Feminist affect and children's embodied trauma

Abstract

Feminist new materialisms account for the agency of the body and the ways it is entangled with, in and through its environment. Similarly, affect scholars have putwords to the bodily feelings and attunements that we can’t describe. In this paper, we provide a brief survey of feminist thought that established the scholarly landscape and appetite for the turn to affect and offer this as a theoretical tool for thinking through the child body. Feminist affect is used here as a resource for understanding embodied change in children who are living with intergenerational trauma. Through analysing data from the Interfaith Childhoods project, we explore art as a way to affectively rework trauma in three case studies with refugee children from our Australian fieldwork sites. Our new materialist arts based approaches map embodied changes in children that speak to how bodies inherit and are affected by things that often can’tbe described. Specifically, in relation to their religious, cultural and refugee histories (Van der Kolk 2014, Menakem 2017), we offer the analysis in this paper as a routetowards understanding children’s bodily experience and expression, in ways that havebeen made possible by affective lines of inquiry pioneered by feminist scholarship.

Pedagogies of discomfort in the world language classroom: Ethical tensions and considerations for educators

“…Regarding linguistic‐ and arts‐based responses to discomfort, the teachers designed pedagogical tasks that enabled the multifaceted expression of discomfort by combining linguistic verbalization of discomforting emotions (in the Skype conversations and written reflection logs) with artistic and multimodal forms of expression (e.g., collaborative artistic artifacts and multimodal recreated book covers). The rationale is that the arts enable an affective and embodied engagement with discomfort and trauma (Hickey‐Moody & Willcox, 2020). Arts‐based pedagogical practices can be the means for understanding and translating otherwise incomprehensible feelings of trauma in classrooms and schools (Dutro, 2008, 2011, 2013; Dutro & Bien, 2013)—feelings that resist representation through linguistic expression (Busch & McNamara, 2020).…”

Linguistic and Artistic Representations of Trauma: The Contribution of Pedagogies of Discomfort in Language Education

“…In this article, we follow those theorists who understand affect as a category that includes forces, energies, emotions, intensities, “impulses, desires, and feelings that get historically constructed in a range of ways” (Cvetkovich, 2012, p. 4). In this sense, affect escapes language but can also be in language, and as such, affect is “often the medium for maintaining or resolving generational trauma, memory and biography” (Hickey–Moody & Willcox, 2020, p. 2).…”

“…Also, Hickey–Moody (2013), writing about affect as pedagogy, advanced the argument that culture and arts are pedagogical in the sense that change occurs in the body through pedagogies. Hence, affects and emotions are the products of entanglements among bodies, contexts, and objects, for example, art materials, writing and literacy methods, times of making and collaborating, ways of presenting and being received (Hickey–Moody & Willcox, 2020). We align with this work that bodies, spaces, and objects are co‐constituted and can be productive in their connections in the classroom, and this approach is evident in our analysis of students’ engagement with pain and trauma—an experience that often creates discomforting feelings in students.…”

The sensorium and fleshy schools

“…New materialist pedagogies of affect and embodiment have been particularly explored in early childhood education, whereby children are seen as being closer to the material world and there is greater acceptance of embodied responses to human and non‐human agents. Affect here is ‘… the intensity that no one body is able to own; the empirical and emotional mixture we don't have a feeling or proper noun to describe, the in‐between zone of things that makes us question boundaries between knowledges, bodies, practices’ (Hickey‐Moody & Wilcox, 2020, p. 2). In one example, Dernikos (2020) turns to the role of soundscapes in the primary classroom as affective sites which reinforce the social norms of Whiteness.…”