ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the critical potential of the affective in literacy research and practice by immersing in two young children’s narrations of the political dimensions of their lives. Drawing particularly on the ideas of intensity (Massumi, 2002), slowing the quick jump (Stewart, 2007) and bodily horizons (Ahmed, 2010), I explore how affect can support the critical work of un-naming categories and un-knowing well-worn tales that reiterate what we already think we know–about culpability, advocacy, longing, loss, connection, distance and how the political permeates classrooms. Whether it is the first or one-hundredth time of experiencing Lara’s story of deportation or Malina’s of incarceration, response exists first in sensation. But then, blink, and the words are right there, filing bodies into pre-figured, consequential, story lines. What does affect do in literacy classrooms in relation to particular bodies and the stories they tell and that are told about them? This chapter argues that shifting the critical body (of literacy scholarship, of teachers, researchers, children) into the affective can shake up what is possible to see, feel, and do in the highly consequential racialized, classed, gendered, and heterosexist narratives of what and who is valued, seen, and counted in literacy policies and practices.
