“The Chinatown Foray” as Sensational Pedagogy

Abstract

Thinking through affective theories by Alfred North Whitehead, Giles Deleuze, and Brian Massumi, this paper proposes an understanding of pedagogy that is sensational. To consider affective theories and their implications for educational research, I engage with a relational artwork, “The Chinatown Foray,” by Toronto‐based artist Diane Borsato. In “The Chinatown Foray,” the artist and the audience, which consisted of amateur mycologists, foodies, and a few art students, foraged through Chinatown in Manhattan, New York, to collect various mushroom species in the shops and markets, followed by a group lunch of dim sum at a local restaurant. In the paper I describe relational art and situate Borsato’s practice within this paradigm. From there I contextualize the use of walking as a form of research‐creation and attend to the politics of smell in the construction of alterity. The paper concludes by way of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1986) theories of the “minor,” which recognizes that bodily encounters—the act of one body interacting with another body—are affective. I argue that close, critical, and deeply contextual analyses of relational art practices as sensational pedagogy advances, develops, and enhances understandings, theories, and practices of body knowledge. Moving beyond a simple binary of mind and body, a sensational pedagogy endeavors to free the base senses, like smell, from their limiting associations.