From Effective to Affective Research-Practice Partnerships (RPP): Bridging Empirical and Post-Qualitative Approaches to Study RPPs as Affective Cultural Forms

Abstract

This study experiments with post-qualitative methodologies to understand research-practice partnerships (RPPs) as affective and cultural forms. Revisiting data from an ethnographic case study of a RPP, and drawing on affect and cultural studies, I develop “scene-cases” to trace how teachers attach to professional-managerial metaphors as modes of recovery from institutional precarity, while students attune to institutional ghosts and ruins, generating detachment from improvement narratives. The analysis reveals how RPPs function as sites where differential affective orientations complicate assumptions of RPPs’ inherent goodness. RPPs can simultaneously offer recovery from precarity for some participants while catalyzing refusal in others.