Keynote Presentation

In this paper I will provide a survey of feminist thought that established the scholarly landscape and appetite for the turn to affect. Paying tribute to the years of feminist thinking that have shaped both affect theory and feminist new materialisms, I will undertake a philosophical experiment which considers feminist affect as a resource for mapping economies of embodied change in children who are living with intergenerational trauma. Feminist new materialisms account for the agency of the body and the ways it is entangled with, in and through its environment. Similarly, affect scholars have put words to assemblages of place and feelings that are difficult to describe, in order to better think about bodily changes. Deborah Youdell (2016) has begun to think about possibilities for working with epigenetics in education and I will explore these in relation to art, affect and new materialism. Drawing on the early work of the North American scholar Jane Gallop, I think through the child's body as a site of agency and embodied histories. Using Gallop’s (1990) theoretical approach which ‘thinks through the body’ I map the economies of embodied change in children from the Interfaith Childhoods project, specifically in relation to their religious, cultural and refugee histories and possibilities for resolving embodied trauma. This experiment may serve as a model for new materialist and affect theorists to expand when thinking through feminist affect as a resource for understanding bodily experience through arts based research.