Affective Eugenics: Education,Political Polarization,and the Affective Sorting of Futurity

Introduction

What if we stop pretending ¹ that political polarization is some transient, episodic dysfunction within the broader systems of governance, and rather we are forced to reckon with the reality that polarization is not only inevitable but structural, part of the very architecture of governance that, within a combusting world, is designed to manage planetary decline and mass dispossession? What if the so-called ‘culture wars’ are not merely sideshows to be fixed, nor are they unfortunate byproducts of social breakdown, but rather they are deliberate technologies of affective governance, essential to the management of a collapsing world – tools that obscure the material redistribution of resources and power by rendering it instead as a moral conflict?

In this conceptual-speculative article, we argue that it is crucial to understand that the increasingly polarized world (Applebaum, 2024) is not the unfortunate byproduct of a failing system, but the very design of that system, operating as intended. Political polarization within neoliberal democracies is a condition to be managed, modulated, and strategically contained, rather than a crisis to be solved. It is an agonistic tension that sustains the appearnce of pluralism without threatening the underlying political-economic order (see also Mouffe, 1993). The rhetoric of sentimentalism in the Global North continues to encourage its citizens to buy into an illusion of agonistic moral choice (good vs. evil, civility vs. rage, rationality vs. hysteria), that is, it frames political battles in terms of virtues (love, civility, rationality), when the reality of the current predicament is that the world itself, as ‘we’ know it, is ceasing to function in ways that can hold ‘us’ all (Berlant, 2008; Schuller, 2017). In this regime, affective sorting is the mechanism through which the system’s failures are obscured. Namely, the rich prepare to abscond with what remains of the planet’s resources, the professional managerial class, middle and working class are trained to stabilize through ‘virtue hoarding’ (Liu, 2021), ‘emotional intelligence’ (virtual) therapeutics (Illouz, 2007), as well as gendered and racialized emotional labour (Berlant, 2011; Hochschild, 2012). And the rest, those whose emotional productivity fails to align with the survival of systems in decay (Hage, 2021), are managed or discarded as excess and ‘waste’.

To theorize this dynamic, we introduce the concept of affective eugenics, describing how affective governance legitimizes privatized futures for the few while rendering the many surplus through affective sorting. While this article builds on important scholarship concerning ‘affective citizenship’ (Ayata, 2019; de Wilde and Duyvendak, 2016; Di Gregorio and Merolli, 2016; Fortier, 2010; Lampredi, 2024b; Vrasti and Dayal, 2016) and ‘affective governance’ (D’Aoust, 2014; Sauer and Penz, 2017), which details how states ‘govern through affect’ to manage populations and reinforce borders, our concept of affective eugenics marks a critical intervention into this field. If affective citizenship asks, ‘Who is permitted to feel and belong within the nation-state?’ and affective governance explores, ‘How do institutions govern through affect?’, affective eugenics poses a more sinister, hierarchical question: ‘Whose affective capacity is deemed worthy of a future, and whose is marked for managed disposal?’

Affective eugenics, then, is not merely about inclusion or exclusion based on emotional performance. It is a biopolitical sorting mechanism that stratifies human life according to its perceived affective capacity for productivity within a system of planned (social, ecological, financial, political, reproductive) collapse. It draws a direct lineage from colonial and racial-capitalist projects that classified beings as fully human, subhuman, or non-human based on their capacity for ‘civilized’ affective response (Schuller, 2017). Today, this logic is no longer operationalized to build a unified national body (in contrast to the 19th century), but to triage a fracturing one. The elite and the affluent are anointed with the affective capital of stoic, planetary management; the professional-managerial class is conditioned for resilient compliance; and the surplus populations are rendered affectively dysregulated. This reflects a eugenic logic of affective capacity, applied to the very allocation of futurity itself.

We argue that understanding political polarization through the lens of affective eugenics has important implications for education and educators in the Global North. Decolonial and Indigenous scholars (among many others Coulthard, 2014; Davis and Todd, 2017; Malm, 2016; Simpson, 2017) emphasize that the land and class struggle in the Global North (against the Indigenous peoples) is bound up with the colonial conditions of the Global South. For centuries, the Global North has positioned itself as the ‘advance’ of civilizational progress, while the Global South has borne the consequences of this ‘progress’, of the geopolitics of ongoing Indigenous land dispossession in the North, slavery, resource extraction, wars, and climate breakdowns (Ferreira da Silva, 2022; Sultana, 2022; Yusoff, 2018). The geo-extractive ecologies of affective labour continue to deepen racial injustice in the Anthropocene (Karera, 2019; Povinelli, 2016; Pulido, 2018; Yusoff, 2018, 2024; Vergès, 2017). Now, in the ‘brutalist’ (Mbembe, 2024; see also Mikulan and Wallin, 2025), post-truth age of affective governance, these dynamics are simply reproduced within the same, heavily policed borders, intensified and localized. The question, then, is not so much how to ‘fix’ political, cultural, racial, gendered and economic polarization or to reconcile these divisions, but rather how to live in spite of it. This is a crucial shift in how we approach political polarization and its consequences for education.

We see this logic crystallized in the recent violent dismantling of the student-led Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University in April 2024. To parse this event through the established grammar of affective governance is to misapprehend its profound biopolitical stakes. The administration’s performance of concern for ‘safety’ was a superficial script, a thin veil for a more brutal operation of affective technologies of sorting. The encampment was diagnosed as cultivating ‘pathogenic’ affects, i.e. radical solidarity, joy untethered from institutional validation, righteous rage, all deemed a threat to the university’s neoliberal and colonial futurity. These modes of ‘innervation’ (Lewis, 2023), that is, the affective capacities of bodies when they come together, constituted an alien threat to the affective type of the ideal student-subject.

Drawing on anticolonial theory and affect studies, we argue that reframing contemporary political divides, commonly presented as moral conflicts or cultural battles, as affective technologies of sorting reveals how polarization operates to obscure the material redistribution of power and resources. Rather than striving for reconciliation within a collapsing system, then, the task becomes one of exploring forms of solidarity that refuse the terms of governance. This call is for an educational praxis that orchestrates a relentless refusal of the imperative to be affectively productive, forging affective capacities so stubbornly illegible they sabotage their own translation into the currencies of governance and capital. Importantly, this call is addressed to educators, academics, administrators, education leaders, and practitioners who must grapple with their complicity in existing regimes of affective governance while also taking responsibility for building educational futures otherwise.

This article unfolds through four sections. First, we interrogate the mobilization of sentimentality within neoliberal, colonial, and patriarchal power formations. We then theorize affective eugenics as an apparatus that secures colonial and racialized hierarchies of feeling. Third, we describe how educational institutions function as sites of affective sorting, habituating students into stratified futures. Finally, we gesture toward pedagogies of refusal, insurgency, de-settlement, and affirmative sabotage that fractures the affective infrastructures of eugenics.

Sentimentalism from Affective Governance to Affective Eugenics

In the following discussion, we begin by unpacking the concepts of sentimentalism and affective governance, to explore the ways in which they shape and expand our analytical and practical capacities. We examine how these notions intersect, influence one another, and open different possibilities for understanding and engaging with the political, social, and ethical dimensions of polarization in contemporary life. This discussion also lays the ground for distinguishing our concept of affective eugenics and articulating its conceptual contribution.

Our point of departure is recent scholarship across disciplines that has engaged with the ‘affective turn’ (Clough, 2007), recognizing the central role of affects and emotions in shaping political, social, and ethical life. Feminist and postcolonial scholarship (Ahåll, 2018; Ahmed, 2004, 2010; Berlant, 2008, 2011; Cvetkovich, 2012; Koivunen, 2010; Stoler, 2002) has been instrumental in theorizing how affects and emotions are not merely personal but function as mechanisms of power relations. In particular, this scholarship has shown that the regulation of affects and emotions is deeply embedded in neoliberal, colonial, and patriarchal power structures. For example, Ahmed (2004) argues that experiences of racism and sexism must be understood as embedded in broader structures that mobilize affects and emotions to uphold the patriarchal, capitalist state. Similarly, Berlant (2008, 2011), Cvetkovich (2003, 2012), and Schuller (2017) examine how affective politics, particularly sentimentality and nostalgia (see also Boym, 2001; Mikulan, 2026, forthcoming), shape national and social belonging and invoke a particular ethics.

Berlant (2008) traces the emergence of national sentimentality in the United States, demonstrating how public life is structured through emotional attachments to certain idea(l)s and behaviours. She explains that: ‘The political as a place of acts oriented toward publicness becomes replaced by a world of private thoughts, leanings, and gestures projected out as an intimate public of private individuals inhabiting their own affective changes’ (2008: 41). Here, political issues such as colonialism, racism, and sexism are depoliticized through sentimental narratives that emphasize personal feelings over structural power relations. This emotional framing discourages systemic critique, and instead fosters attachments that reinforce existing inequalities (Zembylas, 2023).

Sentimentality thus emerges as a biopolitical technology of governance, aligning individual emotional needs (e.g. belonging, sympathy) with broader political agendas (e.g. nationalism, racial hierarchies). Bargetz (2019) conceptualizes this as the ‘sentimental contract’, where private emotions are instrumentalized to sustain neoliberal, colonial, and patriarchal power relations (see also Stoler, 2002). Schuller (2017) expands on this idea with her theory of ‘sentimental biopower’, arguing that sentimentality functions as a mode of governance that reinforces existing hierarchies:

Sentimentalism stimulates the moral virtuosity and emotional release of the sympathizer and her affective attachment to the nation-state at the expense of the needs of the chosen targets of her sympathy, typically those barred from the status of the individuated Human: often the impoverished, the racialized, the conquered, the orphaned, and/or the animalized. (Schuller, 2017: 2)

In other words, sentimentalism mobilizes sympathy for the suffering of the Other while deflecting attention from the structural conditions that produce this suffering. By framing issues through emotion rather than power, sentimentality legitimizes inequality, all the while discouraging transformative action at the structural level (Zembylas, 2021b). This dynamic resonates with Gramsci’s (1971) theorization of hegemony, which highlights how cultural forms, including affective attachments, help sustain dominant social orders. As Mayo (2025) explains, hegemonic social relationships – we suggest that sentimentality is among them – are embedded in the everyday structures of society, demonstrating that hegemony is secured not only through coercion but also through consent, including affective consent.

It is in this sense that we argue that sentimentalism functions as a form of affective governance (D’Aoust, 2014; Sauer and Penz, 2017). The concept of affective governance highlights how institutions ‘govern through affect’, that is, how emotions are ruled by political practices of governance and discourse that prescribe and legitimize what individuals (e.g. citizens) must feel towards others (e.g. non-citizens) and towards events in general (Lampredi, 2024b). A related concept, affective governmentality (Penz and Sauer, 2020; Sauer and Penz, 2017), describes how emotions are mobilized both for governing populations and self-governance. This concept extends Foucault’s notion of governmentality by linking affect, subjectivation, and state power. Citizens, in this framework, are not only governed through discipline but also through affective persuasion, shaping their identities via emotional regulation. Affective citizenship (e.g. Ayata, 2019; de Wilde and Duyvendak, 2016; Di Gregorio and Merolli, 2016; Fortier, 2010; Vrasti and Dayal, 2016) offers another conceptual lens for analysing the processes of inclusion and exclusion in relation to citizenship.

D’Aoust (2014) argues that approaching governmentality through the lens of affect and emotion reveals the extent to which these forces actively constitute political formations, a point further developed by Protevi (2009). In other words, emotions such as love for the nation, anxiety, anger, and fear are not incidental to governance; rather, they are central to its functioning. Right-wing populist movements, for example, mobilize fear and resentment to create emotional attachments that sustain authoritarian and exclusionary politics. Crucially, while individuals are manipulated by such rhetoric, they also actively embrace it because it provides them with a sense of purpose and belonging (Kemmer et al., 2019). As Cooper and Hardy (2013) argue, the neoliberal hegemony of individualization diverts attention from systemic contradictions, thereby ensuring that the underlying conditions of exploitation and inequality remain unchallenged.

Importantly, then, understanding affective governance through these perspectives allows us to avoid romanticizing affects and emotions as inherently liberatory (Zembylas, 2021a). Instead, these perspectives reveal how affects and emotions are embedded in power relations but also serve as sites of resistance. While mechanisms of affective governance regulate and constrain emotions, they also generate affective struggles that challenge dominant structures, and this opens new possibilities for political transformation. Hence, it is crucial to emphasize that affective governance also has the potential to build solidarity and political mobilization against these regimes (Bargetz, 2019).

Political polarization, then, can be understood as a mechanism of affective governance through which emotions and affects are harnessed to legitimize exclusionary practices, normalize hierarchies, and consolidate power. By understanding political polarization as an affective technology of governance rather than a failure of democratic discourse, this article contributes to a broader understanding of how affects and emotions sustain existing power structures. Yet, in a world accelerating toward managed collapse, the very logic of governance, with its implication of modulation, regulation, and inclusion, may itself be a sentimental relic. The violent dismantling of the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University in April 2024 serves as a case in point. The administration’s performance of concern for ‘safety’ and ‘civility’ was a superficial script of sentimental governance (Schuller, 2017), a thin veil for affective eugenics. It constitutes a shift from Foucault’s (2012 [1978]) biopolitical imperative to ‘foster life or disallow it to the point of death’ (p. 111) to a curatorial imperative to selectively disallow certain forms of affective life from ever entering the archive of the future. It is this shift from the regulatory framework of affective governance to the triaging logic of affective eugenics that the next section interrogates.

Affective Eugenics

Within regimes of biopower, as articulated by Fanon (1963) and Wynter (2003), the key domain of the political has long been biological existence, wherein state and nonstate actors govern by promoting the health and vitality of some, while designating others for dispossession and death. Yet, as Schuller (2017: 2) observes, ‘very few have taken up the project of assessing the integral involvement of sentimentalism, a discourse of emotional and physiological feeling, temporality and materiality, in the politics of life’. In our era of heightened political polarization, this oversight is particularly revealing. The conflation of affect, the capacities for affecting and being affected, with narrowly regulated emotional response reifies the historical ontology of whiteness, assigning racialized bodies an ‘unrefined’ capacity for affect. Understanding the effects of racialization, gendering, and the uneven distribution of economic and political resources in ways that capture the affective and physiological dimensions of emotion, trauma, and impoverishment remains seldom addressed explicitly in relation to whiteness (see also Gaztambide-Fernández and Angod, 2019) and affective eugenics. A renewed analysis of the interplay among culture, biology, and affect, and the process by which normative value is attributed to affect, sentimentality, and subjectivity (aside from the ideal of white maleness), must consider how power has accrued around the sentimental governance of feelings (see also Lynch et al., 2009).

Foucault’s (2007, 2012) notion of the biopolitical imperative has always contained a eugenic impulse, namely, the qualification of which life is to be sustained. It manages life (health, reproduction, mortality) to ensure the strength and stability of the state. Death is a byproduct, a failure to optimize, or a necessary exclusion (‘let die’) to protect the general population. The ‘curatorial imperative’ of affective eugenics is thus not a new logic but the ruthless refinement of this original function. It manages which emotional and relational potentials are allowed to inform and shape ‘the world to come’. Death (social, political, existential) is the active and preemptive goal, to disallow certain forms of life from ever attaining legibility or viability. It seeks to purify, if not sterilize, the archive of the future before it can be written. This suggests that the regulatory impulse of affective governance has reached its colonial eugenic conclusion, that is, a shift from governing populations through affect toward actively sorting them by affective capacity, determining whose emotional productivity is worthy of a future and whose must be eradicated as surplus. It is biopower stripped of its pastoral pretenses, operating on the very affective substrate of futurity itself. The distinction lies in the temporal register and object of control. Therefore, affective eugenics is the pedagogical and affective arm of necropower. It is necropolitics (Mbembe, 2019) applied to the realm of potentiality.

Affective eugenics is a biopolitical process that extends the historical logic of eugenics from genetic fitness – though it always trafficked in the governance of feeling as much as genes - to a hierarchical sorting of human life based on ‘affective fitness’. It operates within a racialized, heteronormative, ableist, and patriarchal framework to determine which emotional expressions and relational potentials are deemed worthy of a future. Shame, disgust, pride, pity, admiration, fear, they all marshal to rank bodies, behaviours, and relational styles. The process stratifies the capacity for ‘proper’ emotional regulation and ‘refined’ affect, thereby reproducing and naturalizing normative hierarchies of feeling. Its goal is to preemptively sterilize the future by disallowing ‘dysgenic’ or threatening modes of feeling from attaining social legibility or viability. Rooted in historical strategies of affective governance and colonial notions of ‘improvement’, it operates by dictating not only who is permitted to feel, but how they are allowed to feel, legitimizing acts of violence that uphold a racialized ordering of affective capacities (Mikulan, 2026a, in press; Zembylas, 2022).

This logic has deep historical roots. As Schuller (2017) argues, the 19th-century sentimentalism functioned as an epistemic, ontological, and aesthetic mode, wherein the ‘uncivilized races were consigned to the immediacy of childlike sensation and instinctive response, captive to whatever stimulation crossed their paths’ (p. 13). Together, impressibility and sentimentalism of the 19th century distinguished civilized bodies as receptive to their milieu and capable of disciplining their sensory susceptibility, thus possessing the life and vitality that required protection from the threat posed by ‘primitive’ bodies deemed impulsive and insensate, incapable of evolutionary change, and nearing the end of their temporal progression. In other words, the systematic and ongoing suffering inflicted upon Others during settler colonization and enslavement created hierarchies that designated who counted as human and capable of experiencing pain. These hierarchical categories distinguished between those perceived as similar and those viewed as different and inferior (Ferreira da Silva, 2022; Schuller, 2017; Weheliye, 2014). The characterization of the colonized peoples’ feelings as ‘childlike’ – that is, ‘excessive’, ‘inappropriate’, or ‘animated’ – served to displace their sovereignty, dehumanize, and reduce their affective capacity toward the ‘primitive’, ‘animalistic’, ‘brute’ end of the line of progress (Chakrabarty, 2000; Cohen, 1970; Tibebu, 2011). As Weheliye (2014) argues, biopolitical hierarchies are sustained by designating certain populations as less than human, their suffering ungrievable, their emotional responses deemed primitive and excessive.

In the settler colonies, church, school, and bureaucracy were the institutions deeply involved in the governance of proper sentimentality (Mikulan and Sinclair, 2023; Rifkin, 2017). These institutions operated within a Eurocentric axiology of humanness, of what it means to be human, that was premised on imperial and patriarchal violence rendered ‘inconspicuous’ (see, e.g., Byrd, 2011; Coulthard, 2014; Fanon, 1963; McKittrick, 2014; Spillers, 1987; Weheliye, 2014; Wynter, 2003). Central to this axiology was the cultivation and regulation of whiteness as both a social and affective practice. Far from being stable, whiteness possessed a plasticity that required continuous oversight and reinforcement. It is in this context that we situate affective eugenics as the process by which whiteness is perpetually revalidated, embodying a ‘grown-up’, ‘civilized’ body that, over time, cultivates a disciplined responsiveness: the capacity to regulate emotions reflectively rather than act on raw impulse (Schuller, 2017). Within such a system, the reproduction of whiteness is not secured through fixed notions of genetic purity but through the regulated accumulation of affective capital, i.e. the capacity to affect and be properly affected in sanctioned ways. Affective eugenics thus functions as a mechanism of control that measures and regulates the accumulation of affective capital over time and generations, ensuring that certain bodies are recognized as capable of ‘civilized’ reflective emotional regulation, while others are relegated to the realm of ‘uncivilized’ receptive affectivity.

Today, amid escalating political polarization around climate crisis, gender, race and culture wars, and ‘wokeness’, this very logic is mobilized in affective governance as affective eugenics continues to dictate who is deemed capable of proper emotional regulation and full participation in the human/elite collective (Pedwell, 2017). The cultural wars over issues like ‘wokeness’, critical race theory, or 2SLGBTQ+ rights are deeply tied to affective eugenics. Opponents of progressive movements often weaponize nostalgia and sentimentalism, framing their resistance as a defence of ‘traditional values’ or ‘civilized norms’ (we only need to remember how, during ABC’s presidential debate, Trump said about the Haitian immigrants that: ‘In Springfield, they are eating the dogs’ [https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c77l28myezko]. This positions white affective responses (e.g. nostalgia, fear, or moral outrage) as legitimate and reflective, while casting racialized groups as disruptive and threatening to social order. Refugees and migrants are systematically portrayed around the globe as ‘uncontrolled’ threats to national stability, while positioning the state’s affective response (e.g. fear, security concerns) as rational and protective. Movements like Black Lives Matter, Me Too, Idle No More, climate activism or student protests in universities over the war in Gaza are also systematically delegitimized through narratives that portray their emotional expressions (such as anger, grief, or urgency) as excessive or irrational, while the emotional responses of dominant groups (e.g. white fragility or defensive nationalism) are normalized as measured and justified.

The Columbia University example thus supports our argument, that is, we suggest that affective eugenics seeks to cleanse the future of modes of feeling that threaten the hegemonic affective infrastructures of power. The arrest of Palestinian student and activist Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder, exemplifies this. His legal status was rendered null by his ‘affective status’; his capacity for righteous outrage marked him as excess, his emotional productivity dysgenic and thus disposable. This logic echoes what Stoler (2002) identifies in colonial contexts as the intense policing of intimate, affective domains to maintain racialized boundaries of the human. As Mikulan, following Wynter, suggests elsewhere (2026a, in press), this system is deeply embedded in the autopoietic propositional grammar of whiteness, which relies on a temporalized biopower and the sentimentalist sorting of affects to continuously revalidate whiteness as a ‘cultivated’, ‘disciplined’, and ‘civilized’ affective state (see also Zembylas, 2022).

However, in a world increasingly defined by crisis and cultural polarization, affective eugenics finds its most potent and everyday expression in the institution tasked with crafting the future – the school. It is to the classroom as a site of affective sorting that we now turn in order to suggest that under the regime of sentimentalism, virtue pedagogy operates as a tool of affective control, training students to internalize resilience, adaptability, and moral self-fashioning while obscuring the structural violence that produces their precarity.

Abolishing Virtue Pedagogy: Education as a Site of Affective Eugenics

If political polarization operates as this mechanism of staging moral conflicts to obscure material redistribution, then its management through affective eugenics becomes the essential work of securing a futurity for the few. The affluent, therefore, need not ‘win’ the culture wars; they only need to keep us fighting within them, a spectacle that obscures their quiet absconding with the very possibility of a future. If classical eugenics sought to optimize the white human body for a future of national strength, today’s affective eugenics sorts people by emotional productivity in a world without a viable future for all. The emerging oligarchic techno-feudal order does not require mass kidnapping and extermination, though it continues to do so in brutal ways, only the strategic neglect and managed disposability of the surplus population. This sorting mechanism is increasingly automated and amplified by digital platforms, which are the very tools of the techno-oligarchic class. Algorithms modulate affect, curate outrage, and reinforce the agitational loops that serve the eugenic goal of keeping populations polarized and manageable, their affective energies directed horizontally against each other rather than vertically at the structures of dispossession. Those who cannot or will not adjust, adapt, or emotionally regulate within a collapsing world are treated as ‘waste’ (Mikulan, 2026, forthcoming). Here, education becomes a site where affective governance operates through modes of sentimentalism, where moralizing narratives about the resilience, optimism, and goodness of overcoming adversity obscure the fact that the adversity itself is produced by the very structures that seek to pacify the discontent of those most affected by it.

For example, In British Columbia, February the 14th is a day marked by the yearly Women’s Memorial March for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. In 2024, some of the Indigenous pre-service teacher students in Mikulan’s class planned to take their primary years students to the march when, at the very last minute, they received a letter from the authorities prohibiting them to do so. The arguments stated in the letter against bringing children to the march were a) that ‘this is not an approved field study’; b) that ‘the march focuses on the lived experience of families who have been impacted by colonial and gender violence and could be triggering to students who participate and may not have the ability to process the adult content that is shared’; and c) ‘the structure of the event creates supervision challenges for elementary aged students’.

The prohibition against Indigenous teacher-candidates bringing their students to the Women’s Memorial March in British Columbia is a quintessential example of virtue pedagogy operating as affective eugenics. The administration’s letter, with its appeals to ‘adult content’ and the need to ‘protect’ students from being ‘triggered’, performs a classic maneuver of affective governance. It frames a political and historical reality, that is, the ongoing colonial and gendered genocide of Indigenous women, girls, and ‘Two Spirit’ people as a problem of individual emotional management and child development. This is, pragmatically speaking, bureaucratic risk-aversion. But more importantly, it is the active, preemptive sterilization of the affective field to prevent the contamination of ‘innocent’ settler futurity by the disruptive, grieving, and politically radical affect of Indigenous resistance and remembrance. The stated rationale, i.e. fear of unprocessed trauma and supervisory challenges, masks a deeper eugenic logic. The march represents a mode of collective affective insurgency, a public witnessing that binds grief to political demand. To allow children to participate would be to permit them to be affected by this insurgency, to cultivate an emotional capacity for righteous anger and collective grief that is directly antagonistic to the individuated, therapeutic emotional regulation (e.g. Social-Emotional Learning) that virtue pedagogy promotes. The school’s intervention is a form of affective sequestration, determining that certain emotional responses to colonial violence are ‘risky’, ‘unproductive’, and thus must be prevented from ever taking root in the next generation. It protects the ‘emotional well-being’ of the settler child only by enforcing an emotional illiteracy about the conditions of Indigenous life and death, ensuring the future citizen’s affective palette remains compatible with the hollow reconciliatory sentiments of the settler state (Mikulan and Zembylas, 2025). This is affective eugenics, or in other words, the systematic disallowance and ‘purification’ of those affective capacities that threaten to forge solidarities outside and against the managed distributions of a colonial future.

Within the expanding architecture of affective eugenics, schools train students in the emotional orientations necessary to inhabit their raced, sexed, ableist, and classed roles within a ‘collapsing world’. For those positioned to inherit power, elite institutions cultivate a curriculum of planetary management, where crisis is framed as opportunity (Saltman, 2018). Here, education emphasizes systems thinking, tech-resilience and long-term vision (O’Connell, 2017), instilling a form of stoic ‘rational detachment’ (Khan, 2011) that prepares students to navigate, and ultimately govern, a privatized future (see also Garrett, 2020). This affective eugenics of education operates through explicit exclusion, and the slow erosion of futures for those deemed non-essential. It is not a system that ‘fails’ its students, as we tend to hear all too often in public discourses; rather, it succeeds in preparing them for the future roles available in a divided, combustible world.

Virtue pedagogies extend this logic, transforming moral education into an instrument of affective governance, where students (and teachers) are encouraged to ‘be the change’ while remaining structurally powerless to enact it. ‘Virtue hoarding’ (Liu, 2021), allyship training (Applebaum, 2022; Badenhorst et al., 2022), and civility politics produce a curriculum of emotional performativity, in which virtuous self-fashioning substitutes for structural change (see Ozias and Bettencourt, 2022). Students are conditioned for resilience and compliance, their schooling an exercise in emotional self-regulation (Gillies, 2011), adaptability, and entrepreneurialism (Brown, 2015). Privileged private (often Christian) and public schools and universities reinforce an individualistic framework, where crisis is cast not as a structural condition to be dismantled but as a personal obstacle to be overcome (Apple, 2006).

This bifurcated landscape is one in which the most privileged students are trained for planetary governance while the rest are conditioned for precarity. Elite institutions cultivate entrepreneurial self-sufficiency, teaching students to see crisis as an opportunity for extraction and domination, while underfunded institutions, increasingly abandoned to austerity, prepare students to endure the accelerating collapse with ever-diminishing resources. Systematically underfunded public schools, for example, administer the logic of disposability. Their students are subject to punitive discipline, surveillance, and austerity (Kautz, 2024; Rooks, 2017); emotional distress is either criminalized or medicalized, treated as dysfunction rather than as an indictment of the conditions producing it (Kupferman, 2017). Therapeutic education (Ecclestone and Hayes, 2009) reframes systemic crises (climate anxiety, economic precarity, racial violence) away from the structural conditions demanding collective intervention, towards an individual physical and emotional challenge to be managed. Within this framework, Social-Emotional Learning, mindfulness practices, and trauma-informed pedagogies function less as liberatory tools than as containment strategies, mechanisms for absorbing distress and redirecting it toward self-regulation rather than institutional transformation (Zembylas, 2020). Similarly, in a recent talk titled ‘Becoming Unsettled: Why White Virtue Will Not Save Us’ (2025), Báyò Akómoláfé suggests that ‘virtue is a capitalist product’:

You can get it off the shelves these days. You can buy it in a workshop. You can do the work and get white virtue . . . good white people are still part of the systems that make oppression possible. Because white virtue teaches that virtue is the currency of settlement and virtue can only produce more settlement . . . Virtue never yearns for apostasy. Blackness is apostasy. You see, it cannot be virtuous. It cannot be good, right? . . .You can be morally opposed to oppression in Gaza or apartheid in South Africa and still be entrained within the Logics that make it possible. (n.d., transcribed by Mikulan)

If education is being retooled to prepare students for a world where billionaire-backed governance manages global collapse to their global advantage (see also Ball, 2012), then what does it mean to teach and learn otherwise? Put differently, what forms of teaching and learning remain possible within institutions designed to normalize obedience and virtue? In the last part of the article, we suggest that our response to these questions demands an insistence that if the ruling class is already designing an ‘after’ that renders vast swaths of humanity as garbage, waste, and excess – some far more systematicaly and violently than others – then education must turn away from their visions altogether, orienting instead toward un/commoning solidarity, innervation, and anticolonial strategies that refuse the terms of their governance. To abolish the fantasy that polarization can be dissolved or resolved is to relinquish the idea that either universities or K-12 schools are neutral sites of reconciliation and to recognize them instead as terrains of struggle, where affect is shaped, where futures are determined, where the question is never just what is taught but for whom the world is being prepared.

Articulating Counter-Futurities: A Provocation beyond ‘Pedagogies of Collapse’

Our point of departure for articulating counter-futurities is Spivak’s (2012) notion of ‘affirmative sabotage’, which marks a rupture against the slow recalibration of existing structures toward their unmaking, an epistemic break that refuses the measured pacing of sanctioned critique: ‘Affirmative sabotage is to change the instrument so that it can be used to undermine its felicitous end’ (2012: 52), writes Spivak. If educational institutions, as they presently exist, remain tethered to the production of governable subjects, subjects who know how to feel and argue but not how to act, who are disciplined in their dissents precisely so that they might remain legible within the state’s sorting pedagogical frame, then an education that strategizes against power rather than merely analyzing it would constitute not only an alternative approach but an impossibility within the current order.

To render, then, a pedagogy of affirmative sabotage thinkable would require a shift in curricular objectives and a restructuring of public sentiment itself, a reconfiguration of the affective economies that sustain education’s legitimacy as an institution of pacification rather than antagonism. We therefore agree with Spivak (n.d.) that ‘⦋u⦌nlearning one’s own privilege is a narcissistic undertaking. I would now say, “learning to learn from below”. Forget about the other one. I mean, you can’t unlearn privilege.’ The state’s management of dissent, its absorption of critique into the rhythms of deliberative democracy, would no longer hold if schools and universities became sites of active refusals and resistance in the now, rather than preparation for the future.

But what does refusal mean in the face of ‘reactionary modernism’, where the fantasy of and nostalgia for a lost past is weaponized against the fractures of the present? If the dominant forms of governmentality have reoriented themselves toward an affective politics of nostalgia, a yearning not for the past itself but for the stability it is imagined to have provided (Mikulan, 2026, forthcoming), then the function of educational institutions becomes even clearer, that is, to teach a future into existence, a future that mirrors the past as an idealized order rather than an irretrievable condition. Within the field of education, this is understood as the liberal futurism of progress narratives, but we suggest it is something else entirely, something more insidious. It is a necropolitical demand to reproduce a world that is already collapsing, to sustain the coherence of a nation-state that can no longer maintain itself except through force. It is here that Christian eschatology, with its end-of-days boosterism, intersects with educational affective governance, for if education operates on the deferred promise of a future in which the student will become a subject worthy of recognition, then the Christianized temporality of apocalypse (see also Morton, 2024) offers its own perverse counterfactual, a world in which education no longer matters because history itself is ending. And yet, even here, the logic remains the same: the management of temporality, the disciplining of dis/belief, the insistence that the present must always be endured for the sake of something yet to come.

What, then, would it mean to teach in the end-times, a moment in which the social contract between teachers, parents, and the state, the contract that presumes education as a preparation for a stable and governable future, is beginning to disintegrate under the weight of planetary collapse? The very possibility of schooling beyond the social reproduction of existing structures necessitates a confrontation with this question as a speculative provocation and as an immediate pedagogical demand. A pedagogy of counter-futurities would work against insulating students from collapse; it would not train them merely to survive it either. Rather, it would insist on the necessary sabotage of the ideological machinery that demands their subjugation to a future that no longer exists. Nostalgia here, as Mikulan (2026, forthcoming) suggests, ‘is less about the past or future than it is about the failure of this relation tout court, the impossibility of organizing oneself in time when the promise of continuity has disintegrated. To feel nostalgia in this moment is to experience the recursive tension of non-belonging, the ache for a time that does not abandon one to separation.’ A pedagogy responsive to such sentimentality would necessitate an anticolonial reorganization of the polarized social imaginary itself, a recognition that the unsustainability of schooling’s current aims, in their institutionalized nostalgic attachment to the teleology of the future, its role in stabilizing the present, has always been a historical contingency rather than an inevitability. To teach otherwise, for example, would mean to unmake (abolish?) schooling and higher education as we know them, not in the name of some future reform or revolution but in the urgency of the now, in the insistence that if ‘we’ of the Global North too are joining the always already ending lifeworlds, then educational institutions at all levels, like other institutions, must reckon with what it means to no longer pretend otherwise. Or in the words of Mbembe (2017: 6), ‘[t]his new fungibility, this solubility, institutionalized as a new norm of existence and expanded to the entire planet, is what I call the Becoming Black of the world’.

To move beyond ‘pedagogies of collapse’ (Servant-Miklos, 2024), then, has to do with enacting forms of education that refuse the inevitability of its logics. If contemporary education serves to habituate students into stratified futurity, then an alternative needs to reject education as a site of passive endurance and instead cultivate practices of insurgent world-making. This requires dismantling the affective infrastructures of compliance and generating otherwise modes of collective attachments that sustain resistance beyond the immediate horizon of crisis. What is needed is not so much more resilience but ‘affective rupture’ (Lampredi, 2024a), yes, adaptation, but through insurgency, which would suggest an education that refuses both the nostalgia of ‘reactionary modernism’ and the managed optimism of liberal futurism.

At this juncture, however, a critical danger arises. If the alternative is simply to affirm marginalized affects such as rage, grief, or despair, then education risks reproducing the very agitational logics it opposes. As Lewis (2023) warns, affective agitation on the left can all too easily mirror and even feed into the agitational aesthetics of the right, creating affective bridges through which disoriented youth, particularly white boys, swing toward fascist movements that are far more adept at weaponizing social media. Counter-agitation, in other words, risks collapsing into the polarized dynamics it seeks to dismantle. He argues that what is needed is not only affirmation of stigmatized affects but the cultivation of a qualitatively different affective orientation.

Drawing from Walter Benjamin, Lewis (2023) proposes ‘innervation’ as such an alternative, an affect that resists the lure of polarization and opens bodies to collective experimentation. Whereas agitation thrives on intensification, projection, and paranoia, innervation foregrounds joy, play, and receptivity. It is an enlivening of what bodies can do together without presupposed boundaries. In pedagogical terms, innervation signifies practices that cultivate openness to difference, collaborative becoming, and joyful experimentation, rather than channeling malaise into scapegoating or nihilistic destruction. Importantly, Lewis suggests, innervation also resists exhaustion, for where agitation burns out into paranoia and despair, innervation generates the sustaining energies of collective joy.

A pedagogy of counter-futurities needs, therefore, to forge an alliance between the work of refusal and the orchestration of innervating practices. This demands that education move beyond the valorization of any singular affect, be it rage or hope, to ask what ‘lures for feeling’ (Whitehead, 1929) can sustain solidarities that actively sabotage the agitational pull of polarization. It calls for pedagogical spaces that harbour fugitive forms of receptivity, creativity, and joy, which are the practices constitutively resistant to capture by the affective infrastructures of the right. The most radical work of education is thus not to produce subjects for the world as it is for us, but to forge a capacity to refuse the world’s terms altogether, while enacting affective orientations that corrode the possibility of any future that might be captured and put to use. This also requires an education that ceases to pretend deliberation is action, that critique is transformation, or that resilience is survival.

Hence, if education is to move beyond the paralysis of critique and into the terrain of counter-futurities, it needs to confront its own complicity in the material-affective reproduction of racialized, gendered, and economic hierarchies (see also Zembylas, 2025). A refusal of the future as prescribed by the state must be accompanied by an unmaking of the past as narrated through its institutions. To educate for the future of otherwise, then, is to ask what comes before/during/after collapse, but also to insist on the necessity of the question’s undoing. Against the agitational economies that fuel this machinery, a pedagogy of innervation would insist on the praxis of joy, receptivity, and playful collectivity, amplifying the minor refusals already alive at the fringes of the quotidian. These everyday fissures, where commoning and new attachments are tried out, offer the seeds of an otherwise education that invents affective infrastructures resistant to polarizing logics.

Conclusion: Anti-Pedagogy of the Unthought

This article has argued that the so-called crisis of polarization is in fact a perfected logic of affective eugenics, the systematic cultivation and culling of feeling to secure a futurism of the few against the many. It is the managerial art of sorting life by its emotional yield, its capacity to feel, endure, adapt, and comply within the slow unraveling of the colonial-capitalist project. In such a landscape, the search for pedagogical alternatives cannot simply be a search for or cultivation of ‘different feelings’ and/or ‘better affects’ (Mikulan, 2026a, in press). What must be confronted is the harrowing possibility that no affect is innocent, no emotional practice safe from re-absorption into the eugenic machine. Even practices conceived as resistance risk becoming their own kind of affective capital. Consider the concept of innervation (Lewis, 2023), theorized as a collective, connective process of building new capacities to feel and act, which appears as the antidote to polarized agitation. Yet, we ask, innervation for whom, and to what end? The brutal insight of affective eugenics is that the system’s first intent might not actually be to crush or govern dissent but to harvest it. By which we mean that the nervous system of resistance can be mapped, its energies monitored, its innovations ‘stripped for parts’ and converted into data for crisis management.

Nevertheless, Lewis’s (2023) warning is instructive here. To counter right-wing agitation with left-wing agitation risks reproducing the same economy of intensification and polarization. What mattered at Columbia were the forms of embodied collective experimentation that emerged: the daily rhythms of shared meals, the creation of a commons, the weaving of chants, songs, ‘the movements, the attitudes, the glances’ (Fanon, 1963: 109), and gestures that opened students’ bodies to one another. These were acts of resistance and instances of innervation in Benjamin’s sense: creative and receptive capacities to feel differently, to improvise new circuits of solidarity that were not reducible to agitation and that were structurally useless to the university’s operational logic. At the same time, the rapid criminalization and surveillance of the encampment revealed the constant danger that even these ‘energies’ could be absorbed, repressed, or harvested by the ‘eugenic order’. Namely, the genuine outrage and pain of the protestors were stripped of their context and repackaged as a threat to be sold to donors, politicians, and the reactionary base. The affective ‘energy’ of the protest was thus metabolized to fuel its opposition, creating a polarized feedback loop that serves the broader economy of agitation. In other words, the system is no longer trying to regulate and manage everyone. It is making a bet on which affective world, i.e. which future, it will invest in (in this case, the reactionary base, wealthy donors, and political allies), and it uses the energy of the ‘excess’ world to power the chosen, ‘purified’ one.

The affective plasticity demanded by innervation, that is, the ability to form new neural and social circuits to ‘feel differently’, is also the plasticity prized by the neoliberal subject, forever adapting, forever learning, forever ‘growing’ (see also Mikulan, 2026a, in press). In this light, innervation threatens to become the ultimate affective labour of education in the Anthropocene: the work of endlessly rewiring our own sensoriums to survive a world we are not permitted to change, a kind of internalized resilience that leaves the material infrastructure of dispossession intact. At the same time, innervation is worth fighting for if it radically refuses its own administrability as a form of capacity building. It must be an innervation that is about ‘unsettling’ (Tlostanova, 2023: 5) a ‘nervous system’ for a world that does not yet exist, a nervous system so alien to the present that it can only be seen as dysfunctional.

If affective eugenics demands emotional plasticity, resilience, and the continuous labour of self-optimization, then the counter-praxis is a kind of affective ‘estrangement for the world’ as ‘we’ know it, an ‘as an aesthetic, existential, and political practice of passionate thinking and freedom, which strives neither for utopia nor for artistic autonomy, but for the transformation of this world’ (Boym, 2017: 6). Estrangement for the world affirms the critical energy released when that rupture becomes an impetus for reimagining intimacy in collective life. Yet ‘it is an estrangement both for a “world” that has no horizon, and an estrangement from the temporal frames that have collapsed under the pressures of neoliberal extraction and necropolitical violence’ (Mikulan, 2026, forthcoming). Thus, estrangement necessitates a deliberate undoing of the sentimental contract, a refusal to feel as we are supposed to feel about the endings we are supposed to accept. Columbia students’ strike against performing the affective labour of ‘resilience’, their insistence on grief as a collective ground for solidarity, exemplified such affective desertion – an affective stance that could not be easily co-opted into the university’s managerial language of wellness.

The task, then, is to create the kinds of milieus where students can unfeel the administered emotions of the end-times, and in that void, begin to grope toward the unthought sensations of a future not yet captured by the eugenic imagination. This draws from the fugitive traditions of Black feminist study (here we think of the many works by Hartman, Wynter, Spillers, Ferreira da Silva, Butler, Campt, among many others); ironic pessimism (here we think of works by Cioran, Weil, Pascal); and the practice of being a problem (Du Bois, 2016) through a silent, stubborn, and somatic refusal to perform the emotional labour of the world (Ahmed, 2004). It is the refusal of the colonized to feel the gratitude demanded of them, the refusal of the student to perform the ‘hope’ and ‘resilience’ expected in the face of their own foreclosure. It is an active, collective withdrawal of affective consent.

So, then, a pedagogy of de-innervation? A praxis of purposeful de-settlement of the nerves that the system depends on? This moves beyond making the world strange to making the ‘self’ unknowable – which is an ethics of what Glissant (1997) called ‘the right to opacity’, that is, the right to not be understood, to not have one’s grief or rage translated into a manageable educational case file. The educational task is to create spaces – temporary, fugitive – where students can practise this radical affective de-settlement to become emotionally unintelligible to the sorting mechanism of the eugenic sensorium.