Tag: Affect

  • Thinking with affect theory in higher education: what can it help us to do?

    Thinking with affect theory in higher education: what can it help us to do?

    by Karen Gravett

    How does higher education feel, to work or to study in? How do affects circulate through the places, spaces, bodies and the structures and pedagogies of institutions? And why might thinking about feelings and affect be useful for educators? This blog draws on recent research that seeks to explore how affect theory can be helpful to understand and enhance our work in higher education. Attuning to affect, I suggest, has implications for both how we understand power relations in education, as well as for finding ways to foster more creative and meaningful pedagogies. 

    What is affect theory?

    Interest in affect, and ideas from affect theory/studies, are gaining momentum across the evolving field of higher education studies. Within the social sciences, the ‘affective turn’ has been influenced by work from Clough (2007), Massumi (2015), Seigworth and Pedwell (2023), Ahmed (2010), and many others. No longer confined to binary ideas of emotion/reason, body/mind, scholars have begun to think about emotion and affect as interwoven with education in complex ways. What we mean by emotions and affect can be understood differently, but for many scholars, affect specifically refers to sensory experiences (Zembylas, 2021), forces that are felt bodily. Affects circulate and evolve within and in between ordinary encounters, and in mobile ways.

    Affect in the classroom

    Thinking with affect can help us understand the classroom as a space in which learning is not divorced from the body but viscerally experienced and felt. This helps us to see learning and teaching as always situated and informed by the moment in which it occurs and as we experience it. Feelings do not simply happen within individuals and then move outward (Ahmed, 2010). This shift in thought enables us to consider ourselves in relation to others (both human and non-human), to consider how learning and teaching feels, as well as the ‘structures of feeling’ (Williams, 1961) that circulate within institutions. Thinking with affect helps us to think about the micro-incidents of co-presence, its frictions, and the ‘inconvenient’ (Berlant, 2022) work being present requires of us to engage with others. Education requires affective work of us; it requires us to change, evolve, and adapt constantly to others. This work is exposing; discomforting. In engaging with one another, and being affected and receptive to one another, we are made aware of our own interdependence.

    Affective institutions

    Thinking about affect, then, enables us to understand how institutions are permeated by, and also create, ‘affective atmospheres’ (Anderson, 2009), or ‘structures of feeling’ (Williams, 1961). In his work, Williams uses the idea of ‘structures of feeling’ to study the affective quality of life, in order that we might understand ‘the most delicate and least tangible parts of our activity’ (Williams, 1961, 48). Affective atmospheres, including competition, collegiality, anxiety, inclusion and exclusion are created through pedagogies, policies and practices. For example, the affective atmospheres of self-improvement and self-promotion may permeate neoliberal higher education institutions. Cultures of neoliberalism and precarity require academics to adopt certain affective and embodied practices, such as being competitive, self-motivated or resilient. And yet, affect may be able to disrupt these conditions: affective experiences such as humility, collegiality and joy offer opportunities for resistance and can also be found flourishing within institutional cultures and practices.

    Affective craft

    In the classroom, there may also be ways in which teachers are able to reshape affective relations. This might mean that certain relations could be given space to flourish, and other hierarchies of difference might be, at least momentarily, constrained.Different pedagogical approaches contribute to different feelings in classroom spaces and to different connections. For example, Stewart describes the changing affective atmosphere of the classroom when she employs storytelling and uses questioning approaches to enable dialogue: ‘something subtle but powerful had shifted…The room had become a scene we were in together as bodies and actors’ (Stewart, 2020: 31). For Airton, these kind of affirmative pedagogic approaches work as ‘affective craft’ and might include providing open spaces for students to lead and shape the learning encounter. In my research with Simon Lygo-Baker, we examine different ways in which teachers can experiment with affective craft. These include through teaching in spaces beyond the classroom, using art and objects for generating discussion, engaging storying and the sharing of vulnerabilities, as well as through using Play-Doh modelling to disrupt hierarchies and foster collaboration. These are just some ordinary, everyday ideas, and are ideas we also explore further in our new book: Reconceptualising Teaching in Higher Education:  Connected Practice for Changing Times, to be published in 2026 by Routledge.

    We believe that teaching is about presence, connection, an ‘encounter’, and that affect theory can be a helpful way to understand and enhance the connections we make, as well as the institutions in which we work and learn. As Dernikos and colleagues explain: ‘scholars are now theorizing what these affective swells can do. And what is surprising is that this does not call for grand movements, nor for great reforms, but depends on the subversive power of the very small’ (Dernikos et al, 2020: 16).

    Dr Karen Gravett is Associate Professor of Higher Education, and Associate Head (Research) at the University of Surrey, UK, where her research focuses on the theory-practice of higher education. She is a member of the Society for Research in Higher Education Governing Council, a member of the editorial boards for Teaching in Higher Education and Learning, Media and Technology, and Associate Editor for Sociology. She is a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She is also an Honorary Associate Professor for the Centre for Assessment and Digital Learning at Deakin University. Karen’s latest books are: Gravett, K (2025) Critical Practice in Higher Education, and Gravett, K (2023) Relational Pedagogies: Connections and Mattering in Higher Education.

    Author: SRHE News Blog

    An international learned society, concerned with supporting research and researchers into Higher Education

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  • How a Drop in Ph.D. Students Could Affect Colleges

    How a Drop in Ph.D. Students Could Affect Colleges

    Under mounting financial and political pressures, universities have paused or rescinded graduate student admissions on an unprecedented scale, which could create cross-campus ripple effects next fall and beyond.

    The extent of the cuts to the graduate student workforce remains unclear and will vary from institution to institution. But if and when those losses come to pass, experts say that employing fewer graduate students—particularly Ph.D. students, who typically hold years-long research and teaching assistantships—will undermine universities’ broader operations, including undergraduate education, faculty support and the future of academic research, which is reliant on training the next generation of scholars.

    “First and foremost, a reduction in the number of graduate students may threaten that individualized, close attention for undergraduates,” said Julia Kent, vice president of best practices and strategic initiatives at the Council of Graduate Schools.

    That’s because many doctoral students work as teaching assistants, particularly for large introductory undergraduate courses, where they assist with grading, lead discussion sections, help students with assignments and supervise labs.

    “While a professor may be doing the lectures for those courses, they may not seem as approachable or accessible to undergraduates. In those cases, the graduate teaching assistant is the first point of contact for that student. They may go to them for questions or feel more comfortable asking for help with assignment,” said Kent, who added that graduate students also support universities’ learning missions in other ways, too. “They may also help staff in the writing center and support undergraduates writing essays for their classes and provide informal mentoring.”

    ‘Not Sustainable’

    Although colleges and universities haven’t felt the effects of losing a number of those roles yet, Kent said the uncertainty surrounding graduate admissions poses a “real risk” to undergraduate learning.

    If universities do want to maintain smaller class sizes with fewer graduate students, they may rely even more heavily on low-paid contingent faculty, said Rosemary Perez, an associate professor at the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan.

    “That’s not sustainable for those instructors, who may be teaching five or six classes at multiple campuses and still not making enough to live,” she said. And with fewer graduate students in the pipeline, “we’ll also have fewer people who are trained to be faculty. People are going to retire. Who’s going to teach these college classes that have experience working with college students?”

    Nothing concrete has to happen for people weighing their futures to decide to take a different path where it seems like there may be more stability. Rational humans may decide that’s not the direction they want to go in anymore, and that’s going to be an immediate loss to the field.”

    —Marcel Agüeros, astronomy professor at Columbia University

    And with fewer spots available to prospective graduate students, Perez fears students who don’t attend top-ranked institutions will be the first to disappear from the academic pipeline. That’s because when resources are scarce, “the tendency is to rely on markers of prestige or GRE scores as predictors of success,” she said. “But those aren’t great predictors of what people are capable of doing in their careers.”

    Fewer graduate students will also likely mean a heavier workload for faculty, who in addition to teaching, also rely on them to help with research by assisting in running labs and research groups and co-authoring papers.

    “They help universities’ reputation, but they also help faculty funding prospects by making the faculty more productive, because funding agencies like to see productive faculty. A lot of that labor is happening through graduate students,” said Julie Posselt, a higher education professor at the University of Southern California, which last month revoked outstanding offers for numerous Ph.D. programs, including sociology, chemistry, sociology, molecular biology and religion. “Meanwhile, there’s also plenty of evidence that Ph.D. students are contributing to universities’ research output and are independently advancing knowledge in their respective fields.”

    Impact Will Reach All Fields

    Already, numerous universities across the country have said they’re reducing the number of Ph.D. students in the biomedical sciences as a result of drastic cuts to the National Institutes of Health, which each year sends universities billions of dollars in grants that indirectly and directly support graduate education.

    But it won’t just be those in the biomedical sciences that feel those cuts, especially as colleges downsize their budgets in light of the NIH’s plan to cap the amount of money it gives institutions for indirect research costs, which covers facilities maintenance, compliance with patient safety protocols and hazardous biowaste removal. Although a federal judge has blocked those cuts for now, the Department of Health and Human Services filed an appeal Monday; if the plan takes effect, it will force universities to find other areas they can cut from their budgets to make up the difference.

    “Even if you’re in the humanities, what’s happening right now in federal granting agencies that are far from the humanities has an impact on the humanities, because the overall budget for a university to do things like keep up their infrastructure and keep the lights on will go down,” said Jody Greene, associate campus provost and literature professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “And if we also don’t have international students, that’s also going to be a significant budget hit at institutions like ours.”

    International Students at Play

    In addition to drastic cuts in grant funding from the NIH, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Department of Education, the government has also revoked scores of international graduate students’ visas and detained several others.

    U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has characterized, with little concrete evidence, those students as “lunatics” who came to the United States “not just to study but to participate in movements that vandalize universities, harass students, take over buildings and cause chaos.” The administration is also considering a travel ban affecting 43 countries. (After Trump issued a travel ban for seven countries during his first term, the number of international applicants to U.S. colleges fell 5.5 percent for graduate students, though applications have been on the rebound post-pandemic.)

    But universities worry that targeting international students—who made up nearly one in four incoming graduate students in 2022—will create a chilling effect, cause international student enrollment to plunge and strip institutions of yet another vital revenue source. According to data from the Institute of International Education, 81 percent of international undergraduate students and 61 percent of graduate students completely fund their own tuition.

    Would-Be Ph.D.s Wary

    All this politically driven chaos and financial uncertainty is making graduate school—and a career as a faculty member—a harder sell for students interested in research careers.

    “Up until this year, we’ve been able to tell prospective graduate students that the university will cover the costs of their Ph.D.,” said Marcel Agüeros, an astronomy professor at Columbia University, where the Trump administration has frozen some $650 million in NIH funding. “We want to stay true to that commitment, but we’d be lying if we said that’s going to be 100 percent possible.”

    And even though his department is currently only expecting to offer one fewer Ph.D. slot, Agüeros said the uncertainty over the future of federal funding—and even what areas of research academics are allowed to pursue—is enough to push people out of academia.

    “Nothing concrete has to happen for people weighing their futures to decide to take a different path where it seems like there may be more stability,” he said. “Rational humans may decide that’s not the direction they want to go in anymore, and that’s going to be an immediate loss to the field.”

    And those are the questions would-be graduate students all over the country are asking themselves right now.

    “We don’t have any data yet, but anecdotally, I’m hearing that there are a ton of students who are choosing not to even try to go to graduate school this year and next year because they’re perceiving less funding and support,” said Bethany Usher, immediate past president of the Council on Undergraduate Research and provost at Radford University in Virginia.

    “Those Ph.D. students are the ones who push the boundaries of research,” she added. “They have the newest ideas, and if we reduce those, it will have a generational impact on higher education, industries and communities.”

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  • How a Republican Plan to Cut Universal Free School Meals Could Affect 12 Million Students – The 74

    How a Republican Plan to Cut Universal Free School Meals Could Affect 12 Million Students – The 74


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    Every school in Kentucky’s LaRue County provides free breakfast and lunch to any student who wants it.

    It’s been that way for a decade, ever since the federal government launched a program allowing LaRue County Schools, and thousands of other districts nationwide, to skip the paperwork asking how much families earn.

    In these communities, lots of kids already receive other kinds of assistance for low-income families. Federal officials saw a way to make the subsidized meals program more efficient: Cover meal costs based on how many children are in similar assistance programs, rather than verify every family’s income.

    But LaRue County Schools won’t be able to do that anymore if sweeping changes to social programs proposed by congressional Republicans become law. GOP lawmakers say they want to ensure only eligible families get help and that taxpayer dollars are reserved for the neediest students, so that federal subsidies for school meals remain sustainable. But by one estimate, the Republicans’ plan would affect nearly a quarter of the students in the nation’s public schools.

    Research has found that universal free school meals can boost school attendance, increase test scores, and decrease suspensions, likely because it eliminates the stigma students often associate with the free meals. Taking them away from students on a large scale could also have downstream effects on everything from families’ household budgets to local unemployment.

    Stephanie Utley, the LaRue County district’s director of child nutrition, said that inevitably, fewer kids would eat school meals, either because their families no longer qualify for free breakfast and lunch or because they cannot produce documents to verify their income.

    When fewer kids eat school meals, it’s harder for districts to cover their costs. To save money, Utley would likely swap higher-quality foods for cheaper ones, she said.

    Apples and beef from local farms would go. The high school would serve fewer salads — they’d be too labor-intensive to prep. And a popular chicken breast sandwich would become a ground chicken patty.

    Utley may have to lay off staff, too, she said, which would hurt the rural community’s economy.

    “We’re the biggest restaurant in town,” she said. “It would be a nightmare.”

    GOP school meals proposals would impact states

    Republican lawmakers are considering a trio of proposals to help offset tax cuts sought by President Donald Trump that would be “devastating” to children and schools, said Erin Hysom, the senior child nutrition policy analyst for the nonprofit Food Research & Action Center.

    One proposal would dramatically increase the share of students who need to be enrolled in aid programs — such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families — for schools to be eligible to serve free meals to all kids through the Community Eligibility Provision.

    Right now, schools need to show 25% of students are enrolled in those kinds of assistance programs to participate in community eligibility. The House Republican proposal would raise the share to 60% — higher than the threshold has ever been. That would kick more than 24,000 schools off of community eligibility, and some 12 million students would no longer automatically qualify for free meals, Hysom’s organization estimated.

    Essentially, only communities where nearly every child qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch could serve free meals to all kids.

    “They’ve really moved the needle to the upper echelon of poverty,” Hysom said. “You couldn’t get any higher than that.”

    Another proposal would require all families who don’t automatically qualify for free school meals through programs like SNAP to submit documents to verify their income with their application. That would burden families and schools with time-consuming added paperwork. Schools could end up cutting staff who serve food and work on school menus to hire more people to process applications.

    Together, those changes would save $12 billion over 10 years, according to the list of proposals circulated by U.S. Rep. Jodey Arrington, the Republican chair of the House budget committee.

    A third proposal would change how families qualify for SNAP and likely make over 1 million students no longer automatically eligible for free school meals. That would increase the paperwork burden even more.

    All of that would make it more costly for states with universal free school meals to run their programs, because they rely heavily on federal reimbursement. Some states were already weighing whether they could afford to keep up free meals for all.

    These three proposals are part of a process known as budget reconciliation that GOP lawmakers are using to make long-term changes to federal spending and revenue. As of Wednesday, Congress was considering a separate, stopgap budget that would keep funding essentially flat for the Agriculture Department, which pays for the school meal program, through the end of September.

    School staff and child nutrition advocates are taking the House’s budget reconciliation proposals seriously. The Trump administration has already cut a $1 billion Agriculture Department program that helped schools buy food from local producers.

    Free school meal cutbacks would have ripple effects

    If fewer kids have access to free meals at school, more families would likely struggle to afford groceries at home. Many families who don’t qualify for free meals struggle to pay for food. This school year, a family of four qualified for free school meals if they made under $40,560 a year.

    When schools eliminated free school meals for all following the pandemic, there was a surge in unpaid school meal debt, an issue school staff say will only intensify if these proposals go through.

    Right now, schools typically have to verify the family’s income for 3% of their applications. If schools had to check income for every application, the burden would be enormous, school staff and child nutrition advocates said.

    Many families who eke out a living working multiple jobs would have a hard time gathering up all the required documents to show how much they earn. Though children can participate in the school meals program regardless of their immigration status, undocumented parents may be afraid to hand over personal documents when Trump is threatening mass deportations.

    “Eligible children are going to fall through the cracks,” Hysom said.

    Many schools are already facing financial pressures from higher-than-usual food and labor costs, a 2024 survey of nearly 1,400 school nutrition directors showed. On top of that, schools are navigating new and stricter requirements for how much salt and sugar can be in food served by schools.

    Schools have to buy most of their food from American sources, but if Trump puts certain tariffs in place for the long term, that could create new financial constraints.

    “Cost is absolutely a concern,” said Diane Pratt-Heavner, a spokesperson for the School Nutrition Association, which represents school nutrition directors and conducted the survey. “When avocados or tomatoes from Mexico become much more expensive, that will cause an increase in demand for domestic produce, and an increase in price, as well.”

    Shannon Gleave, the president of the School Nutrition Association, understands the need to make sure the school meal program runs as it should.

    In Arizona’s Glendale Elementary School District, where Gleave is the director of food and nutrition, kids can speed through the lunch line because everyone qualifies for free meals. But staff scan student ID badges to make sure each kid only takes one meal, and that children with dietary restrictions get the right food.

    Upping the verification requirements a little could work, she said. But verifying 100% of applications “is not an efficient use of time.”

    “There is no way my existing staff could do that now,” she said. “You have to figure out a way to be good stewards of resources, but also look at the amount of administrative burden that it’s going to entail.”

    This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.


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