Malou Juelskjær

Gendered subjectivities of spacetimematter

This paper investigates enactments of human subjectivities with a focus on how subjectivities may be studied if spatiality and temporality are taken up as constituting forces in the production of subjectivities. By reading poststructuralist feminist theorising, agential realism and empirical material diffractively through each other I re-situate gendered subjectivity to be of spacetimemattering [Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the Universe Half Way – Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press] rather than something occurring in space and time. From a study of students who changed schools in order to experience ‘new beginnings’ the paper presents an in-depth case study of Mary. By following Marys transition and how she is complexly enacted through her past and present school lives, it becomes possible to investigate how spatiality and temporality co-existed as forces in her becoming. I argue that this perspective opens up alternative possibilities for understanding the constitution of subjectivity.This paper investigates enactments of human subjectivities with a focus on how subjectivities may be studied if spatiality and temporality are taken up as constituting forces in the production of subjectivities. By reading poststructuralist feminist theorising, agential realism and empirical material diffractively through each other I re-situate gendered subjectivity to be of spacetimemattering [Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the Universe Half Way – Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press] rather than something occurring in space and time. From a study of students who changed schools in order to experience ‘new beginnings’ the paper presents an in-depth case study of Mary. By following Marys transition and how she is complexly enacted through her past and present school lives, it becomes possible to investigate how spatiality and temporality co-existed as forces in her becoming. I argue that this perspective opens up alternative possibilities for understanding t...

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.

Resisting and Committing to Schooling: Intersections of Masculinity and Academic Position.

In Western countries, discourses concerning ‘boys failing school’ are circulated in media as well as in schools. Research is conducted that offers sweeping sociological, societal or biological explanations, or context‐sensitive ethnographic or social psychological and variable explanations on the relation between boys and school life. In this article the author outlines her research into boys in school, based on her empirical studies of subjectification processes in the institutionalized context of school life. The case study is ‘Ryan’, who switched schools and left a school life in which he was ‘resisting schooling’. At the new school, new possibilities were available. The analysis shows how complexly the dynamics of resisting and committing to school are intertwined with local, shifting and intersecting categories of masculinity, academic learning, race and the struggles of power within and between these categories, and also with struggles of what is pedagogically relevant.

Students of Reforms. Investigating and Troubling the Enactment of Student Voices in Research on Reform.

Abstract We investigate how students’ voices are enacted in reform processes and in research on reforms. Our theoretical stance on the concept of reform is performative and onto-epistemological; thus, we understand reforming as an entangled multiplicity, co-emerging and co-morphing. Reforming reconfigure what ‘is’ and intra-act with what is already there. The article focus on a reform of the Danish primary and secondary school. We work with three different cases, each with a different data-set, and analyse how research methodologies and findings in the field of reform research constitute ‘the student’ and ‘student voice’ as well as we look into dynamics of how reforms shape and change what counts as voices and how voices change and shape reforms.

The Principal Is Present: Producing Psy-ontologies Through Post/Psychology-Informed Leadership Practices II

This chapter explores how affective states of mind, such as presence and vigilance, emerge, transform, and disappear as performative effects of leading students’ learning milieu. Specifically, we follow how the use of post-psychologies targeting milieu, contexts, relations, and bodies are centrally incorporated into leadership practices. Post-psychologies are psychological concepts and practices that go beyond modern psychology and are concerned about the autonomous individual. These post-psy-informed leadership practices are, on the one hand, producing and bringing life to certain feelings and affective state of minds, while on the other hand, taking the life out of others. In addition, these processes are carefully interwoven with practices informed by modern psychologies. Inspired by Michel Foucault and Brian Massumi, these types of post-psy-informed leadership practices can be conceptualised as an ontopower radically producing and constituting psy-ontologies and affective economies. All in all, this results in an interesting, however, muddy, affective economy, and a situation, which again asks for new thoughts on the entanglements of leadership practices and post/psychologies. The chapter is a hopeful contribution to such psy-interruptions.