No affects left behind. Affects, globalisation and eductional leadership

Author(s):

Dorthe Staunæs(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2012

Network:

23. Policy Studies and Politics of Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

23 SES 10 A, Power and Emotion

Parallel Paper Session

Time:

2012-09-20

15:30-17:00

Room:

FFL - Aula 19

Chair:

Janne Varjo

Contribution

This paper examines possible entanglements between unpleasant and pleasant affects, their global evocation and their managerial aftershocks in Danish public schools. It examines the formation and affectivity of educational management, relating them to national identities/intensities as well as notions of selfhood and otherness, through an encounter between Danish school principals and Southeast Asian schools.

The paper is based in poststructural conceptualisations of leadership and the affective turn.

Method

In order to do so, it draws on interviews, travel descriptions, videos and articles from educational managers who have reorganized or intend to reorganize elements of their educational methods and institutional structures after visiting similar institutions in China and Singapore.

Expected Outcomes

The analytical focus is on how affective assemblage of bodily excitement and a taste for the ‘Other’ is transformed into self-loathing and nausea, which again have psy-mangerial aftershocks. This transmission of affects is evoked across globalised educational sites. It touches and tunes educational leadership, pedagogies, organisations, and subjectivities in Danish schools. The paper analyses how the melodramatic reorganisation of schools is touched by the sound of survival. The encounter with the Southeast-Asian ‘will to survive’ and general economic and societal success, not only evokes shame (Pors & Staunæs 2011) and disgust about the state of Nordic homelands, it also evokes a will to activate pleasant and positive emotional registers, as opposed to the harsh struggle for survival abroad. Rather than being victims of globalisation, interviews show how the disgust/excitement construction may revitalise a (postcolonial) taste for traditional core aspects of Nordic pedagogy, while leaving no affects behind.

References

• Ahmed, S. (2004) ‘The performativity of Disgust’. In Ahmed, A. The Cultural Politics of Emotions. Edinburg University Press: 82-100. • Anderson, B. (2006) ‘Becoming and being hopeful: towards a theory of affect’, Environment and Planning. 24(5): 733-752. • Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the universe halfway. Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham & London: Duke University Press. • Butler, J. (1993) Bodies that matters: On the Discursive Limits of “sex”. New York: Routledge. • Bjerg, H. & D. Staunæs (2011) ‘Self-management through shame: Uniting Governmentality studies and the “Affective Turn”’, Ephemera: theory & politics in organizations, 11(2): 138-156. • Held, D. (2002) Globalization/Anti-Globalizations. Cambridge: Polity Press. • Massumi, B. (2002) Parables for the virtual. Movement. Affect. Sensation. Durham & London. Duke University Press. • Miller, W. I. (1997) The antonomy of disgust. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. • Mohanty, C. (1988) ‘Under Western eyes’, Feminist Review 30: 65-88. • Moisi, D. (2009) The Geopolitics of Emotion. How cultures of Fear, humiliation and hope are reshaping the world. New York: Anchor Books. • Ngai, S. (2005) Ugly feelings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. • Pors, J. G. & D. Staunæs (2011) ´Hvordan føles det at tabe i OECD? Chok og skam som affektiv motor i uddannelsespolitik og -ledelse’, Unge Pædagoger 4: 18-36. • Said, E. (1978) Orientalism. London: Vintage Books. • Staunæs, D. (2011) ‘Governing the potentials of Life: Interrogating the Promises in Affective Educational Leadership’, Journal of Educational History and Administration 43(3): 227-247. • Thrift, N. (2004) ‘Intensities of feeling: Towards a spatial Politics of affect’, Geografiska Annaler 86B: 57-78. • Tsing, A. (2005) Friction. An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Author Information

Dorthe Staunæs (presenting / submitting)

University of Aarhus

Education

Copenhagen

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