Dorthe Staunæs

Where have all the subjects gone? Bringing together the concepts of intersectionality and subjectification

The concept of intersectionality is often used to grasp the interconnections between the traditional background categories of gender, ethnicity, race, age, sexuality and class. The concept can be a useful analytical tool in tracing how certain people seem to get positioned as not only different but also troublesome and, in some instances, marginalized. In research focused on subjectification and the variability of social life, a retooling and differentiating of the concept is needed. We do not know how the overall categories work and intersect with the lived experiences of subjects and we need to rethink the concept, which can be useful in specifying the troublesomeness of some subjectivities in a diverse and complex version of lived experience. By taking into account the above-mentioned shortcomings, the article lays the foundation for a theoretical reworking of the concept, grounded in empirical studies of subjectification processes on a subject level in a school context.

Governing the potentials of life itself? Interrogating the promises in affective educational leadership

This article critically explores how educational leadership is becoming increasingly affective in order to cultivate pupil potential and thereby meet the challenge of creating the best schools in the world. It critically analyses policy and handbook approaches to affective educational leadership technologies by showing the difficulty in keeping promises and by introducing the Massumian distinction between possibilities and potentiality. The analysis draws upon the notion of governmentality and the ‘affective turn’, and highlights affective, educational, leadership technologies as they appear in contemporary leadership handbooks in Denmark using four examples: (1) How school becomes the managed core of society. This reshapes educational leadership as onto-power, which means governing through ideas and materialities of perception and neurons. (2) How affectivity becomes synonymous with positive feelings, while more indeterminate parts of affectivity are neglected. (3) How educational leadership becomes a matter of governing the future through simulation and imagination. (4) How affective leadership is energised by a temporally and spatially structured bio-morality. I argue that such discourses tend to maintain the status quo rather than challenge basic premises and thereby, the edifying nature of the technologies paradoxically overshadows the possibilities promised by the technologies.

Standards and (self)implosion: How the circulation of affects accelerates the spread of standards and intensifies the embodiment of colliding, temporal ontologies:

Standards constitute an interesting phenomenon in discussions on emotional circulation and subjectivities. Because standards travel. And they are usually on a mission: to standardize policies or products and consequently also those who are administered by them or consume them. Literature on the spread of standards often tends to conceptualize the traveling of standards as contagious processes resulting in epidemic spreads. In this article, the metaphor of epidemic spread is replaced by an analytical configuration of a new mode of educational governance in which orchestrating webs of incentives and anticipations is a major driver. International standards are propelled by material–affective infrastructures and the embodied interpretations that educational agents and organizations make of them. The article displays how standards make organizations and selves implode and how the impact of standardizing processes and colliding temporal ontologies is embodied in mid-level managers’ collapse between anticipatory and nauseating affects.

The return of the Freudian Couch®: managing affectivity through technologies of comfort

This article explores how the affective “set-up” of Freud’s legendary couch has been exported into modern education relations. The so-called psy-sciences from pedagogy, psychology, and psychiatry have informed self-management in school. Managing self-management has a material-affective dimension. Through affective encounters with the couch, we argue, management can foster and maintain students’ desire to take part in school and enhance their own learning. Combining Karen Barad’s notion of intra-activity, a Gilles Deleuzian/Brian Massumian concept of affectivity, and Malou Juelskjær’s concept of comfort technology, we explore how the couch participates in transforming intensities and shaping desires by affecting bodies, voices, atmospheres, and relations. We look into the Danish school, which over the past decade has intensified its focus on preparing students to take part in a workforce in the knowledge economy. This means that much focus is on cultivating a learning subject that desires personal development and lifelong learning. We look at the couches placed near or inside the principal’s office to explore their role in affective management and how they tune and charge subject formation. Through our material-affective perspective we zoom in on everyday practices in the offices of principals to see how the couch, a mundane comfort technology, affects management relations between principal, students, parents, and teachers.

Orchestrating intensities and rhythms: How post-psychologies are assisting new educational standards and reforming subjectivities

The aim of this article is to trace how contemporary (post)psychologies, when used as psy-leadership tools in order to reach new standards, may create new work around the standards and may also create new subjectivities. It is well known that education is a field in which standardization and the making of subjects have held sway for many years; and it is also well known that schools have been some of the most regular purchasers of psychological methods, tests, and classifications. Following, but also elaborating upon governmentality studies, it is suggested that a current shift towards environmentality and learning-centered governance standards has dramatic and performative effects for the production of (educational) subjectivities. This implies a shift from governing identities, categories, and structures towards orchestrating affective intensities and rhythms. Finally, we discuss possible new worries and vulnerabilities when school goes post-psychological.

Learning to Stay Ahead of Time: Moving Leadership Experiences Experimentally

In the context of an ongoing change, management is required to take the form of a leadership that must be reignited over and over again. The article examines a new art of leadership that may be viewed as an attempt to keep up with these challenges and stay ahead of time. It emerges from a pilgrimage leadership learning laboratory on the road to Santiago de la Compostela. This moving lab creates situations of extraordinary intensity that border on hyperreality and force the leader to find him/herself anew on the verge of him/herself. Conceived as pilgrimage, leadership moves ahead of time as it reaches into and anticipates a future still unknown. In this setting, anticipatory affects and the virtual take up a predominant role. As it emerges here, leadership distinguishes itself not only from leadership in the traditional sense, but also from management and governmentality.

Who is ready for the results? Reflections on the multivoicedness of useful research

How is the usefulness of research assessed as university research becomes more and more commodified? The question is addressed through an analysis of how the results of a particular research project were received in a large private company that had provided the main funding for a research project on gender and top management, a project based on poststructuralist approaches. The ways in which the company received the research took many forms. There were differing responses from the organizations human resource staff, the managers and the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) depending on their varying interests, hierarchical positions and individual investments in specific organizational moves and individual careers. People in different positions in the organization applied elements from rationalist and constructionist discourses and combined them in ways that were neither coherent nor fixed. The article offers a complex analysis of the many and still shifting forces involved in the recipients assessments of usefulness. It poses questions for researchers and university management concerning researchers current working conditions and the protection of research integrity.

Producing curious affects: visual methodology as an affecting and conflictual wunderkammer

Digital video cameras, smartphones, internet and iPads are increasingly used as visual research methods with the purpose of creating an affective corpus of data. Such visual methods are often combined with interviews or observations. Not only are visual methods part of the used research methods, the visual products are used as requisites in interviews when interviewees are watching the recordings and share their reflections on these. The purpose of this article is to critically interrogate how such research apparatus, on the one hand, privilege a visual sense and, on the other hand, how the visual may turn into a multisensory knowledge situation, in which tense situations, un/expected and perhaps conflicting senses and un/comfortable affects are evoked. The article takes its point of departure in our analysis of a research apparatus we invented and used in the research project Schooling identities. In this project, 60 pupil review conversations with 13–15-year-old pupils were videotaped with the purpose of exploring the management of self-management. In 20 follow-up interviews with the pupils, the videos were played on an old television and used as memory triggers and initiators of reflection upon the affective experience of their own pupils’ review conversation. We argue that methods can be analytically scrutinised as affective “wunderkammers”, in which different realities are juxtaposed. In so doing, our ways of experiencing research and processes of subjectification are affected and complicated. We interrogate the intensification of this “wunderkammer” and the particularity of it, when a television is part of the apparatus. As Lisa Blackman reminds us, television may be a technology of intimacy, a medium of telepresence which makes certain mental touch and affective transfer processes such as empathy and suggestion possible. During the television-watching, the peer-review conversations were not only represented or memorised but the very experience of the conversation, the people and the tasks involved were revitalised. In the interviews, former lived reality, videotaped reality and presence were conflated. These moments of a new reality affected both pupils and ourselves as researchers intensely. The television-initiated loops of reflection worked as an affective and inventive trigger creating an intense situation. It may also affect the everyday life of school.

Desire and (self-)management in education. Post-lenses on Nordic intakes of transnational tendencies

Education, learning bodies, and organizations are undergoing significant transformation. More and more institutional contexts, including virtual ones are being drawn into the orbit of comprehensive educational strategies in order to make nations fit for an imagined future that is often termed Knowledge Societies or Knowledge Economies (e.g. Nóvoa & Lawn, 2002; Rizvi & Lingard, 2010). Humans are being expected to ‘stretch’ themselves to the limit of their own capabilities. Therefore, human subjects are under increased demand to learn all the time and everywhere. This has put concepts like Life Long Learning and Life Wide Learning on the agenda in the Nordic countries, the EU, and beyond. In order to make successful learning happen, two entangled phenomena are obvious: learning must be self-managed, and the processes of self-management are often facilitated in affective ways. Thereby, the management of selves and the intensity and quality of desire and other affective and cognitive dimensions of institutional life have become both the target and the instrument when human capacities as ‘the potentials of the future’ are cultivated and governed (e.g. Popkewitz, Olsson, Petersson, & Kowalczyk, 2006; Staunæs, 2011). This special issue explores what (self-)management in education may mean – understood as productions of desire and engagement in Nordic education and as answers to policies on various hot issues like inclusion, gender equality, truancy, technologies for disciplining students, and university reform among others. The authors have asked their empirical material questions such as:

Governing the Intermediary Spaces: Reforming School and Subjectivities Through Liminal Motivational Technologies

A recent national reform of the Danish public school facilitates a number of ongoing experiments in (re)organizing the school day in an attempt to potentialize the spaces in the shape of what we usually recognize as recess, breaks, and transitions. The reform may indeed be positioned within what have been termed the GERM or Global Educational Reform Movement; however, the Danish reform also has particular traits of its own as “a new, different and more varied school day.” Within this lies the reorganization of the everyday rhythm of schooling as well as the addition of a mandatory daily 45 min of physical education and activities. In the chapter, we focus upon the governmentality of “the intermediaries.” Reorganizing the school is not only a way of ordering and structuring the day and of disciplining subjectivities but also a way of potentializing subjectivities to promote learning. Hitherto unnoticed spaces of freedom – both in the form of recess and free or spare time and resources and in the form of energies and affects – are the object of intensified management and pedagogy. We analyze this governmental shift by reading our empirical material through the lens of two thinking technologies, “the liminal motivational technology” and “potentializing intermediary spaces.” Our analysis shows how certain kinds of leadership for learning can be designated as psy-leadership, which means leadership that draws on (post)psychologies, how educational subjectivities are being reformed through this setup, and finally how the potentialization of the liminal and the intermediary spaces also invites new unmanageability into the school, which may result in non-intended and perhaps unwanted effects and exhaustion.