Affections that matter is the academic project home for the research outcomes of Dr. Melissa Joy Wolfe, educator, senior lecturer, artist and creative educational researcher. As my research continues, new work and different digital media will be listed on the projects page. See below for my new book.
By exploring the material-discursive production of gender norms in Australian secondary schools, this book offers a novel feminist posthuman new materialist perspective on how schoolgirls are pre-determined within educational space and place. The text ultimately illustrates how gender and race inequity is reproduced through presumptive thinking and a failure to recognize student potential.
Affect and the Making of the Schoolgirl maps affective accounts of students’ everyday experiences in school spaces. Student negotiations with prescriptive processes of subject participation and subject selection are explored to illustrate how inequities are systematically reproduced. Chapters also offer an examination of STEM subject fields as entitled male space. Engaging theoretically with concepts from performative feminist new materialism and affect theory, the text highlights filmic semblances created as part of an onto-epistemological project, and calls for alternative educational encounters which affirmatively acknowledge difference and promote non-binary thinking.
This text will benefit postgraduate researchers, academics, and scholars with an interest in gender and sexuality education, teacher education, STEM education, gender inequality, intersectionality, and the sociology of education. Those interested in gender studies, affect theory and feminist theory, as well as educational policy and politics more broadly will also benefit from this book. you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Melissa’s research in high schools utilizes a creative filmic research methodology, engaging with theories of affect, that takes account of gender, race, socio-economic status and engagement in public pedagogical practice. She pragmatically thinks with Karen Barad’s (2007) theory of agential realism as a conceptual framework for aspirational educational futures.
Get in contact
You can get in contact with Melissa via the following: