This document summarizes Emily Danvers' PhD research into students' experiences with critical thinking in higher education. She is conducting interviews and observations with students in their first year at a university in England. Her theoretical framework draws on works by Ahmed, Berlant, and Barad to examine critical thinking as a social practice shaped by affect, hopes for transformation, and its material enactment. Initial conclusions suggest critical thinking is a negotiated performance between words, bodies and matter, driven by affect rather than rationality alone.

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Troubling the concept: students’ experiences of critical
thinking in higher education
SHRE Newer Researcher’s Conference 2013
Emily Danvers, Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research (CHEER), University of Sussex
e.danvers@sussex.ac.uk

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The research in progress
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2nd year of ESRC funded PhD
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Interviews with 15 students at the beginning (Oct) and end (May) of
their 1st year at university with email interviews twice in between.
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2 cohorts - an academic and a professional social science course
at a University in the South of England. Participant(ish) observation
of both cohorts in a compulsory module.
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Following around the concept, interrogating what it makes
possible/not possible using Ahmed’s work on sociability and affect
(2010, 2012), Berlant’s (2005) work on (un)happy futures and
Barad’s (2003, 2007) work on materiality and ontoepistemology.

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Critical thinking as…
‘Part of the furniture’ in Higher Education. Conceptualised in
a number of ways:
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A mechanised skill for employability akin to problem solving
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A cognitive product of ordered, logical thinking
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As an individual process of self-reflection
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As the force behind social transformation
…As a tacit social practice (Bailin et. al, 1999)

4. ‘I got kicked out of school when I was 15 and moved to
another school. And there were a lot of technicalities that went
on…For the large part I got told the truth about it but there
were a couple of small facts that were left out or not
exaggerated enough and it ended up casting a completely
different light on the situation. So where I’ve had it done to me
and have got the brunt of it, I’d like to be able to do it to
someone else. To basically make myself look better because I
know how to speak. I’d like that, I would really like that. Just
because it is very unnerving when you see it unravelling and
you know the way that a situation is going to go but you can’t
think quick enough to know how to be critical about the way
someone is speaking to you. To be able to turn their argument
on its head when they least expect it would be pretty cool I
think.’

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Reading data with Ahmed
‘To basically make myself look better because I know
how to speak’
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‘If we take the shape of what is given….we experience the
comfort of being given the right shape’ (2010: 79)
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Ahmed explores the affective tensions of occupying a counterhegemonic space and the tension between sociability and
social critique
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A story of noise becoming voice (Biesta, 2010).
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Are there normative models of criticality? What might these
look like? What might they make possible? Who might they
exclude?

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Reading data with Berlant
‘So where I’ve had it done to me and have got the brunt
of it, I’d like to be able to do it to someone else…To be
able to turn their argument on its head when they least
expect it would be pretty cool I think’
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Cruel optimism ‘names a relation of attachment to
compromised conditions of possibility’ (Berlant, 2001:21)
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What does it mean to place hope in the transformative power of
criticality? What is the relationship of critical thinking to the
‘good life'?

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Reading data with Barad
‘Casting a completely different light on the situation’
‘It is very unnerving when you see it unravelling’
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Intra-action – ‘it is not about matter supporting discourses but
matter comes to matter through the iterative intra-activity of the
world in its becoming’ (Barad, 2003: 823)
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Critical thinking understood as an assemblage of the humandiscursive-material
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The materiality of critical thinking could include things such as
voice, bodies, words, physical environments and also could be
explored through the analogies used e.g. light, unraveling,
brunt of it, turning it on its head

8. Initial Conclusions
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Critical thinking is not a straightforward ‘doing’ – it is a continually
negotiated performance – between words, matter and bodies.
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It is anything but ‘rational’ – brimming with affect
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Playing around with theory allows me to trouble the seemingly
transparent intellectual values of higher education: ‘the value of theory
lies in its power to get in the way: to offend and interrupt…it stops us from
forgetting that the world is not laid out in plain view before our eyes’
(MacLure, 2010).

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References
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Ahmed, S. (2010). The Promise of Happiness. Durham [N.C]: Duke University
Press.
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Ahmed, S. (2012). On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life.
Durham [N.C]: Duke University Press.
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Bailin, S., Case, R., Coombs, J. & Daniels, L. (1999). Conceptualising Critical
Thinking. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 31(3): 285-302.
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Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How
Matter Comes to Matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3):
801-831.
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Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the
Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham [N.C]: Duke University Press.
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Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel Optimism. Durham [N.C]: Duke University Press.
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Biesta, G. (2010). Learner, Student, Speaker: Why it matters how we call those
we teach. Educational Philosophy and Theory 42(5-6): 540-552.
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Maclure, M. (2010). The offence of theory. Journal of Education Policy, 25(2):
277-286.