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This article explores how Danish school girls affectively engage with and relate to STEM subjects, and what draws the girls to STEM subjects and pushes them away, respectively. We draw on Ahmed's work to shed light on the 'sticky' affects that become attached to STEM subjects as well as student subjects in constituting these as affectively (un)attractive for girls. We explore the discourses on STEM subjects that circulate amongst the students before considering the affects that these discourses generate in and amongst the students, and which roles these affective reactions play in how the girls engage with and relate to STEM. Our analysis evolves around three affective tensions in the data and shows that positive affects are felt by and attached to students with STEM interests and skills, and that students negotiate different kinds of (dis-)comfort when relating to their engagement with STEM in the present and in the future.

This article explores how feminist teachers can engage with affective pedagogies when teaching intersectional gender studies. In the context of global corporate universities that emphasise action plans on diversity, equality, and inclusion, and alongside a rise in anti-gender and anti-diversity politics both within society and on campuses, feminist scholars encounter challenges in navigating affective contestations and tensions when teaching intersectional gender studies. These tensions can both evoke uncomfortable atmospheres and offer hopeful glimpses of societal changes and solidarities. In addressing this, we employ the idiom of 'the elephant in the room' to exploring how affective tensions emerge in the classroom and how feminist teachers may respond to and care about them. Drawing on literature on affective pedagogies, we conceptualise affects as intensities that move within and infuse feminist classrooms and analytically unpack two experiences of elephants emerging when teaching an intersectional gender studies programme at a Danish university. Specifically, we offer two takes on affective pedagogies that we name 'swaying the elephant' and 'holding the elephant' and discuss the ways in which feminist teachers can nurture ethico-political and affirmative practices in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In education, the child is often observed as a potential to be shaped and realised. In this article, we analyse the educational program, First Lego League. Surprisingly, its aim is not simply to realise a potential, but to potentialise the child to become unlimited potential. Children should become 'a force for change', and they are told that 'you can be anything, just do it!'. To implement this program, First Lego League develops a transition medium that consists of non-representative, presentational symbols such as play, fun, innovation, dance and discovery. Such a program does not come without costs. Our analysis reveals how negativity is negated, knowledge is devalued and the children's selfnarratives are decoupled. This could result in children being confronted with paradoxical demands, which are difficult to navigate. Analytically, the article draws on Niklas Luhmann's systems theory and in particular his concepts of form and medium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]