Impasses of Affective Inquiry in Pandemic Times

This paper puzzles through the doubled impasses of our affective inquiry into learning communities in a college setting. In so doing, we take on the incommensurabilities of our field site and post qualitative inquiry, providing an example of critical qualitative inquiry where theory and practice are made to work together at their limits, both compromising with each other, neither subordinated to the other. Affective inquiry, an instantiation of concept as method inquiry, itself was a search for the impasses of learning community life. When our observations were moved to Zoom as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, we were faced with another impasse: how to attune to affect in this new and thoroughly datafied space? We open by theorizing affective inquiry and our doubled impasse, and we then explore three locations of these impasses in our fieldwork. We close with a reaffirmation of relentless experimentation.