Living expanded document here: affect (Expanded)
Bodily Intensities, felt forces and capacities prior to narrative, label, or cognition that modulate the (human and nonhuman) body’s abilities to act and be acted upon; transpersonal forces that move across bodies, things, and environments, composing atmospheres and dispositions that render some actions and meanings possible and others less so.
Drawing on Spinoza as reworked by Massumi, Deleuze & Guattari, Ahmed, and Berlant, affect names pre-personal, pre-cognitive intensities that register as shifts in bodily capacity and orientation. Although intensities sometimes register as emotions in specific settings, affect more broadly describes the gradients and rhythms that course through encounters, images, interfaces, architectures, and atmospheres, composing collective tones and tendencies. In Ahmed’s work, affect sticks to bodies and signs, creating orientations and patterns of circulation; in Massumi’s account, affect is autonomous in the sense that it is irreducible to meaning or intention, even as it is inseparable from them in practice. Affect theory thus tracks feelings not as merely private interior states, but as relational, worldly dynamics with social force and consequence.
Postqualitative inquiry turns to affect to attune methods and analysis to the more-than-representational dimensions of events: the surges, hesitations, micro-shocks, frictions, and atmospheres that shape what becomes possible. It privileges research designs that compose apparatuses that can register these intensities, tempos, and tonalities across sites, artifacts, and bodies, through situated fieldnotes, sensory descriptions, rhythm analysis, interface traces, and compositional experiments, treating affect as a material-discursive force within assemblages. Posthumanist and new materialist approaches refuse to isolate affect within the human subject, instead following how bodies, devices, spaces, and discourses co-compose feeling. This orients method toward attunement, situated noticing, and tracing distributions of capacity, rather than coding interior states.
Thinking with affect reconfigures inquiry as an attunement practice. Fieldnotes, audio traces, interface recordings, and sensory descriptors are worked with as affective materials rather than as mere representations. Analysis follows how affective gradients amplify, dissipate, or reroute through material-discursive arrangements, paying attention to micro-shifts in pace, hesitation, momentum, saturation, and relief. Ethics is immanent to method: choices about where to dwell, how to cut episodes, and how to compose descriptions participate in the very modulation of capacities under study, calling for careful accountability to how affective worlds are enacted in and through inquiry.
Affect clarifies how instructors’ encounters with LLMs are felt as ambivalence, tension, curiosity, dread, or relief before they are named, and how those intensities are shaped by interfaces, institutional signals, and histories of writing pedagogy. GenAI’s frictions and fluencies in generating output can generate surges of ease or suspicion that recalibrate confidence, vigilance, and trust, thereby modulating decisions about authorship, evaluation, and collaboration. In classrooms, affect gathers as atmospheres around creativity, cheating, and care, sedimented by policies, prompts, and exemplars; these atmospheres condition participation, risk-taking, and the willingness to tinker. As rubrics, prompts, and feedback practices are reworked around AI, they encode affective expectations—calm, urgency, openness, caution—that distribute agency differently among instructors, students, and tools, shaping what kinds of writing become thinkable, sayable, and doable in the AI-entangled pedagogical assemblage. In the context of GenAI in higher education, affect is central to understanding how anxieties, excitements, and uncertainties are collectively produced and circulated as instructors and students encounter new technological possibilities and constraints.
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