Session Information
Contribution
‘Ghosted Bodily Matter[s]?’: The Transmission of Affect and School ‘Disaffection’ in a UK Coal-Mining area’.
As a surfacing of a difficulty in remembering or in being certain about the truth of memory, the body becomes a memorial, a ghosted bodily matter. (Clough, 2007, 7)
This paper looks at material relating to affect drawn from an intergenerationalethnography of class, education and youth transitions in part of the British coalfield. Scholarship has seen the coalfield setting not only as paradigmatic of working class ‘community’ in modernity – even ‘archetypally proletarian’ (Dennis et al 1956) - but also as shaped by a ‘context of singularity’ (Strangleman, 2001, 255) relating to a history of workplace and community resistance. That history is characterised by “a very clear sense of the past as struggle [that] constitutes a memory that goes back at least a century” (Fentress and Wickham, 1992, 115-6). In the localities forming the boundaries of the ethnography - four neighbouring communities in Derbyshire, England, which were at the front-line of the British miners’ strike of 1984-85 (Richards, 1996) - social memory, as I’ve argued elsewhere, strongly shapes the context of young people’s experiences of education.
Indeed, I’ve noted the phenomenon of some young people in these localities apparently refusing the formal education project as a whole and have argued that such ‘school disaffection’ is complex, paradoxical and deeply situated in the local, classed, historical context (Bright, 2010, 2011a, 2011b). In those discussions I have, while pursuing other more developed arguments, touched tentatively on a kind of ghosting process evident in the ethnographic data. Here, young people seem to re-enact the deeply contested past of their own localities as a repetitively affective ‘sealing of the heart’ (Brennan, 2004, 97) even while that past both remains unknown to them and is now foreclosed. It is this ‘transgenerational haunting’ - and, particularly, the possible role of transmitted affect within it - that is the specific focus of this paper.
Drawing on a literature that arguably constitutes an ‘affective turn’ in social theory (Clough, 2007), the paper considers a situated repertoire of ‘disaffective strategies’ employed by young people as manifestations of embodied ‘affects of trauma’ (Hardt, 2007, xii) rooted in local histories. With reference to key examples from the ethnographic data, it is argued that conceptualising disaffection as a phenomenon of embodied ‘affect’ in the light of contemporary theorisations of affect (Massumi, 2002) and its possible modes of transmission (Brennan, 2004) and circulation considerably deepens our understanding of disaffection – moving it beyond the pathologising framework of individual psychology (Skeggs, 2009) and tying it, as palpable social memory, to felt collective experiences of the ‘cofunctioning of the political, economic and cultural’ (Clough, 2007, 1).
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
References Brennan, T. 2004. The transmission of affect. New York. Cornell University Press. Bright, N. Geoffrey. 2010. ‘Just doing stuff’? Place, memory and school disaffection in a UK coal-mining area. In International Journal on School Disaffection. 7, 1. 44-52. Bright, N. Geoffrey. 2011a. “Off the Model”: resistant spaces, school disaffection and ‘aspiration’ in a former coal-mining community. In Children’s Geographies. 9, 1, February 2011. 63-78. Bright, N. Geoffrey. 2011b. ‘Non-servile virtuosi’ in insubordinate spaces: school disaffection, refusal and resistance in an English coalfield. In European Education Research Journal. Forthcomning. Clough, P. 2007. ‘Introduction’ in Ticineto Clough, P. (ed). 2007. The affective turn: Theorising the social. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Dennis, N., Henriques, F. and Slaughter, C. 1956. Coal is our life. London; Eyre and Spottiswood (2nd edn 1969), London: Tavistock. Fentress, J. and Wickham, C. 1992. Social Memory. Oxford: Blackwell. Hardt, M. 2007 Foreword: What affects are good for. In Clough, P. T. 2007. The affective turn: Theorising the social. Durham and London: Duke University Press Massumi, B. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Passerini, L. 2006. Memories between silence and oblivion. In Hodgkin, K. and Radstone, S. eds. Memory, history, nation, contested pasts. New Brunswick: Transaction. Richards, A. 1996. Miners on Strike. Oxford: Berg. Skeggs, B. 2009. Haunted by the spectre of judgement: Respectability, value and affect in class relations. In K. Páll Sveinson. ed. 2009. Who cares about the white working class? London: Runnymede Trust.
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