Abstract
This paper puzzles through the doubled impasses of our affective inquiry into learning communities in a college setting. In so doing, we take on the incommensurabilities of our field site and post qualitative inquiry, providing an example of critical qualitative inquiry where theory and practice are made to work together at their limits, both compromising with each other, neither subordinated to the other. Affective inquiry, an instantiation of concept as method inquiry, itself was a search for the impasses of learning community life. When our observations were moved to Zoom as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, we were faced with another impasse: how to attune to affect in this new and thoroughly datafied space? We open by theorizing affective inquiry and our doubled impasse, and we then explore three locations of these impasses in our fieldwork. We close with a reaffirmation of relentless experimentation.
What happens when researchers practice affective inquiry in spaces of relentless datafication when datafication is counter to exploring affect? Videoconferencing technology, our particular relentlessly datafied location, channels the classroom experience: it separates audio from visual, places us all in seemingly interchangeable boxes, eliminates spaces of shared smell, taste, and touch, and routinizes spaces of sight and sound. It both segments and modulates us, and in so doing relentlessly datafies, or dividuates, its settings (Deleuze, 1992; Galič et al., 2017; Iveson & Maalsen, 2019; Massumi, 2018). This paper explores the negotiations of an affective inquiry (Lenz Taguchi & St Pierre, 2017), in learning community classrooms newly mediated by video conferencing technology during the COVID-19 pandemic.
At our university field site, almost all Fall 2020 learning communities were canceled due to complications from the novel coronavirus. The remaining five communities moved to a virtual synchronous format via Zoom that, along with our university’s prohibition of in-person research, channeled the flow of affect for us as researchers. By affect, we mean our capacities to move and be moved in relation to our interactions and shared experiences with the students, faculty, and staff involved with learning communities at our study site (Spinoza, 1677/1992). Early in the semester, our field notes bemoaned the fact that our observations faced a wall of turned off cameras, suspended chat features, and muted students. We found ourselves at an impasse, “a space of time lived without a narrative genre... [in which a]daptation to it usually involves a gesture of undramatic action that points to and revises an unresolved situation” (Berlant, 2011, p. 199). We were at an impasse in our attempts to collectively “engage in a process of actualization” (Deleuze, 2005, p. 31) with our participant-collaborators in and out of virtual, synchronous classrooms. Our options were to observe the technologically and pandemic-mediated realities to which we had access, or not to conduct field research at all. To conduct research, we would need to find a way to live within the incommensurability of affect and dividuation (Massumi, 2018). This was a methodological impasse marked by COVID-19 through and through (Tosca, 2021).
In what follows, we explore the impasse created by using data collection practices otherwise incommensurate with an affective inquiry (Lenz Taguchi & St. Pierre, 2017; St. Pierre, 2018). We believe the posts must rise to the challenge of the empirical world. Rather than subordinating a stubborn world to an endless regress to theory that might question our ability to move forward (Aagaard, 2021), we moved forward a bit anarchically (Denzin et al., 2017) from within this incommensurability. Our field is education; we have a specific material-discursive world to explore and change through intervention with theory and practice (Flint & Toledo, 2022; Wolgemuth et al., 2022). We next discuss the negotiations of researchers-participants in field sites newly mediated by videoconferencing technology in the COVID-19 pandemic. We end by arguing against the need to make the negotiations of methodological impasses linear. Correct or coherent, concept as method is nothing more and nothing less than a relentless experimentation with philosophy in the world, from our location (Braidotti, 2013).
Theoretical Constructs for Our Affective Inquiry
This project is an affective inquiry of the impact of learning communities on college students in excess of our understanding of impact through dividuation. Affective inquiry is an instantiation of concept as method research.
Concept as Method
The mode of inquiry for this project is concept as method (St Pierre & Lenz Taguchi, 2017). Lenz Taguchi and St Pierre (2017) offer concept as method, in thinking with Claire Colebrook, as an approach to inquiry that begins “with a concept instead of a preexisting methodology” (p. 646). Instead of using predetermined research procedures, concept as method researchers are guided by a concept that “orient[s] her thinking and her practices, which might or might not include conventional practices” (p. 646). Concept as used here does not simply represent a part of the world we take as common sense, but rather is capable of upending that common sense and producing worlds in which our current common sense becomes strange (Lenz Taguchi & St Pierre, 2017). If there is a purpose or a consistency to concept as method inquiry, it is to launch inquiry from a concept into open-ended experimentation.
Affect: Imperceptible Impacts
The concept used as method here is affect. We take affect as the reality of our worlds that escape datafication. We think with affect as a social, pre (or supra, Robinson & Kutner, 2019) individual force. Affects, as distinct but not entirely separate from individualized emotions, are “not so much forms of signification, or units of knowledge, as they are expressions of ideas or problems performed as a kind of involuntary and powerful learning and participation” (Stewart, 2007, p. 40). An affect is “a capacity for activation” (Clough, 2009, p. 48) or “relations of motion and rest” (Massumi, 2002, p. 20) that produce our individuation as such. Affect’s indeterminacy and dynamism do not lend well to traditional social science research methodologies (Clough, 2009; Massumi, 2002). For (Clough, 2009), Any method of attending to affect cannot simply be a matter of containment; it also cannot simply be a matter of interpretation, meaning, signification or representation. Method cannot help but produce affective resonance, attunement, that is, the intensifying or the dampening of affect. (p. 49)
Put another way, affect is not quantifiable and our goal is neither to quantify nor interpret its meaning. Social science research is defined to its detriment by analytical attachments to categorical thinking, recognition, quantification, dividuation, and interpretation (Berlant, 2011; Freeman, 2017; St Pierre, 2016). To take affect seriously in concept as method research is to disinvest in these analytical attachments and instead use traditional (e.g., observations) and nontraditional (e.g., attunements to affects on the threshold of perceptibility) tools of research to map the diagram that affect creates (Freeman, 2017).
This disinvestment is key to our interest in utilizing affect as method. Operationalizing affect in our empirical study provided a spark to experiment with inquiry capable of exploring our social world, the work of learning communities in excess of their datafication (Iveson & Maalsen, 2019; Koopman, 2019; Lupton & Watson, 2021; Sellar & Thompson, 2016; van Dijck, 2014). In this process, we were in search of a means by which we could study the impact of a program whose existence is in part justified through its (datafied) impact (Kuh, 2008). Affect opens empiricism beyond that which is actualized and actualizable into data; it theorizes “the subtlest of shuttling intensities: all the minuscule or molecular events of the unnoticed. The ordinary and its extra-” (Siegworth & Gregg, 2010, p. 2). Affect exists in moments that seem noteworthy and, just as importantly, in moments so dull you find nothing to remark upon. Affect as method is experimentation oriented to experience in excess of data. In our initial foray into affective inquiry, we centered participant observation as our primary means of engagement with our empirical site.
Methodological Considerations: Observation, Affect, Ethics, Impasse
Data collection of all forms is always already mediated—nothing stands outside of this—and videoconferencing only data collection gives a specific format to this mediation. To conduct data collection live, to co-experience the researched world with your participants, is to be immersed in indeterminacies. In other words, it is to research within an impasse. Berlant (2011) defines the impasse as “a stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic” (p. 4). They go on to explain that in an impasse the activity of living demands both a wandering absorptive awareness and a hypervigilance that collects material that might help to clarify things, maintain one’s sea legs, and coordinate the standard melodramatic crises with those processes that have not yet found their genre of event (p. 4).
We are located within a control society that seeks to datafy concepts like student engagement and high-impact practices (Deleuze, 1992). Impasses, stretches of time and collections of affects that have yet to coalesce into a named concept like engagement or a measurable outcome like student success, are everything in this location. They are the collections of affects prior to a classroom practice becoming high-impact, or a student remark becoming engagement. Our research sought out such affective spacetimes. We wanted a form of data collection that would soak us in them, and in the 2019–2020 academic year, we engaged in in-person classroom observation to do just this.
Participant observation can break open methods of enclosure, rigidities, demarcations, regulations, and other datafications of social worlds. Participant observation as practiced within an affective inquiry allows researchers to enter into the mixture of daily participant life, to share spaces, and give space for the unexpected; it is “contingent on the circumstances, and advance[s] toward no end” (Ingold, 2014, p. 390). This is not an unregulated form of data collection—there is no outside of power, no objective stance from which we research (Deleuze, 1986/1988; Foucault, 1978/1990). It is differently regulated than other forms of data collection, and in some important ways, less regulated; participant observation “indexes one of the most impressive ways yet invented to make ourselves uncomfortable” (Van Maanen, 2011, p. 151). Spontaneity and chance in our relations with participants, research sites, and research communities are differently possible in participant observation.
We also observed classrooms live out of our ethical desire to walk with our participants and our sites (Ingold, 2015). This honors the theoretical commitments of affective inquiry, as informed by Barad’s ethico-onto-epistemology. For (Barad, 2007), Practices of knowing and being are not isolable; they are mutually implicated. We don’t obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are of the world. We are part of the world in its differential becoming ... what we need is something like an ethico-onto-epistem-ology--an appreciation of the intertwining of ethics, knowing, and being--since each intra-action matters, since the possibilities for what the world may become call out in the pause that precedes each breath before a moment comes into being and the world is remade again, because the becoming of the world is a deeply ethical matter. (p. 185, emphasis in original)
We questioned the ethics of coming to know-with our participants in (overly) regimented or scripted environments such as the enclosure of the interview room or the format of the interview protocol or survey. Taking (Barad, 2007) words seriously that “we know because we are of the world” (p. 185), we were of the world in this project with our bodies, sharing space and time in classrooms. This choice is deeply ethical and never perfect. In observations, we still reside in our singular social locations and attend to practices and affects affected by our habits. This paradox of participant observation in an affective inquiry, that we are present at our field site to observe the becomings of our participants that we will never be able to re/present, does not alter our commitment. In fact, it simply highlights an unhelpful evaluative frame for our work. The value of participant observation is in its process, not its outcomes.
The ethics of data collection in affective inquiry is not an ethics of effects or outcomes, for example, was this observed action fair, is the outcome equitable, or did a learning community impact student engagement, retention, and/or graduation. The ethics of affective inquiry is an ethics of process, of moving through the world within impasses where outcomes are unclear or indeterminate (cf. Mazzei & Jackson, 2012). An affective ethics of data collection is an ethics of a commitment to the everyday of educational environments. It is an ethics of sharing spacetimes with participants. It is an ethics of living-with. It is an ethics of becoming—an ethics of the impossible presence of the present, or of the impasse. This is, in the words of Siegworth and Gregg (2010), “an ethico-aesthetics of a body’s capacity for becoming sensitive to the ‘manner’ of a world” (p. 14). Interviews have impasses; archives have various visibilities (Berlant, 2011; Deleuze, 1986/1988). To privilege observation is not to necessarily exclude other forms of data collection from being appropriately affective (cf. Feely, 2020). It is to value a different mode of presence in the lives of our research site. The value of data collection practices are contingent upon their particular locations and in/determinacies. In our time and space, and given the field site we came to work within, we believed that real-time observation was the most ethical form of data collection for the study of student engagement in a university high-impact practice. This is not so much a preference for observation as it is a preference for spaces of indeterminacy. It is our preference to locate ourselves into impasses where outcomes are yet to be determined. Why did we engage in practices of real-time observation? To live our research within the impasses of our field site.
Pandemic Mediation
In March 2020, in an effort to counteract the spread of COVID-19, much of US higher education instruction moved online, and many institutions continued online education in Fall 2020. With this transition to learning mediated to videoconferencing (in our case, Zoom), our field site prohibited in-person data collection and our learning community classrooms were either canceled or moved online. Online teaching and learning have their own unique challenges and opportunities (Guyotte & Flint, 2020), but what of online affective inquiry? Does observation via Zoom allow access to the conditions that make humanities, individuations, and datafications of our participants possible (Stewart et al., 2020, p. 5)? Our impasse had now doubled: in search of the impasses of impact, we now encountered a methodological impasse as well. What does Zoom-mediated classroom observation produce within an affective inquiry?
Our Local Context: Observations of Classroom Practice in COVID-19
The second year of our affective inquiry, the 2020–2021 academic year, was mediated by the pandemic. This year is the focus of this piece. Our inquiry in this year began in Summer 2020 with two 90-minute faculty training sessions that were attended by 45 learning community faculty and administrators. We continued through the Fall 2020 semester with classroom observation of four learning communities. For these communities, we observed one three-credit lecture course and four one-credit orientation to the major and university courses. We also observed out-of-class activities and events offered by the learning communities program. In total, the observed communities enrolled approximately 90 students and were taught by three faculty members. Our classroom observations totaled close to 100 class hours across 15 weeks. Observations were supplemented by biweekly interviews with the three faculty members and a learning community administrator and one-time interviews with three of the communities’ peer mentors. All data collection was conducted via Zoom.
Our field notes varied distinctly between year 1 and year 2 of the study. In year 1, we attuned to all manner of bodies and their relations, such as the alignment and proximity of desks in the classroom, gestures between students, note taking, and laptop displays. We also had the opportunity to note sounds, from whispers between classmates, to knocks on the locked classroom door, to the general buzz that seemed to permeate the space (Smithers et al., 2021)(). Our field notes in year 1 were also richly detailed regarding our participants during out-of-class activities, such as a tour of a cadaver lab on campus. We were able to note that students tucked their cellphones away and leaned into and away from the dissected body.
In year 2, we were left with datafied representations of our participants—the outside of affect. Often the only sound we were able to capture in field notes was the voice of the faculty member, as all but the faculty’s microphones were muted for much of the class period. Less frequently, we were only able to note the absence of sound. Our views were limited as well. Even when the faculty did not share their screen, we were unable to attune to all of the students simultaneously, necessitating a scrolling through video tiles, and therefore missing those we sought to live and become with. When screen share was active, we could only observe three or four students at one time, if they were observable at all. Although students’ cameras were typically turned on, some of their rooms were so dark we could not determine facial expressions. Other students had their cameras pointed toward the ceiling. For those students whose videos displayed their faces in well-lit rooms, we were still limited in discerning their physical orientations. When they looked down, we could not tell whether they were looking at class notes or their cell phones. When they appeared to type on their laptops, we were unable to assess whether they were taking notes or writing an email.
Zoom as Impasse
We sought out the impasse of indeterminate classroom affects as method and curiosity, and with COVID-19, our impasse doubled. The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically changed classroom life at our field site, as most synchronous course offerings were now completed through Zoom. This change required that we consider various options to continue our affective inquiry of student engagement. Ultimately, we made the decision to continue observations despite the limits of a virtual, synchronous, datafied setting based on our ethical commitment to live-with our participants, and thus our commitments to live-within the incommensurabilities presented (e.g., Bozalek et al., 2021).
By continuing observations, we could ourselves experience, from our various social locations, the shift to Zoom-mediated synchronous learning. We attended real-time Zoom sessions for scheduled course sections, becoming integrated into the learning environment with the students hoping to continue the experience of the prior academic year in in-person classroom settings. By attending class in real-time, we could observe aspects of class that were not available on recorded Zoom sessions. For example, in real-time we could know which students were present during the class period by seeing their names in the participant list, or their faces on individual tiles, albeit not all at the same time and only if cameras were turned on. We were able to select our view by scrolling through or arranging the participants’ video frames. Recorded sessions only allowed the viewer to see active speakers during the videoconference. To rely on class recordings instead of real-time attendance would prevent us not only from experiencing the various affective states of living through Zoom classes, but also prevent us from observing students who chose not to unmute and speak during class.
Attendance during real-time Zoom sessions also provided opportunities for us to observe breakout rooms and observe small group student-to-student interactions not directly facilitated by the instructor. Breakout rooms were an opportunity for students to work collaboratively in ways that are similar to in-person class sessions. Real-time observations also allowed us to track interactions which occurred in the chat feature during class time. Although not used consistently during all observed class sessions, student-to-student and student-to-instructor interactions were facilitated in the chat feature when students were experiencing technical difficulties with microphones or simply did not want to unmute and speak. Our results, as imperfectly representational as they must be, are oriented to locations of this doubled impasse of affect and Zoom. Below we explore three of these.
Impasse 1: Observing Engagement
If humanist research renders materiality inaccessible behind the language systems that stand in as abstracted representations (MacLure, 2013), we faced mundane, material, and doubled technological in/accessibilities in our Zoom-mediated affective inquiry. The first mediation was by the participants’ own cameras on their personal devices used to log in to class, such as their smartphone, tablet, or laptop. The students and faculty in our study pointed their cameras at the view they wanted represented to the class: their bed, their ceiling, themselves sitting at a desk or on a couch. Lights may have been turned on or left off. Pets may have been visible, or not. Cameras may have been turned off entirely. The second mediation was by the display of our own personal devices as observers. We may have observed class on a small laptop screen or on dual monitors. This impacted how many participants we could attend to at once, and what level of detail we could discern without zooming in on the display. At times, we encountered technical difficulties that prevented us from accessing the class altogether. Excerpts from our fieldnotes illuminate our quest to negotiate the observation of Zoom-mediated college courses.
8:00 we are let into the zoom room. The room is silent. 74 participants plus the professor’s cat
8:02 class starts, 78 participants, room locked
Prof begins by calling out students’ names he can’t see due to darkness/camera not showing them. He calls on one particular student 3 times. When she doesn’t respond he removes her from the zoom room.
This excerpt hints at certain conditions that come to determine the materiality of students in the Zoom classroom. Observations of in-person classrooms can take place in informal spacetimes, allowing for a palpable affect that flows around spaces. In the virtual observation, the opening of the Zoom room was typically followed by several minutes of complete silence while all participants had their microphones muted. Their groans, moans, yawns, and mumblings were silenced by technology. The affect permeating the room was truncated. The technologically mediated classroom buzz was disaggregated in the spacetimes surrounding our participants, stifling their actions and interactions.
As participant-observers, we encountered several impasses in our efforts to be present with our participants. We could not observe late arrivals, because the professor did not allow them to exist in the virtual space. We could not observe students who were unresponsive, because they, too, eventually no longer existed in class. We could not observe the audible goings-on in the participants’ worlds, because every microphone was turned off. Amidst these constraints, we continued to observe.
I can see three tiles of consenting students. Student #1 is propped up in bed against a metal rod headboard. Her laptop is on her lap. She’s awake and looking at the computer screen. She reaches over to her nightstand and grabs a coffee mug. Takes a sip. Sits back on her bed and looks back at the screen. The second student’s camera is pointed at a window. The room is dark otherwise. I cannot see a person. Presumably student #2 is in the bed below the window. Nothing else to say about that I guess. Student #3 is in the third screen. She’s sitting in a kitchen at a table. The room is well-lit. She appears to be writing notes on a notepad next to her laptop. Occasionally she looks at the screen, then back over to her notebook, writing things down. Presumably the definitions the professor is going over. I scroll to the right. Student #4 is completely horizontal in bed. Her face is obscured by her name on the tile. There is a white Christmas tree in the corner. I would say she’s checked out. She’s moving occasionally but is she in this class? I scroll once to the right. Student #5 appears to be sitting up on her bed in the corner of her room. She seems to be taking handwritten notes (though I can’t see anything from her chest down). She looks up at the screen, takes out her scrunchy and re-puts up her hair into a ponytail.
In our field notes, we render indeterminate moments as determinant. We noted their physical locations, such as the rooms and furniture they inhabited. Did they join class from a bed or a desk? We noted their movements, such as note taking or typing. For those participants who were asleep, we noted their non-movement. And for some participants, we noted that they were simply not visible to our eyes.
As we observed what was visible to us, the professor’s lecture droned on, the topic now forgotten. The chat feature remained empty. The professor’s presentation screen was shared, perhaps followed by students, perhaps ignored. We attempted to gauge engagement by participants’ movements, gestures, and leanings-in, despite our inability to hear them or to see them interact with each other. Our view consisted of three, perhaps four, individual participants’ tiles. Much of the class was invisible to us, both by their choice, and by our decisions to land and linger on a certain set of tiles. These choices, deliberate or accidental, contributed to the production of engagement of our participants, leaving us in a methodological impasse.
[professor continues to lecture] - as he goes silent, a TV blaring can be heard through someone’s mic. The professor calls out to students 'you all should be muted. and you shouldn’t have the tv blasting.'
Much of the lecture class we observed was, indeed, lecture. Each class consisted of perhaps 60–65 minutes of the professor’s voice, and everyone else duly muted per his instruction. This field note excerpt describes a rare moment of silence contrasted with a blasting TV sound when one student’s microphone is turned on and everyone in the zoom room could hear the person’s television. We searched for the culprit in the participant list but were unable to determine whose microphone was turned on. The professor’s comment, or perhaps Zoom-mediated learning generally, contributed to an environment where docile bodies existed in quiet, digitally modulated spaces, their voices muted unless directly spoken to, and often muted even then (Deleuze, 1992; Foucault, 1977/1995).
As the semester progressed we attempted to zoom in on Zoom, enlarging our view of individual participants:
I pin student #6 to see her more closely. I can see her from the nose up. She has a collage of photos saying 'class of 2020' on the wall beside her head. She’s reading something on the screen (her eyes are moving left to right, then back). Her laptop is balanced on her knees. Student #7 is sitting at a desk or table. (is this the new measure for engagement?) She yawns openly, then takes a swig from a metal travel mug. She takes handwritten notes into a notebook on her table. Student #8 is horizontal in bed.
Midway through the term, we discovered the pin feature in the Zoom platform. When pinned, a participant’s video tile appeared larger and we could more clearly attune to visual detail. Despite the ability to enlarge our view, much of the participants’ lives remained invisible, restricting our efforts to live and become with them. Student #6 was likely reading something on her screen, but we were not privy to what. Instead, we were compelled to make assumptions, constrained by the myopic glimpse of technologically mediated fragments of our participants’ realities. In the case of student #6, she may have been reading the presentation slide, she may have been reading a personal email, or she may have not been reading at all. Student #7 sat at a desk or table, while student #8 was horizontal in their bed. We presumed #6 and #7 were differently engaged than #8, but our Zoom-mediated access to observing the conditions that impact the representation of students confounded our methodological impasse (Berlant, 2011).
As the semester, and with it our affective inquiry, closed, observing engagement became no less challenging and for some of us more and more frustrating. I scroll through the class and count 16 tiles of students who are either horizontal in bed, off screen, obscured by their names, or in a too-dark room for me to observe them. 16/74 students in the class. Are they part of this learning community? Do they want to be?
At the beginning of the term, the lecture class enrolled more than 90 students. By December 1, one quarter of these students did not make it into the Zoom room before it was locked by the professor. Of those students who attended, another quarter were unobservable. Some were covered by comforters, some not in view of their cameras. Others’ faces were obscured by their names on their Zoom tiles and yet others were sitting in rooms so dark we could not attune to them. The actions of our participants not to join the class, to remain invisible, to step out of view, or to cover up are nonverbal reflections of individual and collective affect.
Impasse 2: The Chat
The chat feature in Zoom was a way to foster classroom interactions. The logistics of real-time synchronous class sessions mediated by technologies were able to delay or interrupt interpersonal communication between the instructor and the students or between students. Lags in connectivity, technological malfunctions like broken or accidentally muted microphones, or personal choice meant that participants could not or did not respond verbally.
11:00am- Instructor admits students into the Zoom session from the waiting room. Instructor says, 'Hi everyone, how’s everyone doing?' No response. Instructor continues, 'That well, huh? Well, let’s do our fun question, maybe then someone will talk to me ... What’s your favorite TV show?' Students type their answers in the chat feature. Instructor asks, 'Does anyone want to be brave and unmute?' … One student unmutes and says 'I like Criminal Minds and Bates Motel.'
This excerpt refers to use of the chat feature in one of the 1-credit classes. Although there were 17 participants present in class on this day, only one of them unmuted to verbally respond to the ice-breaker question. All other responses were typed in the chat feature. In this Zoom-mediated session, the answers were succinct, limited to show titles and no further discussion of the answers given, resulting in the instructor moving on. Time appeared to stand still as the room was silent, while muted participants typed their answers in the chat, choosing to speak in written form. Our participants’ affects existed within a world infinitely mediated by technological devices and videoconferencing. Our ethical desire to live-with the participants allowed us to attend to the timing of this moment as it occurred, rather than reviewing a recording and transcript of the class.
In some of the virtual classrooms we observed, the chat feature was used as the main form of communication. Participants were able to ask questions or respond without unmuting.
11:12am-Visitor asks students why they will be required to volunteer for their major, asks students to type answers in chatbox, 'I get pretty overwhelmed in Zoom trying to figure out who is talking and it's hard to follow when everyone talks at once.' Typed answers included 'experiences what would benefit you in your career of interest, help us with the service part of our professions, social skills, to experience the career before having to do it forever, it makes us more well rounded and can show us different perspectives.'
With responses to the presenter’s questions recorded and visible in the chat feature, the participants were not required to unmute to share verbally. In that moment, the audible silence did not necessarily indicate potential disengagement with the materials shared. However, these ordinary interactions exerted a palpable pressure that was felt by us as observers and by the instructor for the class who later shared with us the pleasure she experienced from interacting with students (Stewart, 2007).
Providing a space for students to interact with the presenter or instructor through the chat feature created opportunities for interaction that did not require audible responses. In the lecture class, there were days that the chat feature had been disabled, but in this field note excerpt, the professor had enabled the feature. Despite having the opportunity to interact via text communication, the chat feature remained empty.
Chat is enabled. [...]
8:44 nothing in the chat at all
9:04 I’ve landed on three tiles with consenting students. Student on the left is propped up in the corner of her bed, two white cinder block walls. Room is lit, she is looking off screen, huddled in a comforter. Professor introduces the video referenced as the Harlow experiment in the text and plays the clip. As the clip ends, I am back at my three student tiles. One girl appears to have fallen asleep. I’m shocked there’s no reaction in the chat. Maybe students haven’t realized it’s back enabled.
During our observations, there were many days when no participants used the chat feature. When participants had their cameras turned off, their microphones muted, and left the chat feature empty, they were truly hidden from our view. Were they listening? Were they attuned to the content? Were they asleep? Were they there? This silence was an affect of its own (Mazzei, 2011). The apparent absence of affect was an affect nonetheless: participants spoke through their in/actions and remaining invisible.
We learned that participants used the chat feature to privately communicate with others in the class. We were unable to engage in observing this practice, but the instructors and peer mentors often discussed it during conversations which occurred after the class sessions. By utilizing the chat feature, which created a space for direct communication between the instructor and student, none of the other participants, nor we as participant-observers, were able to observe these exchanges.
After all students have logged off: brief discussion about the impact of the changes this semester with synchronous Zoom class sessions. Instructor mentions that there are some changes but many things are still the same- 'I have just as many students fall asleep in my actual classes as I do in Zoom classes, the only difference is that in actual classes, I can go around and bang on desks. In Zoom, I just chat people, privately chat people. If you could see my chat right now, all the messages I send to students during class saying, ‘hey, if you can see this chat, you need to pay attention.’'
Faculty did not share the number and recipients of these private exchanges. As observers, we only knew the instructor could moderate who was present and the information that was shared, and that all participants could moderate the chat dialogue that others could observe. The Zoom mediation of class time modulated all users (Deleuze, 1992).
Impasse 3: Attention, Attunement
Our Zoom observations provided a myopic glimpse into the systems that produce students in learning communities. It was myopic, because individual data was captured by individual lenses and displayed on individual computer screens. Our observation data was collected on laptops and laptop displays are finite. In the lecture course, at best, we were able to see the professor’s shared screen and three or four small tiles of students. In virtual observation, researchers may only be able to observe a subsection of participants at a time, those they have stopped on during their scrolling. The details we attuned to, zoomed in on, and chose to note in our field notes, evolved over the course of the semester. At the beginning of virtual observations, we primarily attended to participants that moved, spoke, wrote in the chat, or otherwise rose to the surface.
In this field note, we sift through individual representations of participants to associate a name with a speaker.
8:32 Professor resumes screen share. One of the students I can see is lying in bed, eyes closed. The normalization of being horizontal in a bed huddled in a blanket with the eyes closed baffles me. Are you learning? Are you even awake? It’s doubtful. Oh, he moved! That startled me. The woman in the tile next to him is looking down, presumably at her phone. The man in the tile next to her scratches his ear, then yawns, covering it with his wrist. He’s sitting up in a living space (it’s not a dorm room, it looks like he’s in a home.) [The professor shares an experience from his childhood.] One student unmutes himself and shares a story of walking behind his dad mowing the lawn with a toy lawn mower. [it’s the student I thought was sleeping. okay I stand corrected. he is present].
During this particular class, 87 of 90 students were invisible to us. We had stopped attending to the student in bed. We had moved on, leaving him, we assumed, asleep. We assumed he was not engaged, and focused our efforts on participants who were. We returned to him because the startling action of a presumably non-participating participant prompted us to make note of his behavior. Our first instinct was to record what moved.
Those who did not move were also part of the systems that produced engaged students in our study. Unable to capture the buzz that snaked through our pre-pandemic rooms due to muted microphones, disabled chat features, and away-facing cameras, we resorted to rote scrolling. We committed to note all of the users in front of us, regardless of their doing noteworthy acts or uttering noteworthy sentences. In doing so we attuned to, or made noteworthy, affect at rest, as described in this field note:
My three tiles have three new students. The first, in bed, all I can see is her comforter. In the middle, [another student] is sitting in a well lit room, doesn’t look like a dorm room. Student X in the tile on the right is sitting up, but she seems kinda spaced out. She has a pillow behind her. She gets up, fixes her hair and stretches her neck. She props her head in her hand, yawns, and looks around the room.
[…]
Student Y is sitting up in front of a window. Rests her head on her hand, yawns, rubs her eyes, rests her head on her hand again. She seems to be watching the computer screen. She seems unaffected. The person next to her in the middle tile has her face obscured by her name on the screen. Her eyes are open. In the third tile, a student is in a dark room. She has a hood pulled up on her head. All I can see is her forehead and up. She may be taking notes, but who can tell for sure?
[…]
Student Z sits leaning against a white wall. Her face is covered by the name on her tile. The same is true for the girl next to her. She sits next to a window, blinds down. In the tile next to her is a male student who is lying in bed as usual.
Futures of Affective Inquiry and Zoom Mediation
Affective inquiry as an experimentation with concept as method research provides a means to explore student engagement in excess of its datafication (Iveson & Maalsen, 2019; Koopman, 2019; Sellar & Thompson, 2016; van Dijck, 2014). Two thoughts remain with us at the close of this doubled impasse of affective inquiry. First, we are struck by the differences of this affective inquiry compared to what might have been otherwise had we not been in the second year of a long-term study and could be lulled into a false binary of normal affective inquiry and other. We conclude with a meditation on ethical research practices given affect’s theorization of our mutual entanglement and an embrace of the uncertainties of concept as method inquiry.
In our second year of research on learning communities, the COVID-19 pandemic year, we began with assumptions that our practices of affective inquiry would remain similar to the year prior. Our first weeks of observation notes describe cameras pointed at ceilings, if on at all, and microphones muted as instructed or by choice reflect our frustrations of the Zoom-mediated spaces in which we lived-with our participants. It was in continued experimentation that we came to practices of examining what we could see and hear, the darkened screens and silences, and our own thoughts and assumptions as the affects produced in our location. We set aside our previous assumptions of how to conduct our inquiry and began again to live-with the incommensurate (St Pierre, 2016).
Affective inquiry is inextricably shaped by the coming together of bodies, locations, and histories. The ethics that led us to in-person participant observation in our first year held in Zoomland in the second. Our mutual entanglement and search for the forces that co-produce us demand a living-with, no matter how hard of a line that Zoom tiles hold between us (Barad, 2007; Ingold, 2015; Siegworth & Gregg, 2010). Thus, our inquiry using the concept of affect as method ends as open-ended as it began. Concept as method research demands that researchers launch their inquiry from a concept such as affect into open-ended experimentation without a particular destination in mind. Even in intensely datafied research settings, such a practice resists our datafication as researchers and the datafication of our field sites and communities.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
We are grateful for all of our collective efforts. Other research team members are LaShay McQueen, Dr. Jennifer Grimm, Lanah Stafford, and Hannah Hou.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Author’s Note
This paper is the product of work within a collaborative research team.
