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In the Round Table discussion after the keynote lecture given by anthropologist Laura Lakshmi Fjord, presentations were given by Anna-Lena Tvingstedt, psychologist, PhD and research fellow, Malmö University College, Sweden; by Brita Edlund, Sign Language teacher and chair of the Finnish/Swedish association for parents of deaf children, Finland; by Dusan Kuhar, psychologist and family therapist at the Education center for deaf and hard-of-hearing children in Ljubljana, Slovenia and by Felicity Gifford, teacher of the deaf, State Coordinator of Services to Deaf and Hearing Impaired students, Department of Education, Tasmania, Australia. The focus of the session was set on needs and processes in a family when the diagnosis of a deaf child has just been given. This paper is a summary of the four presentations.

School uniforms are proliferating as a staple in figurations created of successful students around the world. In Australia the uniform as compulsory formal school wear is a growing phenomenon in both public and private education sectors. School uniforms have often been adopted as unproblematic, by schools, parents, policymakers, and students themselves. It remains unclear from the previous limited and often contradictory research, precisely how uniforms materially affect student academic and social outcomes. Research that considers how students themselves not just perceive but feel about their uniforms is scarce. I focus on the affective response of students to their school uniforms at one government co-educational selective science high school. A PhEmaterialist approach deprivileges human agency, accounting for matter as dynamic, affective and of consequence in activities, performances, and events. The school uniform as matter is explored as a dynamic and powerful affective force in education and is situated as an integral part of a school's iteration of binary gender differentiations. Uniforms matter twofold, as a conception that materializes what matters and the differential affect on the bodies that wear them. Bodies respond affectively to the uniform with a sense of comfort or discomfort, consciously and unconsciously. Bodies that do not fit easily with the required uniform hurt as students undergo everyday activities at school. This paper considers the affect of the uniform, with a filmic response from one high achieving 'smart' girl through a fine-grain analysis of her feelings of belonging and dis/comfort with and through her school uniform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational research has been witnessing a 'spatial turn' and an 'affective turn' which have informed studies on pedagogy and foreign/second language acquisition. Drawing on a teacher-researcher ethnographic study, this paper examines the implications of primary students' affective engagement in the space of Chinese language and culture learning in Australia. In seeking to make a contribution to the field of Children's Geographies, the study, which used participant observation, journal entry and interview data, examined how a desire to learn is evoked. More specifically, the paper focuses on how affective geographies manifest in pedagogical encounters, with regard to students' relational experiences with peers and educators. By placing the spotlight on the ways in which affect is integral to pedagogic instruction, we investigate not only how the dynamics within the microgeography of the classroom are imbued with affects but also their powerful potential to alleviate 'large-scale' tensions between two nation-states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I reflect on the experience of the Australian summer bushfires of 2019/2020 and the different ways forms of media reporting amplified its affects. Across broadcast media, local response, social media and personal account, I chart alternate stories during and after the event-as-spectacle. Taking into account the socio-political climate, the climatic atmosphere and the ongoing anxiety after the fires, I consider the use of apocalyptic words alongside the repetitive pairing of affective images to question what these might reveal about ourselves. Through the lens of affect attention is drawn to the many interacting conditions and forces that coalesce and gather as attachments, ideas, or assumptions and how these might influence perceptions of the event and actions in the aftermath of fire threat. Woven into the paper is my personal writing alongside details drawn from select Instagram accounts recording the everyday labours of caring for a place during and after the fires. As a counter-narrative to obliteration and all things lost, these missives disclose a different understanding of the event, long after the news media has moved on. For the authors and followers alike, lessons are revealed through attention to the land and hope in the processes of everyday encounters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on the social ecology of Félix Guattari, to suggest that young children learn in complex social and natural situations, in this case 'getting muddy'. The notion of social ecology will be revived in this paper, to ensure that the human social world is embedded in and part of the natural world, with all its complexities, relations and repetitions (re: muddiness). Children learn from their mistakes, from social interaction, due to their instincts, and as part of an evolving situation, much of which is beyond their control, e.g. their attraction to mud. This paper will search for these types of learning(s) in the affect that can be discerned from teaching and learning, and specifically related to 'muddy literacy'. One might call the combined notions that will be put to work in this paper as 'affective literacy', it is an affective literacy fully imbricated in muddy nature. To achieve this, the paper will attend to empirical research in the early childhood context in Australia, that has charted how children learn from inquiry based learning outdoors in mud, pictures of Aboriginal children outside (and a hand), and a mud classroom painting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across the political spectrum of different historical periods, welfare deterrence has shaped social security and immigration policy in both Australia and the United Kingdom. Deterrence discourages access to state welfare through the production and mobilization of negative affect to deter specific groups from claiming state support, and by crafting public affect (of fear and disgust) about these target populations in order to garner consent for punitive policies. In this paper, we argue that deterrence works as a human technology where the crafting of negative affect operates as a technology of statecraft. Through critical juxtaposition and multiple genealogies of deterrence, this paper meshes time and space, and colony/colonizer and metropole, to show the historical and contemporary connectivity of the affective nature of deterrence. We identify five main operations that produce the 'feel' of deterrence: stigmatization by design, destitution by design, deterrent architecture, the control of movement, and the centrality of labour; as well as tracing the political economy of deterrence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article enhances our understanding of the thoroughly embodied nature of knowledge production in relation to automation by demonstrating how making sense of automation is a generative process, rather than the demystification of an already existing object of analysis. It argues that the process of knowing automation involves situated encounters that transform bodies at the level of their indeterminate capacities to affect and be affected which, in turn, contributes to the production of what automation is. Contrasting with more generalised diagnoses about how automation is deskilling or reskilling bodies, it evaluates the constitutive role of situated encounters that register in sensing bodies for reshaping capacities. Focusing on iron ore mining in Australia, an industry sector that is currently increasing its automated operations, the paper draws on a series of fieldwork encounters with people differently positioned in the mining sector. Through the presentation of five stories that incorporate combinations of these fieldwork encounters, the paper constructs a more complex picture of how automation is redefining different bodies. Rather than taken to be mere representations of automation, it argues that the listening to and telling of stories about automation is a form of encounter that redefines bodies in the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Second paradigm school bullying scholars are challenging the reliance on psychological and behavioural paradigms both in Australia and globally. Approaching bullying as 'social violence' has enabled previously underexplored social and cultural dimensions to receive much-needed focus. Bourdieu's 'symbolic violence' offers an avenue to explore the moral and affective dimensions of school bullying as 'social violence', yet it contains a controversial complicity dynamic that must not be overlooked. This paper considers three narratives of teacher-to-student bullying gathered through interviews and focus groups with 11 young people 17–20 years of age enrolled in secondary education in South Australia. Through these narratives, we reimagine symbolic violence as 'affective violence' where complicity is attributed to the institutional and social dynamics. This approach focuses away from discourses of individual responsibility reinforced by the first paradigm of school bullying and identifies the institutional and social origins of harm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper follows recent scholarship in youth studies in suggesting that young people's aspirations for the future are deeply enmeshed within a social, cultural, and economic articulation of what constitutes a "good" life that an individual ought to orient toward. It uses Ahmed's (2014) notion of "wilfulness" to consider how young people anticipate, plan for, and orient toward the future as a real and imagined space that is embedded within their relationship to everyday social, cultural, and economic practices. To do this, I draw upon digital blog and interview narratives collected across a seventeen-month period from three young women in their final year of secondary school in Victoria, Australia. These narratives take up the notion of "willed" space(s) to consider the capacities, energies, and projects that these young women tell about the future over time. Throughout, this paper argues that a willful lens is particularly productive for its capacity to move beyond an understanding of educational participation as a fixed site for realising aspirations to one that highlights multiple processes of becoming within novel spaces of identification and belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Behavioural approaches are increasingly used in both the global North and South as means to effect government policy. These interventions aim to encourage preferred behaviours by subtly shaping choices, applying incentives or employing punitive measures. Recent digital technology developments extend the reach of these behavioural approaches. While these approaches have been criticised from political science perspectives, in this paper we apply an innovative mode of analysis of behavioural policy approaches founded in a 'new materialist' ontology of affects, assemblages and capacities. This perspective enables us to explore their 'micropolitical' impact—on those who are their subjects, but also upon the wider sociocultural contexts within which they have been implemented. We examine two different behavioural interventions: the use of vouchers to incentivise new mothers to breastfeed their infants (a practice associated with improved health outcomes in both childhood and later life), and uses of debit card technologies in Australia to limit welfare recipients' spending on alcohol, drugs and gambling. In each case, we employ a materialist methodology to analyse precisely what these interventions do, and what (in)capacities they produce in their targeted groups. From these we draw out a more generalised critique of behavioural approaches to policy implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the product of not always rational human thought, emotions are either excluded from or considered to be barriers to effective invasive species management. In a context where fish are still disregarded, in this paper I consider the affective and emotional geographies of the world's most broadly distributed freshwater fish, carp (Cyprinus carpio) in Australia, in emerging sites of management that involve killing. Invasive species management is yet to reconcile emotion and the affective politics of killing invasive animals as a normative and ongoing practice of care for the environment. This paper advances animal geographies by developing a conceptual understanding of the biopolitics of invasive life and invasive species management by thinking through carp as affective and emotional subjects. To do this I look to feminist approaches that conceptualise emotion as relational, including Ahmed's analysis of emotion as movement, and visceral geographies' extension of embodied meaning‐making beyond the human. Drawing on original empirical analysis of managing carp, I identify how carp are performed as collectively disgusting or monstrous objects and how emotions are submerged and people can become indifferent to, or "pull away" from, ethical deliberation. However, attending to affect and emotion beyond the human subject also allows carp to emerge as different kinds of "spooky" subjects who, through conflicting, constantly changing, and more‐than‐invasive relationships, resist singular and hegemonic understandings. Taking a feminist approach allows me to consider how carp have affective biopolitical agency, in life and death, across these multiple subjectivities with power to transform human relationships with nature by situating and re‐engaging people in the problems of the world. Indeed, I argue that it is through the affective and emotional practices of managing carp that people might also begin to apprehend their responsibilities and limitations in the Anthropocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we aim to contribute to a growing body of literature that explores the affective geographies of young people's internal migration decisions using mobilities/immobilities as our conceptual framework. As such, our focus is not only on why young people choose to leave their hometowns but also why some choose to stay. By paying attention to young people's experiences of being away, we also shed light on why some young people choose to return to regional areas having left for a time. In emphasising the affective, material, and embodied dimensions of these experiences, the affordances of rural and urban places are also brought to light. Fifty young people aged between 18 and 34 years from three regional Australian towns took part in the study by participating in semi‐structured interviews. Qualitative findings indicate that the internal migration decisions of these regional young people were predominantly affective. We demonstrate how bodies were affected by the particularities of place – including materialities and relations with human and non‐humans – that worked to connect or unify bodies, evoking feelings of inclusion and security. We discuss how the affective atmospheres of places pushed into and onto bodies, making them feel dislocated or oppressed, and the way that places worked to push bodies out through the embodied experience of difference. The participants in our study emphasised the dilemma of these affective pushes and pulls, where feelings of belonging, or longing for home or country had to be negotiated, reconsidered, and re‐worked in relation to the unfolding of place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports the results of ethnographic research conducted in Darwin, a north Australian city with a growing population of Aboriginals and migrant newcomers. It is situated within the emerging literature on race, encounter, and affect and explores how events of phenotypical racism unfold in public spaces of the city. The paper argues that negative affects of hurt, anger, and frustration that saturate places through events of coding, labelling, and judging bodies hypervisible through phenotype have the potential to mutate through attention to forces in a more-than-human world. This paper shows that Elizabeth Grosz's concept of ‘geopower’, a non-human form of power that precedes and exceeds human social relations, provides the possibility to reconfigure anti-racist agendas – bodies of colour not only maintain minimum human dignity but affirm life and learn to live ethically with difference. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Issues Addressed: This paper investigates the influence of mood while driving, advocates for identifying high-risk groups and detects associations between mood while driving and risky driving behaviours. While commensurate studies regarding aggressive driving have confirmed significant detriments in driving performance, little scholarly research has studied the gaps and opportunities at the intersection of mood and risky driving in young drivers., Methods: A cross-sectional design was implemented using 660 young drivers (17-25 years) from Australia (34.7%) and Colombia (65.3%), who completed the Behaviour of Young Novice Drivers Scale (BYNDS). Cluster analysis differentiated young drivers across two groups: high-risk and low-risk driving while influenced by mood. Hierarchical segmentation analysis explored the relationship between driver mood and self-reported risky driving behaviour., Results: Young drivers reported frequent driving while influenced by mood. The typical risky driving behaviours of young drivers who are emotion-affected are transient violations (eg, speeding) and risky exposure (eg, driving tired)., Conclusions: Risky driving behaviours that have been found to increase the risk of road injury (speeding, fatigued driving) and to decrease the survivability of road crashes (speeding) are inextricably intertwined with the influence of driver mood upon driving behaviour at an international level. Driver mood is a neglected issue in health promotion programs for young drivers. SO WHAT?: Current health promotion interventions for young drivers safety such as Graduated Driver Licensing may not prevent driving while influenced by mood. Additional strategies are required to minimise the exposure to driving while affected by negative mood., (© 2018 Australian Health Promotion Association.)

This paper takes as its subject the circulation of tolerance discourse within two pedagogical encounters in two Australian educational settings, and draws from the work of Wendy Brown on tolerance as a regulatory force. Brown argues that discourses of tolerance are produced within historical and cultural milieu that enable tolerance and aversion to exist simultaneously. This has significant implications for how we might come to understand the project of working towards a socially just educational system and the various struggles encountered within pedagogical sites. I also examine the pedagogical affects that are produced within different educational moments as we work to teach in or around difference and when we embody the Other in the classroom. I engage with how these experiences speak to the way in which tolerance as national ideal acts to both alleviate and circulate discourses of inequality such as sexism and homophobia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores an innovative approach to evaluating the effectiveness of a writing group in an Australian research-intensive university. Traditional qualitative and quantitative methods typically applied in higher-education research may be effective in analysing the output of writing groups; however, they do not always address the affective domain of writing and giving and receiving feedback in a small-group context. The group had previously evaluated its practice with a speed-dating activity, itself an innovative approach designed for efficiency and to take advantage of the size and diversity of the group. The changing membership of the group, from eight to four participants, warranted a methodology appropriate to the intimacy of the group. In this paper, three theoretical frameworks are used to conceptualise the practice of the smaller group: communities of practice, peer mentoring and affect theory. The methodologies of critically reflective practice and memory work described here emerged from these theoretical frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Academic, policy, and public concerns are intensifying around how to respond to increasing mental health problems amongst young people in OECD countries such as the UK and Australia. In this paper we make the case that public knowledge about mental health promotion, help-seeking, support and recovery can be understood as an enactment of public pedagogy--as knowledge practices and processes that are produced within and beyond formal spaces of learning. We explore the question of how new pedagogic modes of address are produced through digital technologies--social media, gamified therapies, e-mental health literacy, wearable technology--as they invite particular ways of knowing embodied distress as "mental illness or ill health." The rapid growth of formal and informal pedagogical sites for learning about youth mental health raises questions about the affective arrangements that produce new kinds of (ab)normal in the digital era. Through a posthumanist perspective that connects critical mental health studies and public pedagogy, this paper offers an original contribution that theorises pedagogic sites within the cultural formation of public-personal knowledge about mental (ill) health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I examine Nazeem Hussain's SBS comedy series Legally Brown (2013–2014) to show how the series used humour to challenge the centring of white emotion and national belonging in Australian television. Drawing on Ghassan Hage's theorization of 'governmental belonging' and Sara Ahmed's work on affect, as well as scholarship on race and humour, I analyse how the series deployed a shifting mode of address to interpellate POC viewers and to speak to, about, and over whiteness. I argue that, by refusing to centre white emotion, and by exposing links between historical and present, and structural and 'everyday', racism in Australia, the series engaged critically with settler colonialism as an ongoing structuring logic of white 'governmental belonging'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports the results of a small, longitudinal study involving a group of Japanese elementary school students (N = 29) involved in exploratory research using foreign language activities, including two Skype exchanges between these students and students in Australia. The purpose of the research was to test for the impact of a series of Skype exchange activities with students in Australia on Japanese elementary school students' affective variables toward EFL. The results show that the students had statistically significant increases in foreign language activities, international posture, and motivation. This tech-based language activity arguably supplied compelling comprehensible input. The student participation in the preparations leading up to the exchanges would have encouraged them to work diligently to be able to speak so as to be understood. The results are discussed regarding future directions in this line of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines collaborative researcher-practitioner knowledge work around assessment data in culturally diverse, low socio-economic school communities in Queensland, Australia. Specifically, the paper draws on interview accounts about the work of a cohort of school-based researchers who acted as mediators bridging knowledge flows between a local university and a cluster of schools. We draw on the concept of recontextualisation to explore the processes of knowledge mediation in dialogues around student assessment data to design instructional innovations. We argue that critical policy studies need to explore the complex ways in which neoliberal education policies are enacted in local sites. Moreover, we suggest that an analysis of collaborative knowledge work designed to improve student learning outcomes in low socio-economic school communities necessitates attention to the principles regulating knowledge flows across boundaries. In addition, it necessitates attention to the ways in which mediators navigate dilemmatic spaces, anxieties and affects/feelings in order to generate innovative learning designs in the current global context of high-stakes national testing and accountability regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Work-life balance policies have become a ubiquitous feature of university strategies for formally recognising that employees have personal interests, ties and obligations beyond those of the workplace. However, rationales for work-life balance policies and programs in Australian universities predominantly link personal health, well-being and family responsibilities to imperatives for a more productive and competitive tertiary sector. In this paper, we call for an encounter between work-life balance policies, everyday organisational practices and the performativities of academic subjects. Informed by poststructuralist theories of institutionality, governmentality and subjectivity, we draw on personal and policy narratives to argue that 'well-being' is a construct through which the risky humanity of academic subjects is not only managed, but also appropriated into normative discourses of obligatory productivity and self-governance. Informed by Sara Ahmed's recent work on the cultural politics of emotion and in particular, what she terms the obligation or 'duty to happiness', we consider how academic performativities are implicated in discursive fictions that equate work-life balance with personal and organisational well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current paper investigates the application of the dual-process (psychological) model of risk perception to the prediction of flood preparedness intentions at the household level in Southeast Queensland (SEQ), Australia. In particular, the paper aims to explore the mechanisms by which cognitive and affective appraisals are related and integrated in risk judgments. Covariance-based Structural equation modelling (SEM) techniques were used for data analysis. The findings indicate that both cognitive and affective appraisals of risk are significant predictors of individuals’ willingness to undertake private precautionary measures against floods. At the end, it was concluded that the dual-process model provides an adequate fit to the data and has potential to inform more tailored approaches to flood preparedness efforts and advance risk communication strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the affective and performative aspects of the right to the city with a focus on the materialisation of this right, its corporeal coming into being. In elaborating the idea of an affective right to the city, I will refer to Judith Butler's performative theory of assembly, along with findings drawn from ethnographic research conducted among individuals experiencing homelessness in Melbourne, Australia. My research suggests that the materialisation of the right to the city is embodied in the social, material and affective occupation of urban spaces. This work reveals how the body's inhabitation of place, and the affordances of the material environment, mediate the performative expression of the right to the city. It also calls for a shift from a juridical conception of the right to the city to an affective one, more accommodating of the social and material contexts in which this right is enacted. I conclude with a brief discussion of the implications of this affective conception of rights for performative studies of homelessness in urban space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the existence of uncritical exhibition practices that support nostalgic narratives about the past cannot be denied, this paper is focused on demonstrating both the existence of critical exhibitions and on explaining how they work. In particularly, this paper looks at the ways in which the production of affective, nonrational forms of experience aimed at inducing a heightened level of engagement on the part of visitors is being used to facilitate a more critical reflection on the relationship between past and present. My examples, drawn from curatorial practices in Australia dealing either with contact histories or histories of migration, will be used to explore how explicit forms of engagement with the senses in contemporary exhibition practices gesture toward not only a new understanding of the pedagogical role of museums but also to new forms of pedagogical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers three pedagogical moments in the film Tomorrow, When the War Began (2010), contemplating the way in which they open a space for conversations about feelings, sexuality and gender. Tomorrow, When the War Began follows the plight of 17-year-old Ellie who returns to her rural town from a camping trip with her friends, to find Australia has been invaded. The film combines the chaos and confusion of war with the happiness and confusion of intimate relationships. In this way, the film both engages viewers and encourages them to recognise and explore their feelings. In Australian and New Zealand schools, emotions and pleasure are often absent from sex education. Considering a film, the relationships it portrays, and the way it makes an individual feel, can go some way to reducing this gap. This paper considers the sexual literacies developed while watching the film and explains how the intersection of affect and film can assist in the identification and critique of heteronormativity by considering the relationships portrayed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages with contemporary debates around the mediation of distant suffering by examining the ways in which news selection and reporting interpellate audiences into communities of feeling, in which affective belonging is structured by multimodal rhetorical strategies. Concepts drawn from discursive psychology and systemic-functional linguistics (appraisal theory) are used to show how news coverage of natural disasters positions audiences affectively. Analysis of Australian print media coverage of the 2009 Australian bushfires and the 2010 Haiti earthquake will be used to show how this process differs for local and international events. The paper contributes to debates on the “emotionalisation” of public culture by exploring the precise functions of affect within disaster reporting; in particular, how the production of various kinds of affects in the wake of a disaster shapes local and global publics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As a school subject, health education functions as a contemporary apparatus of governmentality by attempting to shape the health[y] conduct of young people. Currently, health education, along with many other institutions and programmes, is heavily shaped by neoliberal logics of risk. This paper is interested in exploring how these tenets shape versions of curriculum and classroom practices. The article draws on ethnographic data and the analytical device of governmental assemblages to consider how governmentalities are brought to life at their point of application; via teacher interviews and classroom practices. Analysis reveals that health education pedagogical assemblages are made up of the usual ‘neoliberal suspects’: risk discourses and strategies that attempt to individualise and responsibilise. However, accompanying these ‘usual suspects’ are a raft of melodramatic and affective intensities, including disgust and shame. These affective pedagogical assemblages are significant for scholars interested in understanding the governmental machinery of health education, and public health and health promotion more broadly, and its potential effects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Background The mental health of carers is an important proximate factor in the causal web linking housing conditions to child health, as well as being important in its own right. Improved understanding of the nature of the relationships between housing conditions, carer mental health and child health outcomes is therefore important for informing the development of housing programs. This paper examines the relationship between the mental health of the carers of young children, housing conditions, and other key factors in the socio-physical environment. Methods This analysis is part of a broader prospective cohort study of children living in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory (NT) of Australia at the time of major new community housing programs. Carer's mental health was assessed using two validated scales: the Affect Balance scale and the Brief Screen for Depression. The quality of housing infrastructure was assessed through detailed surveys. Secondary explanatory variables included a range of socio-environmental factors, including validated measures of stressful life events. Hierarchical regression modelling was used to assess associations between outcome and explanatory variables at baseline, and associations between change in housing conditions and change in outcomes between baseline and follow-up. Results There was no clear or consistent evidence of a causal relationship between the functional state of household infrastructure and the mental health of carers of young children. The strongest and most consistent associations with carer mental health were the measures of negative life events, with a dose-response relationship, and adjusted odds ratio of over 6 for carers in the highest stress exposure category at baseline, and consistent associations in the follow up analysis. Conclusions The findings highlight the need for housing programs to be supported by social, behavioral and community-wide environmental programs if potential health gains are to be more fully realized, and for rigorous evaluation of such programs for the purpose of informing future housing initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the emergence of aspiration as a keyword linked to higher education equity policy in England and Australia since 1997. Aspiration serves multiple purposes when constructed as a problematic site in which policy must intervene. For example, it can be understood as a vector for new technologies of governance that operate through the production of entrepreneurial dispositions; as a signifier for groups that have experienced upward social mobility; and as a personality trait that correlates with future earnings and thus can be defined as a dimension of human capital. It has also provided a rallying point for equity work in higher education. Focusing on English and Australian policy contexts, as well as the recent education work of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), we examine the different perspectives of a range of stake-holders on the strategy of 'raising aspiration' for higher education and how these have changed over time; the partnership work undertaken in the HE systems of both countries under the aegis of aspiration-raising policies; and recent policy developments in both contexts. In particular, we consider how aspiration-focused policies have affective effects on policy actors and seek to control affects directly by modulating feelings about capacities for action in the future. Two data sets provide the empirical basis for the paper: (a) document analysis of major equity policies in England since 1997 and in Australia since 2008, as well as a review of relevant OECD policy documents; and (b) analysis of nine interviews with equity practitioners and policy personnel in England, Australia, and located within the OECD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses talk produced by twenty-four newly qualified anaesthetists. Data were collected from round table discussions at the Young Fellows Conference of the Australia and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists 2006. The talk consisted to an important extent of narratives about experiences of horror. The paper isolates three themes: the normalization of horror, the functionalisation of horror for pedagogic purposes, and the problematization of horror. The last theme provides a springboard into our argument that confronting the affect invested in coping with medical-clinical failure is central to enabling young doctors, and clinicians generally, to address and resolve such adverse events. We conclude that the negotiation of affect through shared or 'dialogic' narrative is central to enabling doctors to deal with adverse events on a personal level, and to enabling them at a collective level to become attentive to threats to patients' safety.

The Australian megachurch, Hillsong, is as well known for its music and spectacle as it is for the content of its religious ideas. This is largely due, as Connell argues in his geography of Hillsong, to the peculiar mix of the theological and the modern that a highly globalised and mediatised context can today produce. This paper re-examines the phenomenon of Hillsong through the theory of affect, which has gained notable analytical purchase in geography in recent years. More specifically, it uses the concept of 'affective labour' to analyse the specific ways in which bodies are put to work in the spaces of Hillsong worship. We demonstrate the way that Hillsong produces and mobilises affect in order to attain the collective experience of the spectacle, which is so crucial to Hillsong's visibility as a social phenomenon and also to its recruitment of the individual member into the logic and ethos of the church as a whole. We indicate the importance for the success of Hillsong of producing particular kinds of subject, namely, subjects who are at once comfortable, enthusiastic and loyal. By recruiting its followers as affective labourers towards a shared evangelical cause, the embodied and vaguely felt sense of potential of members is mobilised towards the spectacular phenomenon that is the Hillsong church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Students undertaking field-based learning, in which they work with Indigenous people in Northern Australia, describe a profound learning experience redolent with emotion. Inspired, challenged and transformed, the students are compelled in ways that require them to interrogate their own selves and taken-for-granted beliefs. In this paper, we draw on empirical work with undergraduate students in geography and development studies to investigate what these cross-cultural experiences add to experiential learning models and recent work on emotional geographies. We find that an understanding of the sensory and emotive is imperative if we are to encourage students to build understanding across difference and connect with diverse people, places and experiences in fundamentally new ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The study of therapeutic landscapes, restorative places and enabling environments – what might collectively be referred to as enabling places – has revealed much of the relationship between place and health promotion. However, it is arguable that this work has only partially accounted for the diverse therapeutic features of enabling places and the various means of their production. Drawing on Bruno Latour, this paper introduces a conceptual logic of enabling places grounded in the analysis of enabling resources. Three categories of enabling resources will be considered: social, affective and material resources. It will be argued that enabling places are composed in diverse actor-networks, facilitating access to enabling resources and supporting the development of novel agencies or capacities. This draws attention to the various networks and associations that promote health and wellbeing, as well as the resources and agencies necessary to maintain these states. The paper concludes that the analysis of enabling resources, and the networks and agencies that comprise them, provides a novel basis for describing the character and production of enabling places, as well as the diverse benefits associated with them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religious bigotry, including incidents of discrimination and violence based on religion, continues to rise across Australia. Religion is consequently considered a destabilising factor in Australia's commitment to diversity. But does Australia's religious diversity pose a threat to social cohesion or an opportunity? In Australia's public schools, despite significant curricular and pedagogical advances in the areas of equity and inclusion, it remains unclear how and to what extent educators support the diverse religious identities of learners. Informed by an affective-discursive analytic, this study unpacks a series of emotional encounters at one primary public school in Sydney that serves a community where most families self-identify with a religion. Educators were invited to discuss how their school responds to religious diversity. This article explores the discomforting affects that entangle liberal humanist commitments to freedoms and secular schooling that emerged in focus groups. The article argues that emotional responses to learners' religious diversity, particularly of fear or apprehension, speak to a broader national teacher education context in which how religious and secular beliefs and knowledges should come into conversation remains unsettled. If Australian teacher education is to prepare educators for social cohesion, how can learners' religious identities be genuinely included in curriculum and pedagogy? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In both Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australia, COVID-19 lockdowns were enforced through public scrutiny of the movements of supposedly 'irresponsible' individuals. Denouncing their impact on public health created an affective cartography of collective blame uniting State and society in shared moral indignation. Produced through assemblages of mainstream and social media and government statements, such mediated spectacles engendered a sense of collective unity and shared purpose at a time when both collective cohesion and narratives of individual responsibility were of particular interest to the State. Spatio-temporal maps and diagrams of culpable contagion helped materialise the invisible movement of the virus but also enabled identification of the sick. Some bodies more than others were made to carry the morality of the collective enterprise of stopping the virus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: This paper reviews the knowledge accumulated from published population studies of health and ill-health experiences during the menopausal transition., Results: Well-being: mid-aged women are more likely to report positive moods than negative moods. Well-being is not associated with menopausal status but is associated with current health status, psychosocial and lifestyle variables., Symptoms: SYMPTOMS vary greatly across cultures, with North American and European samples reporting higher rates of symptoms than Asian women. The most symptomatic women in the North American samples and Australian studies are those whose menstrual cycles have changed. Vasomotor symptoms increase through the menopausal transition. Other variables such as socio-demographic, health status, stress, premenstrual complaints, attitudes to ageing and menopause, and health behaviors are associated with the occurrence of symptoms. Psychological complaints: There is no increase in the incidence of major depression with the menopause. Negative moods are not associated with the natural menopausal transition. Factors associated with negative moods include surgical menopause, prior depression, health status, menstrual problems, social and family stressors and negative attitudes to menopause. Sexuality: Several studies suggest a decline in sexual functioning associated with menopausal status rather than ageing. Social factors and health status factors are also associated with sexual outcomes., Recommendations: Future research should bring together biomedical and sociological aspects. Positive aspects of health should be assessed as well as troubling symptoms. Longitudinal studies are needed with measures of hormonal change. Promoting positive attitudes to ageing and menopause, health lifestyles and stress reduction can be used as community interventions and as part of individual care.

Building on work on sexual harassment in schools, this article continues one of the threads from the first Schooling and Sexualities conference held, in 1995. In so doing, it offers a contemporary account of a teacher's sexual harassment by one of her students, through a sexually violent comment posted about her on the Rate My Teacher website. Throughout, I explore the affective politics of sexual harassment. In developing an understanding of affective politics as it plays out through an online review, a teacher, a classroom and students, I draw on the concepts of affects and assemblages, and the capacity of a sexual harassment assemblage to constitute (and de-constitute) identities. I consider how power is both increased and also diminished between student and teacher in an assemblage of gendered, sexual and neoliberal identities; and how she and her student are re-situated through the sexual harassment. Attending to the affective politics of a teacher's sexual harassment by her student offers a way to understand violence and identities as social, material and discursive assemblages, and contributes to understanding sexual harassment in schools, particularly where teachers are targeted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Indigenous peoples are increasingly being engaged in the management of natural hazards. • Settler natural hazard bureaucracies remain underexplored. • Our research provides a situated account of governance and policy enactment. • We find that affect conditions experiences of the state. • Policy brokerage involves a diverse ecology of personal styles and characteristics. In recent years settler governments have begun to seriously engage with Indigenous peoples' fire and other ecological knowledges in the context of managing natural hazards and resources. In Australia, Aoteroa New Zealand, Canada and the United States, Indigenous peoples and their ecological knowledge have become increasingly involved in combating such naturally—and socially constructed—threats as wildfires, floods, and storms. Nevertheless, while there has been significant research into the sociocultural dimensions of Indigenous peoples' ecological knowledges, until recently little analytic effort has been directed to understanding the other side of this intercultural interaction: what can be conceptualised as settler natural hazard management bureaucracies. Taking the emergence of government engagement with Indigenous peoples' fire knowledge in the southeast Australian state of Victoria as a case study, this paper contributes to the nascent body of ethnographically informed research focusing on the interaction between state natural hazard bureaucracies and Indigenous peoples. We do so by asking what motivated this change in government interest in Indigenous peoples and their fire knowledge. Informed by engagement with experienced fire sector staff, our findings reveal the presence and importance of affect and other more-than-representational qualities that animate state engagements with Indigenous peoples and their cultural burning knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article has been written for qualitative researchers inclined towards in-person, narrative interviewing with members of groups designated 'inconvenient' or 'hard to reach', about sensitive or controversial topics. The aim is to critically reflect on narrative research interviewing practices we have undertaken in Australia with (1) women who had recently survived domestic violence and had relocated with 'their animal companions'; and (2) dairy farmers discussing challenges to their wellbeing and that of 'their livestock'. The themes of affect, iteration and assemblages guide our discussion. Affect speaks to emotions; iteration to researchers raising prior interview content with subsequent participants; and assemblages to the process of piecing together an analysis that later appears seamless. With some caveats, we argue that (in-person) narrative interviewing has the potential to generate rapport with diverse participants that enables the production of 'good data', that is, data that are rich in detail but also politicised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I examine the current definitions of internalised racism in the extant literature and suggest where they may be expanded upon in order to further our sociological understanding of the phenomenon. I draw upon data from a wider study that investigates how internalised racism manifests within the lived experiences of racialised subjects in Australia. By introducing a re-reading of Hage's White nation thesis specifically from the perspective of the racialised subject, I demonstrate how there are polarising variations in how internalised racism manifests, specifically in its affective impacts. I argue that beyond the racialised subject's experience of a manifestation of internalised racism, whether negatively or positively, is how they conceive of themselves as relationally dependent upon the dominant racial group's appraisal of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers the post-COVID-19 debates over the level of migration to Australia to understand how the rhetoric of 'affective congestion' which is used for population management has changed. On the one hand, it demonstrates that the concerns of white bodies regarding congestion are taken more seriously by the political and media mainstream than those of new migrants. On the other, it shows that COVID-19 is bringing the injustice of this approach to light, as seen in the case of the harsh lockdown imposed on public housing estates in Melbourne. Finally, it argues for population density planning that uses the 'mobility justice' framework and makes a case for developing affective capacities in addition to building infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined empirical associations between employee cognitive perceptions of leader behavior (directive behavior, supportive behavior) and leader values (self‐concern, other orientation), employee positive affect and negative affect, and employee work intentions indicative of (dis)passionate employees. An internet‐based self‐report questionnaire survey was administered to 409 employees within three private sector organizations in Australia. Structural equation modeling indicated that supportive behavior, other‐orientation, and self‐concern had respective indirect effects on work intentions through employee positive affect. Employee positive affect was a stronger predictor of employee work intentions than was employee negative affect. Implications of these findings for theory and practice are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminist digital geographies are an important part of the digital turn currently underway in geographic scholarship. At the same time, feminist movements are taking advantage of, and emerging from, digital spaces. This article considers how the digital intersects with gender and what opportunities the digital affords feminist movements. We do so by drawing on a case study of feminist activism within Destroy the Joint (DTJ), an online social media activist group, and build a qualitative analysis of a dynamic, reflexive digital space. Qualitative studies of emotion, affect and the power of digital geographies, including social media spaces populated by groups like DTJ, demonstrate how cultural and social practices are changing along with technologies. This research does not draw on a techno-deterministic approach to digital geographies but forwards a feminist perspective that critically engages with the constraints and possibilities of the complex, paradoxical and contingent within the digital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The current study aimed to identify the most statistically appropriate short‐form of the UCLA‐Loneliness Scale (LS). This was intended to provide researchers and practitioners with a measure that reduces the burden on participants and measures a unidimensional model of loneliness in accordance with the theory proposed by Russell. Method: Eight short‐forms of the UCLA‐LS were assessed in two undergraduate samples (N = 552, 206). Students were from a metropolitan Australian university and completed online surveys. Results: One‐, two‐, and three‐factor (i.e., an overall loneliness factor, and two method factors representing positively and negatively scored items) models of the original 20‐item UCLA‐LS provided poor model fit. One 10‐item short‐form provided adequate model fit in both samples. However, all configurations of the measure were generally internally consistent and displayed convergent validity. Greater loneliness was significantly associated with reduced social wellbeing, positive affect, life satisfaction, vitality, and psychological wellbeing, and increased negative affect. Conclusions: It is recommended that a 10‐item short‐form is used in future applications. This short‐form displayed similar internal consistency and convergent validity as the 20‐item measure despite being half as long, and provided superior model fit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article brings recent debates in literary studies regarding the practice of close reading into conversation with Derek Attridge’s idea of ‘readerly hospitality’ (2004) to diagnose the problem of students in undergraduate literary studies programme not completing set reading. We argue that the method of close reading depends on encouraging students to foster positive affective responses towards difficulty – semiotic, emotional and intellectual. Drawing on trials of teaching methods in literary studies’ classrooms in four universities in Australia, we suggest that introducing students to the concept of ‘readerly hospitality’ – rather than assuming an appreciation of difficulty – can better prepare students for the encounters they will have in set literary texts and strengthen the effectiveness of classroom teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In most common law jurisdictions worldwide, an offender’s remorse is a mitigating factor in sentencing. It matters whether or not a person who has committed a crime is truly sorry for what they have done. And yet how judges evaluate such expressions is unclear. Drawing on 18 interviews with judges in the New South Wales criminal justice system in Australia, this article examines the status of offenders’ live, sworn evidence in the judiciary’s assessment of offenders’ remorse. These interviews with the judiciary reveal that remorse assessment often operates beyond semiotic, representational paradigms (such as ‘demeanour assessment’) and instead works, in experiential terms, as a feeling. When it comes to offenders getting into the witness box and speaking of their remorse, it seems that sometimes something gets felt by judges at the level of embodied affect that then enables them to declare: ‘This person is remorseful.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Dementia is a prevalent neurodegenerative disorder affecting an estimated 24.3 million people across the globe. The burden on those caring for people with dementia is substantial, with widespread implications for the caregiver, the care recipient and the community. Relaxation techniques, such as Transcendental Meditation® (TM), have been shown to reduce stress and anxiety in healthy workers; similar benefits are anticipated in dementia caregivers. The objective of this study was to ascertain whether TM can improve psychological stress, quality of life, affect and cognitive performance in dementia caregivers. Methods: The study was conducted as a pilot prospective, multi-centre, community-based, randomised wait-list controlled trial. Community-dwelling caregivers of persons with diagnosed dementia were randomly assigned to a 12-week (14-hour) TM training program or wait-list control. Participants were assessed for quality of life, stress, affect, cognitive performance and adverse effects. The feasibility of the study was also evaluated. Results: Seventeen caregivers were recruited and randomised. Improvements in WebNeuro response speed scores over time were significantly (p = 0.03) greater in the TM group relative to control. Changes between groups over time in all other primary and secondary outcome measures did not reach statistical significance. However, there was a trend toward greater improvement in WebNeuro stress, depression and negativity bias scores in the TM group. Adverse events were reported amongst 63 % of TM-treated subjects; however, events were generally transient, of mild-moderate intensity and only ‘possibly' related to TM. Conclusions: Dementia caregivers exposed to TM demonstrated varying degrees of improvement in several measures of cognitive function, mood, quality of life and stress following exposure to TM. However, as the pilot study was underpowered, no firm conclusions can be made about the effectiveness of TM in this caregiver population. Findings from full-scale trials are now warranted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The affective dimensions of intimacy and emotional labour in academic development are explored utilising two methodological resources: autoethnography and narrative practice. An excerpt from the author’s reflective professional journal infused with affect and emotion is analysed utilising theories of intimacy in modernity, emotion work, and professional intimacy. The journal excerpt is ‘restoried’ to produce narrative lines that provide insight into the journal entry. The article concludes by proposing a ‘pedagogy of intimacy’ as an analytical space that values both skill and care. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]