affective Turn (Expanded)
Quote
With the affective turn, bodies have thus moved from a blank slate to living beings, from clay to be moulded to creatures feeling their way through ever-changing worlds.
— Melissa Gregg & Gregory J. Seigworth, 2010, p. 1
The affective turn marks a major theoretical and methodological shift in the humanities and social sciences, foregrounding affect—understood as pre-cognitive, bodily intensities and forces—as a central analytic focus. In posthumanist, new materialist, and postqualitative research, the affective turn challenges anthropocentric and representational frameworks by exploring how affective forces circulate between human and nonhuman entities, emphasizing relationality, embodiment, and material agency. affect (Expanded) is not simply a synonym for emotion or feeling; it is a force, a capacity, a field of intensity that traverses and constitutes bodies, assemblages, and events (Massumi, 2002; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Braidotti, 2013).
Affect is conceptualized as a transindividual and transspecies phenomenon, emerging in the specificities of time-space-matterings (Fullagar & Bozalek, 2021). It is sensed in the mundane and the extraordinary, in the “stickiness” of a word, the atmosphere of a classroom, or the jolt of a digital encounter. Affect is not owned by individuals but is distributed, relational, and often elusive—difficult to capture through traditional representational methods (Stewart, 2007; Ahmed, 2004). In this sense, the affective turn is not only a theoretical reorientation but also a methodological provocation, inviting researchers to attune to the forces, intensities, and emanations that charge moments with meaning and potential.
Historical and Philosophical Roots
The intellectual momentum known as the Affective Turn has deep philosophical roots, most notably in the work of Baruch Spinoza. In his Ethics, Spinoza (1677/1996) proposed a universe where mind and body are not separate substances but attributes of a single substance. Central to his philosophy was the concept of conatus, the striving of every being to persevere in its own existence, and affectus, the states that increase or decrease the body’s power of acting. This Spinozist foundation, which treats bodies as dynamic capacities defined by their ability to affect and be affected, provides the bedrock for contemporary affect (Expanded) theory.
This lineage was powerfully re-energized by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987), who mobilized Spinoza’s ideas to theorize affect as a pre-personal, asignifying intensity that circulates within and between assemblages. Their work was instrumental in shifting the focus from affect as an internal state to affect as a relational force of becoming within assemblages, and emphasizing the productive, generative nature of desire and intensity.
The Turn Itself: A Shift in Focus
The Affective Turn marks a significant theoretical reorientation across the humanities and social sciences, emerging in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It complements and challenges the dominance of the linguistic turn by re-centering embodied, material, and energetic dimensions of experience. This shift foregrounds affect (Expanded) not as a secondary property of a subject but as a primary, generative force. Early articulations can be seen in the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003), who drew on the psychologist Silvan Tomkins’s work to explore the role of shame and other affects in shaping identity and culture. However, it was Brian Massumi’s (2002, 2014) influential distinction between affect and emotion that catalyzed the turn for many. Massumi described affect as a raw, autonomic, unqualified and non-conscious intensity, while emotion is the actualization, narrativized capture and socio-linguistic qualification of that intensity. This distinction opened a conceptual space for scholars to analyze the forces at play beneath and beyond conscious feeling and discourse.
Key Concepts and Thinkers
The scholarship of the Affective Turn is diverse and interdisciplinary. Clough (2007) has argued that this turn is a response to the increasing mediation of life by technology and data, pushing social theory to account for the non-conscious and biological registers of experience that are being manipulated and mobilized by contemporary capitalism. In a different register, Kathleen Stewart’s (2007) Ordinary Affects offers a rich ethnographic methodology for tracing the subtle, atmospheric, and often mundane intensities that compose the texture of everyday life. Her work demonstrates how to write about affect as it moves through public worlds, creating potentials and shaping events.
Sara Ahmed’s (2004, 2014) work on “affective economies” has been instrumental for understanding how emotions and affects are not free-floating but “stick” to certain bodies, objects, and signs, thereby participating in the shaping of social and political boundaries, and of communities and identities. Her work insists on the political and historical entanglement of affect, showing how it works to align subjects with collective norms.
Jane Bennett (2010) extends affect theory into the realm of vibrant materialism, attributing affective capacity and agency to nonhuman entities and assemblages. Rosi Braidotti (2013, 2019) develops a posthumanist ethics grounded in Spinozan affect, emphasizing relationality, process, and the capacity for transformation across human-nonhuman boundaries.
Feminist and queer theorists such as Elizabeth Grosz (1994), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003), and Margaret Wetherell (2012) have further enriched the field, challenging mind-body dualisms and exploring the political, ethical, and methodological implications of affect. Kathleen Stewart (2007) introduces the concept of “ordinary affects,” focusing on the everyday, atmospheric, and often ineffable forces that shape experience.
The affective turn is also marked by significant debates and critiques. Ruth Leys (2011) questions the political and analytical precision of affect theory, while scholars such as Weiss (2008) and Hayles (1999) caution against the potential depoliticization and neglect of social difference in some affective and posthumanist accounts.
These thinkers, among others, contribute to a field that sees affect as central to understanding power, subjectivity, and the very fabric of sociality.
Relevance to the Research
The Affective Turn is deeply entangled with the research questions guiding this project. It enables the inquiry to move beyond a purely cognitive or discursive analysis of how instructors engage with Generative AI. Instead of asking only what instructors think about AI, this turn prompts questions about what this entanglement does and what it feels like. It provides the theoretical tools to investigate the visceral jolts of anxiety, curiosity, or frustration that circulate within the instructor-student-AI assemblage. This orientation allows the research to treat these intensities not as private psychological states but as data about the changing material conditions of pedagogy. It provides a vital lens for understanding how core beliefs about authorship, creativity, and learning are being negotiated at a bodily, affective level, leading to the emergence of new pedagogical practices and the cyborgification of the writer and the text.
In this research, the turn to affect enables a movement beyond individual psychology or discourse analysis, attuning instead to the circulating, collective, and more-than-human intensities that shape pedagogical assemblages.
For example, the lived, emotional, and embodied dimensions of instructors’ engagement with AI (Q1) are not reducible to personal feelings or attitudes. Instead, they are understood as affective events—moments charged with intensity, uncertainty, and potential—emerging from the intra-action of instructors, students, AI systems, institutional policies, and digital infrastructures. The affective turn also illuminates how core beliefs about authorship, creativity, and learning (Q2) are not simply challenged or reinforced at the level of ideas, but are felt, negotiated, and transformed through affective encounters and atmospheres.
New pedagogical practices and artifacts (Q3) can be seen as crystallizations of affective flows—material traces of the forces that move through and animate the classroom assemblage. The cyborgificationof the writer and the text (Q4) is not only a conceptual or technological shift but an affective one, as bodies, machines, and texts become entangled in new circuits of sensation, desire, and capacity.
Connections to Other Concepts
The Affective Turn is intimately connected to a number of concepts within this project’s onto-epistemological map. It is inseparable from, and indeed animated by affect (Expanded), which names the force or intensity itself. Affect circulates through the heterogenous constellations of assemblage as they foreground the relational, emergent, and more-than-human nature of phenomena. The concept of intra-action (Barad, 2007) enriches the Affective Turn by providing a rigorous physical and philosophical account of how bodies, technologies, and affects are co-constituted within phenomena, rather than interacting as separate entities. The turn is also deeply connected to entanglement, which foregrounds the inseparability of entities and processes; to embodiment, as it insists on the material, bodily dimensions of knowing and being, and with Performativity, as it attends to what affect does in the world.
Affect theory’s emphasis on relationality and material agency resonates with New Materialism, while its attention to the atmospheric, the ordinary, and the ineffable connects it to concepts such as Affective Atmosphere and Ordinary Affects (Stewart, 2007). The affective turn also intersects with feminist, queer, and critical race theories, which have foregrounded the political, ethical, and intersectional dimensions of affective life (Ahmed, 2004; Weiss, 2008).
Methodologically, it finds its practical expression in an affective Method (Expanded), which seeks to trace and attune to these affective flows.
Methodological Implications
The Affective Turn demands innovative research methods that are sensitive to the non-representational, the atmospheric, and the emergent. This moves beyond conventional qualitative methods that are focused on language, representation, and individual subjectivity, often inadequate for capturing the elusive, distributed, and pre-personal nature of affect and heavily reliant upon interviews or textual analysis. It suggests a methodology of attunement, where the researcher’s own body and affective responses are understood as resonant instruments for registering the intensities of a research site. This becomes actualized through affective methods that prioritize adaptation, experimentation, and the tracing of affective flows and atmospheres. Data may include field notes on bodily sensation, descriptions of space and atmosphere, digital traces, and the researcher’s own affective responses. Writing itself becomes a method for evoking and transmitting affect, rather than merely representing it (Hickey-Moody, 2013; Stewart, 2007). This might involve ethnographic descriptions of the “feel” of a space, experimental writing that seeks to evoke affective atmospheres, or attention to the rhythms, pauses, and energies of an encounter. The boundary between researcher and researched becomes porous, and the research process itself is understood as an affective event. This demands a reflexive, situated, and experimental approach to inquiry, one that is open to surprise and transformation.
Example from the Field
In the context of AI-entangled pedagogy, an instructor’s sense of unease or excitement when introducing LLMs into the classroom is not simply a private emotion but an affective event. This event emerges from the entanglement of institutional anxieties, media narratives, student expectations, and the material presence of AI technologies. The “atmosphere” of a faculty meeting on AI, the “stickiness” of terms like “plagiarism” or “authenticity,” and the bodily sensations of anticipation or dread are all sites where affective forces are at work, shaping what becomes possible in teaching and learning.
Critiques and Productive Tensions
The affective turn has been critiqued for its political ambiguity and potential to depoliticize analysis by focusing on amorphous flows of intensity at the expense of structural power and social justice (Leys, 2011). Some scholars argue that the emphasis on pre-personal, nonhuman, and transindividual affect can obscure the role of social difference, intersectionality, and human agency (Weiss, 2008; Hayles, 1999). The conceptual vagueness of “affect” and the methodological challenges of studying pre-cognitive forces have also been noted as limitations, prompting ongoing debates about the scope, rigor, and political stakes of affect theory.
Scholars such as Hemmings (2005) and Ahmed (2014) have cautioned against a tendency to treat affect as a universal, pre-social, or politically innocent force. Such an approach risks erasing the ways in which affect is always already shaped by histories of power, discourse, and social difference. The critique highlights the danger of a depoliticized analysis if affect is abstracted from the specific material and historical conditions of its emergence. These critiques do not invalidate the turn but rather introduce a productive tension, underscoring the importance of situating any affective inquiry within specific assemblages and remaining attentive to the complex entanglement of affect with discourse, materiality, and power.
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