ABSTRACT
In Hannah Jickling and Helen Reed's Ask Me Chocolates, part of the larger project, The Pedagogical Impulse, the leakiness and unruliness of poo announced itself as an affective pedagogy of willful failure. In the chapter, the author introduces the larger project and the methodology of research-creation. Working with different theories of failure and affect, the author argue for failure as a form of performative disengagement, as pedagogies of refusal. If failure is typically understood as the opposite of success, through pedagogies of refusal-or a kind of willfulness-failure becomes a means for artists and children to resist normativity. Further, failure's affects, like shame, embarrassment, and disgust, are regulated and governed in schooling, in an attempt to create docile and sanitized bodies. Instead, in The Pedagogical Impulse residencies, the fecundity of poo and its concomitant affects touched, titillated, and aroused.
