This article contributes to conversations around difficult knowledge in pedagogy by (a) investigating how post-truth claims about issues of race and racism may constitute forms of difficult knowledge, and (b) proposing that fostering 'affective solidarity' can constitute a productive pedagogical response to post-truth claims, because it moves…

This paper turns our attention to a rather neglected dimension of (de)colonization, namely, the affective elements of (de)colonization in the context of higher education. "Affective decolonization" highlights that decolonization has to also happen at the level of affective life. The notion of affective decolonization complements the work…

Jack Mezirow's (1978, 1991, and 2008) transformative learning (TL) theory was developed with transforming society in mind. However, that intent has been overshadowed by a dominant focus on individual transformation and a rational cognitive approach to critically assessing assumptions as the path to transformation. We (the authors) wonder what…

Political polarization is often argued to be a major threat to democracy. This article examines whether the two different forms of polarization, ideological and affective, may risk some of the core assumptions of democratic legitimacy. The paper argues that ideological polarization is linked with increasingly radical ideological positions being…

Based on empirical research with working-class students studying in Australian universities, this article frames class as a structuring relation, but also as a series of affective events, through which we emphasise capacities. Putting the concept of class in conversation with two analytics of affect, we show how class is a relational site of…

To explore the affective domains embedded in academic development and teacher practice, a team of academic developers was invited to consider a poem and how it reflects the emotions and feelings underpinning experiences as teachers within Higher Education. We used a method of arts-informed, collective biography to evaluate a poem to draw upon and…

In bringing together the literature on post-democracy and theoretical work on the politics of affective societies, this article explores how democratic education might benefit from a sustained examination of negative emotions and affects associated with democratic disenchantment. In particular, the analysis highlights what is gained by introducing…

A long-asked question in children's literature studies is how the child reads the very same book we (adults) have read. In 1984, Peter Hunt argued for a "childist criticism" proposing that young readers' multiple individual responses to literature should inform adults' critical practice. In this article, I propose that affect theory and…

The contemporary university works to produce an imagined global graduate who can demonstrate competencies such as mobility, intercultural awareness and global citizenship. In Australia and New Zealand, teacher education academics are charged with the production of graduates who can display and transmit such competencies, but the labour and lived…

In this paper, I draw from an in-school music research-creation project to consider the complex, racist-ableist politics of failure in the early childhood classroom. I theorise failure as it unfolds through anxiety, which I conceptualise as an affect of failure, to discuss both the perverse possibilities and perilous precarities of (neuro)queer…

The objective of this article is to engage in a critical review of Roberto Esposito's biopolitical account by including a thoroughgoing interrogation of racism and white supremacy through the lens of Black affect studies. It is argued that both white supremacy studies and Esposito's framework could work side-by-side in ways that are productive for…

This article offers an example of how to use embodied learning effectively in online education. The discussed assignment is designed for classes in rhetoric, visual communication, or public memory, and places pedagogical research in conversation with scholarship in visual, aesthetic, and rhetorical communication. This type of digital aesthetic…

Small human complex systems, here called co-present groups, are found across all fields of human social life. Complexity thinking suggests why this is so: that these groups, irrespective of formal content, have a meta-function of providing maximum complexity to manage the "indeterminacy" or "uncertainty" that characterises the…

Two recent lines of inquiry that have emerged in educational philosophy and research are the turn to affect theory and the call for decolonising education. Although there have been some efforts to bring these two lines of inquiry together and inform educational philosophy and research, there is still important conceptual work to be done,…

The aim of this paper is to turn attention to the role of affects and emotions in fundamentalism, and examine two interrelated dilemmas that emerge when university instructors come across students who express fundamentalist beliefs and emotions in the classroom: pedagogical and ethical dilemmas. The paper examines these dilemmas through the…