Theorizing "difficult knowledge" in the aftermath of the "affective turn": Implications for curriculum and pedagogy in handling traumatic representations

This essay draws on the concept of "difficult knowledge" to think with some of the interventions and arguments of affect theory and discusses the implications for curriculum and pedagogy in handling traumatic representations. The author makes an argument that affect theory enables the theorization of difficult knowledge as an intersection of language, desire, power, bodies, social structure, materiality, and trauma. To show the possibilities of this theorization of difficult knowledge, the essay puts in conversation Judith Butler's work on vulnerability, affect, and grievable lives with scholarship on difficult knowledge. The essay leans on Butler's work and affect theory to make a political and pedagogical intervention into the terrain of learning and acting in the face of difficult knowledge. This intervention offers a conceptual, curricular, and pedagogical way out of dilemmas of representation and it is rooted in a political project of social action that does not disavow the psychical problematics residing therein. © 2014 by The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto.