PPT Presentation by Suresh Canagarajah, “The Invisible Politics of Affect in STEM Learning Contexts,” (LSL Session: (In)Visibility: Language, Ideology, and Power)
ABSTRACT
Affect has been defined as experienced at the prelinguistic and nonconscious level by theorists such as Brian Massumi (2015). For that reason, Massumi also theorizes that shaping affect has become the most effective way of imposing dominant ideologies for contemporary institutions. However, the embodied nature of affect also exceeds total control by individuals and agencies. The body reacts to conditions in the environment in unpredictable ways. Even when people feel that control is so rigid that they cannot articulate their opposition, their bodies might speak their discomfort and protest. For these reasons, affect is paradoxically both an effective mode of political control and resistance.
I illustrate these processes from a graduate-level STEM interaction. I will play the videotaped conversation of a lab group in Electronic Engineering in an American university. Lab meetings are considered a site of professionalization where students learn the discourses and practices of their discipline while engaged in high-stakes research with their peers and faculty. This genre of interaction is treated as bound by a group-ethic, as members are unified by their competitive research projects (Swales 2004). However, many forms of inequality remain at an invisible level.
I demonstrate how the Principal Investigator adopts a teacher-led and male-dominant discourse much against his professed ethic of egalitarianism. A female graduate student is constantly spoken over by the PI and his male students. While all members collude in this form of silencing as part of their habitus, the female student’s body is disaligned from their talk, suggesting her discomfort and protest. Eventually, the PI senses her body language and cedes the floor, offering her a small victory. The presentation will demystify the ideologies of egalitarianism and positivism traditionally claimed for STEM discourses to unveil the invisible inequalities in scientific practices.