Project
Becomings
engage · learn · reimagine · grow
Reimagining recovery narratives following adversity
Affective Pedagogy
Exploring how recovery can be felt, encountered and learned through bodies, relationships and everyday experiences.
What Is Affective Pedagogy?
Pedagogy is often associated with formal teaching — a teacher giving knowledge to somebody who learns it. Affective pedagogy asks us to think about learning much more broadly.
We are continually learning through our encounters with the world: through other people, bodies, spaces, objects, images, experiences and the feelings and sensations that move through those encounters. Sometimes these experiences change what we understand without anybody deliberately setting out to teach us.
Affect is important here, but it does not simply mean emotion. Affect draws attention to our capacity to affect and be affected — to what happens through encounters and how those encounters might change what a body can feel, think, do or become.
From this perspective, learning is not only a cognitive process that happens through receiving and understanding information. It can also be embodied, relational and felt. An encounter might unsettle something we previously believed, enable us to recognise something differently, create a new connection, or open a possibility that had not previously seemed available.
Within Project Becomings, affective pedagogy helped us consider recovery in this way. Rather than understanding recovery only as something somebody does through treatment or individual work, we could explore how people might also come to know, practise and experience recovery differently through the encounters that make up their lives.
Recovery could therefore be approached not only as something to achieve, but as something continually learned, unlearned and re-learnt through encounters with the world.
Why Affective Pedagogy For Trauma And Recovery?
Understandings of trauma and recovery are often communicated through information: explanations of symptoms, therapeutic concepts, coping strategies or guidance about what someone should do. This knowledge can be valuable, but knowing something cognitively does not necessarily change how it can be felt, embodied or lived.
Affective pedagogy offered Project Becomings a way of thinking about this gap. It draws attention to what happens through encounters — with people, bodies, spaces, materials, ideas and experiences — and to how those encounters can affect what somebody is able to feel, think, do or imagine.
This was particularly important for thinking about trauma recovery because experiences can become embedded in how bodies encounter the world. Someone may, for example, understand intellectually that they are safe while their body responds differently. Equally, an experience of connection, creativity, movement or being differently within a particular space may create possibilities that explanation alone could not produce.
From this perspective, recovery involves more than acquiring the ‘right’ knowledge about trauma. It can involve opportunities to experience, practise and come to know things differently — sometimes through small encounters that shift what feels possible.
This also challenges the idea that learning about recovery happens only within formal therapeutic or educational spaces. Learning can happen through relationships, communities, creative practices, physical environments and everyday life. An encounter does not need to have been designed as a lesson for something to be learnt through it.
Affective pedagogy therefore helped Project Becomings explore the relationship between knowing and doing: how knowledge might become embodied, practised and transformed through experience rather than remaining something that is only understood.
Affect: More Than Emotion
When we hear the word affect, we might think it simply means an emotion such as happiness, sadness, fear or anger. Within affect theory, however, it means something broader.
Drawing particularly on Spinoza and Deleuze, affect can be understood through the idea of our capacity to affect and to be affected. It draws attention to what happens through an encounter and to whether that encounter changes what a body is able to feel, think, do or become.
Imagine placing your hand into water. Your hand moves the water, creating currents and ripples, but the water also acts upon your hand — through its temperature, pressure and resistance. Something happens through the encounter between them. Neither can be understood entirely by looking at one in isolation.
Human encounters can also affect our capacities. A conversation might leave someone feeling able to speak when previously they could not. A particular room might allow somebody's body to relax, while another produces tension. An artwork might unsettle an assumption, or a relationship might create possibilities for trying something that previously felt impossible.
Importantly, we may not always be able to immediately name or explain what has happened. We might notice a bodily sensation, a shift in atmosphere or simply that something feels different before we can translate that experience into a recognisable emotion or thought.
This made affect particularly useful within Project Becomings. It allowed attention to move beyond asking only what people thought or felt about recovery towards noticing encounters, bodily responses, atmospheres and shifts in what appeared possible.
The important question became not simply “How did this make someone feel?” but “What did this encounter enable or constrain someone to do, feel, know or become?”
Bodies, Encounters And Capacities
Our bodies are continually encountering the world around us. People, places, objects, memories, sounds, materials and environments can all participate in shaping what a body feels able to do.
Affective pedagogy draws attention to these encounters and to the ways they can expand or diminish our capacities. Capacity here does not simply mean physical ability. It can include the capacity to connect, speak, trust, participate, imagine, create, rest, take risks, experience pleasure or encounter ourselves and others differently.
This was particularly significant when thinking about trauma and recovery. Trauma can shape how bodies encounter the world: what feels safe or threatening, what becomes possible or impossible, and how someone responds to particular people, places or situations. These responses cannot always be changed simply by knowing or being told that something is safe.
But capacities are not necessarily fixed. Different encounters can create different possibilities. A relationship in which someone feels heard might make speaking possible. A creative practice might allow someone to encounter their body differently. A particular space might enable participation where another closes it down. Being part of a community might make possible forms of connection, belonging or experimentation that were difficult elsewhere.
Importantly, this does not mean that particular encounters will affect everyone in the same way. The same space, material, relationship or activity can expand one person's capacities while constraining another's. What an encounter can do depends upon the particular bodies, histories, relations and conditions coming together within it.
For Project Becomings, this shifted attention away from asking only whether an activity or experience was good or helpful. Instead, we could ask:
What is this encounter doing? What capacities is it opening, closing or changing — and for whom?
This offered a different way of approaching recovery:
not simply as the reduction of symptoms, but also through changes in what people feel able to do, experience, know and become.
Learning Beyond Words
Learning is often imagined as something that happens through words, explanation and conscious understanding. We receive information, think about it and, eventually, know something we did not know before.
Affective pedagogy allows us to think about learning differently. Bodies can learn through experience and encounter, sometimes before that learning can be easily put into words. We may come to know something through doing, sensing, practising, relating or repeatedly encountering the world in different ways.
This distinction became important within Project Becomings. Co-researchers could sometimes know something cognitively while experiencing something very differently through their bodies. Understanding an idea about recovery did not necessarily mean that it could immediately be felt, trusted or lived.
Equally, new understandings did not always begin with explanation. Creative practice, relationships, movement, materials and shared experiences could produce moments in which something was noticed, felt or encountered differently. Meaning might emerge later — and sometimes an experience did not need to be completely translated into words to matter.
This helped challenge a hierarchy in which verbal and cognitive knowledge is treated as more legitimate than embodied, experiential or affective knowledge. Different ways of knowing could instead sit alongside one another, sometimes reinforcing one another and sometimes remaining in tension.
For Project Becomings, this became part of the relationship between knowing and doing. Recovery was not simply about knowing what to do. Opportunities to practise, encounter and experience something differently could themselves participate in producing new knowledge.
Sometimes we come to know differently because we have first been able to experience something differently.
Public And Affective Pedagogies
Learning does not only happen in classrooms, universities or therapy rooms. Public spaces can also become places where knowledge is encountered, questioned and produced.
Public pedagogy draws attention to the ways we learn through everyday cultural and social spaces — including communities, exhibitions, artworks, media and encounters with other people's experiences. These spaces do not simply transmit information. They can invite people to question what they think they know and encounter ideas in different ways.
Within Project Becomings, this became particularly important when the research moved into the public exhibition space. Visitors did not simply receive a set of research findings explaining what trauma recovery was. They moved through a space containing artworks, objects, words, sounds, materials and the traces of other people's experiences.
Thinking through affective pedagogy allowed attention to be given not only to what visitors consciously understood, but also to what these encounters might do. An artwork might provoke discomfort, recognition or curiosity. A material might invite someone closer. A particular arrangement of the space might change how somebody moved through it. An encounter with another person's account might unsettle an assumption they had previously held.
Importantly, these responses could not be completely controlled or predicted. The exhibition did not teach one correct understanding of recovery. Different visitors brought different bodies, histories, experiences and knowledges into the space, meaning that different encounters could produce different possibilities.
The public therefore became more than an audience receiving research. Through their encounters, reflections and responses, visitors could also participate in the continuing movement of knowledge around trauma and recovery.
Project Becomings could therefore be understood as a public pedagogical space: somewhere knowledge about recovery was not simply displayed, but could be encountered, felt, questioned and potentially reimagined.
What Did Affective Pedagogy Allow Us To Think Differently?
Affective pedagogy helped Project Becomings think about recovery as more than something a person understands, achieves or is taught to do. It drew attention to how recovery can also be learned, felt and practised through the encounters that make up everyday life.
This shifted attention from knowledge as something that is simply transferred from one person to another towards knowledge as something that can emerge through experience. Relationships, bodies, creative practices, communities, materials and spaces could all participate in how recovery came to be known and practised.
It also made capacity important. Rather than asking only whether an experience reduced symptoms or produced a particular outcome, we could consider what an encounter enabled or constrained: Did it make connection possible? Did someone feel able to speak, create, participate or imagine something differently? Did it open possibilities that had previously felt unavailable?
Importantly, these changes were not necessarily permanent or predictable. An encounter that expanded someone's capacities in one moment might affect them differently in another. Recovery could therefore be understood as ongoing and situated, rather than as movement towards a stable end point.
Affective pedagogy also helped us recognise that learning about recovery happens beyond formal treatment. Communities, relationships, creative practices and public spaces can all become places in which existing understandings are questioned and different ways of knowing and doing recovery can emerge.
Together, these ideas contributed to understanding recovery as a pedagogical process — not because somebody is teaching a person how to recover, but because recovery can involve continually learning, unlearning and coming to know ourselves and our worlds differently.
Recovery, from this perspective, is not only something we know about. It is something that can be felt, encountered, practised and continually learnt through our relations with the world.
