Affective schoolgirl assemblages making school spaces of non/belonging

• Published in: Emotion, space and society Vol. 25; pp. 63 - 70
• Main Author: Wolfe, Melissa Joy
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Ltd 01.11.2017
• Subjects: Affect; Belonging; Documentary; Girl; Intra-action; Spacetimemattering; Documentary; Intra-action; Affect; Girl; Belonging; Spacetimemattering
• ISSN: 1755-4586; 1878-0040
• DOI: 10.1016/j.emospa.2017.05.010

In this paper I draw on a filmic study with former Australian schoolgirls. I focus on their desire for belonging in secondary school spaces and the ways that belonging was mediated through shame and restricted educational outcomes. This work examines everyday schooling as undergoing a process of affective non/belonging through filmed intraviews (Kuntz and Presnall, 2012). It questions the ways that power relations operate to re/create spatial differences as reductive. Intra-actions re/counted demanded the materialisation of particular types of schoolgirls within marked spaces, demonstrating the making of difference as entangled Baradian (2007) cuts productive of exclusions. Enacting improvisations ‘to fit’ enabled some of the female participants to endure these spaces but others removed themselves from educative pathways. Some bodies were worn down, and others found ease of movement. The filmic methodology employed accounts for shifting ‘multiple instances’, revealing a multiple and conflicting reality (as mattered meaning). The virtual viewer becomes with the research in affective intra-action that is materially consequential. The re/active documentary methodology (Wolfe, 2016a) accommodates a multiple non-linguistic affective recognition of relationality, a sameness in difference. This is a move to a Baradian response-ability that may reconfigure what appears as common sense in education, in the present. •Affective assemblages (of shame) operate with educational spaces and re/create inequity.•Affective un/belonging in educational spaces is mediated through shame and restricts educational outcomes for some bodies.•Performed practices in school that created feelings of shame are explored.•Affect has often been ignored in educational research and this matters.•I suggest that educationalists enable a feminist account of ‘response-ability’.•Filmic methodology accounts for multiple and diffractive encounters as a multiple and conflicting reality.