogical stance that is humanizing, and it is certainly not critical. If simplistic, uncritical teaching pedals truisms, blanket statements (like the one above), and perceives the world as given, then critical social studies teaching is about helping students see how our present worlds are constructed, and how social studies class might be one place in which teachers and students discuss what is “good” and how such good can be made more available to all of us in our everyday lives (Greene, 1978). In this sense, Jake is quite aware of the affects of shame that ought to be a part of any U.S. History class, but his theory of affect is once again characterized by his tendency to be balanced and measured, an attachment to a fantasy that by both embodying and curating an affective classroom landscape that is “stable” he and his students can ride things out towards a comforting equilibrium. So on the other hand, Jake is well-versed in particular methods of dealing with negative affects like shame, what Tomkins et al. (1995) call affective scripts. Just as we learn over time not to feel affects of fear or terror when we approach a busy street, Jake has mastered shame scripts in social studies teaching (and through him, so have his students). And we all use affective scripts. In our work together, all of the participants avoided the negative feelings affects of shame produce, and in all of my observations, affects of shame were neither present nor felt. Instead, I found it difficult to register embodiments of affect that surprised me, or moved me, beyond the given expectedness that characterized Lakeside’s affective landscape. Point being, it is not as though affective scripts are good or bad. Following Tomkins et al. (1995), scripts are methods human beings use to live, affectively, without being overrun by spastic embodiments of fear, excitement, shame, anger, unbridled interest, and other affects. Here, Tomkins (1962/2008) disagrees with Freud. For Tomkins, the defensive nature of 127 the affective script comes at neither a high, nor unworthy, cost. What he calls the “beauty” of the affective system is located within the script itself, the human ability to recognize the possible dangers of certain affective experiences and thereby cope with them at a distance, making it so the affect “need never be activated nor experienced” (Tomkins et al., 1995, p. 167). And yet, as I have discussed in this chapter, the negative affect of shame is both “dangerous” and available for redemption. For Tomkins et al., movements of shame—their very presence—can serve as a measure of how projects of living with one another (e.g., civilization) in equitable and humanizing ways are either succeeding or failing. He said, “shame enlarges the spectrum of objects outside of (man) which can engage him and concern him. After having experienced shame through sudden empathy, the individual will never again be able to be entirely unconcerned with the other (1995, p. 162). As opposed to contempt or humiliation, shame is fundamentally entangled with empathy and concern for the other, a brief glimpse of one positive way forward within a matrix that is always unfolding. Returning to Jake, Tomkins’ paradox provides a helpful lens. Affective scripts, while “beautiful” and necessary, might simultaneously narrow, rather than “enlarge,” the “spectrum of objects” we are concerned with. And is this not one of the fundamental aims of critical social studies teaching: To enlarge our students’ zones of concern, increasing who and what, along with which harms and why, we consider worthy of meaningful attendance? Moreover, what I am interested in, here, is how recognizing the scripts we use in teaching social studies, like shame scripts, might allow us to disrupt them, not to create dangerous, painful affective experiences for students, but to move them towards the “sudden empathy” Tomkins describes above, a feeling that might open up new, more ethical, relations. As a social studies teacher, Jake is always engaged in affective productions, what usually amounts to a scripted, affective routine. In our work together, it was evident Jake is accustomed to curating 128 affective experiences in class that are critical and difficult, but not too much so, a rendering of the world, and the past, that, while not rosy, is guaranteed to end with the sun breaking out of the clouds. Jake demonstrated his proficiency with social studies shame scripts in sharing one example of how shame is routinized in social studies curriculum and teaching. Jake: So every year I teach the Civil War in U.S. History and it’s an example of shame leading to pride. One moment where we move from shame to pride is the 13th to the 14th Amendments, and it’s the significance of 14th I try to really stress, a moment to be proud of the country. We got something right! And yeah, that ‘right’ is still developing, but I think you need to do it that way. In this sensible, inoffensive progression, Jake is working within a common social studies shame script, one that embraces narratives of progress and other fantasies of liberalism. And while this script protects Jake and his students from negative affective experiences, it does not use shame to “engage” and “concern” his students in new, more expansive ways. Jake’s aim is to produce affects of accomplishment and success, feelings of pride in our country because “we got something right!” He concedes that “right is still developing,” but this social studies shame script does not provide Jake and his students with any meaningful next steps, and in this example of one yearly “teaching routine,” affect is not used to move students towards worlding more just futures. Rather, affect is used to reproduce the feelings of national pride Jake is attached to, and it is unclear to what extent such affects are, in turn, embodied and felt by his students. And this issue is crucial, especially within this discussion of three White teachers conceptualizing movements of shame in social studies curriculum and teaching in a school of primarily Black and Brown students. While Jake’s approach to shame was more “scripted” than Garrett’s, he seemed to be more cognizant of how his embodiments of shame—his felt experiences of the affects of shame produced in his classroom—are markedly different from the felt experiences of his students. 129 Jake: The large majority of my students are Black and Brown, so any time we talk about slavery or immigration restrictions and deportations, I feel this sort of doubled-sided shame. ‘Who am I to be teaching this to these students?’ They know about some of this stuff through their lived experiences, or they don’t know and they want to know, but who am I to teach them? I’m a part of the perpetrators of these shameful acts and so it’s emotional, it’s tough, and I openly tell my students I’m really uncomfortable teaching this. While Garrett exhibited a brief embodiment of shame in announcing the Democratic primary results, Jake’s reflection above moves beyond this. Grappling with a “double-sided shame” that emerges through the past (and represented within curriculum), it is also embodied by his positionality as a White man in authority. This subject-position is painful for Jake, but he is open with his students, telling them he is “really uncomfortable teaching this.” In Garrett’s telling, shame is his, and it is housed within him—a force—leading him towards an embodiment of critical social studies teaching that is driven by his shameful past and relations. But Garrett is less inclined to consider the affects of shame he might be producing within his own classroom. It is possible, then, that in teaching “critically,” especially as a White teacher to predominantly Black and Brown students, teachers are, however unintentionally, reproducing the same painful affects of shame that, as we have discussed, are embedded within critical social studies curriculum. And there were interesting dissonances and contradictions in how both Garrett and Jake considered and accommodated for (or did not) this dynamic between themselves and their students. It is not as though Jake was thoughtful and Garrett was not; rather, within the ebb and flow of our work together, diverse, and often competing, feelings would rise to the surface. In other words, the ambivalences that are inherent to qualitative inquiry abounded, and the participants (along with myself!) floated within multiplicitous affective flows produced by our work together (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). For example, in Research Module 1, I asked the participants to discuss the affects they experienced—as embodied—within their encounters with 130 20 photographs of U.S. History. After this, I asked each participant to choose 1 photograph to discuss more deeply during a second set of activities, and as they conceptualized the affective productions of their chosen photo, they loosely structured a classroom inquiry centering it. Figure 2: White Civil Rights Note: Garrett’s choice of one of the 20 photographs used during Research Module 1. Garrett was quick to choose a photo he called “White Civil Rights” (see Figure 2), and unsurprisingly he anchored his choice in his shameful past. “This is just really a part of my upbringing and it’s bullshit I’ve had to…I don’t want to say deal with, but it’s affects I’ve had to be cognizant of, and mitigate, my entire life.” Later, he emphasized that the “bullshit happening in this photo, that’s what drives me, the shame that I come from a place where I felt these affects of hate, I saw it,” and he shared how it was more than simply getting away from his hometown after high school; it was also what he did next, and he traced his path from northeast Ohio to teaching in the Bronx and then in various neighborhoods in Chicago. Interestingly, though, when I pushed Garrett on how this photo might be used in his classroom, what it might invite his students to feel, he was taken aback, and he struggled to articulate how he perceived affects of Whiteness functioning at Lakeside. In other words, it seemed as though Garrett individualized affects of Whiteness, and Lakeside’s “diversity” further compounded this feeling for Garrett, and 131 instead of Whiteness being an affective structure of feeling, one that is hegemonic—societal and institutional—it became his own (shameful) burden to bear. Garrett: Uh, my students? I don’t really know. I only teach 3 White kids at Lakeside, and it would probably just make them uncomfortable. For the Black and Brown students, it’s more of just a throw away, like it’s not even worth getting upset about. In this moment, Garrett’s conceptualization of how a photograph can produce affects that invite, or disinvite, students to feel, is narrow, or as Greene (1978) might say, unimaginative. For Garrett, it is as though affects are predictable and directable, solely attached, and attracted, to particular identities, experiences, and memories. He acknowledges the photograph might “make them (the White kids) uncomfortable,” but he is not thinking about how those affects of shame or discomfort, ones he himself has discussed at length, might move his White students to think or feel about their relations to others in new ways. As Garrett thought about it more, he started to convince himself that the photo would not be useful in a diverse setting like Lakeside. Garrett: The messaging of this photo is a visual for policy in America. But I think the affects of the photo aren’t super pertainable to Lakeside. I don’t think any of the White students at Lakeside are actively saying, ‘I’m better than everybody else.’ I don’t feel like they have that feeling. I think being at Lakeside, being in a diverse area, they live in the neighborhood and they’ve been exposed to diversity for a long time. I suggest that as Garrett’s theorization of the photo and its affects progresses, he begins to realize how the negative affects of shame produced by the photo would be able to move, and affect, beyond his control, but he is simultaneously unsure of what to do with this realization. In Garrett’s view, the photo is only meaningful, as an affective text, in contexts like northeastern Ohio, and he makes some broad, tenuous claims about Lakeside, a school that, as we saw in the previous chapter, is filled with diverse and competing worlds and affective landscapes, some of which are replete with White supremacy and racism (remember the moment of affectivity in the gymnasium). On the one hand, the shame Garrett finds to be so useful in his teaching is captured 132 in the photograph he chose, but he struggles to conceptualize its use in teaching at Lakeside. Its affectivity—the shame Black and Brown students might experience, the discomfort it might cause for White students—is dismissed because of school’s “diversity,” and Garrett’s shame remains bottled up in both himself and the photograph. On the other hand, we know this is a fantasy: affects defy intention, and teachers, texts, students, and whatever else produce affects that cling to our relations and drift beyond our control. The affects of shame Garrett locates as a force driving his critical teaching practice is not simply an internal motivator; it must also be monitored in how it is produced, and subsequently felt, by others. Crucially, Garrett’s attendance to these entangled movements of shame and Whiteness was more nuanced and reflexive on other occasions. In reflecting on teaching the events in Charlottesville in 2018, Garrett discussed the shame he felt in his classroom, a White teacher amidst mostly Black and Brown students, and this dynamic is one he aimed to work through in our time together. Garrett: Two years ago we started the year off teaching about Charlottesville. I said to my students, ‘Being a White male teacher in your presence, I feel a lot of shame. The fact that people who look like me and have similar backgrounds would have these feelings is shameful.’ I did a lot of frontloading. I needed to let them know that I was not like that. I don’t think they would ever believe it for sure, but I needed to try and make sure they understood that’s not how I feel. In this reflection, Garrett draws closer to considering how his shame, the affects he “uses to do better,” are inevitably “in relation” to his students. Here, affects of shame are entangled with Garrett’s practice, his attachments, and his memories, and we see how they slow him down and compel him to share feelings with his students he might not otherwise share. Garrett’s desire for communion with his students provides the shame he feels with a pathway that leads towards flourishing (potentially), and his attempts to “let them know (he is) not like that” are movements that stem from entangled affects of shame, interest, excitement, and love. And still, Garrett’s shame remains solidly one-sided. For example, as opposed to Jake’s reflexive openness to the 133 lived experiences of his students above, Garrett is not conceptualizing shame as moving beyond himself. In contrast, Jake’s shame in teaching about slavery or the genocide of American Indians as a White man is fundamentally relational; rather than conceived as flowing out of him, affects of shame are produced through the relations between himself and his students, an embodiment of shame that leads him to consider what his own complicity in past traumas and current injustices means for his ability to teach his Black and Brown students in ways that are both humanizing and critical. In each example, shame is “positively” curbing the interest and excitement of both White male teachers, leading them towards reflection, humility, and vulnerability in relation to their students, but Jake’s approach is at once cognizant of his own shameful complicity while also attuned to how such affects are acting upon his students. A Segue The first two themes I have discussed have centered on how affects of shame can motivate and move teachers towards more just futures, as well as how, and why, the same affects ought to be monitored and attended to. This subsection will discuss a third theme—shameless teaching—before moving onto this chapter’s discussion of my unique work with Sahar. In this way, this subsection serves as a convenient bridge between Garrett’s and Jake’s productive uses of shame and Sahar’s encounters with shameful contempt in her work with a White co-teacher. It is through exploring the productions and movements of a “negative” affect in social studies teaching that I have aimed to offer counterintuitive alternatives for how we think about the relationship between shame, social studies teaching, and teacher education. Interlude: Clodagh’s Affect After moving this dissertation study to Zoom, Clodagh’s new dog, a tiny Pomapoo named Destiny, became a key fixture in our data generation. Constantly yapping in and out of 134 sight, it felt as though Clodagh and I were interrupted every 5 minutes. Added to this, Clodagh’s internet connection was spotty, and every Module was prefaced by something along the lines of this: “I really wish we could use Google Hangouts. It seems my computer just really can’t handle Zoom. But that’s [inaudible] [frozen screen] [disconnected].” If I had not been so sure switching platforms would do nothing to solve a clear internet issue, I would have gladly complied, but alas: To state what is likely obvious by now, the affects produced by my work with Clodagh felt strained and stressed. I could sense I was on edge, worried we would not get through a given Module’s activities before, a) the internet gave out, or b) Clodagh’s strict 60-minute timer started to beep. And the timer was my fault. I had provided a guesstimate that proved to be too conservative for my ever-expanding vision for what the participants and I could generate together on Zoom, but she was the only participant unwilling to budge even 5 or 10 minutes. As I write this, I recognize I am feeding off of negative affects, memories of frustration, anger, and stress from my work with Clodagh, and this is largely unfair. Our first meeting, in-person at a Starbucks on the far northwest side of the city, was lovely. Bubbling with excitement as she shared her vision for social studies, Clodagh was the only participant to suggest we schedule my two and a half months of biweekly observations right then and there. She was telling me she was invested, she cared, and we parted ways with a clear and exhilarating vision of what my study could actually look like on the ground. And then things changed, drastically, and I tried on numerous occasions to conjure the affects we produced, in relation, during our first meeting and interview, the excitement and felt, mutual investment. So perhaps this is one takeaway from the past year of a pandemic and Trump and everything else: Our bodies matter, and whatever we think we can do virtually is lacking in the affects attached to human relationality, the 135 embodiments of commitment and trust that make working with one another special, together and not alone. Shame-less Teaching If this chapter’s first two themes—affects of shame as motivating and necessarily monitored or attended to—emerged from Garrett’s and Jake’s open, curious engagements with the idea of affects of shame in relation to teaching social studies, then my work with Clodagh might be characterized by an equal but opposite refusal. Importantly, though, Clodagh’s refusal seemed to stem from her own perceptive awareness of shame’s centrality to social studies curriculum and teaching, but it is simultaneously a presence she tries her best to ignore and / or suppress in her own practice. When I asked Clodagh how she conceived of the relationship between shame and social studies curriculum or teaching, she was clear: “I think people think too much about shame when they teach. They let it change how, and what, they teach, but I’m not going to let that happen.” Here, Clodagh at once acknowledges the capacity of affects of shame to shape, and shift, practices like teaching while simultaneously attempting to maintain what I will call a “shame-less” approach to teaching social studies (to differentiate it from the more pejorative “shameless”). In other words, Clodagh understands the capacity of affects of shame to produce a particular affectivity in her classroom, but it is a phenomenon she is wary of; she does not want her own feelings of shame to impact her students’ learning—an admirable desire. I asked her for an example. Clodagh: The fact that the majority of White women voted for Trump fills me with tremendous shame as a White woman, but when I’m teaching it to students, I’m not going to downplay it like a lot of people do with affects of shame. If you feel shame, it’s like, okay, feel it, but you need to make sure you’re still presenting the content correctly and objectively to the students. This quote from Clodagh, and specifically her intentional use of the world “downplay,” is open to a few different interpretations, and Clodagh herself seems unsure of what she is trying to 136 articulate about affects of shame. First, she is attuned to the fact that many people, in embodying affects of shame, attempt to tuck it away, refusing to consider how those affects might be a positive force in shifting how they view the world or interact with others. On the one hand, it seems shame can be “downplayed,” remaining unacknowledged, in how one aims to present particular identities, interests, and investments. On the other hand, shame can be “not downplayed” and subsequently invited into the epistemological work of teaching. But it is as though Clodagh doubles back within her own example, and how she is using “downplay” in relation to affects of shame grows fuzzy. She says she does not want to downplay shame like some people do—in this case, the tremendous shame she feels as a White woman following Trump’s election—but she also, quite clearly, seems to tuck it away so it does not affect how she presents the “content.” Here, we see how this “tucking away” is one embodiment of affects of shame; not an ashamed response for shame itself, but a shame for including her own feelings of shame in her teaching. It is as though Clodagh, as she discusses shame, begins by acknowledging shame’s role in her practice and then reverses course, perhaps feeling shame in what she is saying to me about shame itself. And still, I am not entirely clear on what Clodagh means by “downplaying” affects of shame. Extending Clodagh’s example—the common trope White women won Trump the election in 2016—we see how it is a story that, in many ways, is constituted by negative affects of shame and contempt. Whether the percentage of White women who voted for Trump was closer to 53% or 47% is beyond the scope of this chapter (Chait, 2020), but it is clear affects of shame have been produced by the opposition to shame White women, not only a curious voting strategy (one might think shaming prospective voters could prove to be counteractive), but also the opposite of what Clodagh might mean by “downplaying” the issue. In one scenario, the 137 affects of shame felt by White women following the election of Trump, ones produced by a diverse coalition of oppositional activists—specifically Black women—might become entangled with positive affects, forces that could help lead White women back into the fold of the Democratic party. This is not “downplaying” shame. It is using shame to move people by making them feel. So if this is one use of shame, and another is to “downplay” shame so it cannot be a force within how we feel and act in the world, Clodagh does neither, but she is closer to the latter. Rather than discuss the affects of shame she feels, as a White woman, with her students, she tucks the shame away—for her, a different response than downplaying it—and the potential of the affect, its embodied capacity to move us towards new investments or renewed relations, remains latent. Interestingly too, Clodagh differentiates between affects of shame and feelings of it, albeit unintentionally, and it is important to note the feelings of shame are ones she cautions against. It is okay to feel them briefly, but then it is time to move on and do your job. In this vein, this excerpt provides a glimpse of Clodagh’s theory of affect, and it reinforces her embodiments of particular affects I observed in her classroom. I found Clodagh to be a sturdy, no-nonsense teacher. She roams the room with an air of authority; her back is kept straight and her head is held high—she pauses often at desks to provide a nudge, a correction, or an awakening tap on the shoulder. She is the embodiment of my old high school’s teaching moto: Strict but fair, stern but kind, and in her theorization of shame and social studies teaching a fascinating relationship emerges from the ashes of her initial disavowal. Indeed, shame is very much a part of Clodagh’s teaching, but she imagines it as being kept in a separate container and tucked away, not allowed to contaminate her presentation of the content, done “correctly,” to her students. Attached to fantasies of objectivity and emotionless, rational teaching, I would argue Clodagh’s affective life is relegated outside her classroom, a predicament that diminishes her 138 capacity to create an agentic, authentic teacher identity. Her example of Trump and White women is ripe with affects of both shame and contempt, but it is an affective, interior experience she refuses to lay bare for her students. While Jake, and even Garrett to some degree, were eager to share moments of vulnerable, shame-filled relations with their students, Clodagh maintains that sure, you can feel shame, but it had better stay inside, far removed from the work of a teacher: “Presenting content correctly and objectively to students.” Here, we see how certain affects (like rigidity or objectivity) can be attached to particular performances of gender; it seems as though Clodagh’s capacity to be affectively free—to invite affects of shame into her classroom for example—are caught up in the larger norms embedded within the affective landscape that is a school. I followed up by asking her to say more about her affective experiences with shame as a social studies teacher. Clodagh: So for Trump, I try to reframe the shame in my brain, put it in the back. My students need to know—I need to teach them about voting patterns and why voting patterns matter—but I’m not going to bring my own shame into it, the fact that my demographic elected this bastard. Similar to Jake, Clodagh is using shame scripts to navigate affects of shame in her teaching practice, but Clodagh’s scripts are different in a few important ways, and I want to focus my interpretive analysis on these differences. First, Clodagh’s affective scripts are not exclusive to shame; they cover other affects, feelings, and emotions, and these scripts are derived from the ways in which the affective and emotional registers have been gendered and racialized over the course of modern education. In exploring the gendered matrix of teaching, affect, and the conscription of women to function as “caring police,” Boler (1999) shows how the exclusion of women from the public sphere can be traced to the Greek polis, an exclusion that can be traced to binaries that equate men with reason and women with irrationality. Over time, the limitations of these binaries became “naturalized” through emotionality, body, sexuality, and 139 reproductive capacity” (p. 42), and the “natural” capacities of women have carried into education. In teaching, Boler (1999) argues “women have been assigned as ‘repositories’ of irrationality: They must embody irrationality (e.g., as the nurturing caregiver, and the embodiment of passions) while simultaneously they are held responsible for removing irrationality from children in order to civilize them” (p. 42). These discursive expectations are pressed upon female teachers like Clodagh and Sahar in varying ways, and within this, the subject-position of a female teacher is less free than their male counterparts. Garrett and Jake had some reservations about how affects like shame might be brought to bear in their classrooms, and I discussed how Jake, like all of us, “deals with” shame in his teaching according to an affective script, but neither of them expressed Clodagh’s need to “reframe” shame in their brains, to “put it in the back” and not let it affect their job as a teacher. Second, I am not aiming to essentialize Clodagh through this analysis. Rather, I am building from Boler (1999), Crocco et al. (1999), and other feminist scholars of education to show how the affective lives of female teachers in contemporary schools function beneath gendered expectations, roles, and norms. While discursive structures and affective regimes are not given—they are constructed and available for reconfiguration—these structures are powerful in how they are expressed in our bodies and made manifest through our practices, reflected in the harmful objects and fantasies to which we are attached (Berlant, 2020; Greene, 1978). Following Crocco et al. (1999), exploring the history of education through a feminist lens also provides examples of how structures of oppression can be challenged and transformed. I argue studying affect is similar in its capacity to open up new worlds, what Crocco et al. (1999) might call the creation of subjectivity, “a fluid, often conflicted, and continually renegotiated sense of personal identity and agency” (p. 1). In Clodagh’s case, it is not about compelling her to embody more 140 shame in her teaching, and neither is it the case that Garret and Jake do not also work as teachers beneath oppressive affective structures and regimes. Rather, in this sense, exploring affect helps us see how the inner, emotional lives of teachers are self-regulated in different, gendered ways in schools, ways that are harmful and diminish our full capacities as human beings. Perhaps in certain spaces—whether in schools themselves, teacher education classrooms, or wherever—we might follow Berlant (2020) in thinking about how what she calls “infrastructures” might be built, a sort of queer world building that function alongside the larger structures that are wearing us down, making us “reframe our brains” and silence our rage. In these heterotopias, new folds of life might take shape, new attachments to better, more life-giving objects (Berlant, 2020). I return to the crucial matrix that is affect, gender, and social studies teaching in more depth in Chapter 6, but it is important to emphasize once more that affects of shame have been weaponized in cruel and inventive ways for centuries. In large part, this weaponization has been conducted to benefit heteronormative, White, masculine ways of being in the world while marginalizing (and shaming) othered embodied identities. This process of systemic, institutional shaming fits within a given culture’s larger structure of feeling, and it is felt throughout, at all levels, whether we are looking at a “progressive” part of a particular nation-state or in a place where gendered affects are far more visible (e.g., Saudi Arabia’s restrictive laws governing how women are allowed to be, or not be, in the world; anti-abortion laws in numerous states in the United States). In other words, gendered affective productions still linger—and are powerfully felt—in how everyday practices like social studies teaching are embodied. Still, and as I mentioned above, one potentiality of exploring regressive affective embodiments—ones that restrict a body’s freedom to move according to gendered or racialized identities—is that they are available for reconfiguration and redemption. Following Berlant (Lasky & Berlant, 2014), this 141 difficult work of worlding requires a two-part attendance: On the one hand, we can explore how people (like Clodagh) find “sustenance and make survival happen in worlds that are not organized for them” (para. 5). On the other hand, and simultaneously, we can try to figure out how new worlds can be formed, new affective landscapes on which to live, feel, and teach, that allow us to open ourselves up to the mind’s need to dream, “to rest, coast, spread out, and incohere” (para. 5). I expand on these possibilities in the next section. Interlude: Caravaggio’s Shame In 1601, Caravaggio painted St. Peter hanging upside down from a cross, too unworthy to die right side up like his Lord. Figure 3: The Denial of St. Peter by Caravaggio, 1610 Note: This painting currently hangs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City In 1609, Caravaggio got the shit beat out of him by a knight outside a bar in Naples, a knight he had previously assaulted. The knight disfigured his face. In 1610 Caravaggio would die, but before he did, he painted The Denial of St. Peter, a painting experts say is littered with decline, perhaps owing to the caved-in face of the painter. 142 The apostle is alive once more but visibly distraught, accosted by a soldier and a young woman. Hands point inward, beseeching, open mouth, watering eyes. Jesus has just been arrested, and Peter is in the clutches of prophecy: 500 years earlier, Zechariah wrote, “Strike the Shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered,” a saying Jesus used at the Last Supper to remind the apostles they “will all fall away.” Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro—his trademark juxtaposition of light and shadow—is, to me, perfect. Peter betrayed Jesus three times in a single night. When I was little I heard this story at Sunday School, always at Easter. I was 7 and I asked: Why wasn’t he the one who killed himself? In 2010, I started teaching and I decided to get St. Peter tattooed on my right arm, a Russian icon I liked that ran from my elbow to my shoulder, all the way around. He is walking on the water to meet Jesus, but he loses faith and starts to sink. My response to questions: Because it is my name. Weaponized Shame in Social Studies Teaching Sahar discussed working upon an affective landscape (Lakeside) that is gendered and White, a dynamic that both reinforced and complexified the findings stemming from my work with Clodagh, Jake, and Garrett. For example, how might Sahar respond to Garrett’s assumption that the “White Civil Rights” photo is affect-less in a “diverse” space like Lakeside? Or what does Clodagh’s Whiteness afford her as a woman, and are the affects of shame she imagines she confines to a “non-teacher part of her brain” a symptom of White privilege? As Sahar started to conceptualize affects of shame in relation to her practice as a teacher, it became evident that shame was moving in different ways than in my work with the other participants. Specifically, it seemed affects of shame were caught within a different sort of assemblage, a milieu that made it difficult to glimpse the positive potential of shame’s affectivity I shared in some of my findings 143 above. Of course, shame is always entangled with other affects, moving within the assemblages of which we are a part, but Sahar’s classroom assemblage—herself, her predominantly Black and Brown students, her White co-teacher, affects of shame, contempt, aesthetic texts, and colonization and other narratives—was particularly volatile, a classroom landscape especially filled with affectivity. First and foremost, and contrary to Garret and Jake specifically, Sahar did not conceptualize affects of shame as intertwined with critical social studies teaching. For her, using critical lenses, including marginalized narratives; these are the methods, inquiries, and texts she finds resonate most with her students. Significantly, they are the stories she calls her own, the ones to which she is affectively attached. In fact, Sahar did not locate affects of shame in her teaching until she was made to feel ashamed by her White co-teacher. At this point, she realized how affects of shame are attached to colonization, migration, and other narratives of White oppression, and the co-teacher’s affective experiences of shame, in a classroom of Black and Brown students with a Brown female co-teacher, produced negative affects that led away from communion, love, and other life-giving ends. In describing the deteriorating dynamic with her co-teacher, Sahar became emotional, and it was a situation that resurfaced throughout our work together. Sahar: Once we moved into colonization and migration, those units triggered affects of shame for her, and it’s like they were embedded the entire time. I got push back from her, and I know it’s because I’m a Brown woman teaching this content. All of a sudden she’s like, ‘I’m really worried about the messaging we’re giving students. It shouldn’t be about shaming other people.’ In teaching about colonization and migration, Sahar’s co-teacher is experiencing negative affects of shame; she “calls out” Sahar about their “messaging,” and she is worried about shaming “other people.” As the co-teacher is the only White person in the classroom, Sahar believes she is responding to an “overly critical” approach to teaching colonization and 144 migration, and in conversations with the department chair the co-teacher accuses Sahar of being anti-American. In some ways, this brings us full circle, all the way back to the “Project” and Trump’s phantasmatic curriculum. To what end are affects of shame produced and utilized in social studies teaching, and how are affects—shame, excitement, interest, joy, or whatever—in fact far beyond the teacher’s locus of control? In teaching colonization and migration, Sahar did not intend to produce affects of shame her co-teacher would feel and respond to, just as the co- teacher does not know how her Black and Brown students responded, affectively, to a unit on colonization and migration developed and delivered by their Brown female teacher, the granddaughter of Pakistani immigrants who is also from their neighborhood. But crucially, we know affect is at work here because of Sahar’s story, because of how affects of shame, and also contempt, led her co-teacher to narrow, rather than expand, her objects of concern, interest, and love (Tomkins et al., 1995). Again, this issue of interest also returns us to my initial theorizations of how affects of shame are powerful in teaching. Building from Tomkins et al. (1995), shame is useful in how it curbs our excitement, interest, joy, and other positive affects, and the novel move by Tomkins is to shrink shame into a microscopic and ubiquitous experience germane to everyday life. In this sense, affects of shame not only stop us from eating more and more holiday cookies; affects of shame also remind Sahar teaching in a school is a collaborative project, one that is oftentimes uncomfortable, awkward, and frustrating. Sahar’s interest, her investment in her students, is boundless, but it is also entangled with her reality: she is co-teaching, and over the course of our work together, Sahar’s commitments to her students, her colleagues, and her school community strengthened. In our first meeting over semester break, Sahar told me she was leaving Lakeside at the end of the year. With tears in her eyes, she discussed her many frustrations. Five months later, Sahar was eager to begin summer department meetings, and she 145 was determined to be more vocal as a social studies teacher-intellectual committed to critical pedagogies. My point, here, is that Sahar’s affective, relational rupture with her co-teacher was productively-paired with her own invested interest in her students. Through this, affects of shame did not become contemptuous, and while it was not easy, Sahar—a 2nd-year teacher—learned how even the best intentions (like teaching critically in just the way we want to do it!) must necessarily be curbed to make space for new relations, along with the multiplicitous, ever- emerging interests therein. She summarized her understanding of this. Sahar: We’re both teachers. Yes, we should teach them what’s happening in the world, but we’re also teaching them how to be good humans. I know that’s subjective, and what that means to me and what it means to my co-teacher might be different things. But that’s our job, to figure that out and work together for our kids. Far from a rosy, Kumbaya ending, I offer this final excerpt as one powerful example of how affects within relations, once located and recognized, might be reshaped. Early career teachers like Sahar, Black and Brown teachers working in White affective landscapes, female teachers feeling as though they are not able to exhibit affect or emotion; the affects attached to these subject-positions and the relations therein ought not be permanent. In its quiet way, shame reminds us we are not alone in this world. We are entangled—however frustratingly—with co- teachers, partners, mentors, best friends, and fickle friends, and it is imperative we take stock of the multiplicitous, excited interests embedded within such strange relations. Indeed, it is through this that we might continue to enlarge our spheres of concern, community, and obligation, and Sahar’s story shows how affects of shame are, both inevitably and productively, embedded within our relationships with others. If one thrust of this chapter has been to demonstrate shame’s ubiquitous presence within everyday life, then Sahar’s work as a teacher engages with shame on 146 various levels, both within her interpersonal relationship with her co-teacher and in her relations with her Black and Brown students. Finally, and extending this final point, I argue Sahar’s embodiments of shame, as a Brown woman, are involved in movements of “unshaming” the communities of color she is both a part of and teaches. While Sahar does not locate this movement of shame, I suggest it is shame in a different disguise, an approach to critical teaching that is working against representations of communities of color that are shame-filled, representations that center lack and distort the experiences Sahar herself embodies. In this sense, just as Sahar’s co-teacher was adamant about not “shaming other people” (what I argue to be a stand-in for her own experiencing of shame as a White woman), Sahar knows, as a former student of color in the same neighborhood, how conventional narratives in U.S. History produced affects of shame within her, making her feel insignificant and small. While she does not articulate this, I offer Sahar’s project of unshaming as an approach to critical teaching that springs from her affective experiences, memories, and attachments, a practice that simultaneously works to prevent her students from embodying the affects of shame she knows linger within curriculum, ones she herself has felt as a student. Interlude: Turning to Texts In this chapter I explored affect on the level of the social studies teacher; how the participants embody and experience affect in their teaching—specifically affects of shame. In the next chapter, I turn to affect on a third level: textuality. Aesthetic texts are a common fixture in social studies classrooms, and teachers use texts like films, photographs, and art towards various ends. Recent scholarship (Garrett & Kerr, 2016) has shown the majority of these ends are severely undertheorized, and Garrett and Kerr (2016) offer aesthetic conflict and relational aesthetics as two conceptual aims social studies teachers might adopt. While my findings do not 147 reveal rigorous engagements (on the part of the participants) with either concept, my interpretations of my work with the participants offer new ways forward in how aesthetic experiences might be facilitated in social studies classrooms. In the next chapter I explore the affective, aesthetic attachments of the participants with the aim of doing a few things. First, I wanted to see how the teaching lives of the participants are infused, or not, by affective, aesthetic experiences. Here, I am interested in blurring lines between teaching life/non-teaching life, social studies text/non-social studies text, and in school/outside school, aiming to both see how the participants work within, or beyond these lines, and also to offer a vision of a more open, textual, and humanizing social studies teaching life. Second, I wanted to investigate how the participants actually use the texts they say they are attached to. I asked the participants to bring their aesthetic, textual attachments to our work together, and all of the participants embedded their texts in a full lesson they designed. This chapter explores both the texts and their lessons. Finally, I discuss what the participants think of their texts as doing in an affective sense, and I use their conceptualizations of affectivity as a way of interpreting textual affective productions that move beyond the participants’ aims and intentions. 148 CHAPTER 5: AFFECTIVE, AESTHETIC TEXTS IN SOCIAL STUDIES TEACHING Steel-blue and light, ruffled by a soft, scarcely perceptible crosswind, the waves of the Adriatic streamed against an Imperial squadron as it steered toward the harbor of Brundisium, the flat hills of the Calabrian coast coming gradually nearer on the left, and here, as the sunny, yet deathly loneliness of the sea changed with the peaceful stir of friendly human activity, where the channel, softly enhanced by the proximity of human life and human living, was populated by all sorts of craft—by some that were also approaching the harbor, by others heading out to sea and by the ubiquitous brown-sailed fishing boats already setting out for the evening catch from the little breakwaters which protected the many villages and settlements along the white-sprayed coast—here the water had become mirror- smooth; mother-of-pearl spread over the open shell of heaven, evening came on, and the pungence of wood fires was carried from the hearths whenever a sound of life, a hammering or summons, was blown over from the shore. —Hermann Broch, The Death of Virgil, 1945 In art, the emotions are the meaning. —Henry James In the sixth and final volume of his sprawling novel My Struggle (2019), the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard calls Hermann Broch’s opening description of the dying Virgil’s entrance into a Roman harbor “one of the finest sentences of prose written in Europe during the last two hundred years” (p. 643). It is a sentence I have read hundreds of times now, first as a homeschooler in Maine, 14-years old and likely wrapped in a blanket by the wood stove, and then later as an 8th grade Social Studies and English Language Arts teacher in Chicago, trying mightily to make my attachments to historical fiction take hold in my students. I had not read Broch again until this spring, when I found myself scrambling to reconfigure components of this dissertation study amid covid-19 and the impossibility of classroom observations and in person interviews. And stumbling upon Broch in the Knausgaard I was reading on a dark March night should not have surprised me; his entire literary project (My Struggle) aims to embody a style of 149 slow and patient noticing, moving brilliantly across a range of textual encounters—a single (very long) sentence from Broch, a bizarre Talking Heads lyric, and J. M. W. Turner’s “Dido Building Carthage” (1815) to name three. While Knausgaard is well-read in aesthetics—the philosophies of beauty, taste, and art—his analysis uses theory as a nothing more than a departure, and what makes My Struggle (2019) so compelling is his unflinching belief in the value of his own subjective experience (of course, Knausgaard’s “subjective” analyses of aesthetic texts, his reflections upon his aesthetic experiences, are a product of a “continuous and cumulative interaction of an organic self with the world” (Dewey, 1934/2005, p. 229)). The value Knausgaard attaches to his own experiences is critical and reflexive; constantly unsure of his own individuality (and uniqueness), the authenticity of his aesthetic experiences—and the manipulative capacity of affect within such experiences—he produced a magnum opus that is obsessive in its attention to consciousness, experience, and the objects surrounding him, objects that disrupt dualisms and produce affects of joy, anguish, and purpose—fantasies of different worlds and alternative lives. Over 3,600 pages, Knausgaard’s novel trains a phenomenological lens upon his own experiences, many of them affective and aesthetic, working through what they provide and how they affect him. Not dissimilar from projects explicitly engaged with affect theory (Berlant & Stewart, 2019; Stewart, 2007), he is attuned to the tiniest movements and vibrations, experiences of affectivity we are able to perceive, and reflect upon, if we “slow things down,” whether as a parent, a teacher, or whatever else is at hand. Knausgaard’s “Struggle” is modern life; the task of carving out meaning and purpose beneath hegemonic affective structures that overproduce affective, aesthetic experiences as cheap, ephemeral thrills. For Knausgaard, life is sustained, quite literally, by everyday relational encounters with various texts, and such encounters make life worth living. Following this, if 150 there is one foundational question driving this chapter, it stems from this Knausgaardian commitment to lives sustained by aesthetic experiences: Assuming social studies teachers are the best-positioned P-12 teachers to cultivate, and facilitate, aesthetic learning experiences for their students, a) What do social studies teachers think about the relationship between aesthetic texts and their practice, and b) To what extent do such experiences occur in their classrooms? Before I delve more deeply into these questions, there was an evident (dis)connection in my work with the participants between living an “aesthetic life” and using affective, aesthetic texts in teaching social studies. While this might seem obvious, I was struck by the aesthetically-barren life of one of the participants in particular, and I mean this neither judgmentally nor conclusively; it goes without saying—the inner-lives of the participants are, of course, obscured, and the affective attachments disclosed over the course of this study provide an incomplete picture. Still, Clodagh was particularly resistant to, and confused by, the notion of aesthetic experiences in social studies teaching and learning. For example, Clodagh does not read outside of school—she is too busy and tired—and she said “for me as a teacher, aesthetics, art, or anything like that are just not a part of social studies.” I want to be careful, here, in my interpretation of Clodagh’s sentiment; I am not outlining some sort of authoritarian vision for what an “aesthetic life” as a teacher ought to like—adjudicating what counts, or does not count, as an “aesthetic text or experience” is the least of my concerns in this chapter. However, I am interested in both exploring, and disrupting, a series of prevalent through lines (and binaries) embedded in Clodagh’s comment, demarcations I noticed throughout my work with the participants: a teacher self/non-teacher self; social studies/non-social studies; an in school/out of school self; and teacher interests/personal interests. In many ways, this chapter’s findings—and its general discussion of the relationship between affective, aesthetic texts and social studies teaching—is 151 entangled with many of the far larger issues circulating within these binaries, so I want to clarify the boundaries surrounding this chapter. First, as a social studies teacher educator and researcher, I am bringing a particular vision of “a teaching life” to this study, a vision that aims to humanize teachers and carve out possibilities for more livable teacher lives. My conceptualization of affect as a force that is entangled with freedom and movement is central to this vision: In this sense, aesthetic texts are filled with affectivity, and our entangled attachments to textual objects are at capacity with fantasies for better futures. The promise, then, is that affective texts can actually move teachers and students towards better futures, producing teacher lives that become more human and livable within their relation to vibrant, life-giving texts. Far from criticizing Clodagh’s orientation towards affective, aesthetic texts and experiences in social studies teaching, I am moved by empathy and worry. And moreover, my vantage point is inherently incomplete and interpretive. I can only make assumptions about Clodagh’s aesthetic affective attachments from what she told me and from what I observed during our work together, so my conclusions—my visions of alternative social studies teaching lives—are less about Clodagh and the other participants than they are co-created worlds produced by our work together. Following this, one aim of this chapter is to both explore how the affective, aesthetic texts the participants are attached to (or not attached to) move, or do not move, their teaching (in an affective sense) and, stemming from this, to offer ways in which teachers might resist against the affective regimes (in schools, in society) that produce teacher lives that are always-exhausted and aesthetically-barren. This offering aims to be broad, inclusive, and unprescriptive; I am interested in how a text can make us wide-awake (Greene, 1978), “shock us,” and open up alternative worlds will vary according to who is perceiving the text, but affective, aesthetic experiences are capable of bringing teachers 152 to life (Garrett & Kerr, 2016; Greene, 1978), moving them towards new approaches and commitments in their practice. In Clodagh’s case, then, it is not as though she does not encounter affective, aesthetic texts in her everyday life; we even discussed various television shows she is bingeing during the pandemic—indeed, her life is decidedly not as aesthetically-barren as she initially characterized it to be. Rather, it becomes a matter of how an affective text like the HBO show Watchmen (Lindelof, 2019), for example (one show we discussed), is able to infiltrate Clodagh’s “teacher zone,” an area of her “professional life” she thinks of as being inherently disconnected from “aesthetics, art, or anything like that.” Following Greene (1995), a text like Watchmen is able to “release the imagination” of Clodagh’s whole self, a self that is constantly learning to “be liberated to transform her own reality, to become aware of her encounters and of what it means to be present in the world” (Greene, 1978, p. 209). For example, when I came upon Broch’s sentence in My Struggle (2019), I felt forced to stop. I looked upwards, envisioning, and then feeling, my own worn copy of Virgil, and I closed my eyes, breathing in the old, familiar smoke of the wood fires burning along the Calabrian coast. In my mind, I moved to my desk, trying to articulate—as a writer—the affectivity of the sentence, trying pin it down. Is it the words themselves, a masterful assemblage of signifiers curated by an expert writer? Or is it my own experiences as a young reader, the contagious love my mom—our teacher for a time—had for historical fiction, the ambitious work of Hermann Broch, Avi, Alex Haley, and Mary Renault? Indeed, in 9th and 10th grade, our Social Studies curriculum was comprised entirely of historical fiction, assembled chronologically, and delivered through close reading and discussion. From another angle, what is happening here, within my encounter with this sentence, and to what extent are such encounters a part of social studies education? If they are a part, what do they do to teachers and students, and what are the 153 implications of this “doing” for social studies teachers? Finally, and stemming from this, where is affect in this experience, and what are those affects’ relations to new understandings, to learning? In response to the first question, Dewey’s (1934/2005) theorization of an aesthetic experience—like my encounter with Broch’s masterful description of a dying Virgil lying in a boat—rings true. Dewey said: “Art elicits and accentuates…being a whole and of belonging to the larger, all-inclusive, whole which is the universe in which we live” (p. 202); his attention to wholeness, both as an individual being and as a being who “belongs” to a larger whole, captures one thread of an ineffable resonance. Finally, is my Broch reverie in 2020 simply a product of this dissertation itself, an intellectually-consuming project that has the ability to make affect show up everywhere? These questions are both rhetorical and instructive. Clearly, my encounter with Broch, via Knausgaard, in March was replete with all of the affective experiences and memories, attachments and fantasies above, a conclusion that does not intend to diminish the complexity of any aesthetic experience. Rather, I am interested in what textual encounters like this one do to teachers, how their affectivity moves us in particular ways. For example, on that dark evening in covid-March, I opened my eyes and reread the sentence again and again. Before going to bed, I went into my study and opened my laptop, making notes on the Research Module protocol I was developing for this study: “Broch’s Virgil; my attachment to it; aesthetic text/experience; use it with the participants, but how?” Finally, I glanced at the lesson plan I was constructing for the Social Studies Methods course I was co-teaching, a class session focused on affect in social studies. Quicky, I jotted, “Affective texts, vibrancy, shock…Broch?” before calling it a night. While I am not offering this as an “ideal” representation of an “aesthetic teaching life,” this small anecdote shows how, in some cases, affectivity needs to be both invited and actively felt (a “felt embodiment” that must be acknowledged). By this I mean an 154 orientation, a habitus, a way of being-in-the-world that is radically open to what affective textual experiences count as “applicable” to our work as social studies teachers. For example, as Clodagh views Watchmen (Lindelof, 2019), taking in not only its innovative uses of technology—its striking visual dimensions—but also its cutting commentary on the functioning of White supremacy in United States history, her perception of this text, and her orientation towards it, is passive. In an alternative world, Clodagh might complete an episode and not only think, but perhaps move towards new teaching futures. I am not suggesting Clodagh did not think deeply about Watchmen, but what I interpreted from our conversations, along with her general attitude (an embodied demeanor) towards the intradisciplinary possibilities inherent to social studies, suggested a sort of bleary-eyed consumption that is used to routine, passive perceptions and unlively aesthetic experiences. I am using “eyes” intentionally here, not only as a reference to one mode of perception, but also to invoke “wide-awakeness” (Greene, 1978), a conceptualization of what affective, aesthetic texts and experiences are able to do to teachers. In a compelling call, Greene (1978) encourages teachers to invite encounters with aesthetic texts into their lives, a vision of “a teaching life” that aims to be authentic and unconcerned with divisions between in school and out of school, or what counts as curriculum (or a discipline) and what does not. Through this, teachers might be enabled to “break through the horizons of the ordinary, of the taken-for-granted, to visions of the possible, of ‘what is not’” (p. 173), worlding alternative “landscapes of learning.” While Greene does not use the language of affect theory in her work, the “affectivity” of aesthetic texts—and texts generally—is foundational to her vision of embodiments of teaching that are “wide-awake” to the world, to each other, and to the numerous relations, ethical obligations, and problems we must be wide-awake to perceive and attend to. Crucially, it is the affectivity of aesthetic texts that can “shock” us awake, bringing 155 teachers to life in new, more relational, ways (Garrett & Kerr, 2016; Greene, 1978), another example of how affects that move us are produced in relation, in movement. At the same time, Greene (1978) is working against a “back to basics” movement in education that aims to rid curriculum and teaching of aesthetic texts; “back to basics” discourses are constituted by largely conservative narratives that center the “failure” of American education according to particular standardized metrics, and they are generally dismissive of learning aims not explicitly tied to “efficient” teaching and learning—aims that are measured by test score data. Within this affective landscape, the field of the possible is narrowed, and unaesthetic embodiments in teaching are not only reified, but the affective landscape itself becomes a static reality, producing a taken-for-granted attitude that says “it is what it is.” And these discourses are alive and well; in 2014, student scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress were interpreted by liberals and conservatives alike as yet another nation-wide failure of social studies education in the United States. While this “story” is neither new nor accurate, Shuttleworth and Patterson (2020) show how these perceptions of failure both produce and reinforce “affective narratives” (my term) of anxious decline, narratives that compound to perpetuate the landscapes Greene (1978, 1995) and others have worked to subvert: teaching for social efficiency and mobility (Labaree, 1997); a removal of the “humanities” (and diverse, aesthetic texts) from curriculum; and teaching lives that are weary and worn down. One hope, here, is that as Labaree put it, these educational aims—and the affective landscapes that further them—are contested; it is a “struggle,” and I am providing this context to situate this chapter as one contribution to this struggle over social studies curriculum and teaching. Recent scholarship (Adams & Kerr, 2021; Garrett & Kerr, 2016) on aesthetic texts and social studies education has pointed out a few things: First, social studies teachers regularly use 156 aesthetic texts in their teaching, and, in many ways, using aesthetic texts is thought of as a “best practice.” While this is encouraging, Garrett and Kerr (2016) show how the use of aesthetic texts—the pedagogical “why,” teacher rationales—is sorely undertheorized. They offer aesthetic experience, aesthetic conflict, and relational aesthetics as three concepts they use to theorize what aesthetic texts are actually doing in social studies education, and this chapter builds from their work—specifically their use of relational aesthetics (Bourriaud, 2002)—to explore (a) the affective, aesthetic attachments of the participants, and (b) the potential of textual affectivity to open up new futures (and alternative ways of being-in-the-world with one another) for teachers and students. Through this, I offer a vision of a more humanizing and aesthetically-fulfilling teaching life; not a prescription, but one that has, and will continue to, draw from my own affective, aesthetic attachments and experiences—my life as a social studies teacher educator and researcher aiming to embody a more ethical, textual, and relational approach to teaching. Second, Adams’ and Kerr’s (2021) article is the most recent attempt to open up social studies curriculum and teaching to an intradisciplinarity they argue to be foundational to the field. Just as the reconceptualization of curriculum (Miller, 2005; Pinar, 1978) used poststructuralist theories to open up conceptions of “a text” (as well as conceptions of teacher education itself as a text (Segall, 2002)), the rich and diverse textuality of social studies education is “always-already there” (Adams & Kerr, 2021, p. 6), hiding in plain sight. The lines we draw, whether disciplinary (e.g., civics, history, geography), vocationally (in school, out of school), or textually (not / a social studies text) are hopelessly—but productively—entangled with one another, and I will position this concept—intradisciplinarity—as affective because of the remarkable freedom it produces in teaching lives. Drawing from new materialist theories of anti-disciplinarity, intra-action, and posthumanism, Adams and Kerr world a social studies 157 curriculum that is radically irreverent of disciplinary boundaries they argue to be limiting and reductive. My own scholarship (Nelson & Durham, forthcoming) has worked towards similar aims (opening up social studies curriculum to more-than-human entanglements), and this chapter builds from their work to explore not only how the participants’ textual attachments are guided by, or subvert, social science disciplinarity, but also how the affectivities of the texts they use move and shift other boundaries, relations, and commitments. A Matter of Attachment: Aesthetic Textuality in Social Studies Teaching Generally speaking, the participants’ aesthetic text sets, and their approaches to using aesthetic texts in teaching, were similar in numerous ways. First, I want to note a “finding” that is especially tied to my methods. Perhaps as I ought to have expected, all four participants approached the “text set task” as a lesson planning exercise. In this sense, the teachers were being “good teachers” (just as some students can master the art of embodying the “good student”). Each participant completed the task by designing a full lesson plan (complete with an accompanying PowerPoint because, of course, we cannot teach without PowerPoint!), and each lesson included 2-5 aesthetic texts. Moreover, all four participants had clear objectives and learning outcomes for their respective lessons, another example of how Research Module 5 was not the free-flowing discussion of aesthetic textual attachments I imagined. I say all this because I felt initially disappointed in what the participants brought to our work together. In my fantasies of how Research Module 5 would play out, we would be discussing Baldwin, Cézanne, Atwood, August Wilson, or Dostoevsky, an exciting (but phantasmatic) collage of texts I knew to be moving, filled with affectivity. Through this, I would try to understand the participants’ attachments to the texts they brought, and then help them theorize how “The Grand Inquisitor” (Dostoevsky, 1880/1993), for example, might be used to 158 produce particular affects—sparks of affectivity—in their social studies classrooms. I feel foolish articulating this fantasy; it reads as not only idealist, but absurd. And I want to clarify that following analysis and interpretation of the data, I am excited about the findings I will discuss in this chapter. While the participants’ texts were unexpected, I should have realized this would be the case. The objects we are attached to, like aesthetic texts, are deeply personal and oftentimes obscured, even to our own selves (a phenomenon I address below). However, in writing a dissertation on affect and teaching, I believe it is especially important for me to take the time to slow things down; an embodied attentiveness to the reverberations of unfulfilled hopes and the pleasures found in getting lost, reaching what seems to be a dead end (Lather, 2007). One final methodological note: Reflecting on Module 5, I realized I might have designed the Module differently, especially my use of language in the task I emailed to the participants two weeks before our meetings. For example, I might have provided a list of examples of aesthetic texts, or even encouraged them to bring a text or two we had already discussed during previous Modules (Garrett’s attachment to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (Stowe, 1852/2019) is one example) along with some others. In this way, I might have disrupted the assumptions and expectations of the participants, a way of nudging them out of the teacher discourses that shape how we think, feel, and move, leading us back towards the same old ways of thinking (Jim Garrett, personal communication, December 2019). It is evident that, at least initially, the participants interpreted the Module 5 task through a teacher lens, a lens they use with comfort and expertise. Providing the participants with diverse examples of aesthetic texts—even trending towards the bizarre, difficult, and weird—might have colored their perceptions of the task in productive, exciting ways. 159 Findings First, all 4 participants anchored their texts in a social studies topic, ranging from climate crisis (Clodagh) and civil rights (Garret and Sahar) to the former president of Chile, Salvador Allende (Jake), and significantly, all 4 text sets were ones the participants had used in previous lessons. Second, and stemming from this, all four of the participants responded to my initial question (“Let’s begin by chatting about the text set you brought today. Walk me through the texts and explain to me why you like it, why it’s important to you, and how you use it in teaching?”) in a similar manner: they taught a lesson, and I mean this in a literal sense. Clodagh and Sahar opened PowerPoint presentations to deliver a social studies lesson in which their aesthetic texts were embedded, and while Garrett and Jake did not use PowerPoint, they walked me through a complete lesson, demonstrating where each text would be used and how they expected students to respond to it. I was surprised by this response, and I noted how long each participant spoke, uninterrupted, while delivering their lesson and “explaining” their aesthetic texts (see Table 1 for the participants’ text-sets and length of time speaking uninterrupted). Table 1: Participants’ Aesthetic, Textual Attachments, and Length of Time Speaking Uninterrupted Participant Texts Textual Mediums Speaking Time Clodagh -Photographs of -Photographs 13 minutes, 32 animals suffering -Video seconds from climate crisis -Student-produced art -Video of Bill Nye from around the discussing climate world (collage and crisis painting) -Video of Greta Thunberg’s speech at the Climate Action Summit, 2019 -Climate crisis art 160 Table 1 (cont’d) Garrett -“Fuck Tha Police” -Music 7 minutes, 15 seconds by N. W. A. -Sculpture -“Just a Girl” by No Doubt -“The Ballad of Ira Hayes” by Johnny Cash -“Wake Up Dolores” by Los Lobos -Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument, Kelly Ingram Park Jake -“I Am a Woman -Poetry 12 minutes, 33 Born of a Woman” -Music seconds poem -“Prayer for a Peasant” by Victor Jara -“The Plough” by Victor Jara Sahar -“The Birth of a -Film 16 minutes, 10 Nation,” directed by -Photograph seconds D. W. Griffith -Photograph of Black Americans demanding the right to vote Third, every aesthetic text was positioned at the start of each lesson, used as what Garrett called “a primer,” what Jake called “an engagement piece,” what Clodagh called “a conversation starter,” and what Sahar called “an emotional kick starter.” In this way, all of the texts felt marginal to the larger purpose of each lesson, lessons not about the texts themselves—how to analyze a photograph, for example, or what the affectivity of an N. W. A. song could do to 161 teachers and students—but lessons that tried to use an aesthetic text to create an experience, a fleeting, rushed experience, primarily concerned with cultivating “student buy-in,” a phrase every participant used throughout Module 5. Following this, the participants’ aims were grounded in the learning outcomes they hoped to observe by the end of each lesson, a finding I am struck by, especially considering the context of the activity: An experimental research module focused explicitly on aesthetic texts and social studies teaching. Fourth, I found it difficult to locate the participants’ aesthetic attachments. When disclosures occurred, they were offhanded, digressive, and often “separate” from discussions focused on teaching. And this makes sense; following Felski (in Gutkin, 2020), an affective attachment is a tie that is formed and strengthened relationally, institutionally, and/or politically. Affective attachments appear as appreciation, love, obsession, or whatever else, and, importantly, the uncovering of attachments occurs in relation. For example, in exploring the affective attachments of the participants’ in relation to concepts like democracy and protest (see Chapter 3), my interpretive findings drew not only from the subjective accounts of the participants, but also how I interpreted their attachments as embodied—and brought to bear—in their pedagogical responses to moments of affectivity. In this chapter I am exploring textual attachments, albeit ones that are closely and affectively held, and a number of factors stymied my attempts to uncover the affective, aesthetic attachments of the participants: the perceived demand to follow a given social studies curriculum; narrow conceptions of what counts as a social studies text; and a tenuous connectivity (or lack thereof) between the participants’ “teacher selves” and their aesthetic attachments. Fifth, the participants’ aesthetic texts largely represented what I will call “bad, sad worlds.” In examining the affects produced by their texts, affects of trauma, fear, threat, and lack predominate, and all of the participants articulated desires to emotionally “impact” their students 162 through textual encounters, an emotional impact they imagined as an affective response to texts representing racism (Garrett and Sahar), environmental catastrophe (Clodagh), and political violence (Jake) to name just three. Of course, as I argued in Chapter 4, “negative affects” can be used, quite powerfully, to move teachers and students, helping them world new futures, but I found the participants generally struggled to move from “bad, sad worlds” towards more just worlds, and oftentimes, student encounters with “sad aesthetic texts” were positioned as (a) an introductory end point or, (b) a means to a larger learning outcome, an end that remained stuck in the same depressing textual representations that started the lessons. A final finding I will share in this overview cuts across the findings I have already discussed. It is evident the participants think about social studies curriculum and teaching in a strict, disciplinary sense. This is not a bad thing, per se, but it limited the ways in which textual affectivity is invited, or not, into their practice, producing larger implications for how the aesthetic attachments of teachers—the texts they are tied to, love, and hold dear—are, for the most part, considered irrelevant to their work in social studies. For example, it was rare for a teacher to produce affects of joy, excitement, or interest in discussing an aesthetic text with me, and I found this affective “detachment” to be a prevalent theme throughout my work with the participants on Module 5. As I have mentioned, it was within informal, digressive portions of our discussions that I started to glimpse ties between the participants and aesthetic texts: Jake’s attachments to the letters of soldiers from the Civil War, letters he claimed “glowed” with the “emotions of history”; Garrett’s love for “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (Stowe, 1852/2019), and Sahar’s attachments to contemporary art. In the next three subsections, I explore various through lines (or themes) that will cohere the findings above. As with any theme in critical qualitative research, the boundaries of the themes below are porous, productively troubled by moments of dissonance, contradiction, and 163 ambivalence. According to Miller (1990), “points of dissonance are pinpricks in our consciousness; they sometimes sting at inopportune moments when we are most concerned with maintaining a smooth and unruffled countenance” (p. 85), and this chapter (and dissertation) is committed to sitting within these moments. Instead of painting a linear, neat picture that is neither accurate nor affective, I am open to “getting lost” (Lather, 2007) within compelling dissonances and points of rupture. This is not to say I am not writing towards truths, towards the construction of new knowledge; rather, it is an acknowledgement that this chapter’s findings, and the new worlds I imagine for social studies teaching, are contingent, continuously unfolding. Detached Attachments I found all 4 participants, to varying degrees, to be working within a sort of affective double-bind. On the one hand, simply asking the participants to collect aesthetic texts they are attached to revealed alternative, unaesthetic attachments, affective ties to linear lessons and approaches to teaching social studies that use aesthetic texts to jump start the class with a single burst of affectivity. Within this, it was clear the participants are attached to aesthetic texts they are used to teaching, texts they are comfortable with, and texts that are safe, producing predictable and manageable affects. In this way, the participants used aesthetic texts towards unaesthetic ends, a remarkable dissonance I noticed, and felt, throughout Module 5. These habits of the participants are ones we all recognize. It is natural to develop ways of doing things, like teaching, that ease uncertainty, stress, and preparation time. However, I argue the uninterrupted time each participant spent walking me through their text sets is one demonstration of the scripts teachers develop in talking about their work, and all of the participants embodied affects of detachment, weariness and lifeless routine as each monologue progressed. Now, on the other hand, Garrett, Jake, and Sahar embodied affects of shame and embarrassment as they started to 164 conclude their monologues. They seemed to realize the dissonances inhabiting their lessons, an awakening to the fact that they had just spoken, uninterrupted, for 7-16 minutes about an aesthetic texts lesson they all admitted to not thinking about deeply. As I mentioned, all of the participants used texts and lessons they had previously taught, and all of them mentioned they had reassembled (or found) their texts and lessons within the past 24 hours. I am not offended by the participants’ lack of forethought—they are busy, and working with a graduate student on his dissertation ranks low on their ladder of obligations. Rather, these examples of detached attachment to particular texts, lessons, and pedagogical approaches shows how certain teaching lives (and discourses) are overproduced. Of course, all of the participants are smart and critical teachers, but I argue the hegemonic affective landscapes of social studies teaching draw boundaries and forefront norms that discourage teachers from envisioning alternative engagements with aesthetic texts. Instructively, once the participants’ concluded their initial demonstrations of conventional teacher competence, it was as though a weight was lifted. They moved and spoke more freely, and I felt as though we were starting to embody affects of creativity and risk in our work. Jake, Garret, and Sahar specifically discussed texts and ideas they all “wished they had used” in our work together, a sort of bittersweet acknowledgement we made the most of moving forward. A Proper Place and Time The participants’ detached attachments to the aesthetic texts they collected for their text sets were situational, utilitarian, and seemingly unemotional. For example, there was a prevalent absence of feeling when Jake discussed the poem “I Am a Woman Born of a Woman,” an anonymous Chilean poem he has used for more than a decade, a poem he “found somewhere on the Internet.” In our discussion, Jake concentrated on the “content” of his lesson: Allende’s Chile 165 and U.S. incursions in Latin America in the 1970s, and it was a struggle to reorient him towards the text itself. It became evident the poem was simply an accessory to the lesson itself, a tangential text Jake attaches to content he covers annually. Me: Can we return to the poem for a minute? How do you the poem itself producing affects or moving students? What is really its use for you in the lesson? Jake: So…let’s see. I feel like for aesthetic texts…well, I use them primarily to engage students at the start. Then, when I challenge them with more traditional historiography and writing they’re more engaged with it. I’m using the poem as a hook rather than as the lesson itself because we’re moving towards what historians actually do, the formal writing, formulaic, and source-based work. Having kids read those poems and songs, it’s so they’ll be engaged in the historical conversation that comes next. The aesthetic texts are almost a supplement instead of a text. In this illuminating excerpt, Jake begins to articulate his theory of affective, aesthetic texts. I argue Jake is not affectively attached to the poem; instead, it is a detached attachment. Its affectivity is buried beneath routine and the promise of what is next; the actual work of historians—the “formal writing, formulaic, and source-based work” that is apparently unconcerned with aesthetic texts like “Woman.” In Jake’s lesson, students enter the classroom and read the poem with a partner. Attached to the poem is a worksheet with 5 questions, 4 of which asks for “facts” students are expected to draw from the poem. The final question moves away from facts, asking: “Are there any universal experiences here?” While this is an interesting question, Jake allotted 5 minutes to discuss the questions as a class before moving on. In the next activity, Jake and his students use the same format to encounter two songs by Victor Jara, a Chilean singer assassinated during the 1973 coup. I pressed Jake, asking him “What are you really trying to do with these texts; anything besides engage them for the larger part of the lesson?” His answers centered on the mind of the artist; he wanted students to think about the historical place and time in which the art was produced, asking them: “What was this poet thinking? Who would have the rationale to write these songs? Why write them?” In my field 166 diary following my session with Jake, I wrote: “It seems Jake, and most of the participants, don’t really know HOW to analyze, or engage with, a poem or other aesthetic texts. They’re too concerned with meaning.” For Jake, it seems the poem is nothing more than misshaped information. He does not think about the affectivity of the lyrical form, nor the affects attached to Jara’s songs (let alone the affectivity of his tragic story). I am not criticizing Jake’s pedagogical approaches, but I cannot help but notice how the affective potentiality of these three texts are never seriously considered. The affective, aesthetic experiences Jake is providing his students are characterized by their utility (to simply “engage”) and a rushed completion. The poet Archibald MacLeish (1985) wrote, “A poem should not mean, but be,” but it is evident Jake is not equipped to explore the poem beyond its meaning, an exercise constituted by its goal of shallow excavation and closure. In thinking about affective, aesthetic experiences in social studies teaching, this idea of how teachers are intellectually equipped, or not, to help their students have meaningful and rich aesthetic experiences is crucial, and it raises important questions about the role of prior knowledge within such experiences. Of course, the search for meaning is an essential component of education, so it is not as though Jake’s aims are wrong; rather, it is an issue of what meanings we are moving towards and co-constructing—in a poetic search for meaning in social studies, what is required? Greene (1978) wrote that “in order to penetrate a work of art, individuals must be equipped with a degree of cognitive understanding: they ought to have an acquaintance with figurative language…perceptual and cognitive awareness…opens apprehension…a necessary…condition for full engagement with the arts” (p. 180). I am intrigued by the emphasis Greene places on the cognitive understanding of the poem itself; it is not as though an aesthetic text like a poem can be encountered in an intellectual vacuum—the poem is not a magical device guaranteed to affectively move each and every reader. Greene and 167 Dewey (1934/2005) remind us, too, that every aesthetic experience is a layered product; an instantaneous aesthetic experience is not possible—in an unfolding reality that is constantly making itself, any experience is a “continuous…cumulative interaction of an organic self with the world” (p. 229). Understanding this truth, and considering its implications for social studies teaching, calls into question the ubiquitous use of aesthetic texts to “engage,” “prime,” and provoke students before simply moving on. Again, it is not as though such methods are incorrect or harmful, but within the grammar of social studies teaching (Evans, 2011), such uses of aesthetic texts form strong “detached attachments” in teachers, and I am concerned by what opportunities for meaningful, affective experiences are lost. For example, what if Jake’s students were provided the space to dwell with “Woman,” or one of Jara’s songs? A patient, open approach to an aesthetic text would not only produce affects of surprise, greatly troubling the grammar of social studies and the ways in which students are conditioned to engage with an aesthetic text, but what new futures might be glimpsed within a more careful curation of this aesthetic experience? After all, it is imagination that defines an aesthetic experience, the worlding that is produced within the entanglement that is the self, an aesthetic object, past experiences, knowledge, affects, the new and the old (Dewey, 1934/2005). Of course, this adjustment of aims would shift Jake’s lesson, what he is trying to move his students towards, but I argue the pieces are already there. Indeed, such a shift can occur through the same aesthetic texts, the same teacher and classroom, but it requires an embodied shift, too, an attitude of noticing—of slowing things down—a renewed attention to the small movements and vibrations Jake is otherwise rushing past. In addition, I interpret Greene’s (1978) “cognitive understanding” as qualitatively different from what Jake was aiming for in his lesson. Greene’s understanding is interested in 168 how the text is shaped, its form, how it moves, sings, or vibrates, a far cry from the cognitive understandings students might demonstrate in a one-sentence answer to a comprehension question. In this sense, the affectivity of the poem has to be both invited and accessed; it is not simply there, dripping, waiting to be consumed. In my own experience as a teacher, this rings true; for example, my attempts to engage my 8th grade students with Broch failed—I had not prepared my students for an encounter with a difficult aesthetic text. I think many good teachers know this, or feel this intuitively—the capacity of our students to engage meaningfully with one of our own aesthetic attachments—but it is interesting how often we hope texts will just “do their thing,” whether that is to “engage,” “prime,” or “provoke” our students. Greene’s point is that an aesthetic attunement to texts can be taught and learned, one way of more fully inviting and accessing a text’s affectivity, and she calls for teachers to embody the subject-position of an art critic. In this sense, critics teach; criticism “elucidates, describes, interprets, explains, and it involves discourse about the works of art themselves” (1978, p. 206), and again, this knowledge is different from the “content knowledge” about Allende and Chile Jake was aiming to cocreate with his students. And importantly, it is does have to be one or the other. Social studies teachers are, of course, under a multitude of curricular and pedagogical pressures, the affective regimes that compel us to move, and teach, in normative ways. My suggestion, here, offers one shift in attunement teachers might embody. Instead of moving through a poem and two songs in ten minutes, Jake and his students could, quite easily, spend an entire class on those three texts, a move that could open up their future engagements with both the content Jake wants to cover and the ways in which his students are able world and imagine new futures. Greene’s vision of this work is inspiring, and I will quote her at length: It is as if critics (or teachers) were to take their audiences (or students) on a journey through a work of art, pointing to those aspects of their principles or guiding concepts that make it possible 169 for them to see. They can point to qualities within a work, to color combinations, melodic sequences, metaphors, symbols, the action of a hero, the cinematic space within a film. By pointing, they endeavor to afford those who heed them new perceptions, new disclosures, so that they can more effectually realize the work in question for themselves. And that, after all is the test: whether or not critics (or teachers) can intensify another's appreciation, enrich vision, free him or her to bring a given work into being in his or her inner time (p. 207). While Jake did not embody a critic’s approach to exploring aesthetic texts with his students, I argue the potential is already there, and this is exciting. The aesthetic texts Jake brought to our work together are rich, moving, and filled with affectivity; the task, then, is to help teachers see how texts like “Woman” and Jara’s songs might be invited in, and accessed, in new ways. Moreover, Jake and Garrett especially have remarkable freedom in what they do as teachers (a gendered phenomenon I write more about in Chapter 6), and I argue Jake’s lesson shows how affective, aesthetic experiences in social studies are close by—it is not as though I am calling for embodiments of practice completely foreign to our field. Therefore, we ought to attend to issues of affective, aesthetic texts—and the experiences we might foster in classrooms—in social studies teacher education, a forum in which the grammar of social studies can be productively troubled for pre-service teachers. For example, in a social studies methods course like the ones I have taught, it is customary to spend multiple classes on social studies texts, teaching pre-service teachers how to read texts and helping them think deeply about what affective, aesthetic experiences provide students. Through this, we ought to equip pre-service teachers with new methods of approaching, and experiencing, texts; it is evident teachers use aesthetic texts primarily as a means to an end—“engagement”—a valid concern, but reductive in its misuse of aesthetic affectivity. Last year in a methods course I co-taught, we spent the better part of a class analyzing 2 historical photographs, first allowing the pre-service teachers to encounter the texts in their own ways before modeling alternative critical approaches. The questions we used to cultivate new forms of aesthetic encounters were crucial, but so too was the 170 unspoken; the embodied attitude of patient “dwelling within” we aimed to foster in our classroom. Slowing things down, letting the imagination—the “only gateway through which these meanings can find their way into a present interaction” (Dewey, 1934/2005, p. 283)—form ties between the old and the new, invariably demands a thrusting out into a future world. In this way, we see what Dewey means when he says “aesthetic experience is imaginative” (p. 283), a manner of perceiving, being, and feeling that functions on a virtual plane, an imaginative plane, a plane that is affective. The aesthetic text itself is an embodiment of the imaginative; to treat it as a vessel of content—akin to a textbook or worksheet—renders meaning, affect, and an awareness of union in “origin and destiny [emphasis added]” (p. 282) lost in translation. Jake was not the only participant to use aesthetic texts within a very particular—and brief—time slot, and for specific, introductory purposes. When Garrett finished walking me through his texts and lessons, I asked him to explain what he was trying to do with the numerous songs (see Table 1) he played for his students to open his lesson (what amounted to a unit) on civil rights. Garrett: I am focused on lyrical content, highlighting the issues we are about to embark on in class. The songs are primers, and that’s how I always use these sorts of texts, exclusively as primers, to ask the students to take look at the lyrics and consider, ‘What do you think they mean? Can you draw inferences from what these lyrics are explaining and describing?’ And then move we on. I am fascinated by this excerpt on a number of levels. First, it seems Garrett’s pedagogical aims would have been similarly achieved by simply printing the song lyrics (which he did) and not bothering to play the music. While he is using aesthetic texts, including a number of compelling, affecting songs, Garrett’s lesson does not facilitate affective, aesthetic experiences for his students; there is no direct encounter with the texts. In this sense, Garrett is not attached to the aesthetic texts he is using, but, like Jake, he is attached to a particular use of 171 aesthetic texts, a detached attachment that is generally unaesthetic in its realization. Yes, Garrett has his students listen to the N. W. A. song “Fuck Tha Police,” but I argue any direct encounters his students might have with this musical text are misdirected by the worksheets of lyrics and comprehension questions Garrett has them complete as they are listening. Greene (1978) says that “time must be taken so the work of art has some opportunity to inhabit the individual’s consciousness…the qualities and forms perceived…gradually take shape in experience…the listener is enabled to perceive things never before perceived in the surrounding world” (p. 192). I suggest Garrett’s lesson is not completely disconnected from Greene’s vision; it is a lesson filled with aesthetic textuality—and latent affectivity therein—but the encounters Garrett is facilitating are rushed and unconcerned with his students’ “individual consciousness,” their “perceptions” of the songs themselves. The nonlinguistic nature of music, perhaps its most unique and affecting quality, is not only superseded, but completely ignored, by Garrett’s focus on “lyrical content…and meaning.” Again, in many ways, the textual means for Garrett to open up the aesthetic experiences of his students are “already there” (Adams & Kerr, 2021). I argue this shift for Garrett would be an onto-epistemological shift, a new way of being and knowing, perceiving and feeling, an embodied commitment to slowing things down and being patient enough to notice the “gradual taking shape of experience” (Greene, 1978, p. 192) that can occur in his classroom. For example, what if students were given the time to have a direct aesthetic encounter with “Just a Girl” by No Doubt? Rather than answering questions about the time period and content of the song, how might the imaginative perceptions of Garrett’s students been encouraged to “perceive things never before perceived in the surrounding world,” to perceive issues of gender, capitalism, and suburbia in alternative ways (Greene, 1978, p. 192)? As Greene reminds us, this takes time, and teachers need to be willing to carve out the space, and time, for 172 aesthetic encounters to percolate. Following Garrett and Kerr (2016), Garrett’s aim might shift from bringing the past to life to bringing his students to life, and perhaps the scary part here, the part that makes aesthetic experiences so rare in social studies classrooms, is the unpredictability that is woven into this vision of an unfolding—and unknown—affective classroom landscape. I suggest social studies teachers like Jake and Garrett are just short of embodying this vision of an affective, aesthetic social studies; the texts are there, but transforming their detached attachments to reductive approaches (brief, introductory uses of texts) into patient, open-ended embodiments requires reflective reimaginations, on their part, of how social studies classroom life can be more aesthetic. Second, and picking up from this issue of detached attachments: It seems the texts Garrett uses in his lesson—the texts he claimed to be attached to and brought to our work together—are texts no one, in fact, is attached to, neither Garrett nor his students. This is not a judgement of the texts themselves—they are diverse, interesting, and vibrant in their own ways—but I am interested in how these texts came to be in the classroom, why and how they were chosen and invited. For Garrett, it was all about the content he is covering—various civil rights movements in the United States—and his description of how he chose the texts was notable for what factors were clearly marginal: the texts themselves. Garrett: I started with what I wanted to teach—civil rights movements—and then incorporated songs I’ve used over the years. The songs are symbolic of a specific time and place, what was going on in the country at the time, and so we’ll start with those to prime the students for what’s to come. Clearly, Garrett is attached to the texts he brought in particular ways, but I argue his attachment is a routinized attachment, a detached attachment that uses the songs as a means to an end, “symbols of a specific time and place” that are filled with content he expects his students to excavate. He explained this process: “I’ve used these for years. I just give them the album cover 173 and the printed lyrics and as the music plays I ask them questions, asking them to make inferences about this particular group of people based on the lyrics.” Above, I addressed this reappearing issue of a misdirected aesthetic experience, an experience that is never actually allowed to occur because students’ conscious perceptions are not provided the space and time to have a direct encounter with a given text. We see this again in Garrett’s description of his approach to using these specific texts, but I want to pivot, now, to a different issue: In collecting aesthetic texts for our work together, Garrett thought about the texts last. First, he thought of a topic before starting to construct a lesson, and he chose 4 songs he has used numerous times over the years. In fact, it is safe to say the musical texts he chose could be used for any number of social studies lessons, but for Garrett, they are tied to this lesson—they are symbolic of civil rights movements and the “particular group of people” the lyrics are based on. I am not framing this pejoratively; rather, I am interested in the implications of Garrett’s approach to Research Module 5 for how social studies teachers both choose (and use) aesthetic texts and how the texts they are encountering every day in their own teaching lives are, implicitly, kept out of their work as teachers. As I discussed in Chapter 3, of all the participants, Garrett is the most voracious reader; he is a deep, critical thinker, and he was open about his love of fiction, art, film, and other aesthetic texts. In this sense, I had curated a certain fantasy, in my own mind, of what Garrett’s teaching life, his affective, aesthetic landscape, looked like—what aesthetic texts and experiences constituted it—and how he brought these to bear in his teaching. So, I felt puzzled by Garrett’s work in Module 5; on the one hand, I do not want to draw conclusions from one task I asked Garrett to complete. He is a busy, full-time teacher, and as he told me, he “did not give Module the time it deserved.” Still, I suggest Garrett’s approach to the Module, his routinized detached attachments to 4 songs that fit squarely within a particular lesson, offer alternative 174 paths forward for how we discuss teaching lives and aesthetic texts and experiences in social studies teacher education. Garrett is not a foil—in his own words, he lives a “rich intellectual life” that is decidedly textual—but I will position this as an issue of invitation. For example, I suggest concepts like “aesthetic attachments,” “textual affectivity,” and “aesthetic (social studies) teaching lives” might enter into our work with pre-service teachers. Indeed, most of the future teachers we teach engage with aesthetic texts on a regular basis, but how often are their aesthetic experiences reflected upon, and considered, in relation their work as social studies teachers? Furthermore, how can we, as teacher educators, model a productive, life-giving dissolution of the teaching life/non-teaching life binary, a demarcation that seems to produce teaching lives that grow stale, homogenized, and generally unaesthetic? In this sense, my fantasies of Garrett’s teaching life, and what I hoped he would bring to our work together in Module 5, are one affective, imaginary production of my larger vision: Social studies teaching lives that are nourished by life-giving, aesthetic experiences, ones that might allow teachers to teach, think, and feel in new ways. Interlude: Sahar’s Affect What is it about teaching that renders cynicism as wisdom, expertise as homogenized routine, and imagination as naïve, dreams as bound to burst in the harsh weather that is a classroom? We see a similar dynamic in Bernanos’s (1937/2002) “The Diary of a Country Priest”: it turns out the priesthood is no place for worlding new futures—the young and idealist are quickly shown “how things are done” and either diminished or devoured. Sahar embodies a rebuke of the weary cynicism I have often encountered in schools, in my own life as a teacher. In relation, I felt Sahar to be vivacious and intent, curious and earnest. On Zoom, Sahar managed to exude a purpose—a vision—that was wholly felt, wholly her. Her affect reminded me of a 175 handful of pre-service students I have taught; insatiable, yet confident; increasingly aware of norms, of the affective regimes that shape teaching lives in schools, but brash enough, brave enough, to believe they can be overturned, or at least out run. In our first meeting at a Starbucks down the street from Lakeside, Sahar and I talked over lattes and pre-packaged danishes for more than two hours. We were scheduled to meet for an hour. She talked and talked, dashing through her extended family’s story—her grandparents’ teaching lives in Pakistan (her grandfather was a professor of history), their move to Chicago, their roots in the city, the neighborhood—and exploring, through her own digressions, her desires to relearn Urdu, dance with her students, and be a new type of teacher for her students—a Brown woman who “can really see them, really feel what they’re feeling.” As we twisted and turned our way towards a goodbye, a date set for my first visit, a meeting that would cease to exist “due to covid,” that phrase we have all learned to say in our sleep, Sahar started to cry. Affect, emotion: These were not simply “concepts” Sahar started to play with in our first meeting, learning the language she thought I wanted her to use. What I was describing to her, this study’s pitch, was uniquely legible to Sahar. By the end of our first meeting, Sahar was describing the affective landscape of Lakeside, a landscape she felt to be filled with “White affects.” She described the affective toll of walking into an all-White department meeting, both sure her ideas would be dismissed and unsure why: Was it her Brownness, her age, or her gender? She drew lines between microaggressions and affect, how they move in relation, perceived (and produced ) by a few and derided by others, unfelt. Affect is a tricky thing, its tendency to slip through our fingers as we try to talk about it. In Starbucks, Sahar and I were on the same plane. We knew what we were talking about. 176 Bad, Sad Worlds In my work with Garrett and Jake, their detached attachments to using aesthetic texts to start a lesson, to “prime” and “engage” students, imagined affect—and the affects produced by affective, aesthetic texts—as perfume in an atomizer. Through a brief spray of textuality, affects are produced, and spread, throughout the classroom. The participants predict the affect, the smell of the lingering scent, and they imagine its gradual saturation—upon bodies, in nasal cavities, in relation—as a necessary, but also habitual, assumed ingredient in the design and delivery of a given lesson. Garrett (2017) described this phenomenon of “affect dispersal” as a plume, a sort of force field of affective debris that accompanies the “impact of” (an encounter with) an aesthetic text. As I showed above, this introductory affective spray—its dispersal—is automatic for the participants, and they are more attached to this approach, this method, than they are to the texts themselves. In this sense, I argue it is particular affects, certain classroom scents, they are attached to producing, and smelling, in their practice as teachers, and generally speaking, the participants’ exhibited attachments to negative affective productions, a style of (un)worlding I call “bad, sad worlds.” Of course, humanizing and emancipatory approaches to social studies teaching ought to explore issues of injustice and violent, structural inequities, and all of the participants designed lessons centered on topics filled with complex and dynamic affects (civil rights (Garrett and Sahar), political struggle (Jake), and the climate crisis (Clodagh)), so I am not calling for an undue, and inappropriate, influx of “positive,” sentimental affects. Indeed, it is productions of the latter that are oftentimes attached to teaching about human rights in global education, for example. To stave off uncomfortable affects of depression and helplessness in confronting very large (global) systems of inequity, it is common for teachers to produce sentimental, “feel good” affects attached to ineffective but affective solutions (e.g., a school 177 fundraiser) instead of tackling the more difficult—and necessary—task: critiquing and subverting the system itself (and interrogating how we ourselves are implicated in its perpetuation of injustice) (Zembylas, 2018). Moreover, it is not the prevalence of “negative textual affects” I find to be most interesting; surely, teachers and students ought to encounter the difficult knowledge (Britzman, 2003) of the past and present in social studies class, and using textual affectivity to produce affects of uncertainty, ambivalence, and confusion is one example of how “aesthetic conflict” invites the inner lives of teachers and students into the project of teaching and learning (Garrett & Kerr, 2016). Rather, I am struck by the participants’ inattention to affect—to the affectivity of the texts they are using—and how they imagine the affects produced in their teaching (through the texts) as known, predictable, and static. If we extend the perfume metaphor, it is as though the participants are addicted to one familiar smell at the start of their lessons: the negative affects produced by aesthetic representations of racism, environmental degradation, and violent inequity. As I showed in Chapter X, negative affects can be used in worlding (Zembylas, 2018), and one potential of acknowledging and using affect (whether positive or negative) in social studies teaching is its capacity to help students embody new movements (like protest) that are productively foreign to hegemonic affective landscapes like schools. Here, though, I find the participants’ productions of negative affects (through aesthetic texts) to be routinized and one dimensional. In this sense, (un)worlding bad, sad worlds is offering a beginning without an end; of course, using aesthetic texts that produce negative affects is not bad practice, per se, but what are such texts actually doing? In short, what new worlds are they moving teachers and students towards? For example, in discussing how his students would be affected, or not, by the songs at the start of his lesson, Garrett said “it’s a matter of appealing to one part of them so they’re engaged 178 for the rest of the lesson.” The boys get “hyped” when he plays “Fuck Tha Police,” and the girls are sort of “drawn” to this weird White lady (Gwen Stefani) walking around in the suburbs. Of course, “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” makes them “all very sad,” it “is such a tragic story,” and “my Latino kids love Los Lobos.” Garrett’s students are not only robbed of direct, meaningful encounters with aesthetic texts (as discussed above), but the texts are bad, sad representations of various identity groups chosen by Garrett. I am not positioning Garrett’s attempts to engage his students as necessarily wrong, but I am interested in how the affectivity of the texts is rendered closed off and settled, not only because of issues of time and place, but in how affect’s capacity to open up relations, to world new worlds, is reduced to what Garrett, as the teacher, has already imagined as possible. Rather than fostering aesthetic experiences that are open, unfolding, and relational, Garrett’s texts are codified according to identities and expected (and implicitly acceptable) responses. Garrett’s texts represent worlds characterized by injustice and pain, and while there is a scenario in which Garrett’s students might have been moved—through affective aesthetic experiences—to explore issues of civil rights today, in their own lives and communities, in this lesson Garrett’s text set is limited to engagement; the lesson on civil rights remains largely historicized, and his students are stranded in bad, sad worlds. Garrett explained the trajectory of his lesson. Garrett: This is leading towards the students doing something regarding one of these groups of people, showing what they have learned. They can write some song lyrics, write a speech, or memorize a speech from a particular person they feel a connection to. While Garrett’s lesson is “bookended” by aesthetic textuality, the imaginations of his students are constrained by the lesson’s backwards orientation. Rather than carving out space for his students to have imaginative aesthetic experiences that might move them towards new 179 futures—thrusting them out into the world in new ways—the task at hand is centered on reconfiguring the historical content at the core of Garrett’s civil rights lesson (Greene, 1978). In her lesson, Clodagh used photographs of environmental degradation to produce affects of sadness, depression, and anguish. However, she was careful to emphasize how her aesthetic representations of bad, sad worlds were grounded in one aim: moving students towards more just futures. To be sure, “engagement” was her stated reason for starting her lesson with aesthetic texts, and Clodagh’s text set did not disclose her aesthetic attachments (she assembled the photographs from Business Insider the morning of our work together), but I argue Clodagh demonstrated a unique attention to textual affectivity itself, not only how the photographs in her text set produced negative affects, but what new worlds they were moving her students towards and how she ensured they got there. Clodagh: The purpose of the photos is to produce affects, to make them feel some emotion, and that might be affects of anger, depression, sadness, or surprise, but most importantly those affects will drive them to want to do something about climate change. I want them to be like, ‘What the hell? Why haven’t we done anything?’ So it’s about keeping it open and letting them have their own reactions…You have to get them emotionally hooked and engaged at the start, to make them start to care, so they do a good job on the rest of the lesson—brainstorming and making policies that actually work. You can see the difference between the kids who care and don’t care in how they write, how they problem solve. I am struck by a number of things in this excerpt. First, I want to highlight Clodagh’s willingness to facilitate aesthetic experiences that are “open…letting (students) have their own reactions,” a markedly different approach than Jake’s and Garrett’s tendencies to misdirect the aesthetic experiences of their students by attaching comprehension questions to their texts. In this way, Clodagh’s students’ aesthetic encounters with bad, sad worlds are not historicized and content-driven, but used to “drive them to want to do something about climate change.” Her students are provided the time to experience the affectivity of the texts, an intimate space in which they might imagine their future selves in future worlds, perhaps mapping future steps they 180 might take to address the injustices they are witnessing. Second, while Clodagh did not mention empathy in this excerpt, I argue affects of empathy are being produced in these aesthetic encounters. Boler’s (1999) complication of empathy, a common affective goal of social studies teachers, is helpful here. She discusses the “risks of empathy,” making important distinctions between a passive empathy that protects the self and an active empathy that centers meaningful responses to injustice, an embodied style of reading she calls “testimonial reading,” an acknowledgement of the entanglements between the “reader and the text and the conflicts represented” (p. 165). In this sense, Clodagh’s students are bearing witness to the environmental degradation brought about by the climate crisis, and this largely affective, inner work is another demonstration of how attending to affect in teaching—the facilitation of affective, aesthetic experiences—requires not only time and space, but future action. Third, and attached to this, is the complicated actions Clodagh makes available for her students. While the data is limited in this being a conceptualized lesson, Clodagh’s design leads towards what she called an “authentic assessment”: “brainstorming and making policies that actually work.” On the one hand, a focus on “policy” is one pragmatic attempt to world alternative political futures, ones that are less toxic and more just. On the other hand, we might return to Boler’s (1999) concept of “testimonial reading,” a style of relational aesthetics (Garrett & Kerr, 2016) that demands reflexivity, a willingness on the part of the reader, the witness, to consider their own complicities in the injustice they are confronting. Clodagh does not explicitly discuss these relational aspects of the aesthetic encounters she is creating for her students. While students have an implicit, quiet, and imaginative opportunity to place themselves in relation to the bad, sad worlds they are witnessing in the photographs, Clodagh’s pedagogical approach does not explicitly nudge her students into the more difficult, painful realm of implication. Because of this, it is easy to 181 imagine “brainstorming” and “policies” that remain comfortably detached from the very necessary—but affectively, psychically difficult—shifts in ways of being we must consider in order to address the climate crisis in meaningful ways. Indeed, the climate crisis is the most pressing moral and ethical issue of our time, and it is a dilemma that produces affects of fear and existential threat. It is essential, then, that social studies teachers think carefully about issues of affect. If the climate crisis commonly produces affects of hopelessness and powerlessness, it is specifically affective work that will use these negative affects to world new futures, and this will require explicit engagements with the emotions and feelings of teachers and students, as well as critical interrogations of the affective regimes that allow us—help us, even—to feel as though we are too insignificant to make a difference (van Kessel, 2020). Finally, I want to note Clodagh’s interest in shocking her students, making them “wide awake” (Greene, 1978) to the environmental catastrophe that is unfolding. Instructively, she imagines a student’s response to their affective, aesthetic encounter with a photograph: “What the hell? Why haven’t we done anything?” In this, we see how the imagination—and future worlds—are invariably a part of aesthetic encounters, and to be “wide awake” is to do two things at once; (a) glimpse the constructedness of our reality (how reality is constantly making itself), and (b) recognize the availability of reality itself to be shifted. This affective work embraces the multiplicitous possibilities inherent to the present and future, and it is work that requires a particular wide awake authenticity from teachers and students; a willingness to not only be in the world, but also to take responsibility for how things are—and to have the courage to world better futures. Aesthetic Attachments: A Matter of Experience and Complexity For the most part, the aesthetic, textual attachments of the participants did not extend beyond their classrooms. The majority of the aesthetic texts they brought to our work together 182 were texts they returned to every year for one particular lesson, and as I demonstrated above, I found their attachments to be more pedagogical than aesthetic (what I called “detached attachments”); the participants are habituated to using the same aesthetic texts towards the same ends—producing affects of engagement and interest, the affective scent they are accustomed to smelling at the start of their lessons. Of course, this is not to say the participants are not attached to aesthetic texts; better put, I was generally unsuccessful in uncovering the attachments I was expecting to see at the start of this study, and the lines I have grown used to blurring in my own practice (teaching life/non-teaching life, social studies text/non-social studies text) are lines I found to be powerful organizing forces in how the participants make sense of their own identities as teachers. However, I want to touch on two texts brought by two of the participants (Sahar and Garrett): (a) the film “The Birth of a Nation” (Griffith, 1915) (Sahar), and (b) the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument in Kelly Ingram Park (Garrett). I am highlighting these texts because in my work with Sahar and Garrett, the attachments of both participants to each respective text were disclosed. Interestingly, though, neither text played a large role (in any) in the lesson they prepared for our work together, but their attachments to each text were brought to bear through digressive, and what I will call affective, discussions about aesthetics generally, as well the impactful aesthetic experiences each of them had with their respective texts. Through this, I glimpsed an interesting divide: On the one hand, both Sahar and Garrett discussed their separate experiences with the film and the statue, experiences that occurred “beyond” their official duties as social studies teachers at Lakeside, but worked upon them affectively, bringing them to life, and helping them see the past and the constructedness of particular narratives in a new light. On the other hand, they struggled to facilitate similar (or even dissimilar, albeit powerful) aesthetic experiences for their students’ encounters with the same text. However, I 183 found the attachments of both teachers to be constituted by, (a) their own aesthetic experiences with each text, as well as, (b) a certain complex disruption provided by the affectivities of the film and the statue. In this sense, the attachments of the participants were strengthened by their perceptions (within the aesthetic experience) of the swirling contradictions and complexities embedded within a particular representation. I argue this complexity is foundational to an aesthetic experience that is meaningful and resonant. Through aesthetic affectivity, the participants’ views of the past, themselves, and imagined futures are disrupted, and they both said the texts (film or statute) “pushed them to see things differently.” Indeed, it is impossible to remain the same following a meaningful aesthetic experience. Aesthetic Experiences and Teaching Lives For Sahar, “Nation” fit well into the lesson she built on voting rights movements in United States history. Working from the mid-19th century to the present day, her sprawling lesson moved from Black voting rights to women’s suffrage to current attempts by the right to curb largely Black and Brown citizens from voting in a number of states. In walking me through her lesson, Sahar used a 34-slide PowerPoint and took over 16 minutes. I could tell she was nervous, and in that moment I felt acutely aware of the power attached to the subject-position of the researcher, especially in relation to an early-career teacher. Sahar’s aesthetic texts were primarily photographs of Black and Brown citizens protesting the right to vote, and a number of slides were devoted to one photograph with questions attached. “Nation” was her only non-photo text, and during her walkthrough we watched a 2-minute scene from the end of the film. The scene is titled “The riot in the Master’s hall,” and it depicts “The negro (sic) party in control in the State House of Representatives, 101 blacks against 23 whites, session of 1871.” For two minutes, we see Black Representatives chatting amiably, taking pulls of whiskey, smoking, and 184 leering at the few White women in the gallery. The final 30 seconds of the clip depicts, “Passage of a bill, providing for the intermarriage of blacks and whites,” ending with Black Representatives cheering, White women fleeing, and chaos ensuing. Sahar imagined asking her students, “What impact would this scene have on an audience watching this? Would it make an impression on people and encourage them to act in a certain way? If so, what way?” After discussing these questions for 3 minutes, Sahar’s lesson moved forward, and contrary to her colleagues (specifically Garrett and Jake), Sahar imagined her students discussing these questions verbally rather than writing their answers. Before I circle back to Sahar’s own attachments to “Nation,” I want to dig deeper into Sahar’s pedagogical framing, and facilitation, of this aesthetic experience for her students. I have watched this scene no less than 10 times now, and it is as visually affecting as it reads. In watching, I embodied affects produced by the film, affects of shame and disgust, anger and humiliation, but also interest, a sort of curious fascination with the endurance of the same racist tropes we can easily glimpse today in contemporary racist discourses: White supremacy, White fear, Black sexuality, discourses regarding “work ethic,” and whatever else. I am struck, then, by how Sahar’s questions, however unintentionally, decenter—and ignore—her students’ own affective, embodied responses to watching this scene. As the majority of her students identify as Black and Brown, the film’s affective productions could very well be painful and humiliating. It is not that Sahar is wrong for using this text, but I want to highlight her inattention to the very real, and current, affectivity of the film (even though it is over 100 years old). Surely, Sahar’s questions demonstrate her awareness of aesthetic affectivity; “impression,” “impact,” and asking how a film might “encourage people to act in a certain way” are smart, thoughtful approaches to the affectivity of texts, their capacity to move us. However, Sahar’s questions do not engage with 185 the affective landscape of her classroom—the film’s productions of affects working upon the bodies of her students—and while she is engaging her students’ imaginations, a crucial component of any aesthetic experience, her questions historicize the film, rendering it dead and un-affective. Similar to the other participants, Sahar is moving too quickly through this aesthetic experience. On the one hand, Sahar’s use of “Nation” is perhaps the most affective text I encountered in my work with the participants on Module 5, but on the other hand, her facilitation of this aesthetic experience for her students is still rushed when it could be patient, still historicizing when it could be attentive to the present and future. After Sahar completed her lesson walkthrough, I asked her about the film (“Talk to me about ‘Nation.’ Why did you choose this text? Is it one you’d say you’re attached to in any way?”), and our discussion revealed an interesting dissonance between her own aesthetic attachment to “Nation” and her pedagogical approach above. Sahar first encountered “Nation” in her final class as an undergraduate, a history course designed for future social studies teachers. It was her “favorite class in college,” and it “basically turned into a film course…the professor had us watch a film from each decade and then discuss it…how we could use them in our own teaching.” I asked her to reflect on her first aesthetic encounter with “Nation.” Sahar: We watched all 3.5 hours of its silent glory, and it’s a really powerful movie. I felt like it was so messed up…I was shocked. I was like, this is wild! And a lot of these ideas, a lot of the symbolism that’s present throughout, is mirrored in the systematic problems we have today. How things function, how governments function, and just the evil of White supremacy. But I was just flabbergasted, and so angry, by this selfishness, this…hate. I am struck by the dissonance between Sahar’s reflection upon her own affective experience with the film and her pedagogical use of the film: The absence of an active acknowledgement of the film’s affectivity within her own classroom. And as we talked more, it became evident that “time” is, once again, a sort of catch-all excuse for what we “wish we could 186 do” but simply cannot. However, I am positioning Sahar’s use of “Nation” as unique in relation to the other participants’ texts. As opposed to detached attachments constituted by pedagogical routine, Sahar’s attachments to “Nation” are shaped by her own aesthetic experiences with the text, experiences I did not uncover with the other participants. But in our discussion, while Sahar demonstrated a brilliant attention to what the affects produced by films (like “Nation”) can do to teachers and students in social studies, the majority of the issues we discussed were absent from her lesson. To get through her 34 slides, there was no time to attend to the affective, embodied responses of her students. She said, “My students definitely think this movie is crazy, and it forms a great foundation for getting them ready for the Constitution Test and knowing all of these amendments.” In this way, Sahar’s aesthetic attachment to “Nation” remains detached from her classroom work; while she has used it multiple times as a teacher, she has not figured out how to use the film as an affective, aesthetic text in her work. Still, the potential is there, and it is a potential that springs from Sahar’s initial, powerful experience with the text, and in our discussion Sahar started to productively digress, mentioning the multiple pathways she could explore with her students in future teaching worlds. Sahar: Oh yeah, I mean there’s so many awesome examples of how representations are affective and mess you up, like on an emotional level. And then it’s, what do you do with that I guess? All over the film we see Black men characterized as villains, as dangerous sexual beings. There’s a freed former slave who they depict as this crazed guy…and the way they portrayed him—his body and the way he talked and walked—it was nonhuman, like a beast—and the power of that is, I think, on an emotional level, just seeing that is something worth exploring. Here, we glimpse Sahar’s ability to theorize the affectivity of an aesthetic text. It is an initial offering of “what might be” in future classroom worlds, spaces in which students are provided the time to have direct, aesthetic experiences with texts, experiences that can be imaginatively perceived and productively, thoughtfully reflected upon in social studies classrooms. In my view, what is unique about Sahar’s use of “Nation” is less about her use of the 187 text (to be clear, she did not explicitly engage her students with any of the issues above) and more about her attachments to “Nation,” attachments I am offering as formed within a teaching life that is open and textual. I acknowledge Sahar encountered “Nation” in a teacher education classroom, so perhaps “Nation” is a weak example of an “open and textual” teaching life, but of all the participants, Sahar’s textual experience with “Nation” stood out. She exuded affects of excitement, interest, and curiosity in discussing it. There was passion, an embodied investment in not only reflecting upon her initial encounter with the text, but also in theorizing how she could teach it affectively (ironically, in completely different ways than she taught it in the lesson she shared). Moreover, Sahar was (along with Garrett) the participant I was most eager to work with on Module 5 because of how I saw them embody aesthetic teaching lives, however fleetingly or contradictorily. Both of them regularly shared their aesthetic experiences with art, novels, and music, and Sahar’s digressions often circled back to contemporary art, Bollywood films, and modern dance, three aesthetic attachments she (unfortunately) did not bring to our work together on Module 5. But of course, over the course of this study I grew to know the participants, and their aesthetic attachments were often revealed informally, during “downtime,” or at the end of our Modules. In numerous ways, Sahar’s attachments enliven her teaching: her habit of showing Bollywood films to decenter Eurocentric narratives; founding a Dance Club at Lakeside; and enjoying her students’ puzzling looks in encountering some of her favorite contemporary art pieces. I say all of this to both highlight the limitations of this study (especially the move from field observations to Zoom) and also show how the aesthetic attachments of teachers are, in many ways, already there. It is more a matter of inviting them into their teaching lives, their classrooms, and slowing things down to experience and share with their students. 188 Complex Aesthetic Experiences In all of our work together, Garrett and I spent the most time talking about a statue, and somehow, it was an aesthetic text Garrett did not include in his lesson. Still, our discussion shed light on how the aesthetic attachments of teachers are shaped. For Garrett, issues of complexity and contradiction constitute his attachments to the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument in Kelly Ingram Park, and his experiences with the statue moved far beyond his routinized detached attachments to the songs he used in his lesson. While the songs were framed, and delivered, as simple engagement texts, producing affects Garrett was habituated to smelling at the start of a lesson, his attachments to “Birmingham” were shaped, and strengthened, by affects of interest and excitement, intellectualism and complexity. Garrett and I discussed the statue for nearly 20 minutes, and countless issues arose: the textuality of a statue; matters of representation and form; whether a statue ought to tell a “true story ” or simply be “symbolic of an entire group of people”; who a statue represents, and how this is determined; the pedagogical purpose, or potential, of a statue, and how social studies teachers can use statues in their work. Here, I want to focus less on Garrett’s conceptual interpretations of these issues than his assemblage of these complex, difficult issues: How they demonstrate Garrett’s affective, aesthetic attachments to the text that is “Birmingham.” Figure 4: Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument in Kelly Ingram Park 189 As we discussed the statue, Garrett provided background on his own encounters with it, a series of layered, textual engagements that lent him diverse lenses through which to view the statue as a text (see Figure 1). Importantly, the statue is based on a photograph, one of the most iconic photographs from the Black civil rights movement, but recent reporting has argued the scene depicted was an accident: The boy was turning a corner and surprised a policeman and his dog. In fact, the policeman is holding the dog back from biting the boy while grabbing the boy’s shirt to support him. I am not concerned with this recent “debunking” of the photograph (and subsequent statue), but I am fascinated by Garrett’s fixation on this counterstory, a sort of latent truth that underlies the “false” representation that is the statue. And Garrett touched on the affectivity of the photograph and statue, highlighting the affects produced by the photo, “true or not.” He said, “So this statue was made thanks to a freak accident of a photograph that was going to make the photographer look good and win that photographer all kinds of awards, but it was also good for the civil rights movement. The photograph was printed in all the papers across the world. Great. Even if it was a mistake, the representation itself is still true. I love that complexity.” In this moment of speaking, Garrett is embodying affects of excitement. He is alive, and his body is animated in a qualitatively different way than it was during his lesson walkthrough. I argue it is the inherent complexity of the statue—its story, its paradoxically true/false representation—that is affecting Garrett, and it is this affectation that constitutes his aesthetic attachment to this text. Similar to Sahar, Garrett’s theorization of the statue started to veer into future classroom worlds (quite different worlds from the lesson he shared), and he began to imagine how he might use “Birmingham” in lessons to come. Of course, it might have been easier—and perhaps more instructive—if Garrett’s work in Module 5 focused exclusively on this aesthetic text, but it was as though we needed to work through his detached, un-affective 190 attachments before stronger, more authentic attachments could be disclosed. In worlding a future aesthetic experience for his students, Garrett focused on the duplicity of affect, its ability to both move us and simplify, providing feelings that are sweet but vapid. Garrett: I think one really interesting place we could to go here is the falsity of feeling in many ways. Of course, this text represents the emotional landscape—and the experiences—of an entire group of people. But there is another side to every story, and in this moment the statue depicts, it is likely inaccurate, and that’s just one more example of how you don’t want to be complacent with what you’re experiencing, what you’re being told to feel. You’re going to have your own affective responses and believe what you want to believe, but complacency is ignorance. Ironically, this was not the focus of Garrett’s aesthetic texts lesson, and I do not say that judgmentally, but hopefully. Garrett’s attachments to “Birmingham” are rooted in his prior encounters with the text, but also in his deep knowledge of the work itself—its story, its contradictions, and its fascinating complexities. It is texts like these that animate Garrett, and it is hopefully texts like “Birmingham” that Garrett can continue to invite into his classroom. The inquiry he started to world above can become a reality, and it is another example of how issues of affect can be centered in social studies teaching and learning. 191 CHAPTER 6: AFFECTIVITY IN TEACHER DISCUSSIONS Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic. –Michel Foucault An act can never be withdrawn. –Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart I want to start this chapter with a brief admission. When I was designing this study and writing what would become my dissertation proposal, I became intellectually obsessed with one goal: nailing down affect. I read and read, not only “primary sources” like Spinoza, Freud, and Tomkins, but also more recent conceptualizations of what can affect do, where it is located, and what it is: Is affect human, posthuman, or nonhuman? Is it akin to Freud’s drive system, or does it function beyond the human on multiplicitous planes of virtuality? Is it the same “thing” as what I had called “emotion” for most of my life, or is it an altogether different force I had always sensed, felt, but never named? The more I read, the more affect alluded me; the dizzying, diverse theories of affect I encountered did nothing to satiate what I thought I desired—clarity. It was not until I stopped reading (for a time) and forced myself to sit and write (that strange phenomenon wherein the mind loses itself in the body, an act imaginatively entangled with affects of anxiety and doubt before they are washed away (for a time) by an outpouring of the act itself) that I began to feel differently about affect. And I am using “feel” intentionally here; regardless of how much I read about affect, it was not until I embodied my own conceptions of affect (through writing, speaking, and actually carrying out this study) that I started to “feel” shifts in my own 192 onto-epistemological attunements to the affective realm.6 In this sense, what I read was brought to bear and rendered meaningful through its relationship to my own intuitions, embodiments of affect, and unfolding sense-making, a theory of affect that took shape through writing. I also realized the importance of context in studying affect. While much of affect theory can seem to revel in its abstract remove from everyday life, my writing was attracted to projects in affect studies that prioritize specificity and location, embodied experiences and context. If affect itself felt squishy and amorphous, then situating my study squarely in a practice (social studies teaching) and location (Lakeside High School) was crucial to my empirical vision, a bracketing of affect’s multiplicitous relations to ones I could effectively attend to and explore. My desires to “understand” affect have not lessened, but my desires have been productively diluted with an openness to the malleability of language, its fallibility and uncanny ability to make us nervous (Berlant et al., 2017). Debates over definitions of affect, emotion, and feeling completely miss one promise of affect—its disclosure of folds, layers, and other worlds within a reality that can appear—and feel—stuck, rote, and concrete. Here, we move from lesser concerns of what affect is (as defined) to what affect can do, and what qualitative explorations of affect, for example, might provide practices of everyday life. Of course, defining the concepts we are talking about and using in our work is critical, but I am working against a tendency in affect theory—and the humanities generally—to “keep snapping at the world as if the whole point of being and thinking is just to catch it in a lie” (Berlant & Stewart, 2019, p. 42). It is easy to draw a line between such reductive embodiments of critique and my desires to “nail down affect,” but I also want to clarify that my theory of affect—the concepts I have used to analyze and interpret 6 I remember a similar feeling at the conclusion of an Advanced Qualitative Methods: Phenomenology course taught by Dr. Kyle Greenwalt—the ways in which particular methods of exploring human experience can fill up the observer, even change them, providing new ways of inhabiting and seeing the world, of being, of relating to others and living the good life. 193 my work with the participants—are neither correct nor undertheorized. By this I mean that my use of affect in this study—my unfolding theory of affect—is an entangled assemblage, a theory constituted by what I read, my intuitions, my research inquiry, my participants, my own embodiments of affect, my contexts, and whatever else. Berlant’s and Stewart’s (2019) point is not anti-critique—they are not suggesting concepts like affect should escape smart, rigorous theorizations in scholarship. Instead, they are pointing out one paradox of reductive critique in relation to affect; its tendency to define rather than productively open up, narrow rather than multiply—a direct challenge to the potentialities inherent to affect. In this sense, using a concept correctly, or defining it in a way that avoids the snapping mouth of critique, is superseded by a focus on movement, on how writing can engage in the speculative possibilities of affect. Berlant and Stewart call this style of writing “a labor of being…a matter of feeling your way in” as you go, an approach that is as creative as it is reflexive. “You have to start somewhere…light on something, you lean into a realism of slippages and swells” (p. 38), a way of shaping worlds, of writing, that makes words “balloon” and keeps on making, making, making (p. 82). I have written about worlding in this study—how the participants world new worlds with their students—but I have also tried to world as a researcher, as a writer, to make, make, make. In this sense, “nailing affect” is not about articulating a correct theory of affect; it is about using affect—writing with affect—in ways that are fundamentally interested in disrupting our realities—whether in social studies teaching, teacher education, or social studies research—that are too easily perceived as given and concrete. It seems, then, a theory of affect is as good as it is filled to capacity with imaginative potentialities for more just future worlds. And as I highlighted in this study’s introduction, we might focus on movement as a conceptual move towards an 194 embodied clarity; just as no thought can be abstractly lived, any theory (like affect) must be felt and lived, attended to—this is praxis. Interlude: Jake’s Affect I visited Jake’s classroom for the first time almost 3 years ago. It was summer, I had just completed my second year of graduate work, and I was back in Chicago. My partner Lizzy and I had vacated the house we were renting in Lansing, and while the next house we were set to rent would be ready in August, she was prepared to spend the summer in Connecticut for an internship. I, on the other hand, returned to my parents’ basement. Waking up at 6 A.M., I would run 2 miles down a bland suburban road and turn back, catch the end of an early World Cup game, and then schlep to the Metra for a ride into the city, bouncing between various cafes to write and read before I gave in and hopped back on the train with a crowd of evening commuters. On the best days, I would meet up with a friend or two and crash on a couch. It was not a bad summer—and I am incredibly fortunate to have such a hospitable family—but it was a profoundly infantilizing summer. I remember thinking: I am almost 32 and I feel as though I am still an undergraduate. It seems internal crises and self-doubts are common to the graduate school experience, but that summer was unique, a crossroads of sorts—a reckoning with what I desired and what it required. A few times that summer I had the opportunity to visit social studies classrooms as a researcher. Working on a research team with Dr. Maribel Santiago, I was assigned to visit two classrooms in Chicago, one of which was Jake’s at Lakeside. Jake and I had never met, but a close friend of mine—and former teaching colleague—is an Assistant Principal at Lakeside, so he ushered me upstairs to introduce me to Jake. I clearly remember my first glimpse of Jake’s classroom: Jake is leaning back against his desk, arms loosely folded, his head back in the 195 middle of a long laugh. Three students are sitting around him in a disorganized semi-circle. One is doubled-over laughing while the other two are swaying back and forth on their chairs like trees in a breeze. The mood of the room was joyful, relaxed, and harmonious. There were about ten minutes left before bell and Jake had invited 3 students to escape the lunchroom. I introduced myself to Jake and the students, and we casually chatted for the remainder of the period. All three students asked Mr. Sulcov why he, their favorite social studies teacher—“The best we’ve ever had!”—was not also getting his Ph.D. Jake brushed this off with characteristic humility: “I can’t write! Publish or perish would do just that—perish me!” More laughs ensued. Jake’s affect, his aura, was friendship, kindness, and a sort of unguarded openness to the idea that yes, we might very well become friends in this. After his students left, I explained the purpose of my visit and he enthusiastically described the Latinx Studies course he was teaching and I would be observing. I videotaped the lesson (the sole purpose of my visit) and then we chatted for his entire planning period; Jake, telling me his life story and how he came to teaching at Lakeside, and me, listening, responding to his earnest, authentic questions about my own pathways through education. I told him I would be conducting my dissertation research in a few years time and, within that affective space we had both shaped in relation, I felt compelled to ask him if I could contact him in the future. Would he like to participate perhaps? Jake wore a Lakeside baseball hat, backwards, to every one of our meetings. As I waited for Jake to appear on Zoom, I caught myself wondering how baseball would come up in that particular meeting. And not that I minded; as a former high school coach myself, we had plenty to chat about—our experiences playing baseball in college, our favorite teams (Jake roots for the Cubs while my Red Sox have only embarrassed me since I started this study), and then, of course, our current on-field exploits. I played in a wooden bat league in Lansing while he played 196 in a men’s league in Chicago. The fact that I played on Jake’s team this past summer, after this study was concluded, is one simple example of Jake’s affective pull, a committed eagerness to connect, to “hang out,” and build a relationship. In the days following our Initial Interview, Jake and his wife welcomed their second child, and soon our meetings were pushed from 8 P.M. to past 9 P.M., a reflection of Jake’s and his wife’s packed schedules: Both teaching remotely (his wife Leah teaches at Lakeside too) and caring for two young children. Not once did Jake ask to reschedule or miss a meeting, and his quip—“Alright, man! Let’s dive into this!”—became a de facto opener to our work on a given Module, a sort of burst of affectivity we both relied on to fill us up for the work ahead. Social Studies Teachers Talking About Affect The Focus Group was the only time during this study all of the participants were convened at once. However, it is likely that if this study had been conducted in normal times (as planned), I would have observed a number of planned and/or unplanned group meetings in the field; all four participants are in the same Department, and all of them work together on the same planning team for Civics. Point being, they know each other well, and once the Zoom room opened, Garrett greeted everyone with a loud, “It’s just like a Civics meeting!” But despite this early jolt of energy, I felt as though the Focus Group was saturated with affects of apathy and weariness. I reflected upon my own perceptions of the affects our Group produced (I am intentionally including myself as a “Group producer” of affects) directly following the conclusion of the Group. Peter (May 5, 2020): Well, it’s over. Feeling anti-climactic…unsure, frustrated, annoyed, proud in some ways, irritated in others. There it is again, this affect of annoyance7 I have mentioned a 7 An “affect of annoyance” captures the nagging, inexplicable irritation we truly embody. “I don’t know why I feel annoyed” is a sensation running from the stomach to a quick twitch of the eye and a sudden flex of a hand. An attempt to “squeeze out” the affect, perhaps, a sort of intuitive acknowledgement that what we “know” we feel is not always of our own choosing. 197 lot in this document. It seems to be necessarily produced by Zoom. Dammit. What am I desiring I can’t get? While these sentences are laced with frustration, doubt, and desire, I want to be clear; the participants’ work during the Focus Group opened up numerous pathways for me to explore—it is not my aim to be needlessly negative. However, I want to attend to the very palpable affects I was embodying during, and after, the Focus Group, so to do this I am going to start this chapter’s findings from a new vantage point, one alternative way of exploring affect. On the one hand, the findings in this chapter will explore how the participants, in a unique Group format, talked about affect in relation to their practice, and I will provide my interpretations of what they said and created. On the other hand, another way of studying affect within the Focus Group is to dive into the “folds of affect,” to look at affect on the move as the participants discussed affect itself, a sort of doubling (or layering) of what it means to be investigating affective phenomena. So then, I am attending to both affect’s embeddedness within affective/discursive practices like teaching and its non-linguistic appearances within the embodiments (e.g., micro-gestures) of the four participants (Boler & Davis, 2018; Garrett & Alvey, 2020; Wetherell, 2013). I am doing this for a few important reasons. First, qualitative methodological approaches for studying affect generally require an attention to embodiments of affect, to movement (Timm Knudsen & Stage, 2015). I have still centered the affective embodiments—the movements—of the participants throughout this dissertation, even if their affective embodiments were pedagogical fantasies of future movements, but this chapter goes further by exploring the affective folds of embodied, in situ data from the Focus Group. Second, this chapter reinforces and extends recent scholarship that views affect and emotion as inherent to classroom life (Boler & Davis, 2018; Garrett & Alvey, 2020), an orientation that, crucially, informs methodologies. Garrett and Alvey (2020) analyzed particular 198 frames of a videotaped discussion in a social studies classroom (to study affect on the move), but I am not aware of any other studies in the field of social studies education that have explored teacher (or student) embodiments of affect with in situ data (Zoom or otherwise). Affective methodologies (Timm Knudson & Stage, 2015) that center embodiments of affect are no longer unique to the field of qualitative inquiry, but I am offering this chapter’s methodology as an additional starting point for our field (building from Garrett & Alvey, 2020); an empirical experiment focusing on how social studies teachers embody affects while talking about affect—a glimpse of how affect moves, what it does, and how affective regimes and structures shape such discussions. Finally, any space is affective. Our bodies are impressed upon by affects produced through, and within, our relation to other bodies, texts, and any wide range of objects in a given space. In a virtual world, I observed, and embodied, how this “relation” is not entirely erased by Zoom. But, to be sure, our bodies matter, and virtual, remote teaching and learning—let alone qualitative Research Modules—are far different “affective spaces” than my handful of visits to Lakeside. Similarly, in my exploration of the Focus Group as an affective space, I started by focusing on the micro-gestures of the participants, looking first at what affects I interpreted them to be embodying before placing particular embodiments into relation with group-wide affective productions and other forms of linguistic and non-linguistic communication. Affective Structures in Teaching Social Studies: Examining Gender and Race Following this, my findings demonstrate fascinating interplays between the embodied micro-gestures of the participants and hegemonic affective structures, specifically gendered and raced discursive norms. Here, I am following Boler’s (1999) seminal work on how affect and emotion have been gendered and raced (in oppressive ways) in education discourses since the 199 advent of common schooling, but I want to be careful here, too; I am not aiming to lump my findings into two very large, complex, and potentially-essentializing identity categories. Rather, I am interested in highlighting the ways in which the participants’ work in the Focus Group was both shaped by, and challenged, the affective norms (or structures) that, crucially, emerged in relation. In this sense, I am not conceptualizing an affective structure as static or deterministic, a totalizing concept that is definitively structuralist. Instead, affective structures are just that—a matter of affect constituted in relation. The promise here, following Berlant (2020), is that affective structures can be acknowledged and subsequently reconfigured, helping us feel sustained rather than stuck and suffocated. Berlant (2020) says, “You do not just have to down the structures. The structures are expressed on our bodies and in our relations. How can we rebuild structures or create new structures? (n.p.)” This is the worlding potential of affect, an opportunity to carve out, in relation, new, felt worlds, alternative ways of being, feeling, and, for example, teaching social studies in a relational community. Generally speaking, the two male participants embodied dominance during the Focus Group, albeit in different ways. Garrett spoke throughout the Focus Group, and he created four moments of affectivity through tone/volume of voice and the use of humor. At the 12:52 mark of the video, I asked the Group to clarify: Is there are relationship between affect and norms? “Hell yes there is!” Garrett yelled, the first moment of affectivity I felt. Sahar’s eyes grew wide, and Jake and Clodagh chuckled while Garrett proceeded to explain his reasoning. Garrett raised his voice once more at the 1:16:36 mark in a moment of disagreement with Clodagh. This example resonates because Garrett’s “Why?,” uttered with urgency and high volume, led to Clodagh’s most substantial verbal contribution to the Focus Group. At the 1:07:22 mark Garrett deadpanned, “I don’t have any emotions,” a remark that produced a full-body laugh from Jake 200 and knowing nods from Clodagh and Sahar, while at the 1:12:59 mark Garrett once again started speaking first before stopping himself: “I don’t want to dominate the conversation.” This garnered full-body laughs from the entire Group. Jake also embodied affects of dominance but in alternative ways, a sort of embodied freedom to choose when to participate and when to check out. Throughout the Group, Jake was visibly on his phone or another device, looking down to his right. In contrast, Sahar and Garrett were clearly empty-handed, both sitting straight up and starting into the camera for the entire 2 hours. In my Field Diary, I noted 24 moments of notable micro-gestures by the participants, and during more than half of these I wrote, “Jake checked out,” “Jake on phone,” “Jake looking down,” or “…looking out window,” etc. Clodagh also appeared to embody affects of what I might call a “weak dominance,” a sort of self-distancing that seemed, in my interpretation, to be decidedly responsive to Garrett’s dominance of the discussion. In other words, Clodagh’s visible self-removal was, perhaps, a quiet rebuke of Garrett’s affective dominance. For the first 19:16 of the Group, Clodagh did not speak. Instead, I observed her writing on something in front of her, and it was not until the 41:40 mark that I wrote, “Sahar speaking excitedly, Clodagh engaged for the first time…nodding…eyes are focused, responsive.” When Sahar spoke, I wrote “it feels as though Sahar is speaking into a void.” Garrett seemed to embody listening, but the majority of the time Jake and Clodagh appeared to be embodying affects of distraction and self-distancing, and if Garrett responded it was to add a separate thought, what I described in my Field Diary as “talking past one another.” Sahar was the last to speak during every activity, and she appeared to embody contradictory affects of timidity and confidence. Her eyes signaled a hesitancy to jump in, and she usually waited until the other three participants had said something (or at least had a chance) before she offered verbal remarks. But when she did, her voice and posture were confident. In one resonant 201 moment (1:17:47), Sahar disagreed with Clodagh, the latter’s eyes raising with surprise as she sat back to listen, and towards the end of the Group (Activity 4), Garrett cleared the way for Sahar to lead their collaborative work on the presentation, saying, “Sahar, we haven’t heard from you enough. Why don’t you take the lead on this?,” itself a sort of cloaked demonstration of power. Sahar responded by slowly smiling while drawing out, “Okay…,” as though to acknowledge the duplicity in Garrett’s show of generosity. This final moment harkens back to something Sahar said during our work together on Research Module 2, and I think it is an instructive point to keep in mind as I approach the Focus Group as an affective space from a few different angles. In discussing her own teaching life within the Lakeside Social Studies Department, Sahar brought up issues of Whiteness and space. Sahar: I really need to start a conversation (in the department) about sharing space and what that looks like. When I say sharing space, it’s not only the classroom but meetings, the school as a whole. Our staff is mostly White, and I think they struggle to create environments that genuinely encourage and invite our Black and Brown students we work with to participate. And I say this from my experiences in staff meetings. Sitting in staff meetings is an uncomfortable space for me, and I think that’s really where a lot of the discomfort I’ve experienced this year and last year has come out. Sitting in staff meetings and seeing how people don’t share the space. I am interpreting Sahar’s focus on (dis)comfortability as an issue of affect. Sahar’s experiences show how a staff meeting (or a Focus Group) is an affective space, a space constituted by affective structures. Issues of race and Whiteness are made explicit in Sahar’s example, but “sharing space” is also an issue of gender and emotion, how the body itself is significant in the work of teaching and learning. Previous scholarship shows how gender and emotion are intertwined with the embodied work of teaching (Uitto & Estola, 2009), and through this discursive constructs like gender and race make very “real cuts” in the world via embodiment. Focusing on affect extends this work by noticing how particular gendered and raced embodiments are reified and leveraged or stigmatized and weakened by the affects 202 attached, and produced by, every embodied subject position, how affect is both embedded and produced within discursive practices like teaching (Gordon, 2006; Wetherell, 2013). Sahar’s quote does not move us away from the Focus Group findings above; rather, it adds another layer of affectivity to the space of the Focus Group, a space I argue was not “shared” in the ways Sahar envisions. And importantly, this is not to say the Focus Group was entirely dictated, or guided, by the affective structures undergirding it. Affective landscape are multiplicitous and filled with complexities and contradictions, and there were particular moments I felt, and noticed, in which hegemonic affective structures were both glimpsed and/or challenged. I want to dig into these moments, these specific embodiments, to see what they might show us about how affect moves and works in social studies teacher spaces. Hesitant Deference We started Activity 3 at the 1-hour mark of the Focus Group, and from 1:03:10-1:03:14 a series of micro-gestures occurred I want to explore more closely, embodiments of what I will call hesitant deference by Sahar and Clodagh. In these moments, the participants were responding to a particular statement with a thumps up (agree) or thumbs down (disagree), and the question attached to the moments of affectivity I will examine in this section read as follows: In a classroom, emotions need to be checked (or reeled in) by evidence/facts. In Figures 5-78 (see below), we see a wide range of affective embodiments and productions, and to show how the movements of the participants shifted and changed, I have captured 3 frames taken at 2-second intervals. Immediately, Garrett is confident and resolute in his answer. He looks at no one else before giving a thumbs up, and he holds his hand still for the entire 6-seconds, starting straight into the camera to watch his colleagues answer. Throughout, his expression does not change, a 8 To maintain the anonymity of the participants, I have deidentified all identifiable images in this chapter. 203 facial embodiment of flat affect that produces other affects of confidence, resoluteness, and a sort of unemotive (dis)interest in his colleagues’ answers. Similarly, Clodagh was quick with a thumbs up, but then she was just as quick to take it down, what was perhaps an embodied, felt reaction to seeing Sahar and Jake withholding their own answers. In Figure 5, Sahar’s facial affect is pained and uncertain, but a half-smile still lingers, so perhaps her micro-gestures are more of a response to the question itself than to her colleagues’ answers. While Sahar’s micro- gestures exhibit an embodied engagement with the task at hand, Jake’s facial affect is flat in Figure 5: Garrett and Clodagh with quick thumbs up 204 Figure 6: Sahar with a hesitant thumb down, Clodagh reconsiders, Jake unsure Figure 7: Sahar reconsiders, Clodagh unsure, Garrett and Jake resolute 205 Note: Top to bottom—Sahar, Garrett, Clodagh, Jake. Each frame taken 2 seconds after the other. Figure 5, and he seems to be patiently waiting for his colleagues to answer first. In Figure 6, we see his facial affect emerge into a smile that widens into laugh in Figure 7, and he is the only participant to provide a sideways thumb as an answer. Returning to Clodagh, in Figure 6 it seems as though she is embodying an attentiveness to the answers her colleagues provide. A hand has moved from giving a thumbs up to covering her mouth, and her head is slightly tilted in a posture of what might be ponderous uncertainty. This pose breaks in Figure 7 when her hand is removed from her mouth and she says, with urgency, “I just don’t know!” Sahar appeared to embody a similar dance with unsurety and self-doubt. While Clodagh seemed to embody a semblance of confidence with her initial thumbs up in Figure 5, Sahar followed suit in Figure 6 with a forceful thumbs down. Still, unlike Garrett and Jake who held their answers still for at least 2 frames, Sahar’s thumbs down is quickly removed, perhaps seeing she stands alone in her answer. The 3 moments (over the course of 6 seconds) captured in Figures 5-7 are complex and nuanced, but I offer the embodied micro-gestures of the participants as examples of affect on the move; how affect is produced in relation and shapes the contours of social studies teacher spaces like this Focus Group—a space that is, significantly, a familiar space for the participants, a collection of faces, personalities, commitments, attachments, and affects they are accustomed to working alongside in their teaching lives. In contrast to Garrett’s confident and unequivocal thumbs up, we see varying embodiments of hesitant deference. While Jake is “unsure” of his answer, I offer his micro-gestures in Figures 5-7 as a sort of “confident lack of confidence,” a collection of affects that allow him to feel comfortable with not knowing, with the uncertainty he appears to embody with his sideways thumb (and in this sense, he is similar to Clodagh and Sahar). But as opposed to what might be interpreted as Sahar’s invested grimace and Clodagh’s 206 ponderous covered mouth, Jake breaks into a grin that appears to exhibit a certain nonchalance, a sign that he might feel perfectly fine with his unique answer—a stalwart commitment to saying neither yes nor no. There is a certain affective freedom Jake displays within and through this embodiment, a freedom that is markedly different from the affects embodied within Sahar’s and Clodagh’s micro-gestures. This is one fault line I am interpreting as a gendered break, a glimpse of an affective structure that is shaping how the four participants are moving and feeling within this relational space. If Garrett is producing affects of surety and confidence, he is also inflecting the affective space of the Focus Groups with those same affects. In this sense, Garrett is setting the affective tone of the space, and his affective productions will impress upon the affective embodiments of the other participants in varying ways. Moreover, Garrett’s affective embodiments and the affects produced by his movements, his gestures, are not simply independent forces unique to him; they also reflect the affective landscapes of Lakeside (and of society at large)—the affective norms that have governed this Group’s prior meetings. Here, we can see how discursive constructions like gender are performed affectively, how the performance of gender itself is an affective act that serves to reify particular roles, norms, and ways of being and feeling. In contrast to the affective embodiments of Garrett and Jake—movements at capacity with gendered, discursive performances of masculinity—the micro-gestures of Sahar and Clodagh are small examples of how embodiments of hesitant deference can move along gendered lines, an important reminder of how performances of gender in social studies teacher spaces can reinforce oppressive, normative ways of being and feeling. And again, I want to be careful here. I am not arguing the participants are simply marionettes dangling within a hegemonic affective space that dictates their movements and feelings. Far from positioning Figures 5-7 as a generalizable example, I more interested in how 207 the smallest moments—and movements—can disclose new understandings of the affective structures underpinning our social worlds. In this sense, noticing how affective structures work does not make them totalizing and deterministic; rather, it opens them up to reconfiguration, a style of affective noticing that can foster new (teacher) relations. In worlding more just futures for social studies teaching and learning, it is essential we take the time to notice the small, quiet micro-gestures that can reveal how affective structures are brought to bear, however briefly, in our work as teachers. In this sense, we can move from brief glimpses to acknowledgement and towards meaningful actions—embodied movements—that can world alternative futures, spaces that are truly shared and relational, not hesitant or needlessly deferential. Withholding Disagreement At the start of Activity 2, Garrett and Jake were quick to offer the photograph “Dead Federal Soldiers on Battlefield” (see Figure 8) as the most affective of the 6 aesthetic texts in the Civil War text set. Jake said, “Death is always really intriguing to students,” and Garrett agreed Figure 8: Dead Federal Soldiers on Battlefield, Gettysburg, PA, July 1863 by riffing on Jake’s thought. “There’s a great analogy too. The death of slavery, the death of chivalry, the death of a way of living; there were so many different deaths happening, and this image of the dead soldiers captures that.” Quickly, though, Clodagh jumped in. “If we can…I’d 208 like to go in a different direction and use the painting of escaped slaves, pairing that with a narrative that goes with the painting. The experiences during the war for slaves and people of color.” This was met by 6 seconds silence from Garrett and Jake, and I finally asked Sahar if she wanted to jump in. She said, “I’ll go with Garrett and Jake I guess. I know when I show my students images or videos, the ones that get every single eye on the board are the more vivid images of death.” At this point, the Group’s work moved forward but, in no small way, Clodagh was left behind. I immediately felt the affectivity in this moment, and I was reminded of previous conversations with Clodagh and her affective attachments to a sort of death-less curriculum. The topic of death—and making sure she does not trigger or shock her students—came up throughout our work together, and she mentioned, “I never show my students dead bodies” on 5 different occasions. I am not framing her affective attachment to this commitment pejoratively, but this moment within the unfolding Group discussion resonated vibrantly (for me) in relation to her attachments, her felt convictions. For example, in discussing her teaching of a “Holocaust and Human Behavior” unit during Research Module 3, Clodagh explained how this affective attachment is brought to bear in her work. Clodagh: For the “Holocaust and Human Behavior” unit I make it clear right way. I say: ‘We are going to be learning about different genocides, but the way I’m going to teach you is not going to be inundated with pictures. You’re going to be hearing the voices of these people through diary entries and stuff.’ Inundating people with forensic images to shock them, well, I’m really against it…And I say, ‘We’re going to listen to their voices; we’re not going to be looking at pictures of dead bodies.’ That sets the tone that we’re investigating the steps towards genocide rather than death and the camps. I don’t mention the camps often because it’s not really necessary to mention how many people were killed. I might mention it when I do a general summary, but not often. Clodagh seems to be starkly aware of the affective capacity of photographs representing death—their propensity to actually “do something” to her students—and her mention of “tone” demonstrates her awareness of the affective landscape of a particular social studies classroom 209 world, one that is clinical rather than emotional, safely distanced rather than risky and uncertain. In doing this, it seems crucial difficult knowledge is resisted against (i.e., the mass killing that occurred in concentration camps) and—however unintentionally—erased, one byproduct of Clodagh’s attachments to curricular representations that only depict live “voices,” albeit ones that were eventually murdered. By centering the “steps towards genocide,” the genocide itself is reconfigured as an unspoken finale, and profound understandings students might reach are lost in the process: the profound truth that human beings, just like us, carry out genocide; the fact that genocides have been legally sanctioned by state-judicial apparatuses; and the reality that our own state-judicial apparatuses are still used to produce inequities and injustices in society. This is not to say Clodagh’s unit did not possess admirable pedagogical goals, but I am startled by what seemingly benign attachments to a death-less curriculum can produce. During Module 3, I pressed Clodagh on her stance; I wanted to delve more deeply into this affective attachment I had glimpsed numerous times in our work together, and she grounded her approach in a deep concern for her students. Clodagh: I have a lot of students who are refugees…so I might show a documentary with gunshots in a war-torn area, but I’ll tell them beforehand because you don’t know what’s going to trigger somebody. Or, even if they’re not refugees, but they just live in the city in Chicago and they have encountered gun violence or lost someone. I just don’t think there’s any educational value to being like, ‘Here’s a picture of a dead body.’ Clodagh’s affective attachments to a “death-less curriculum” are sensitively attuned to the lived experiences of her students, many of whom bring their own traumatic experiences to class on a daily basis. This is an admirable commitment, and it shows Clodagh’s awareness of her students’ psychical, emotional lives. While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to extend my discussion of Clodagh’s approach, our work in Module 3 demonstrates the solidity of this particular affective attachment, and it provides useful interpretive context for the moment of 210 affectivity I felt during the Focus Group. In disagreeing with Jake and Garrett, Clodagh was making one of her affective attachments—as a social studies teacher—known to the Group, and I was struck by the affective nexus produced by her opinion and the embodied and verbal responses of the other participants. As I have discussed, Clodagh was not particularly active during the Group. She was clearly working on other things in front of her for much of the time and she did not speak until the 19:16 mark. However, her quick response to Jake and Garrett was filled with conspicuous affectivity for just this reason: It stood in sharp contrast to her previous embodiments of apathy and distraction. I interpret Clodagh’s sudden embodiment of affects of interest, excitement, and investment as reflections of this particular affective attachment, and its vibrancy increased in relation to the embodied and verbal responses of the other participants. In the ensuing 6 seconds, I was more struck by the embodiments of the participants than I was by their silence. Garrett raised both eyebrows in surprise while maintaining his otherwise-resolute stare into the camera and Jake looked away to his right, briefly widening his mouth in silence as his right arm was raised to put his hand behind his head, a posture I interpreted to be embodiments of surprise, disagreement, and a flicker of irritation. Before Sahar verbally agreed with Jake and Garrett, she tilted her head to the right. Slowly, a grimace of a smile appeared, as though she was pained to verbalize her disagreement with Clodagh. In this moment, we see the participants engaged in disagreement, and it was the only one of its kind during the Group; a female teacher disagreeing with Jake and/or Garrett. Jake and Garrett disagreed with one another (and with Sahar and Clodagh) throughout the Group—a sort of normalized affective embodiment they seemed comfortable inhabiting—but Clodagh’s verbal disagreement at the start of Activity 2 was the only disruption of one affective regime I felt to be structuring the Group. I argue the gendered affects of dominance and control produced by 211 Garrett (and Jake to a lesser, more passive extent) are disclosed by the affective embodiments of Sahar and Clodagh, and Clodagh’s initial disagreement at 41:40 is one moment of affectivity that provides a glimpse of affect on the move across bodies in relation, one more example of how affects are entangled with gendered affective structures. Whether Sahar felt affectively compelled, in that moment, to agree with Garrett and Jake because of the force of gendered affective regimes is impossible to say; indeed, it is as likely Sahar’s disagreement with Clodagh is a reflection of her own affective attachments to “vivid” curricular representations. Still, I argue Sahar’s “truth,” while obscured, runs alongside other truths, and I am highlighting this moment to show how Clodagh’s embodiments (like Sahar’s in the section above) functioned within gendered lines. I want to keep digging into this extended moment of affectivity to show how Clodagh’s affective burst of disagreement was not only returned to her (verbally) unreciprocated, but was later withheld, and embodied, before making its way back into the world. In this way, we see how disagreement was affectively embodied in a singular, unique manner; while Jake and Garrett disagreed readily and often, the strong dissonance between Clodagh’s affective attachments to a death-less curriculum and the direction the Group took during Activity 2 had a pronounced affect upon her body (See Figures 9-12). In the four frames below, we see two embodiments of Clodagh withholding disagreement (Figures 9-10) before she verbalizes her disagreement once more (Figures 11-12), a disagreement that literally moves her body in unprecedented ways. Following Clodagh’s initial disagreement at 41:40 and Sahar’s deciding vote in favor of the photograph, the Group (primarily Garrett and Jake) started to theorize the affectivity of the photograph and how they would use it in a lesson. During this discussion, the concept of “shock value” came up, and Figure 9 shows Garrett talking at length while Clodagh’s 212 Figure 9: Garrett holding forth on “shock value” and the use of a photograph of dead bodies; Clodagh withholding with eyes down, mouth covered Figure 10: Garrett continues with Clodagh’s eyes looking upwards, her hand covering her mouth; Jake on his phone 213 Figure 11: A moment of disagreement; Clodagh leans back and to her right as she disagrees; Jake on his phone Figure 12: Taken .5 seconds after Figure 11, Clodagh’s embodied disagreement continues downwards to her right; Jake on his phone Note: Top to bottom—Sahar, Garrett, Clodagh, Jake. Four frames between 44:18-53:59 214 eyes are downcast, her head covering her mouth, almost a literal embodiment of withholding her objections to Garrett’s points. The discussion continues in Figure 10 and Clodagh is moved to look up, affects of exasperation and frustration covering her face. In these two moments, Sahar is sitting quietly, while Jake is increasingly distracted by what is happening on his phone, a different sort of embodied response to Garrett’s affective (and verbal) domination of the discussion. In a sense, I argue Jake feels “free enough” to embody conspicuous affects of distraction, an embodiment I observed from Clodagh as well, but less often. In Figure 11, Clodagh speaks for the first time since her initial disagreement at 41:40, and I have included Figure 12 as well to show how Clodagh’s embodiment of her second disagreement moves her body down and to her right. Responding to the Group’s pairing of a literary text with the photograph, Clodagh said, “Giving them one photo with a bunch of dead people—that’s horrible. If you’re giving them other texts to help them realize the amount of people who died…but giving them this photo would not give you the result you want.” In this moment, Sahar’s eyes are directed back towards the screen (Figure 11), and her eyebrows start to rise (Figure 12) as she realizes Clodagh is reiterating her disagreement. Contrarily, Jake’s attention remains on his phone, seemingly oblivious to the affectivity I was embodying—and feeling—while watching Clodagh verbalize her withheld disagreement. On the one hand, I am struck by Clodagh’s removal of herself from the Group’s discussion, their “creation” of a lesson that centers the Civil War photograph. In this second moment of disagreement, Clodagh says the photograph will not give “you the result you want,” a subtle demonstration of her own affective separation from the Group and perhaps a phantasmatic attempt to wash her hands of the product (and its potentially- harmful affectivity) in advance. On the other hand, I see affects working to remove Clodagh long before she attempted to verbally remove herself from the Group by using “you.” In many ways, 215 the affects produced by Clodagh and the other participants at 41:40 steered her out of the Group, and the embodied responses of the other participants to her initial disagreement—along with their nonverbal silence—left her behind both intellectually (or cognitively) and affectively. While Garrett or Jake might have engaged with her comment—an opinion that stems from one of her affective attachments as a teacher—they left it alone to wither and evaporate. In doing so, we can see—by looking specifically at affective embodiments—how a veil of negative affects takes shape, in relation, between Clodagh and the rest of the Group: Figures 9 and 10 show a distant and removed Clodagh long before (eight minutes) she verbalized her disagreement in Figures 11 and 12, and this shows how withholding disagreement, while not “bad” per se, can have negative affective consequences, producing affects of division and contempt rather than communion and love (or even a productive agonism). Paradoxically, while Garrett and Jake generally felt affectively free enough to verbalize their disagreements, it was within the affective moment of Clodagh’s initial disagreement that they withheld their own, a stark shift from the affects produced by their usual banter and Group discussions. Of course, I do not know why they chose to withhold their own disagreements with Clodagh, but I offer the force of gendered affective structures as one explanation. In no small way, the male participants’ withholding of their disagreements with Clodagh ensured their textual choice—the photograph—would be the one the Group ended up using. Perhaps by engaging with Clodagh’s comment, the Group might have taken a different pathway; instead, Sahar’s tacit agreement with Jake and Garrett signaled one way forward, and it was chosen even after one of the participants (Clodagh) verbalized desires to go in an alternative direction. I wager it is unlikely this would have happened if Garrett or Jake had verbalized their own affective attachments to different curricular representations. Instead, we saw the inverse of this, or its embodied, opposite reality: The text Jake and Garrett chose was 216 already chosen once they verbalized their desires. Within this affective structure of the Group, no disagreements were able to shift this world two of them were building. And again, I want to be clear here; I am not arguing against the practical necessity, and simple everyday-ness, of withholding one’s disagreements in a Group context. However, what I am interested in is what embodiments of affect can tell us about how disagreement is experienced for social studies teachers, and in this section I have shown how withholding one’s disagreement is an embodied phenomenon that takes different shapes—and feelings—within gendered affective structures and norms. For example, in analyzing the transcript of the Focus Group, all of Clodagh’s embodiments of withholding disagreement are lost; the affectivity of the moment is reduced to linguistic representations—absent, embodied (nonlinguistic) words that are otherwise impossible to locate. However, by looking at Clodagh’s embodied micro-gestures and verbalized desires, we can glimpse noticeable dissonances between what Clodagh appears to be embodying and (not) saying, an alternative, bodily language we can read and interpret in this exploration of affect and social studies teaching. In the final section of this chapter I will explore a third moment of affectivity that disrupted the gendered affective structures we have investigated so far. Disrupting Gendered and Raced Affective Structures For Berlant (2020), gendered, raced, and heteronormative affective structures (including other hegemonic embodiments of normative identities) are far from deterministic. While such structures do act upon us affectively, making us live, feel, and know in particular ways, we are also free enough—and far more free than we might think, or feel—to trouble them. In short, we are equipped—as social studies teachers and teacher educators—to world “infrastructures” that queer normative ways of living, feeling, and teaching. Crucially, this affective world-building 217 occurs in the everyday; infrastructures are built from life, and if you do not use them—embody them and feel them—they wither and die. Berlant (2020) clarifies that queer world building produces new (infra)structures; there are no illusions here that oppressive structures will simply be torn down and replaced by an undefined—but suspiciously “better”—structure-less way of being with one another. Moreover, it is not a matter of thinking about oppressive affective structures as “up there” with the rest of us “down here.” Rather, Berlant’s focus on affect in everyday life is attuned to what occurs in relation in each unfolding moment. In this sense, we are always able (to varying degrees, as discussed, based on the power attached to particular subject-positions) to engage in affective worlding. So then, in social studies teaching (and in this study) new infrastructures can take shape adjacent to the gendered affective structures I have explored, producing more life-giving and sustaining ways of being, knowing, and feeling for all of the participants. I have discussed the affects of domination and control produced by Garrett and Jake over the course of the Focus Group, and I have shown how their affective productions took shape, in relation, through and within the particular embodied responses of Clodagh and Sahar. Still, during the final quarter of the Group one moment of affectivity startled me in its disruption of the affective structures shaping the Group’s felt landscape. At the start of Activity 4, Garrett ceded his dominant position as the Group’s leader, at least briefly, and as the Group started to discuss their imagined presentation of the relationship between affect and social studies teaching at a professional development workshop Garrett said, “Sahar, we haven’t heard from you enough. Why don’t you take the lead on this?” This comment was met with a few smirks and knowing smiles, but when Sahar started to speak at the 1:33:48 mark (see Figure 13) I wrote, “Wow, a resonant moment of affectivity here. Sahar has the attention of the entire Group for the first time.” Again, I was 218 reminded of Sahar’s comments during Research Module 3; the affective structures of Whiteness she felt to be acting upon her during department meetings and other teacher gatherings. In this Figure 13: Sahar speaking forcefully about an “affective Civics” that helps students see themselves Note: Clockwise from upper left—Sahar, Garrett, Jake, Clodagh moment, I want to explore three layers of embodied and linguistic data: (a) Sahar’s embodiments of affects of interest, passion, and excitement, (b) the verbalized statement Sahar provided during the moment captured in Figure 13, and (c) the affective embodiments of the other participants, in particular Jake’s embodiments of surprise. In the frame above, we can see, for one of the first times, all four participants looking directly at their colleagues, and all of them are embodying affects of interest, a sort of active listening that is a part of the discourse. In this moment, Sahar has been given the floor, a phenomenon that is, according to her, exceedingly rare, and she begins their work on Activity 4 by articulating her own vision—her own worlding—of an affective Civics. Sahar: If we’re thinking about talking to other teachers about affect, telling them why they should care, I start with my own take on it. For me, why did I become a teacher? To help students understand that if you don’t like the present, guess what? You can change the future. I think that’s civics, and that’s affect too. Getting them out there, to move. Figure 13 captures one embodied frame of Sahar’s verbalized commitments, and as she spoke her tone of voice was strong and self-assured, similar to the tone Garrett utilized for much 219 of the day. Her eyes are lit up and she is sitting up straight, leaning forward slightly as she shares her own affective attachments to a Civics class that is meaningful and able to “change the future.” I am also struck by Jake’s expression of surprise, a moment that was unique for him (in the Group context) in the embodied attention he is providing Sahar. His eyebrows are raised as he leans back, an astounded look on his affected face; one might think Jake had never seen “this side” of Sahar—a sort of “shocked realization” the affects she is producing have been there—in relation—all along. And of course Sahar’s verbalized words are working alongside her embodied micro-gestures; her powerful, affective commitments to a style of teaching that is radically interested in worlding more just futures for her students are attachments that “stand out” in this Group context. This is not to say her colleagues do not share her commitments necessarily, but Jake’s embodiment alone suggests her attachments are far from normative; she is not saying what he expected her to say. Now, what are we to do with this moment moving forward, and what does it tell us about social studies teaching lives that are, invariably, lived upon gendered and raced affective structures? First, I offer this moment as one small example of how gendered and raced affective structures are available for disruption. Sahar was, problematically, invited to take “the lead” at the start of Activity 4, but, regardless, this moment shows how Sahar was able to build an infrastructure “from life” itself, from her own embodied, affective habitation of the Group space in new ways. The future worlds and infrastructures this moment started to build are beyond the scope of this study, but another promise of affect lies therein: By attending to unfolding relationality—to affect—we can see how normative embodiments of relations (in teaching) might be shifted—ever so slightly—in ways that are more equitable, just, and sustaining. I think it is fair to wager Sahar felt “good,” or “filled up,” following her embodied and verbalized productions of affectivity within the Group space, and how that shifts her future 220 embodied movements in the world is filled with multiplicitous possibilities. Second, I offer this chapter’s focus on how affect is embodied in social studies teacher spaces as one example of how what teachers say—what can be read in a transcript—is only one component of how relationality is lived. Beneath and beyond what teachers say is how teachers feel, and those affective embodiments are, in no small way, a language filled with meaning. Moreover, the linguistic and nonlinguistic (or affective) registers are inseparable (a conceptual commitment anchoring this study), and I offer this chapter as an example of how researchers might be attuned to not only what is said (and not said), but how the embodiments of social studies teachers can tell us much about their affective attachments and the teaching lives they are living. Interlude: Taking Stock The next chapter concludes this dissertation with a discussion of my findings, specifically the implications they hold for both social studies teaching generally and social studies teacher education. At the same time, I construct an argument (stemming from this study’s findings) that social studies teaching discourses, and the teaching lives they produce, are cruelly attached to damaging objects and fantasies, and I explore the possibility of optimistic social studies teaching lives that are less cruel and more humanizing. 221 CHAPTER 7: DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION—THE (CRUEL) OPTIMISM OF SOCIAL STUDIES TEACHING There are ineffable joys produced within social studies teaching, moments that glimmer in my mind with resonances I cannot articulate: the facilitation of an invigorating and smart class discussion; working one-on-one with a student to closely read a text; sharing a student’s work with their family on parent-teacher night. Having taught K-8 and Secondary Social Studies for six years in Chicago, these 3 generic examples are undergirded by powerfully affective memories for me; particular classrooms and all of the sounds, smells, voices, and atmospheres that constituted the affective landscape my students and I lived upon. And this has continued into my work as a Social Studies Teacher Educator; in a relational, affective sense, I do not feel much of a difference, and it is these feelings that, in no small way, sustain me in the day to day—the memories, the relationships, and the ever-present promise of unpredictable futures. There are also bad, or ugly, feelings (Ngai, 2007) mixed up with these moments of joy. I left K-12 teaching for particular reasons, many of which were constituted by affects and feelings I was experiencing, on a daily basis, as a teacher, affects I felt as though I could no longer embody on a daily basis; teaching had become, for me, unsustainable. In my case, and using the language of this study, it became clear there was an increasing dissonance between my affective attachments as a teacher—my commitments, my anchors, the teacher fantasies that sustained me—and my everyday embodiments of a social studies teaching life. Berlant (2011) might call my affective attachments cruel in how they remained unresponsive, or unshifting, in relation to the emotional and psychical realities I was feeling in my work as a teacher. In other words, I clutched my affective attachments dearly, even as various affects acted upon me, running up against my constituting fantasies of what I was actually doing, how I was moving, teaching. The 222 cruelty, here, is that the process of detaching ourselves from our affective attachments is destabilizing, and this difficult work can prevent us from detaching ourselves and locating (and creating with others) better fantasies and objects to sustain us, attachments that are more closely aligned with our everyday practices, our real world (teaching) movements (Berlant, 2020). In this sense, it is a two-way street. On the one hand (and using my experiences as an example), my cruelly-optimistic attachments to a skills-based, tightly-ordered vision of social studies allowed me to “succeed” according to certain value-added measures at a public charter school, but these attachments were also cruel; they were not sustaining—in fact, they were slowly “killing” my affective conatus to teach. I was always running behind myself, unable to catch up to how I was feeling, the affects I was embodying. On the other hand, I might have better attuned myself to issues of affect and feeling in my work, and I say this neither blandly nor tritely; indeed, this is the thrust of this study—it’s overarching call. In other words, I could have been encouraged, for example, to take stock of my “teaching life,” to slow things down and dwell with(in) the everyday moments that made me feel, to consider how I might increase the appearance of such moments, and to both assess and address the dissonance between my affective attachments and my everyday practice as a teacher. I think this is far different from the now-ubiquitous calls for “self-care”; in my view, “self-care” discourses are not interested in actually shifting landscapes and worlding new ways of being and feeling. Their alliance with hectic, self-exploiting capitalist discourses aside, “self-care” is obsessively individualized, a sort of winking agreement that yes, it is okay to take a 45-minute break from lesson planning to attend a yoga class so long as you are prepared to make up for lost time after dinner! A different sort of self-care, an attendance to affect that is truly caring in its reflexive investment in both the self and others, is necessarily entangled with those around us; and of course it is—we are talking 223 about affect. For example, I could have worked with other teachers in the school to build small infrastructures (Berlant, 2020), spaces in which we could start to imagine and articulate alternative visions and future worlds we could attach ourselves to; within this vision, a teaching life does not have a shelf life, it is not a candle that is prepared to self-annihilate to achieve a particular data point—rather, this is a vision of small teaching communities that are inevitably existing alongside larger affective (school) structures, a praxis of not simply existing, not simply getting by, but refusing to be worn out and refusing to believe teaching lives cannot be sustaining, life-giving, and, in short, humanizing (Berlant & Stewart, 2019; Stewart, 2007). Following this, one of the most disappointing limitations of this study is that I was not able to spend 3 months at Lakeside conducting observations and interviews; I did not have the opportunity to see how the participants might engage in this affect work, this building of infrastructures. Moreover, as the researcher, I did not have the opportunity to feel and experience the affective worlds and landscapes of that unique place; I spoke with the participants about it, of course, but in exploring affect, this problematic limitation is bound up with essential issues of embodiment and feeling—it is like a critic reviewing a restaurant, and even the house dish, by simply sitting outside, watching others eat, and chatting with them once they have stepped out the door. But this limitation notwithstanding, I offer this study’s findings as compelling examples of how the affective attachments of social studies teachers are brought to bear in their teaching in various ways: in how the affective potentiality of a Civics class is imagined and realized, for example; in how affects of shame can motivate teachers to be critical and interrogate issues of Whiteness; in how the affective textual attachments of teachers can be invited into their classrooms; in how the affects structuring “teacher spaces” might be disrupted and reconfigured. 224 I am framing this discussion of the findings, along with their implications for social studies teaching and teacher education, through a lens of cruel optimism, and I offer my own experiences as a teacher as one example of what this lens provides my discussion of this study’s findings and implications. And thinking about attachments as cruel, sustaining, or someplace in between harkens back to Grossberg’s and Behrenshausen’s (2016) reminder that for “the turn to affect” to be politically, socially, and culturally effective (and meaningful to an everyday practice like teaching), it is not about telling people how to feel (or telling them what their affective attachments ought to be) but about exploring how people come to feel (and become attached to particular objects and fantasies) and then undertaking the more difficult work of figuring out how those feelings and attachments might be shifted towards more life-giving ends. In this concluding chapter I will provide a summary of the data chapters before highlighting the implications this study provides for the fields of social studies teaching and teacher education. Summary of Data Chapters The preceding data chapters have explored affect—and the affective attachments of four social studies teachers—from various vantage points. In Chapter 3, I started by looking at a singular moment at Lakeside, an affective rupture of racism and White supremacy the participants could not help but discuss, and I placed my analysis of the school’s affective landscape into conversation with the participants’ approaches to teaching Civics, specifically the concepts of democracy and protest. In doing this, I showed how the affective identities and attachments of the participants played an important role in how not only the moment of affectivity in the gymnasium was addressed (and taught) but also how the participants taught concepts like protest and democracy in Civics. By employing the concept of worlding, I figured 225 Sahar’s affective identities as a Brown woman from the same neighborhood as her students as a constituting force, a force that shapes her embodiments of social studies teaching as worlding. In this sense, I offer her (worlding) approaches to teaching Civics—her investment in teaching her students to move beyond her classroom, thrusting out into the world by assembling in effective protest—as one glimpse of how her affective attachments and identities are entangled with her teaching. Similarly, I showed how Garrett’s disillusion with democracy, for example, impacted his teaching of democracy. I offered “negative democracy” as a concept that could allow Garrett to utilize “negative affects” like disillusionment and anger. My findings showed how this opportunity is missed, while also imagining ways forward in teaching democracy in more responsive and meaningful ways. Indeed, the concept of a “felt democracy” resonated with the participants, and while Clodagh and Sahar shared powerful felt experiences—moments in which they felt affects of democracy—Clodagh and Jake in particular struggled to move beyond their attachments to democracy qua voting and/or “student voice” in the classroom. I argued that while neither of these is “bad,” per se, their attachments to normative representations of democracy foreclose a sort of worlding that might otherwise occur, and I conclude the chapter by using the protests in Chile—along with an anecdote from a Chilean Civics classroom—to highlight the need for reimaging democracy in Civics. In Chapter 4 I offered shame as a prevalent, even constituting, “social studies affect,” a force that moves in relation between teachers, students, and particular texts. Because shame has been conceptualized in various ways, I take the time to demonstrate my own theorization of shame (a conceptualization building from Tomkins et al., 1995) by showing how shame functions in two social studies curricular texts: The 1619 Project (Hannah-Jones, 2019) and President Trump’s American fantasy, the “1776 Commission.”. This conceptual digression, of 226 sorts, showed how affects of shame can be productive in how they lead White students to consider their own complicity in legacies of racism, White supremacy, and American empire. In short, shame can be paired with other “positive affects” to move teachers and students towards love and communion instead of individuation and contempt. My empirical findings demonstrate how Garrett conceives of shame as a motivating force in his work as a critical social studies teacher. Growing up amidst racist discourses both at home and school, Garrett discussed how shame drives him to be a critical, anti-racist teacher, and while his past affective experiences are painful, they are also ones he holds onto so that he can remember the affective structures and discourses he is committed to disrupting. Sahar approached affects of shame from a different angle, and my work with her showed how, on the one hand, her affective identities and attachments (for Sahar, her identities as a Brown Muslim woman and the granddaughter of Pakistani immigrants) motivate her to disrupt harmful metanarratives that produce affects of shame within her students. On the other hand, I also found that Sahar was, in turn, shamed for being overly-critical and “anti-American” by her White co-teacher, a fascinating example of how the co-teacher’s experiences of shame (in encountering, and resisting against, critical discourses in social studies) became anti-relational in how they were paired with negative affects that steered her away from closer communion with Sahar. I discuss the complexities of this dynamic in depth, considering Sahar’s own “working through” of how shame, affective identities, and attachments need to be acknowledged within any authentic teaching relationship. In Chapter 5 I focused on the affective textual attachments of the participants. Starting with a few examples of my own vision of a more sensuous and aesthetic social studies teaching life, I showed how the participants are attached to particular methods of using aesthetic texts in their classrooms. For example, I invited them to create a textually-diverse text set that could 227 challenge demarcations like social studies text/non-social studies text and in school text/out of school text, but they struggled to interpret this task in new or imaginative ways. All of the teachers prepared more of a lesson than a text set, per se, and my findings showed how the participants are attached to using aesthetic texts as an initial primer or engagement piece, a means to an end that, as I argue, misses out on the potential for affective aesthetic experiences to occur in social studies classrooms. Other findings demonstrated how the participants are also attached to a particular genre of aesthetic (teaching) texts, a genre I called “bad, sad worlds.” In this sense, the majority of the aesthetic texts the participants brought to our work together produced negative affects of depression and sadness, and while the concept of “political depression” provides positive ways forward via negative affects, the participants did not engage with the texts on this level. My final findings show how (past) meaningful aesthetic experiences might be invited into the participants’ work as teachers; working with Garrett and Sahar specifically, I explore their respective aesthetic attachments to highlight what secures them. In both cases, affects of complexity and past affective experiences (with each text) “bring Garrett and Sahar to life,” and I call for an invitation of these texts into everyday teaching practice. In Chapter 6 I showed how affective structures are gendered and raced, offering my interpretations of the participants’ affective embodiments during a Focus Group as examples of how affect, in how it is embodied and moves in relation between bodies (even on Zoom), steers the co-construction of knowledge. I do not claim Garrett and Jake (the two straight White males in the group) are intentionally producing gendered and raced affects that position them to dominate and participate in the discussion in different ways than their counterparts. Rather, it is affect’s autonomy, in this sense, that is interesting to me; how relational spaces (even virtual ones) are saturated with hegemonic sociocultural affective structures teachers are inevitably 228 working within. Prior scholarship (Boler, 1999) has shown how the profession of teaching has been entangled with gendered and raced affects (Boler uses “emotion” to anchor her conceptual analysis) since the advent of public school in the United States, and my findings build from this work to demonstrate how affect moves beyond the individual bodies of social studies teachers. In a “teaching space” like the Focus Group (a space that, in normal times, happens regularly within most social studies departments, including the one all of the participants are a part of), issues of affect ought to be considered so the affective identities of Clodagh and Sahar can be invited and heard. In this sense, it a matter of seeing an activity like a department planning meeting, for example, through an affective lens, a lens that can, in turn, compel us to actively carve out a new space that is more equitable and inclusive. Implications for Social Studies Teaching and Teacher Education I see this study providing a number of implications for the fields of social studies teaching and teacher education. Affect and Civics The affective rupture at Lakeside (detailed in Chapter 3) presents a few implications for how Civics teaching is imagined and embodied. I offer an affective rupture as a moment in which the “alongsidedness” of the virtual, its immanence, is brought to bear in the actual, and the power of affect to deterritorialize oppressive affective landscapes is glimpsed. Despite the heavy feelings of normalcy and predictability (the affective regimes of schools and society), one promise of affect is that reality is constantly remaking itself (Grossberg, 2014). Commitments to the positivity of difference and the actualization of the virtual within the actual are ontological demands, ones I argue might radically shift how we think of our work as social studies (and Civics) teachers. 229 An openness to the unpredictable and messy is actually a response to affect, a willingness to be moved, angered, inspired, or frustrated in ways that are beyond our control and happen within everyday, relational encounters between teachers and students. One implication, here, is that we rethink how knowledge is co-constructed in classrooms and how particular bodies ought to move, behave, and mobilize (or not) in schools. Through worlding practices, Civics teachers like Sahar might help their students discover new forms of being that move beyond the idealized and “thought of” conceptualizations of citizenship that appear in explicit curriculum. Rather, a reconceptualized Civics curriculum might emerge alongside a present that is always-unfolding and entangled with the affective lives of teachers and students. Sahar’s stated pedagogical commitment to centering the felt experiences and affective identities of her Black and Brown students is one demonstration of how a teacher’s own identities are a crucial component of worlding in Civics class. Sahar’s affective attachments, her affective identities and embodied felt experiences as a former student, are brought to bear in teaching, shaping her purpose, her movements, and her openness to a present that is ever-new and filled with multiplicitous worlds. The felt responses of Jake and Garrett—both White male teachers—show how a worlding approach might be actualized in their classrooms too. First, there is a tendency of teachers to burn off affect through sentimental tasks, reducing affect to issues of feeling and touch as opposed to countersentimental approaches that forefront movement and meaningful action. I argue Civics teachers might view affect through a more complex lens. For example, Jake perceived the productions of affect in his classroom to be negative affects of anger, and he felt his students ought to burn it off quickly and productively. The opportunity, here, is for teachers to recognize the potential of such affective productions, ones that are moving beyond or underneath the normative affective regimes of schools. Whether the racist teacher at Lakeside 230 would have been fired without the student mobilizations is impossible to say, but such movements are one potential of affect, and I argue Civics teachers especially ought to acknowledge and harness affect in ways that work towards school and community justice. Furthermore, a reconceptualized affective Civics curriculum might resist normative pedagogical representations of mobilizations, protests, and other embodiments of affect, and I will offer Garrett’s disappointment in the students’ protest as one example of a normative representation. Teachers might reroute desires for control towards new possibilities, exchanging familiar forms of resistance for new ones. But what does teaching-as-worlding actually look like? While Sahar’s response to the protest conceded it was “a bit of a shit show,” it is worth reflecting on the alternative; Garrett envisions a protest that is ordered, clear, and coordinated, a movement he could be proud of as the Chair of the Civics Department. As teachers, we might reinvest desires in our students, perhaps opening ourselves up to the affectivity of the “shit show” itself. Indeed, it is the unwieldy potentiality of the assembly of bodies that makes protests and mobilizations the enemy of state power and other institutions constituted by control. I suggest Civics teachers might embrace the potential of affect to disrupt and, just as the students did, change things, rather than enforce the norms of larger affective regimes. Teaching About Democracy All of the participants equated felt embodiments of democracy with voting, but their separate reflections on voting demonstrated how it is an act that resonates powerfully in how they navigate affective political landscapes. Garrett’s disillusionment with voting, and with democracy generally—especially in this time of Trump—formed an affective cloud that hovered over our work together. And while I have offered “negative democracy” as one conceptual outlet through which depression and disillusionment might be refigured through action, Garrett chose 231 not to recall, or envision, what feelings of democracy might feel like in his classroom. This affective blockage, of sorts, is important to note, and it carries implications for how democracy is represented and taught in Civics (and social studies generally). Garrett’s negative articulation of an un-felt democracy in the time of Trump (and post-Trump) is one I can identify with, but it also highlights the constitutive role of affect in how teachers approach their work. Perhaps an embrace of disillusionment and negative democracy is also an acknowledgement that democratic life presupposes uncertainty and dissatisfaction rather than harmonious coexistence, a reflection of what Mouffe (2000) locates as the kernel of agonism between two traditions that structure Western society: classical liberalism and democratic theory. I argue Civics might be opened up to the potential of agonism to cultivate a politics of passion that is constituted by ever-unfolding action as opposed to utopic promises of a harmonious end to conflict. Here, conflict itself is figured as an affective force that motivates and mobilizes. And this is the opposite of a depressive turn towards nihilism; rather, a politics of passion feels deeply that political action matters, and that in order to be effective, counter-hegemonic political action must be felt, deeply. Similarly, Cvetkovich (2003) offers the ACT UP coalition as one example of how conflict, depression, and specifically trauma are available for productive rehabilitations that necessitate movement. So then, in Civics teacher education, for example, an attention to the affective landscapes of politics and society would require nuanced investigations of the field’s concepts, carefully rethinking the assumptions we make about how the good life ought to feel. Many Civics teachers are engaged in this critical work, but I suggest my work with Garrett demonstrates how important it is to attend to the dissonances between how we feel and what are then trying to achieve in our teaching. 232 In addition, the parallels between Sahar’s embodied experience of felt democracy at the teachers’ strike and her approach to producing affects of democracy in her classroom show how the affective experiences of teachers can shape their teaching in powerful ways. While voting is just one embodiment of democratic action, this study has aimed to open up how democracy is felt in schools, and I suggest that looking at affect in Civics shows how concepts like protest and voting cannot be known until they are felt. And a democracy that centers embodiment and feeling is not new; Horkheimer and Adorno (2002) located eros—passion, empathy, and questioning—as the major emotional source of a democracy (as opposed to affects of fear and threat in fascism), and Dewey (1916) conceived of democracy as a state of being, “a form of moral and spiritual association” (p. 240) that is embodied and necessarily experienced. How different is the democracy teachers feel, and produce, in their classrooms? Sahar and Clodagh reflected on how they try and cultivate environments of felt democracy, while Jake’s focus on voice and choice—what I framed as normative attachments to what democratic classroom might look like—remained unfinished in how he invites students to feel democracy upon leaving his classroom. Both Sahar and Clodagh shared small moments of affective experience, and they resonate in how both of them think carefully about the affective landscapes of their classrooms and the inner-lives of their students, pedagogical aims that are capable of moving students to joyfully vote or mobilize in response to harm and bring change. Negative Democracy in Civics Oftentimes in Civics and other social studies classes, teachers represent the United States as a democracy. It is assumed to be true, and surely documents like the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence offer one ideal of an admirable system of government, I am not disputing that. However, my findings show how Civics teachers feel our democracy to be false, 233 or, at the least, unrealized, contradictory, and far more complicated than how it is often represented, and one implication here is that these affects might position the teachers to teach a different type of democracy. Sahar’s cynicism, and specifically Garrett’s articulation of a negative democracy, offer approaches Civics teachers might take in teaching about democracy and creating of inquiry that leads towards student mobilizations. Critical Civics teachers already examine how the United States does not live up to its “ideals,” the “thought of” forms that populate our curriculum. However, my offering of a negative democracy is uniquely aware of issues of affect, and a “negative” approach to democracy, for example, would make use of a teacher’s affective attachments—their felt experiences and identities—in order to disrupt the soothing and sentimental affects produced by certain affective political structures. Teachers can also help their students bring their own felt, or unfelt, experiences of democracy to bear, thereby ensuring that we are using words and concepts that are not unfelt and false, but filled with our feelings and experiences, however negative those might be. Finally, I want to be clear: I am not calling for a “realist” approach to Civics, and I mean that in the most pejorative, Kissinger-ian sense. A negative democracy that makes use of political depression and disillusionment is not working against the powerful—and affecting—“ideas” that inform critical pedagogies. On the contrary, utopic ideals like transformative and reparative justice, collective emancipation, and equitable and pluralistic democracy can form the foundations of the worlding in Civics I am advocating. Indeed, these are my aims as a scholar and teacher, and while we do not always feel the embodied actuality of these ideals in our everyday lives, we work towards them through affect—affects that compel us to move—while we combat the sentimental, affective politics that frame “just getting by” as the best we can hope for. My findings show the participants’ navigation of one facet of this dynamic—the vast 234 distance between normative definitions of democracy and how they feel about democracy—and what studying affect provides is the ability to locate the falsity of some affective politics before we can forge ahead in creating new affective worlds with alternative possibilities. Slowing Down and Attending to Affect in Teaching One of the larger themes of this dissertation study is one I have come to realize is germane to any study of affect: slowing down, taking stock of what we are experiencing and embodying and feeling, and then also reflecting upon what such embodiments—and the attachments that produced them—are doing to us. We do not do enough of this in teaching, let alone in teacher education, but this attitude of noticing is one commitment, a practice, uniting this dissertation study, and it is one I will return to throughout. First, in particular to affects of shame, I have shown how shame ought to be acknowledged and grappled with rather than resisted against, and this attitude of noticing is tied up with any project, or attempt, to redeem shame towards positive, communal ends. My findings show how affects of shame motivate social studies teachers, especially White teachers, to confront privilege, biases, and the problematic affective memories and relations they carry with them into the classroom. One implication for social studies teacher education is that we might think more expansively about how we engage with the shameful legacies of Whiteness that are invariably attached to our work with White teacher candidates. Importantly, I am not calling for a reductive, essentializing, or totalizing approach to White shame, or how such affects might be addressed in teacher education courses. Rather, I am hoping the findings stemming from my work with Garrett and Jake specifically show how teachers are already cognizant of how shame moves within them, constituting their commitments and identities as critical social studies teachers. For example, we might be unashamed to talk about shame in social studies teacher 235 education. As of now, it is an affect that is generally resisted against; felt to be ugly and undesirable as a classroom affect, it is resisted against and left unattended to. An alternative approach would invite these feelings into our work with teacher candidates, thinking deeply and critically about “the topics we are least excited to teach,” for example, before helping our students think about why that might be (on a level of affect). This “affect work” can complement the routine focus on cognition in teacher education, our habitual—and important!—attention to issues of curriculum, assessment, methods, etc. Affects of shame are present within our teacher education classrooms, just as they are entangled with curriculum, assessment, and instructional methods. It is a matter of whether, and how, we acknowledge them. Second, and drawing from Tomkins et al. (1995), we all use affective scripts to “deal with” negative affects like shame. In teacher education courses, we ought to think about how the methods, inquires, and texts we offer teacher candidates either reify scripts or perhaps trouble them, opening them up in productive ways. In this sense, this implication moves us beyond just affects of shame. Scripts are used to not experience, to not feel, undesirable affects, but we also know that learning is difficult and often painful. These affective scripts might be subverted to invite the affective experiences and feelings of teachers and students into the classroom, an alternative to viewing affect as unilateral, a force that is internal and therefore private, at best a force to draw upon, at worst a “bad” or “ugly” feeling to bottle up. Finally, affects of shame and affects of Whiteness are entangled throughout this study. I have shown how shame, in relation to social studies curriculum—specifically U.S. History—is a profoundly White phenomenon. But importantly, such affects are of course embodied and felt by Black and Brown teachers like Sahar and their students. One implication here is that affects of shame, while potentially motivating and “positive,” are dangerous in how they can affect those 236 around us. Affects are not simply contained and internalized; they are inherently relational, and teacher educators ought to help teacher candidates think about how the affects they produce move well beyond them, and their intentions, in the classroom. The answer is not to simply sweeten shame with pride, as Jake attempted, but rather to think about how we, as teachers, are able to be authentic, affective, fully-human people that are affected, and humanized, through our work in the classroom with students. Affective Aesthetic Texts in Social Studies Teaching In thinking about this study’s implications for how affective, aesthetic texts might be used in social studies teaching, I am concerned by three interconnected trends. Generally, I was surprised by the absence of what I interpreted to be authentic aesthetic attachments on the part of the participants, and I want to focus on three implications I see for social studies teacher education: (a) A time to dwell, (b) Inviting ourselves, and (c) Cultivating sensuous teaching lives in teacher education. A Time to Dwell. The participants are all habituated to using particular texts in certain ways, ways that are generally un-affective and unaesthetic. Time is a crucial factor here, and it is one I have discussed throughout this study. For example, the participants’ facilitation of aesthetic experiences for their students were rushed and brief, usually no more than 5 minutes. And it was not an issue with the participants or the texts themselves; the majority of the texts the participants brought to our work together are filled with affectivity—at capacity to be used in any number of exciting ways. Rather, it was a matter of the participants opening themselves up to a more patient and slowed down approach to facilitating aesthetic experiences for their students. As I have highlighted throughout this dissertation, an attendance to affect requires embodiments of noticing and attentiveness, an invested interest in the quiet vibrations that can occur, in relation, in the 237 classroom. Teacher educators ought to model such approaches, because, in many ways, this trend reflects an issue of “know how.” Generally speaking, the participants were not prepared to engage in the style of criticism Greene (1978) calls for, an imagined “teacher as critic” that enriches students’ aesthetic experiences with not only prior knowledge and context, but also the awareness that time, space, and directness are required for an aesthetic experience “to be.” In other words, teacher educators need to show teacher candidates how “the arts,” how aesthetic texts, are not only germane to social studies education but can be used in ways that enrich their own lives and the classroom experiences of their students. The cruelly optimistic attachments of the participants—not necessarily the texts themselves but what they imagine them to be capable of doing in their classrooms—suggest such attachments reduce and limit the possibilities for how aesthetics might play a part in social studies teaching. Perhaps teachers (like the participants) can be shown how their aesthetic attachments, ones they might not know how to invite into their teaching, might be woven into their work, one way of better sustaining and enriching their teaching lives. Inviting Ourselves. Building from this, I am calling for an approach to social studies teaching that is intentional about inviting the textual lives (and attachments) of teachers into their classrooms. Blurring reductive lines between teaching life/non-teaching life and social studies text/non-social studies text can make teaching lives more aesthetic and humanizing, and this affect work can transform the landscapes of schools. When teaching lives are “authentic,” they are “wide awake,” engaged with the world in real, meaningful ways (Greene, 1978). Through this, the affective, aesthetic experiences of teachers are sustaining and constituting, invariably infiltrating one’s work as a teacher. In teacher education, this means inviting the inner, textual lives of teacher candidates into the classroom, an approach that can be paired with discussions of 238 how their aesthetic attachments can be woven into their teaching practice, not arbitrarily or simply for the sake of doing so, but in ways that enrich and enliven their classrooms and the learning experiences of their students. To be clear, a pedagogical invitation of students’ aesthetic attachments requires a teacher, an individual that can not only model what aesthetic attachments can look like but also help students uncover the attachments they might not readily see, texts that can infuse their nascent teaching lives with new imaginaries. Cultivating Sensuous Teaching Lives. Attached to this, it is imperative teacher educators both model and cultivate sensuous, aesthetic teaching lives for their pre-service teachers. Of course, everyone’s embodiment of an open, textual teaching life will look differently, but my vision is grounded in a rejection of demarcations that serve to professionalize teaching in suffocating ways. One implication of this study is entangled with my findings that showed how the participants made quick, habitual assumptions about the text set activity, for example. They assumed I was simply interested in how they would teach a lesson using a collection of aesthetic texts, and so they made PowerPoints with particular texts embedded. Here is an opportunity to slow things down and reimagine this “quick jump” to routine representations, a way of thinking about how their own aesthetic attachments are, in fact, not only what I was interested in discussing with them, but can also be authentic components of their work as teachers. A Final Note The “turn to affect” follows the linguistic turn (postmodernism, poststructuralism), new materialism, and other onto-epistemological shifts in understanding how knowledge is constructed and how we might explore, and make sense of, what it means to be in the world, to perform everyday practices like teaching. This dissertation study is a part of this turn towards affect, an attention to how what teachers feel, what texts, stories, and fantasies they are 239 affectively attached to, and what affective landscapes they teach upon come to matter in their practice as social studies teachers. By exploring the affective attachments of social studies teachers, this study has shown how attachments come to matter in how teachers embody particular commitments, feel about certain concepts, and, in turn, teach. 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