Affect and Emotion with A World at Stake. Issue 1 (2nd January 2019) - Nielsen, Sigurd Solhaug
Abstract : This article focuses on young people's embodied experiences of the museum exhibition A World at Stake and the ways it offers affective and emotional encounters with "poor others." Although representations of global poverty and inequality are sensitive to disengaged notions of care, they are not self-evident, and representational analyses often miss the myriads of ways that young people in particular engage in meaning making, which is not just about confirming the stereotypical. Our explorations of representations, observations, and interviews show some of the ways students' abilities to be affected and to affect difference are not simply about fixing the other, but are about experiencing "poor others" differently and with nuance. By arguing that performing bodies are distinctively made and constituted through connections and relations to external matters, we suggest that A World at Stake can play an important role in young students' encounters of poverty and inequality beyond the exhibition space.