Affective Solidarity Research Articles

Towards a Theory of Collective Care as Pedagogy in Higher Education

This piece offers a conceptual framework for collective care as pedagogy in higher education, and a proposition of how to theorize its orientations within anticolonial and feminist work on affect in education. First, I spotlight work that helps to define collective care. Next, I call on the concept of affective individualism as a way to describe what is: the taken-for-granted affective governmentality (Zembylas, 2021) that shapes how we often come together in our classrooms. Finally, I ground collective care as pedagogy as the building of affective solidarity, an affective conceptual framework for what could be, grounded in the feminist work of Clare Hemmings (2012).

Intergenerational Solidarity During Emerging Adulthood: Associations with Psychological Distress and Satisfaction with Life in Southern Europe.

Intergenerational solidarity between parents and emerging adult offspring requires more substantial attention at the present time. Changing demographic structures and transformations in family dynamics over recent decades have increased both opportunities and the need for parent-child interactions and exchanges of support and affection during emerging adulthood. The study had two aims: first, to explore patterns in intergenerational solidarity in accordance with different sociodemographic characteristics of emerging adults; and second, to analyse associations between intergenerational solidarity and emerging adults' psychological distress and satisfaction with life. Participants were 644 emerging adult university students from Southern Europe (Spain and Portugal), aged between 18 and 29 years, who completed a self-report questionnaire designed to assess variables linked to sociodemographic aspects (gender, country of residence, sexual orientation, living status, family income), intergenerational solidarity, psychological distress and satisfaction with life. The results indicated some differences in intergenerational solidarity patterns in accordance with a range of sociodemographic characteristics. They also revealed significant associations between intergenerational solidarity dimensions and emerging adults' satisfaction with life and psychological distress. Moreover, affective solidarity was found to fully mediate the relationship between associational, functional and normative solidarity and emerging adults' adjustment. In the case of conflictual solidarity, affective solidarity was found to partially mediate the relationship between this dimension of intergenerational solidarity and emerging adults' distress and to fully mediate the relationship between this same dimension and emerging adults' satisfaction with life. The results indicate that it is important to take sociodemographic diversity into account when exploring relationships between emerging adults and their parents. They also suggest that affective solidarity acts as a protective factor in promoting emerging adults' adjustment.

An Autoethnography on Intergenerational Relationships and Transnational Care for Older Parents

I employ autoethnography to undertake a broader scholarly inquiry on intergenerational relationships and transnational care shaped by global migration and aging. Specifically, I reflect on the dynamics of my relationship with my mother, beginning with my departure from my home and spanning a period of 40 years, 8 in China and 34 outside China. In doing so, I contemplate theoretical models of intergenerational solidarity, ambivalence, and role ambiguity. I also challenge cultural assumptions of filial piety. The geographical distance, passage of time, and acculturation process have profoundly influenced my perception of filial piety, which differs markedly from my mother’s. However, this divergence in consensual solidarity—marked by variations in attitudes, beliefs, and values—does not translate into weakened affectual solidarity, characterized by positive sentiments and emotions. Furthermore, aided by advancements in transportation and social media technology, I have been able to extend crucial emotional and some “instrumental” care to my mother, along with financial support if needed, despite limited hands-on care. Nevertheless, I must negotiate my care for my mother and navigate a delicate balance in coordinating my care efforts with those of my non-migrant siblings.

Critical literacies, imagination and the affective turn: Postgraduate students’ redesigns of race and gender in South African higher education

In this paper, we build on critical literacy scholarship and the affective turn, focusing particularly on the redesign process. A close and critical textual analysis of student responses to two assignments in the postgraduate education module Language and Literacy, Theories and Practices, enables us to trace the critical-creative-affective moves that students made when required to analyse and redesign university student recruitment advertisements. Students’ analyses and redesigns illustrate 1) how identification/disidentification with issues of power across gender, race, and (de)coloniality enable them to enter ‘relations of affective solidarity’ as a complex form of empathy, 2) the nuanced negotiations of affect in doing critical literacies across reading and redesign and 3) the ways in which affect surfaces differently for each student across contrasting genres and ‘revealed spaces’ (Boler, 1999).

Social relationships and subjective wellbeing of the older adults in India: the moderating role of gender

ObjectiveSocial relationships have been extensively researched as having compelling health benefits. Nevertheless, these issues are understudied in low-income countries like India. This study investigates whether intergenerational solidarity or the social relationship developed in the household context and social participation or the social relationships developed in the community context are the critical determinants of subjective wellbeing (SWB) of older adults in India. In addition, this study also investigates whether gender moderates the association between social relationships and subjective wellbeing (SWB).MethodsThis study utilises a latent variable approach to investigate the association between social relationships and SWB among older adults (aged 60 or older, N = 9,852) based on a cross-sectional analysis of data from Building a Knowledge Base on Population Ageing in India (BKPAI) (2011). I tested the moderating effect of gender by employing a multigroup analysis in structural equation modelling that incorporated social relationships and other predictors of SWB.ResultsThe study suggests that social participation has a significant protective impact on elderlies’ SWB, and gender doesn’t moderate the relation. Intergenerational solidarity has a significant health protective impact on older adults’ SWB; there is a significant moderating impact of gender. Specifically, functional and consensual solidarity have significant moderating effects of gender. Affectional solidarity, although a significant predictor of older adults’ SWB, and gender don’t moderate the relation.ConclusionThe study suggests taking into account a variety of social relationships as well as gender roles when attempting to understand SWB at a later age. The results are discussed in terms of how gender roles impact social relationships and how men and women evaluate SWB differently based on those relationships.

Feminist solidarity and hopeful imaginings in the MeToo movement in Iceland

In this article, we build on feminist scholarship to narrate how the MeToo movement in Iceland was formed through collective reflexivity and resistance, ultimately connecting different groups of women in affective solidarity. In our exploration of how the movement unfolded, we draw on anonymous MeToo testimonies and media discussions. We argue that the feminist lexicon, particularly the notion of ‘returning the shame’, was instrumental in hailing different groups to the movement. We trace how the concepts used restructured the women’s affective relations to their experiences and thus enabled the ‘feminist snap’ that reverberated across and connected different groups. Speaking positions on different social locations revealed the intersectional nature of sexual violations and were necessary for seeing connections between and among different groups and going beyond politics centred on middle-class pain. We conclude that painting a bigger feminist picture of sexual violence is always an incomplete and ongoing process but is necessary for allowing us to hope for a better future for everyone.

Images of torture: ‘affective solidarity’ and the search for ransom in the global Somali community

ABSTRACT Recent migration trends among the Somali youth and the rise of the migrant smuggling network, in Somali known as Magafe, have rendered traditional practices of solidarity ambiguous. Somali notions of solidarity have historically been a mechanism of care within the clan system. In this article, we argue that traditional practices of solidarity are challenged through the intensification of ransom collection in the Somali community. In recent years, increasing numbers of young Somali migrants have been taken captive in the deserts of Sudan and Libya. Appealing to affective responses, the Magafe network use images and sound recordings of beatings and torture to convince family members, and the wider Somali community, to pay extortionate ransoms. Based on fieldwork conducted in Somaliland in 2013, 2015 and 2021 among Somali families affected by irregular youth migration, the article finds that the willingness and ability of clan members to pay the ever-increasing sums are dwindling. Consequently, mass and social media are widely used by family members and the Magafe network alike to spread the images, sound bites and the phone numbers for money transfer. They thereby appeal to what the article conceptualizes as the ‘affective solidarity’ of the global Somali community.

Daughters Opera: an epistemic representation of feminist solidarities

ABSTRACT Daughters Opera (2020), an inter-cultural Indian-Australian opera, offers possibilities of solidarities through a unique interdisciplinary and experimental encounter using text, music, movement, and site. Women artists from the Global North and Global South come together to embrace multiple performative forms to create an immersive experience focused on women’s experience of violence (domestic and institutional) from the everyday to the extreme. Drawing from writings on the aesthetics of care, these practitioners prioritise relationality and interdependency, wherein the participants and the art-making process is intrinsically linked. It is their feminist aesthetics of care, their ‘affective solidarity’ (Thompson 2015: 430), which enables them to show the migrant figures as resilient and optimistic in spite of their marginalised lives. Daughters Opera showcases individual stories of working-class women navigating the intense hardships levied on them due to their precarious position as disenfranchised subjects. This article delineates how Daughters Opera, through a series of carefully curated images, depicts women’s labour as conveniently invisibilised, and how they are kept in a state of impermanence and marginality. I read the performance as a distillation of female suffering and peripheral positioning through images of migrating bodies, labouring and oppressed voices, and fragile female bodies burning out and performing displacement.

FAMILY FUNCTIONING: BRIDGING THE RELATION BETWEEN GRANDFAMILY HEALTH AND WELL-BEING

Abstract In research, it is important to utilize theories to ask and answer questions about a specific phenomenon. In grandfamily research, there is a need to utilize theory as a bridge to understanding the relationship between family functioning and grandfamily health and well-being. In this symposium, four presentations will discuss their work related to grandfamily well-being and how it was guided by theory. In Scott and Nadorff, Bowen’s Family Systems theory is used as a framework for examining the extent to which agreement on values and beliefs moderates the relation between intergenerational emotional closeness and well-being in the grandparent generation. Findings demonstrated that affectual solidarity rating and religious ideological differences between grandparents and grandchildren influenced grandparents’ well-being. Yancura & Barnett utilized the family life course framework in their study to examine how intergenerational conflict between the grandchildren’s parents and the caregiving grandparents predicted stress and depression in grandparent caregivers. Ye and Smith incorporated the family stress model that was developed by Conger and colleagues in their study. Findings suggested parenting practice profiles related differentially to the well-being of caregivers and the emotional and behavioral outcomes of the grandchildren. Musil, Jeanblanc, Zauszniewski, and Burant used McCubbin’s Resiliency Model of Family stress to examine how demographics, family demands, problem-solving/coping, resources, and situational appraisals affect depressive symptoms in grandmother caregivers. The inclusion of theory in these studies is significant. Without theory, study findings are nothing more than a pile of findings. Theory helps organize these findings in a meaningful way. This is a Grandparents as Caregivers Interest Group Sponsored Symposium.

Doing feminism through Chinese online fiction fandom

To explore the connections between Chinese online fiction fandom and feminism, in-depth interviews were conducted with thirty-two Chinese women and nonbinary fans of online fiction. Online fiction fandom is both a counterpublic and an intimate public in which women and nonbinary fans are connected by a common interest, their feminist identities are formed through or emerge through participation in such a public, and their shared values and understanding of feminism create a closer sense of belonging and affective solidarity. Engaging with feminism through online fiction is a form of digital feminism, creating feminist consciousness among online fiction fans through literary and discursive constructs. Women-oriented online fiction has become a space for many young Chinese women and nonbinary people to criticize and challenge patriarchal gender norms and reflect on mainstream gender relations. This space continues to produce educational cultural resources that make feminist learning and practice a work in progress.

Vulnerability and affective solidarity: Feminist assemblies in Appalachia under and after the Trump presidency

AbstractFollowing the 2016 elections, several feminist groups emerged in the U.S. in response to the election of President Trump. This manuscript focuses on a feminist assembly located in marginal and conservative Appalachia. Grounded in reflexivity, we employ affective solidarity to better understand feminist organizing in a post‐Trump rural Appalachian town. Based on a collaborative ethnography, including the National Organization of Women's local chapter members, conducted between 2016 and 2022, we analyze how political engagement has been initiated by an affective response—vulnerability, misery, rage, passion, and hope. By organizing open houses, marches, and voter guides, this group's outreach strives to inform and engage community members in dialogs around women's rights to improve gender equality in West Virginia, a state historically characterized by a conservative, heteronormative, patriarchal, and anti‐abortion mentality. We show how the dissonance between Trump's glorification of these ideologies and our affective responses served as a mechanism for feminist solidarity. This paper uses Butlerian principles to explore how vulnerability and resistance shape a feminist social movement held together by affective solidarity. We argue that responses to threats prompted by the Trump Presidency have been critical to the resurgence of our feminist agency and political engagement where conservative and masculine ideologies impose control over vulnerable populations. This paper advances the knowledge of vulnerability and agency and contributes to the literature on assemblies for political resistance.

The Virtual Geography of Afrodiasporic Womanist Love: Black Women Critical Educators Collectively Cultivating Solidarity and (En)countering Loneliness Online

In this multimodal article, we respond to the pervasive erasure of Black women’s knowledge-making practices and pedagogies in academic literature writ large while illustrating the use of creative methods for making meaning of community, connection, sociality, and solidarity, in virtual or online adult learner education spaces. We begin by narrating how our collective of U.S.-based Black women comparative and international education scholar-practitioners lovingly banded together for a Study Abroad Program. We theorize the diasporic Blackness undergirding our womanist love of one another as a spatial, relational, corporeal, and political force helpful for cultivating critical community and affective solidarity in our virtual geographic context. Then, using kitchen-table talk as a reflexive method of inquiry, we probe the particularities of that Afrodiasporic womanist love—the energy cohering our collective in an online environment—as noun and verb: a source of sustenance, a reprieve from loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic, and a care-full comforting and healing practice. We locate our theorizing in the genealogy of Black feminist thought, and to interrogate how Afrodiasporic womanist love is shaped by and situated in time, space, and body(ies), we explore our geohistories and legacies. We conclude by reflecting on how, in addition to building solidarity, Afrodiasporic womanist love helped us form a supportive critical community online that provided sanctuary as we (re)conceptualized justice, freedom, and humanity in our individual and collective praxis vis-à-vis the intimacy, authenticity, and vulnerability demanded by this type of Black love.

Intergenerational solidarity of adult children with parents from emerging to established adulthood.

Although researchers have focused on adult children's intergenerational solidarity with their parents following the transition to adulthood, less is known about continuity and change in the multiple dimensions of solidarity as children transition from emerging to established adulthood. Therefore, we focused on reciprocal longitudinal associations between dimensions of latent forms of solidarity (normative and affectual solidarity) and manifest forms of solidarity (associational and functional solidarity) as reported by young adults at three stages from emerging to established adulthood. Data were derived from young adult children participating in the Longitudinal Study of Generations who reported about 260 daughter-mother, 214 son-mother, 244 daughter-father, and 205 son-father relationships in 2000 (18-29 years old), 2005 (23-34 years old), and 2016 (34-45 years old). Multigroup autoregressive cross-lagged models prospectively predicted reciprocal influences among the dimensions of solidarity across four parent-child gender groups. Results showed that young adults' perceived intergenerational solidarity with parents was stable across three-time points. In addition, young adults' perceived associational solidarity with parents in emerging adulthood (2000 survey) predicted functional solidarity with parents (receiving support from parents and providing support to parents) in intermediate young adulthood (2005 survey), and in established adulthood (2016 survey). However, parents' and children's gender differences were not identified in the above associations. The study concludes that frequent contact with parents in emerging adulthood is a key factor in establishing intergenerational solidarity with parents from early-to-middle stage of adulthood regardless of parents' and children's gender. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Cracking buildings, cracking capitalism: antagonism, affect, and the importance of squatting for housing justice

In this paper I argue that squatting provides a concrete and theoretical location for dismantling binaries between successful and failed resistance. Focusing on the development of a political and affective consciousness and the inherent antagonism within squatting above the temporality of an individual squat or occupation helps to recentre the ‘urban political’ and understand the value and power of the urban commons. I combine radical democracy and affect theory to argue for the centrality of squatting in challenging urban capitalist hegemony. Not only does squatting transform consciousness, but the physically and emotionally supportive practices that it engenders helps to return the emotive as well as the political to the urban environment. I support this claim with reference to the successful 2015 Aylesbury occupation in London, which the occupiers approached with affective solidarity and a desire to reclaim space through antagonistic urban insurrection.

할리우드 영화의 여성 연대에 관한 연구

This paper analyzed how female solidarity is represented in Hollywood films and its characteristics. Three classifications of Conventional Solidarity, Affectional Solidarity, and Reflective Solidarity suggested by Jodi Dean are used as theoretical frameworks in order to explain this. Before the fourth wave feminism, female characters were often portrayed as holding each other in check and keeping their distance from others. However, since 2011, when the fourth wave feminism began, the relationship between women in movies has been represented differently than before. Women share value norms to accomplish common interests, have conventional solidarity, and sometimes get together in affectional solidarity in which they internally cooperate with each other through mutual consideration and love and they also unite in reflective solidarity that can coexist even in the differences. Solidarity is a driving force that may achieve something; in a male-centered society, female solidarity was regarded as difficult one to be formed however relationships between women are being rebuilt through solidarity.

Fact signalling and fact nostalgia in the data-driven society

Post-truth tells the story of a public descending into unreason, aided and abetted by platforms and other data-driven systems. But this apparent collapse of epistemic consensus is, I argue, also dominated by loud and aggressive commitment to the idea of facts and Reason – a site where an imagined modern past is being pillaged for vestigial legitimacy. This article identifies two common practices of such reappropriation and mythologisation. (1) Fact signalling involves performative invocations of facts and Reason, which are then weaponised to discredit communicative rivals and establish affective solidarity. This is often closely tied to (2) fact nostalgia: the cultivation of an imagined past when ‘facts were facts’ and we, the good liberal subjects, could recognise facts when we saw them. Both tendencies are underwritten by a myth of connection: the still enduring narrative that maximising the circulation of information regardless of provenance or meaning will eventually yield a more rational public – even as data-driven systems tend to undermine the very conditions for such a public. Drawing on examples from YouTube-amplified ‘alternative influencers’ in the American right, and the normative discourses around fact-checking practices, I argue that this continued reliance on the vestigial authority of the modern past is a pernicious obstacle in normative debates around data-driven publics, keeping us stuck on the same dead-end scripts of heroically suspicious individuals and ignorant, irrational masses.

Numerical Flexibility Practices in Working Relations and Their Effects on Intergenerational Solidarity Processes

This study examines the interactions between the numerical flexibility practices emerging in today’s working relations and intergenerational solidarity relations and in this context aims to describe in depth the effect these practices have on these relations. This study is structured within the framework of the phenomenological design, a qualitative research method, with data being collected using semi-structured interview forms. The study uses the program MAXQDA Pro Analytics 2020 to analyze the data and conducted three-stage thematic coding to form code co-occurrence clusters. According to the analysis results, i) numerical flexibility practices in working relationships are multidimensional in terms of how they reflect onto individuals and are closely related to the precariousness of work conditions, ii) flexible work hours affect individuals’ functional and associational sharing with their parents, and iii) individuals’ consensual status with their parents regarding work shapes the processes of affectual solidarity. The interaction of normative solidarity in the cultural context is seen to be a crucial factor for making sense of the solidarity process, with normative solidarity’s interaction with material resources possibly being the cause of solidarity processes taking different than expected forms.

Płeć, sprawczość, siostrzeństwo: dwie wizje „Solidarności” kobiet w dokumentach filmowych. Analiza feministyczna

In the article, from a feminist perspective, we look at two visions of “Solidarity,” that was co-created by women, shown in documentary films – Solidarity According to Women, 2014, dir. Marta Dzido, Piotr Śliwowski and Women of Freedom, 2019, dir. Wiesław Paluch, Mirosław Basaj. For this purpose, we refer, i.a., to the concept of situated knowledge (Donna Haraway, 2009), its reinterpretation in the context of the category of care (María Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) or to the category of affective solidarity (Clare Hemmings, 2012). We describe the narrative strategy of Women of Freedom as a story about heroism without heroines, while the one we read in Solidarity According to Women we call heroising of heroines. During the analyzes, we explore different visions of female roles and identities, we also address the topic of sisterhood, both between women involved in the movement and in the relationship between the researcher and the subject of the research. Finally, becoming aware of our own affective dissonance, we consider how critical and sisterly interpretative practices are possible.

“A Cossack's Whole Life is War, there is no Fear in a Cossack's Heart!” or How They Become Cossacks Today

The work is devoted to the consideration of the modern Cossacks (on the example of the Kuban), in particular its collective identity through the prism of a complex of theoretical approaches: the theory of masculinity (in the dimensions of hegemony and militarization), as well as affective solidarity grounded on the theory of collective identity. Empirically, the collective identity of the Cossacks is considered through the narratives of the representatives of the Kuban Cossack army, where it is invoked and categorized. The results of the study were the categorization contour of the modern collective identity of the Cossacks. The center of the social identity of the modern Cossacks reveals a historical pattern of militarized masculinity, which is significantly saturated with affective experiences of informants when pronouncing certain categories. The presence of such an experience provides a more complete interiorization of the specific foundations of identity by the Cossacks.

#Metoo as communities of practice: a study of Chinese victims’ digital narratives of sexual harassment

ABSTRACT Online disclosure of one’s own experience and the harasser’s name is a prominent way of telling #MeToo stories in China. Drawing on the theoretical perspective of community of practice (CoP), this article conducts a narrative analysis of these disclosures to explore how they are employed to form communities of practice that serve to resist sexual harassment, thereby contributing to digital feminism in China. The study finds that they shape a common identity as victims and sustain affective solidarity through sharing traumatic experiences and reflective discourses to build the community. Their discursive practice of exposing harassers, including tagging variant hashtags, archiving contents for continued proliferation, and inviting netizens to re-post information, serves to break the silence and challenge the social environment that connives at sexual harassment, constituting a forceful digital feminist movement. By incorporating the theoretical insights of CoPs with the #MeToo movement, the article expands the study of digital feminism.