Feeling Worlds: Affective Imaginaries and the Making of Democratic Literacy Classrooms

The authors examined how the spaces and structures of literacy classrooms were organized, inhabited, and felt by teachers and students in a new project‐based high school. The authors attended specifically to the political valence of these feelings: how educators characterized certain spatial arrangements (modular furniture and flexible seating) and curricular structures (asynchronous learning) as feeling democratic, in contrast to an authoritarianism that they associated with other instructional orders. The authors recognized that these descriptors, more than mere metaphors, were expressions of affective attachments that conditioned the classrooms that literacy educators worked to build—what the authors call affective imaginaries. These imaginaries, the authors argue, have material consequences both for how educators shape the world of the literacy classroom and for what practices are sanctioned, celebrated, and undermined therein. The authors drew from a three‐year immersive ethnography in an urban public school to explore how educators imagined and shaped democratic literacy classrooms, how students worked within and against these imaginaries, and how resulting frictions impacted literacy learning in these classroom‐worlds. Findings center on two interrelated tensions: (1) how infrastructures associated with democratic classrooms, at times, worked against other infrastructures on which students depended for literacy practice; and (2) how these incongruities led to new ways of surveilling students’ autonomy in their literacy learning. The authors conclude by considering how these findings might guide literacy educators not only in attending to the ostensive, normative, and performative dimensions of affective imaginaries in classrooms but also in opening alternate imaginaries, better attuned to the equitable flourishing of all students.