Connecting IE to Bodily Affects through Massumi

An IE “inquiry begins where people are and proceeds from there to discoveries that are for them, for us, of the workings of a social that extends beyond any one of us, bringing our local activities into coordination with those of others” (Smith, 2006, p. 3). Many IE researchers, including ourselves, examine the role of texts in the coordination of people’s ‘actual doings’ in order to understand the social relations that operate, particularly at the front-line of people’s work. Our data speaks to another form of coordination of teachers’ work at the front-line. A coordination that we believe has strong resonances with Brian Massumi’s view of affect as extending beyond the individual. For Massumi, it’s not just about the individual in isolation from others because “affects… are basically ways of connecting, to others and to other situations. They are our angle of participation in processes larger than ourselves” (2015, p. 6). Massumi’s treatment of affect as a “bodily movement”, a “mode of activity” and the associated “capacity to come to do” (2015, p. 7) is for us, the glue that binds affect to the ‘actual doings’ that are the focus of an IE inquiry. Drawing on data collected from teachers and students working in classrooms in Canada and Australia, we explore ways in which a consideration of the effects of affect have extended our appreciation of how teachers’ work comes to be coordinated, or not.