Disability Matters

Pedagogy, media and affect

Anna Hickey-Moody, Vicki Crowley, Anna Hickey-Moody, Vicki Crowley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317978169
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

From the critique of 'the medical model' of disability undertaken during the early and mid-1990s, a 'social model' emerged, particularly in the caring professions and those trying to shape policy and practice for people with disability. In education and schooling, it was a period of cementing inclusive practices and the 'integration' and inclusion of disability into 'mainstream'. What was lacking in the debates around the social model, however, were the challenges to abledness that were being grappled with in the routine and pragmatics of self-care by people with disabilities, their families, carers and caseworkers. Outside the academy, new forms of activity and new questions were circulating. Challenges to abledness flourished in the arts and constituted the lived experience of many disability activists.

Disability Matters engages with the cultural politics of the body, exploring this fascinating and dynamic topic through the arts, teaching, research and varied encounters with 'disability' ranging from the very personal to the professional. Chapters in this collection are drawn from scholars responding in various registers and contexts to questions of disability, pedagogy, affect, sensation and education. Questions of embodiment, affect and disability are woven throughout these contributions, and the diverse ways in which these concepts appear emphasize both the utility of these ideas and the timeliness of their application.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education.

INTRODUCTION

Disability matters: pedagogy, media and affect

Anna Hickey-Moody^a and Vicki Crowley^b

^aGender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia; ^bSchool of Communication, Languages & International Studies, University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia

This edition of Discourse comes into being after two decades of engagement with the cultural politics of the body – through the arts, teaching, research and varied encounters with ‘disability’ ranging from the very personal to the professional. From the critique of ‘the medical model’ of disability undertaken during the early and mid-1990s, a ‘social model’ emerged, particularly in the caring professions and those trying to shape policy and practice for people with disability. In education and schooling, it was a period of cementing inclusive practices and the ‘integration’ and inclusion of disability into ‘mainstream’ (Northway, 2002; Vincent, Evans, Lunt, & Young, 1996; Vislie, 2003). What was lacking in the debates around the social model, however, were the challenges to abledness that were being grappled with in the routine and pragmatics of self-care by people with disabilities, their families, carers and caseworkers. Outside the academy, new forms of activity and new questions were circulating. Challenges to abledness flourished in the arts and constituted the lived experience of many disability activists. In the early 1990s, for instance, performing arts companies such as the London-based CanDoCo and Restless Dance Theatre¹ in Adelaide, Australia, were making dance and redefining its boundaries as physically based performance sourced in bodily capacity (in preference to disciplining the body into extant genres of ‘the dancing body’).

It was the body, arts, and dance in particular, that provided us with our first touchstone as colleagues, researchers, performers and educators and which constituted our earliest professional precursor to this special edition. CanDoCo Dance Company and Restless Dance Theatre captured, and continue to press into being, expressions of worlds in which bodies and embodiment and the complexities of intellectual actualities can incite curiosity, challenge and redefine how bodies (including the thinking body) foster convivial communities of diversity and complexity. Restless and CanDoCo expressly create performance art through collaborative processes between disabled and non-disabled dancers and performers. Restless frames itself as ‘a centre of excellence for disability ethos and practice’ (Restless Dance Theatre, 2010). CanDoCo views its work as ‘pushing the boundaries of contemporary dance’ in ways which ‘broaden people’s perception of what dance is and who can dance’. As CanDoCo’s website states, ‘We want to excite by being daring, inspire by being excellent, and question by being diverse’ (CanDoCo Dance Company, 2010). Here we see, in Jean-Luc Nancy’s (2000) terms, that there is no existence without co-existence and the necessity of being becomes a necessity of ‘being-with’, a being-with that is a mutual exposure to one another.

As editors of this special issue, we are drawn to the capacity of art and media as forms of cultural pedagogy that confront, challenge and re-define knowledge and practice, and mediate altered sensibilities. Further, we are inspired by the ways in which encounters with different forms of knowledge (art, philosophy, curriculum) can shift the techne of disability from its historically and continuingly oppressive ideation and practice into a techne of possibility.

A precursor that brought impetus to this special edition was a two-day seminar titled ‘Ordinary Lives: Narratives of Disability’ sponsored by the Cultures of the Body Research Group at the University of South Australia. The seminar brought together disability activists, policy makers, artists (performers, writers, film-makers) and academics. Conversations arising from this event bring diverse explorations of the body, education, media, art and a range of theoretical frameworks into this issue. This special issue, therefore, is not a collection of articles on disability read through select philosophers, or cultural theorists, or community arts-based works,² or a direct selection of papers from the seminar. It is a collection of articles whose critique arcs toward emergent epistemologies hinged to technologies of disability, their myriad refusals, joys, curiosities, tensions, convergences and re-shapings through digitization, medical interventions and ‘advances’. Some of the articles brought together here also gesture towards the role played by the concept of affect and affect theory in education over the past seven years, and as such we would like to offer a contexualization of this concept in relation to the field of education.

Affect in educational theory

Affect, influenced as it is by the work of Deleuze (1988, 1990a, 1990b, 2002) and Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 1986, 1987, 1994), is beginning to be utilized widely as a conceptual resource in educational theory. Across the past seven years, educational theorists have begun to work with this concept. Here, we consider some of the earliest theorists to bring affect into education because the conceptual move that accompanies this turn towards affect creates space for embodied knowledges of disability. Affect validates emergent epistemologies, which all too often remain silenced from theorizations of education. Christa Albrecht-Crane and Jennifer Daryl Slack (2003), Megan Watkins (2006) and Elizabeth Ellsworth (2005) are theoreticians working in and across education who have begun to employ the idea of affect. Other cultural studies theorists who take up the concept of affect in ways that are of use in considering classrooms include Elspeth Probyn (2000) and Anna Gibbs (2002). We would like to point towards their scholarship, as well as that of Brian Massumi (2002), Felicity Colman (2002, 2005), Gregory Seigworth (2003) and Melissa Gregg (2006), as resources of significant importance in the theoretical project of taking up affect to consider the pedagogical nature of culture.³

The concept of affect was not specifically introduced into educational practices until 2003 when Albrecht-Crane and Daryl Slack (2003, p. 191) made the argument that ‘[t]he importance of affect in the classroom is inadequately considered in scholarship on pedagogy’. While the work of the theorists cited above moves to address the current gap in research on affect and education, the potential of affect to reconfigure theories of education in significant ways has not yet been fully realized. Affect maps the micro-political relations that constitute the beginnings of social change. In order to understand the lived politics of disability in education and, indeed to read disability as a kind of cultural pedagogy, we must begin by thinking through affect (Hickey-Moody, 2009). It is our contention that understanding, naming, illustrating and analyzing the beginnings of social change is imperative if we are to recognize and instantiate disability as a valuable cultural resource and create classrooms that are disability friendly.

Albrecht-Crane and Daryl Slack provide a critical structure for thinking pedagogy through affect by establishing a framework well suited to educational policy and discourse analysis. They do this in a discreet chapter in a cultural studies style anthology of applied Deleuzian theory, titled Animations (of Deleuze and Guattari) (2003). Taking Deleuze’s Spinozist body as a point of departure, Albrecht-Crane and Daryl Slack note:

In most pedagogical models, individuals are defined or positioned to take up posts or places in terms of who they are; that is, in terms of their social identities: gender, race, class, ethnicity, and so forth, and they are seen as possessing varying degrees of agency – that is, an ability to act – as an attribute of who they are. In contrast, Deleuze and Guattari do not begin with the question ‘What is a body?’ but ‘What can a body do?’ and ‘Of what affects is a body capable?’ (2003, p. 192)

While Albrecht-Crane and Daryl Slack’s reading of the body as affective is certainly core to Deleuze and Guattari’s work, this model for thinking the body is not at all contra agency. In fact it is quite the opposite. Within Deleuze and Guattari’s work, agency changes along with subjective experience and evolves in relation to the affects of which a body is capable. Agency is an inherent part of any body, be it a disabled human body, a body of water, a political party. Following Spinoza, Deleuze takes individual material bodies as a challenge to think through the physical dimensions of agency. Deleuze states:

Spinoza … proposes to establish the body as a model: ‘We do not know what the body can do’ … We speak of consciousness and its decrees, of the will and of its effects, of the thousand ways of moving the body, of dominating the body and the passions – but we do not even know what a body can do. (1988, p. 18)

‘What a body can do’ is a material act and it is also a degree of agency. After establishing the affective body as the primary site – or origin – with which a pedagogy of affect would be concerned, Albrecht-Crane and Daryl Slack’s focus shifts from the body of the subject and the micro-political realm to social machinations, and it is here that their theorization gains particular momentum. Adopting a meta-perspective, they note that:

Deleuze and Guattari’s project of rhizomatics maps three types of lines that are central to understanding the work of the socius: molar lines, molecular lines, and lines of flight. Molar lines ‘overcode’ dual segmentations that follow ‘the great major dualist oppositions: social classes, but also men–women, adults–children, and so on’ … the molecular, distributes ‘territorial and lineal segmentations’ … a ‘supple fabric without which their [molar lines] rigid segments would not hold’ … The third line, the line of flight, is also a molecular line (as opposed to a molar line), ‘one of several lines of flight, marked by quanta and defined by decoding and deterritorializations’… This third line acts as a line of mutation, of decoding; it is ‘the ultimate quantum line’ (p. 225). (2003, pp. 194–219)

It is this positioning of Deleuze and Guattari’s work as a tool with which to analyze the ‘Molar lines [that] “overcode” dual segmentations that follow “the great major dualist oppositions: social classes, but also men–women, adults–children, and so on”’ (2003, pp. 194–195), which lends Albrecht-Crane and Daryl Slack’s work to analyzing affective movement of social bodies more than of individual bodies. Disability studies in education, as an academic field, or the disability rights movement, might be considered molar discourses that overcode the affective everyday experience of disability education.

In contrast to Albrecht-Crane and Daryl Slack, Watkins (2006) takes a micro-analytic approach. Watkins’ research methodology was designed in order to evaluate pedagogy through the concept of affect. As such, Watkins’ research is of particular interest because the methodology she employs has been designed specifically to record and ‘capture’, if you will, the embodied negotiations pertaining to – and arising from – affect in the classroom. Whereas Albrecht-Crane and Daryl Slack offer affect as a tool that will support a meta-analysis of classroom politics and discourses, Watkins takes up affect with a focus on learning and teaching literacy. The ways in which her classroom-based research methodology is oriented towards capturing embodied affect are illustrated in the extended quotation below:

Merilee … gave particular attention to this textual form in a unit of work about pirates in which she used Treasure Island as the focus text. In addition to reading this novel, Merilee set a term assignment that students read another two texts dealing with themes related to pirates or the sea. At the same time the class was working on writing their own narrative. She explained that in this lesson they were going to write a description of one of the characters for their story … Merilee asked students for suggestions for words to describe either the protagonist or antagonist that they would be writing about in their story. Students offered an array of words relating to personality. She recorded students’ suggestions on the board and then asked which referred to the protagonist and the antagonist. The class then moved on to list words describing the character’s appearance … Throughout this brainstorming session, Merilee did not simply act as a scribe, but encouraged students to use their imagination by offering her own examples. (Watkins, 2006, p. 278)

Students really responded to this performance and added to the image Merilee had created with one student calling out, ‘He might have a wart on his face’. Merilee replied jokingly that ‘Oh, yes, all antagonists have warts!’ At this point the class all laughed, clearly enjoying the discussion and enthused about writing their own description which Merilee then asked them to begin. She allotted the class 20 minutes to do this and insisted they write no more than half a page. During this time Merilee progressed around the room offering advice. After 20 minutes she asked students if they were finished and then had them read out their work. The first student to do so was a boy called Adrian. He had written the following about the pirate:

A hideous fellow walked through the door.

Unkempt with black hair, he was staring hard at me.

His scared face, a scarred and wrinkled face, like a soldier back from battle.

His clothes ragged and torn. He stank like a dead animal.

After reading this out he was met with spontaneous applause from the class and Adrian beamed. This example is significant in terms of what it suggests about a notion of pedagogic affect demonstrating three different ways in which it can function, that is as discipline, praise and contagion (see Watkins, 2006, pp. 278–279).

As the negotiations between student and teacher in this passage of text illustrate, embodied affects occurring in the classroom constitute a kinesthetic economy of knowledge exchange. Learning is about moving the margins of knowledge from exterior to interior locations and this process of movement, or folding, is an embodied act. The affective image of the pirate prompts this young student to negotiate the margins of their knowledge and technical skills of writing. Watkins’ data show this clearly and also unpack the kinesthetic economy of relations between teacher and student that leads the student to ‘invent’ or arrive at the affective image of the pirate. The teacher deploys affects in her pedagogic practice: ‘she took on the character of the pirate she was describing using an exaggerated tone in her voice to heighten the impact of what she was saying’ (Watkins, 2006, p. 278). For Watkins, then, affect in the classroom is mediated as three pedagogical forms: discipline, praise and contagion.

Ellsworth (2005) talks about affect as a material entity and also as a mode of cognition. She does not draw on Deleuzian theory, although her arguments pertaining to affect have strong parallels to those advanced by Deleuze. Deploying the word ‘affect’ to articulate a material state of affairs, Ellsworth says:

Experience, of course, presupposes bodies – not inert bodies, but living bodies that take up and lay down space by their continuous, unfolding movement and that take up and lay down time as they go on being. When we begin to think of experience as an event in time that also takes place, we can see why a number of contemporary theorists are using media and ...