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Passionate Attachments: Higher Education, Policy, Knowledge, Emotion and Social Justice

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Abstract

We explore the significance of the ‘affective turn’ in respect to higher education policy in the UK. This turn centres on creating new subjects of attention for the ‘employable’ student and the ‘non-traditional’ student, the latter defined as students from backgrounds with no earlier history of higher education (working class or black students for example). The ‘affective turn’ has been associated with intellectual debates creating a form of knowledge claiming that there has been a permeation of the social and the psychic in contemporary social relations. This new intellectual move focusing on desire/affects and emotion can be seen as relevant for thinking about policy sociology and we argue for the potential of using a psycho-social methodology to tease out how the affective of policy, and its translation into the academy, works. This stance provides an alternative reading of contemporary social orders, from the one adopted in an influential anti-emotion, anti-psychoanalysis discourse (see Furedi, 2003; Ecclestone and Hayes, 2008). On the contrary, we wish to describe and document affects as one of the most important of the ‘disqualified discourses’ (Morley and David, 2007) of policy sociology so as to rejuvenate the academy's role in working towards rather than against social justice.

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Notes

  1. There is a detailed debate among those scholars interested in the ‘affective turn’ that is clearly outside the scope and purpose of this paper. We merely offer an introduction to the idea that ‘the affective’ has things to say to the field of higher education policy analysis. The emergent field of the ‘psycho-social’ is structured by the promulgation of competing terminology — ‘emotions’, ‘affects’ and ‘desire’. Our argument retains openness about the various terms because in the spirit of thinking the psychic and the social as mutually entangled, we do not want to work within a binary formulation viz. biology or culture, affects or emotions.

  2. This is a disputed but prevalent concept in current organizational theory and practice (www.eiconsortium.org/).

  3. See (www.skillscentre.leeds.ac.uk/learnhigherleeds/pages/interpersonal_skills/is_home.htm).

  4. Only a small fraction of which is referenced here.

  5. Here the term is used in its Lyotardian (1979, 1984) sense of describing the evacuation of science by informational outputs made possible with the technologization of ‘truth’ and the production of accounts as constituting reality. This substitution is encouraged in audit cultures working with documentation.

  6. Students defined as ‘not in education, employment or training’.

  7. See, for example (www.heacademy.ac.uk/news/detail/Subject_Centres_Help_Ease_Student_Transition).

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Hey, V., Leathwood, C. Passionate Attachments: Higher Education, Policy, Knowledge, Emotion and Social Justice. High Educ Policy 22, 101–118 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/hep.2008.34

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