This autotheoretical paper exploring a collaborative project we engaged in during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic (March-May 2020) is structured as two intertwined stories. The first, a series of autotheoretical vignettes, expresses our process of sense-making about affect as well as multiple affective productions that spurred learning, personal and relational growth, and becomings-otherwise. The second delves into posthuman methodology, autotheory, affect, and affirmative ethics. Together these highlight the ways that our collaborative work of attending to affect helped us enact an affirmative ethics by tapping into traumatic lived experiences of COVID-19, isolation, and academic work, and transforming them into knowledge-producing, connection-creating, hopeful encounters. These encounters gesture to ways that enacting affirmative ethics as a collaborative critical posthuman praxis can help us collectively thrive in neoliberal conditions.