The uncomfortable teacher-student encounter and what comes to matter

Abstract

This article offers insights around how a posthumanist framing might allow us to know our teaching practices, performances and identities otherwise. Influenced by Baradian philosophy and the work of Sara Ahmed, it uses an ethico-onto-epistemology to conduct a diffractive rendering of the affective experiences of three female teaching academics (the authors) as they encounter uncomfortable teacherly moments in the course of their daily work. By repositioning emotions as both material objects and powerful (re)constitutive forces, they are placed at the very centre of teaching practices, performances, identities and teacher-student relationships. From here they function to redistribute agency through such things as words, past experiences, shared histories and bodily responses. This approach extends scholarly research in Higher Education settings beyond conventional humanist ontologies to examine the ways that power shapes the very surface of bodies as well as worlds.