Affective Historical Praxis

We do not add to dominant narratives: We unsettle and complicate them. 

An interdisciplinary pedagogical method created at CML, Affective Historical Praxis insists on the affective dimensions of knowledge-making. It recognizes that archives, data, and historical narratives are never neutral. Rather, they are sites of power, erasure and possibility. AHP requires engaging vulnerable histories, individuals and communities with care, refusing detached objectivity and teaching history in ways that make visible the labor, grief, joy, and practices of refusal that emerge from marginalized ways of surviving and living free. 

Using Affective Historical Praxis, teaching cannot be separated from repair. Our pedagogy draws on Indigenous Studies, Black Studies, Decolonial Studies, Black Feminist and Queer Theory, Disability Studies, and Critical Race Studies. By engaging theory and scholarship developed from these fields, AHP fosters liberatory learning and challenges master narratives and authority. 

Our center’s educators and all users of AHP accept openness and complexity and commit to an understanding of the American past—and present—as dynamic, responsive, and alive.