An orientation to inquiry that foregrounds attunement to affective intensities, atmospheres, and embodied resonances as constitutive of phenomena, treating affect as methodological, ethical, and analytical force in research and pedagogy.
Developed across affect studies and inventive methods, affective method treats sensation, intensity, and atmosphere as integral to how events and knowledge are composed. Building on work by Ahmed, Massumi, Blackman, Gibbs, and methodological interventions by Timm Knudsen and Stage, it reorients inquiry from representing finished emotions to tracing how affect circulates, sticks, fades, and transforms within material-discursive assemblages. It emphasizes situated attunement, attention to microperception, and the crafting of research apparatuses that can register fleeting, prearticulate, and more-than-personal dynamics in social life and education.
Affective method aligns with postqualitative commitments by treating research as world-making and analysis as an ethico-aesthetic practice rather than a representational mirror. It resonates with posthumanist and new materialist orientations that understand bodies, media, tools, and spaces as co-producing experience, and with non-representational and inventive methodology traditions that privilege composing, attuning, and experimenting over coding and categorization. In this frame, fieldwork, writing, and analysis become practices of affective calibration and apparatus design, where agential cuts shape what intensities can be sensed and what forms of accountability emerge.
In AI-entangled writing instruction, affective method supports inquiry into how classroom climates and instructor dispositions take shape through the interplay of platform affordances, institutional policies, media narratives about AI, assignment designs, and embodied histories of composing. It enables close attention to atmospheres of excitement, fatigue, suspicion, curiosity, and relief that materialize around prompts, drafts, and feedback cycles, and to how these intensities reconfigure judgments of authorship, creativity, and learning. As an orientation to pedagogical design, it invites crafting assignments and feedback practices that can register and respond to affective dynamics—such as reflective traces of comfort/discomfort in human–AI collaboration, sensory notations during composing with an LLM interface, or attention to how rubric phrasing modulates anxiety and experimentation.
Practical adaptations include brief “affect logs” capturing felt intensities before/after composing with an LLM; micro-elicitation prompts that note shifts in bodily tension, pace, and confidence across drafting; diffractive readings of policy emails through fieldnotes about classroom mood; and documentation of how interface latency, autocomplete, or prompt phrasing inflects the ambience of a writing session. These generate analyzable traces without reducing affect to trait-based measures and can be folded into iterative assignment design or instructor reflective practice.