In response to rapidly changing societal landscapes, curriculum reform policies have proliferated worldwide, demanding fundamental restructuring of schooling. Yet the successful implementation of such reforms cannot be achieved through explicit directives or institutional controls alone. Reform efforts often falter without less visible mechanisms—motivational strategies that immerse policy actors in reform visions and ideals. What moves policy actors (Lähdesmäki et al., 2020), therefore, depends not only on cognitive appeals to rational deliberation but also, and crucially, on affective dimensions.

Reform policies mobilize rhetorics that evoke particular feelings—such as hope, urgency, or moral responsibility—to encourage engagement (Zembylas, 2023a). Through rhetorical and representational devices that trigger and regulate affect, policies induce teachers and other actors to invest in reform ideas and to become their carriers in everyday practice (Moore & Clarke, 2016). From this perspective, the mobilization of affect operates as a constituent condition of contemporary education reform rather than a secondary or incidental feature (Zembylas, 2023b).

Influenced by the “affective turn” in the humanities and social sciences, recent policy research has increasingly attended to these dimensions (Matus, 2017; Zembylas, 2022). Affect is understood as “visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing” (Seigworth & Gregg, 2010, p. 1)—vital, relational forces that shape movement, attachment, and orientation beyond linguistic meaning alone. Affect can attach to diverse bodies, including humans, objects, discourses, and norms (Sedgwick, 2003). Within policy texts, affect adheres to vocabularies, numerical data, visual representations, and best practices, circulating to steer policy actors toward particular reform trajectories (Matus, 2017). By making specific futures feel desirable, necessary, or inevitable, affect functions as a political force—a governing strategy that regulates thinking and conduct toward predefined goals.

Despite its centrality, affect has often been overlooked in curriculum policy research. Traditional studies have focused predominantly on the critical interpretation of explicit messages or on evaluating implementation outcomes (Webb & Gulson, 2012). Such approaches, however, risk neglecting how policy is enacted through what Masny and Cole (2009, p. 5) describe as “random collisions of affects.” Understanding the complex processes of policy formation and enactment therefore requires explicit attention to the affective registers embedded within policy texts and circulating through them.

Addressing this gap, this study aims to analyze the specific affects mobilized in curriculum reform policy texts and to examine their political operations. It asks: (1) What types of affects are circulated within policy texts to encourage engagement with reform? and (2) How do these affective technologies produce political effects in the enactment of curriculum reform?

Empirically, the study focuses on South Korea’s High School Credit System (HSCS), a nationwide curriculum reform fully implemented in 2025. By analyzing policy texts produced throughout the reform’s development, this study examines how affect is mobilized to compel participation and sustain reform trajectories. By foregrounding affective-discursive governance, the study extends critical policy research beyond analyses of content, ideology, and power relations, while offering transnational insights into how curriculum reforms are sustained amid contemporary educational crises.

While the High School Credit System (HSCS) was fully implemented nationwide in 2025, its policy planning and discursive formation date back to 2017. This study analyzes 47 policy materials produced by South Korea’s Ministry of Education between 2017 and 2024, including 33 policy documents (master plans, manuals, press releases, and guidelines) and 14 promotional videos. These materials were selected to capture how the reform was progressively framed, justified, and circulated over time. Methodologically, the study adopts an affect-oriented approach to policy analysis. Rather than focusing on uncovering latent ideological meanings embedded in textual content—as is common in traditional discourse analysis (Kølvraa, 2015)—this approach attends to affective intensities that exceed manifest meaning. Affect is approached not as subjective emotion but as relational forces that emerge through encounters among language, visual representations, data, and policy actors. In this sense, policy texts are treated as affective assemblages that work to move, orient, and bind actors to reform agendas. The analysis follows the methodological strategy of “reading for affect” (Berg et al., 2019; Knudsen & Stage, 2015). First, close readings of textual and visual materials were conducted to identify vocabularies, phrases, images, graphs, and narrative devices that evoked particular affective intensities, such as hope, anxiety, urgency, or moral uplift. Second, through comparative readings across documents and media formats, the recurrence, movement, and accumulation of these affective elements were traced—for example, expressions such as “fundamental paradigm shift,” “customized learning,” and “growth for all.” Third, the analysis examined how these affective representations connected with different bodies in the policy texts, including subjects (teachers and students), institutions (schools), and objects (curriculum structures). Through such circulation, affective elements bind heterogeneous bodies together and produce trans-linguistic effects that extend beyond rhetorical persuasion. Analyzing affect inevitably involves the researcher’s embodied engagement with the data. Because affect is registered through sensations that call for response (Kølvraa, 2015), my positionality functions as both an analytical resource and a research instrument. Throughout the analysis, I reflexively attended to my own affective responses while examining how these intensities operate as political technologies that govern the thinking and conduct of policy actors in curriculum reform.

The HSCS policy texts circulate a complex affective configuration in which anxiety and fear coexist with hope and expectation to legitimize curriculum reform. Anxiety is activated through a rhetoric of crisis that foregrounds future societal challenges such as demographic decline and global competition, fostering a collective fear that failure to adapt will jeopardize the nation’s future. At the same time, these texts mobilize a rhetoric of innovation that frames the HSCS as an indispensable solution to systemic educational problems. This coupling of crisis and solution produces a sense of relief (McKenzie, 2017), encouraging policy actors to invest affectively in the reform. By linking key HSCS concepts—such as “customized curricula” and “student agency”—to universally valued ideals including inclusion, diversity, and growth, the policy renders the reform not only necessary but ethically compelling (Lähdesmäki et al., 2020). The political effect of these affective technologies lies in the normalization of new roles and responsibilities for teachers and students. Positioned as essential contributors to a “better future,” school actors are encouraged to desire conformity to these emerging norms (Moore & Clarke, 2016). Hope for improvement, coupled with anxiety about being perceived as incompetent or outdated, functions as a governing force that shapes conduct and subjectivity. Ultimately, these affective-discursive strategies bind heterogeneous bodies—teachers, students, parents, and curriculum structures—into a cohesive and optimistic atmosphere. While this dense circulation of positive affect secures commitment to reform, it simultaneously marginalizes critical reflection on structural issues, such as intensified academic competition, widening educational inequalities, and increased teacher workload. In this sense, the affective governance of the HSCS produces a form of optimistic attachment that may obscure the precarious and uneven realities of curriculum reform enactment.

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