Jette Kofoed

Travelling and sticky affects: Exploring teens and sexualized cyberbullying through a Butlerian-Deleuzian-Guattarian lens

In this paper we combine the thinking of Deleuze and Guattari (1984, 1987) with Judith Butlers (1990, 1993, 2004, 2009) work to follow the rhizomatic becomings of young peoples affective relations in a range of on- and off-line school spaces. In particular we explore how events that may be designated as sexual cyberbullying are constituted and how they are mediated by technology (such as texting or in/through social networking sites). Drawing on findings from two different studies looking at teens’ uses of and experiences with social networking sites, Arto in Denmark, and Bebo in the UK, we use this approach to think about how affects flow, are distributed, and become fixed in assemblages. We map how affects are manoeuvred and potentially disrupted by young people, suggesting that in the incidences discussed affects travel as well as stick in points of fixation. We argue that we need to grasp both affective flow and fixity in order to gain knowledge of how subjectification of the gendered/classed/racialised/sexualised body emerges. A Butlerian-Deleuzian-Guattarian frame helps us to map some of these affective complexities that shape sexualized cyberbully events; and to recognize technologically mediated lines of flight when subjectifications are at least temporarily disrupted and new terms of recognition and intelligibility staked out.

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.

Experimenting with Affects and Senses — A Performative Pop-Up Laboratory (Self-)Critically Revisited

Some years ago, we established a pop-up laboratory at a suburban secondary school in Denmark. Let us call the school ‘X-school’. By the term ‘pop-up laboratory’, we mean a laboratory setting, or a ‘a place to work’, that pops up in a limited time at a particular place and that is designed for working (‘laborara’) with and testing assumptions on a particular research subject on the spot. Our ambition with this laboratory was to get closer to some of the precision mechanisms of new forms of biopolitics. Or, more precisely we were curious about how affects and senses are constructed and governed by new forms of educational leadership, when educational leadership expects students to affectively engage themselves in their own learning processes and to be committed and motivated for further schooling: How did the students feel about this management? How did they the experience to be a ‘human resource’ that could constantly be cultivated and potentialised? Borrowing Brian Massumi’s (2009) term, we might say that we were (and are still) interested in the ‘ontopower’ of today’s schooling and educational leadership, targeting cognition, perception, and affertivity as the objective as well as the means. However, in this chapter, we revisit the format of the pop-up laboratory and more particularly the visual methodologies that we used for producing empirical material. By critically scrutinizing the unintended effects of our lab and how the research design produced and experimented with conflicting affects, this text attempts to contribute with self-critical and nuanced reflections, rather than only celebrate or abandon our own experiment.