Agent ontologies and the history classroom: a more-than-human experiment

An ontological haunting

When talking about Indigenous scholarship, especially as a non-Indigenous scholar, there is always a risk of adopting a problematic pan-Indigenous approach that collapses disparate Indigenous scholarship into a broad category. For this reason, it is important to highlight my engagement with Indigenous agent ontologies which first came about during my MA in Vancouver, Canada (2017–19). I am most familiar with North American Indigenous scholars, particularly Mi’kmaq scholar Marie Battiste (2005, 2011), Michael Marker (2006) (a member of the Lummi Nation), who worked with Coast Salish communities in British Columbia, and his ideas about history education, and Julie Cruikshank (2005), who worked with Yukon elders. Vine Deloria Jr (2003)’s theoretical observations of Western history have also been significant as have a wider range of works (Fixico, 2017; Kimmerer, 2013; King, 2003; Oxendine, 2024; Watts, 2013) and Indigenous scholars and scholarship beyond the North American context (Bonaldo and Pereira, 2023; Fornssler et al., 2014; Rosiek et al., 2020; Tuhiwai Smith, 2021).

My personal introduction to Indigenous history-making practices in a Canadian context is also significant because in Canada much of the conversation is conditioned by the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC), which, as Gibson and Case (2019) state, ‘presents history educators in Canada with a significant challenge’ (p. 253). Responses about how to face the challenge have been informed by seminal articles by Marker (2011), and by Seixas’s (2012a) response to Marker’s (2011) and Cutrara’s (2018) critique of historical thinking among others (see Anderson, 2017; McGregor, 2015, 2017). It could be said that a binary emerges from this debate about whether historical thinking can meet the challenges of the TRC. Cutrara (2018) argues that it cannot because it is an inherently racist and violent enterprise that places a ‘settler grammar over the study of the past’ (p. 253), but Gibson and Case (2019) think it can and there need not be a ‘wholesale dismissal of the discipline of history and its methods’ (p. 254).

There are two important points to make here that relate to the task at hand for facilitating a more-than-human experiment for history education. First, the debate about Canadian history education centres around meeting the requirements of the TRC, which has concrete objectives and tackles specific contested histories in specific places where multiple history-making practices exist at once. Similar tensions have been raised from scholars in other countries (for example, Australia and New Zealand) which are the products of settler-colonialism (see Harcourt, 2016; Sheehan, 2021; Smyth, 2024; Tuhiwai Smith, 2021). This is not the case for English history education, which means my engagement with this debate was, and is, different owing to my positionality and context. The intention of the more-than-human experiments presented here is to learn from (not about) Indigenous scholarship (see Reeploeg, 2023) in order to theoretically challenge assumptions that underpin history education, not to provide closure or specific comment on the binary of Western/Indigenous history-making practices.

Second, this article is interested in how individual history teachers might change their teaching (and history-making) practices not broad-stroke curriculum changes. A specific passage from Marker’s (2011) article (and the response to this passage) is illustrative of the role of individual history teachers in upholding the inside of the history classroom, repeated in full as follows:

In classrooms, Aboriginal students come up against an almost impenetrable wall of historical ‘facts’, which teachers deliver in tightly sealed conceptual boxes. Aboriginal students who sometimes question these ‘facts’ can be regarded as disruptive to educational processes. One of my Aboriginal graduate students told me how questioning historical ‘facts’ in a public school history classroom was a ‘defining moment’ in her educational experience. The teacher was explaining the early origins of Aboriginal peoples in Canada by telling the students that the Bering Land Bridge enabled the early ‘Aboriginal immigrants’ to cross to North America. The graduate student remembered asking ‘if they had left footprints, or a note, or something. How do we really know this for sure?’ She was questioning the ‘truth’ of the official explanation: an explanation that contradicted the creation stories of human origins from her own Aboriginal community. The teacher insisted that the class had gone over the ways in which scientific evidence shows the reality of the past, but the Aboriginal student continued to be dissatisfied with an official history that placed her ancestors as part of someone else’s story of the past – and as immigrants. The student told me: ‘I remember being punished by having to stand in the corner.’ (p. 99)

This passage was an important part of my ontological haunting, as the history teacher draws on the discipline of history and Western canon more generally (scientific evidence, reality of the past) to affirm their position. This collision of the two understandings of the past (Western and Indigenous) had a profound impact on the student, something they describe as a defining moment. Marker (2011) concludes that Canadian history educators will need to sacrifice some ‘conventional ways of teaching Canadian history’ (p. 111) to accommodate Indigenous knowledge. This is not, however, the response of all educators. Gibson and Case (2019), while agreeing the incident would have been ‘deeply disturbing for the student’, place the blame on the incident being ‘insensitively handled’ (p. 260) by the teacher and question whether it raises ‘deep epistemological tensions’ (p. 260) because the clash amounts to one of differing historical interpretations.

The justification for there not being deep epistemological tensions, according to Gibson and Case, is that four themes outlined in Marker’s article about Indigenous historical consciousness are first-order considerations, ‘statements about the world’ and indicative of ‘Indigenous worldview of the past’, whereas the historical thinking concepts identify ‘categories of questions to guide inquiries’ (p. 272). As such, the historical thinking concepts are concerned with second-order considerations that do not offer substantive answers for example, about whether ‘time is circular or linear (p. 272). Historical thinking, because it is rooted in History (the academic discipline), has a ‘self-corrective capacity’, no ‘fixed, universal or uncontested system for constructing knowledge’ (p. 262) and therefore offers the ‘least prejudicial forum for enabling diverse groups to … reconcile warrants for their conclusions of the past’ (p. 264). This frames historical thinking as a way of asking questions about the past, whereas Indigenous history-making practices are associated with a worldview or beliefs. This justifies historical thinking’s epistemological credentials as the best way of responding to the TRC and side-steps the binary of colliding knowledge systems.

In the context of whether historical thinking can meet the objectives of the TRC, an argument for historical thinking on epistemological lines may be valid; however, there are two problems with this justification that are significant when thinking about a more-than-human experiment for the history classroom. First, it places huge confidence in the discipline of history’s self-corrective capacity. Kleinberg (2007, 2023) illustrates that many historians, rather than evolving, are resistant to change. There are some calls to change history from within the Western discipline of history and many of these voices draw on agent ontologies (Barrell and Raimondi, 2025; Bevernage, 2008; Bevernage and Lorenz, 2013; Domańska, 2021; Simon, 2022a, 2022b; Tamm, 2022; Tamm and Simon, 2020). This means that responding to the clash of Indigenous and Western history-making practices is necessary if history is to be considered an evolving discipline.

Second, this view minimises Indigenous knowledge systems to something like belief, whereas Western history-making practices are belief-free owing to their epistemological credentials and grounding in evidence-based claims, rationality and disciplinary standards. Seixas (2012a) betrays this view by likening Indigenous cosmologies to ‘Islamic cosmology, Biblical fundamentalism and Haitian voodoo’ (p. 136) and fixating on ownership of stories by certain people ‘for spiritual reasons’ (p. 129), which Gibson and Case (2019) further question asking why ‘non-Indigenous people are asked to accept historical claims from Indigenous Elders without evidence or scrutiny’ (emphasis in original, p. 275). The issue with this critique is not that it is necessarily incorrect (although it does seem to fail to account for the important role of place for Indigenous history-making practices; see Rosiek et al., 2020; Tuhiwai Smith, 2021; Watts, 2013), but it fails to interrogate the first-order considerations that sit behind historical thinking.

The Indigenous scholar Deloria (2003) puts forward a convincing case that Western history has never escaped its Christian roots. A ‘general set of assumptions [from Christian’s doctrine of creation] about the nature of the world’ (p. 203) were absorbed by Western history making the Christian religion and Western history ‘inseparable and mutually self-supporting’ (p. 111). To frame Western history solely as a continuation of Christian history oversimplifies the issue; however, Deloria’s critique is an important one because it turns a metaphysical mirror back on Western history. It is not only Indigenous understandings of the past that are entangled with beliefs, or, as they are being framed here, assumptions. It could be said this is illustrated by the teacher in the incident Marker outlines whose actions are revelatory of the ontological position or first-order considerations embedded within historical thinking. The teacher draws on the parameters of the discipline of history to make an argument about what counts as historical fact that influences the student. They use the idea of the truth of scientific evidence to justify the reality of the past; this is an ontological position that carries with it a worldview or set of beliefs. Gibson and Case’s critique on epistemological lines does not fully engage with the ontological dimensions of historical thinking and fails to account for the pedagogical realities of the history classroom because while the teacher may have handled the situation insensitively, what if that was the only way they know how to handle it because it is the only truth or reality they know or have been trained in?

This turn to the ontological framing of historical thinking is similar to Clark’s (2022) call for academic historians to use alternative history-making practices to ‘consider History’s own underlying assumptions’ (p. 302). The discipline will have to ‘surrender authority’ (p. 302) to do this. This in turn echoes Marker’s call to Canadian history educators to make some sacrifices. In this vein, rather than being a wholescale dismissal of historical thinking, a more-than-human experiment is an effort to interrogate assumptions that underpin history education as an opportunity that ‘recognises Indigenous knowledge and uses that recognition to critique and expand … [the discipline of history’s] own structures and practice’ (p. 304) so that history education might evolve. A more-than-human experiment for history education draws on agent ontologies, including but not limited to Indigenous knowledge, to evaluate the inside of the classroom in an effort dissolve the boundaries that uphold the binary division between inside/outside. While Indigenous history-making practices and scholarship are central to the ontological haunting that shaped this process it is the assumptions that sit behind historical thinking, exposed by paying attention to critique from Indigenous scholars, that are central to the critique.

Assumptions

Historical thinking is closely aligned with second-order procedural concepts (Lee and Chapman, 2019; Seixas, 2017; Seixas and Morton, 2013; Shemilt, 2010) which Counsell (2017) argues are the ‘most efficient device we have for defining the structure of the discipline in curricular terms’ (p. 217). My teaching experience is mainly in English history classrooms and my training focused on the use of second-order concepts. Gibson and Seixas (2021) argue that historical thinking is ‘standard in theory and practice of history education in Western Europe and North America’ (p. 1, emphasis added) and can be traced back to the 1970s in England. Divergent but connected centres of research in the USA, Canada and Germany inform disciplinary history but ‘English researchers have led the way to a new conceptualization of history education’ (Lévesque and Clark, 2018, p. 120). Historical thinking is associated with other terms, including disciplinary knowledge (Chapman, 2021), epistemic knowledge (Seixas, 2017), historical reasoning (Van Drie and Van Boxtel, 2008) and historical literacy (Lee, 2017). One could read this as saying the wider definition of historical thinking is a common-sense approach to history education, the standard. This would be a contentious claim because iterations of historical thinking in England are very different to those in, for example, the USA, and there is a wide range of views about what exactly disciplinary history is for English history educators, but there is an argument to be made that a history education informed by the Western discipline is the standard.

Smith and Jackson (2021) offer an interesting analysis that helps explain how certain assumptions are shared by disparate schools of thought, making them standard, by identifying traditional social realists and radical social realists. Traditional social realists value historical thinking over historical consciousness and think disciplinary knowledge refers to both substantive and disciplinary knowledge. Radical social realists value historical consciousness over disciplinary knowledge and think disciplinary knowledge is procedural. Both traditional and radical social realists agree, however, that ‘the western historical method is the best tool we have for knowing the past’ (p. 156) and neither ‘seek to question the veracity of agreed historical fact’ (p. 174). This highlights how the roots of certain assumptions prevalent in history education are grounded in the Western discipline of history. Smith and Jackson’s analysis is helpful because, while focused on English history education, it highlights how historical consciousness (see Körber, 2011; Nordgren, 2019; Rüsen, 2004; Seixas, 2012b) and historical thinking (see Chapman, 2020; Lee, 1983, 2017; Lévesque and Clark, 2018; Seixas, 2017), including US iterations of this (see Barton and Levstik, 1998; Epstein, 1998; Levstik, 1997; VanSledright, 1997; Wineburg, 2001), are connected by their adherence to the Western discipline of history as the starting point, and their consequent shared assumptions.

Deleuze’s (1968) discussion about common sense is a helpful way to think about the assumptions that underpin Western history-making. Often thought of as vitalist, May (2012) explains that Deleuze’s philosophy asks the question ‘how might we live’, which is a different philosophical question to ‘how should one live’ or ‘how should one act’? This stance is useful for the task at hand because it is a stance that asks how might things be different. Deleuze (1968) questions ‘the subjective presupposition of philosophy as a whole’ (p. 174) and the idea that ‘it is presumed that everybody knows, independently of concepts, what is meant by self, thinking, and being’ (p. 171, emphasis added). This, according to Deleuze, is the dogmatic image of thought and while this image of thought has different forms, such as those held by rationalists and empiricists who do not ‘presume [the dogmatic image of thought’s] construction in the same fashion’ (p. 174), there are some shared assumptions within the Western canon about what it means to think. Deleuze’s idea of the dogmatic image of thought shares many parallels with Indigenous critique of Western knowledge, most notably Tuhiwai Smith (2021), who talks about a cultural archive of the West. Unpicking these assumptions is a way of questioning what it means to think historically by challenging the dogmatic image of thought that is part of this process. This amounts to a critique of parameters that frame the inside of the history classroom which rests on assumptions from the Western discipline of history.

The history-student-in-place

Having established how the three assumptions, time, distance and the human, facilitate a dogmatic image of thought for history education that frames the inside of the history classroom, it is now time to think how history education might be different through experimentation with more-than-human concepts that trouble these assumptions. This first more-than-human theorisation of the history classroom uses an Indigenous informed concept of place as the starting point to theorise the history-student-in-place.

Marker (2011) explains that for many Indigenous communities, ‘the past is located in the local and traditional territory’ (p. 105). The past on this understanding can have a specific location in the present because stories of the past are the land. Indigenous history is therefore ‘sublimely local’ (p. 105) and the distance between the past and the present collapses under the concept of place. This collapse elevates the ‘act of being in place’ (Marker, quoted in Rosiek et al., 2020, p. 338). Stories of the past (histories) are not told (or constructed/reconstructed) in the present about the past, they are told/constructed/reconstructed in place.

Following this understanding of place, storytelling occurrences become crossings, or time portals, where ‘the past and present intersect’ (Fixico, 2017, p. 6). According to Anishinaabeg/Cree storyteller Wescolt, ‘the story is a living being’ (Garroutte and Wescolt, quoted by Rosiek et al., 2020, p. 341) or living agent, dependent on an emergence of agency that is shared between stories and humans. Reaffirming the importance of the relationship between humans and place is part of a process that recognises a deep sense that ‘the land knows you’re there’ (Marker, 2011, p. 103). This sees the landscape as ‘sentient’ (Cruikshank, quoted in Marker, 2011, p. 103) or ‘responsive’ (Cruikshank, 2005, p. 18). Being in place brings historical actor and storyteller (historian/history teacher) together.

Indigenous scholarship, when discussing non-human aspects of place, can tend to focus on land, landscape and sometimes animals. This is a criticism that Seixas (2012a) has with Indigenous history-making practices that elevate the role of ‘encounters with Owl, Ravel, Wolf, and Bear’ (p. 134). This raises the issue of how an agent ontology feels like a loss because it gives agency to non-humans that are ‘not invested with historical agency’ (p. 134). Rather than a loss of agency, the history-student-in-place’s historical agency is in relation with the classroom. This is what the Indigenous encounters with animals represent. Students’ ability to think historically cannot be separated from the place where that thinking is happening. And this happens in relation with non-human objects and actors. An Indigenous-informed concept of place as a starting point for a more-than-human experiment is therefore interested in how humans in place are in relation with both the place and other non-human objects and actors in that same place. History-making practices that occur in place, which could include Western-informed history education taking place in a classroom, are storytelling occurrences of a certain kind. The past, rather than being tightly contained in human minds, is in place.

There are two potential ways for history teachers to facilitate the history-student-in-place. The first is by focusing on the classroom itself as a place. In the history classroom, objects such as history textbooks, historical traces of the past (sources/relics) as well as other classroom objects (desks, chairs, digital equipment) are all part of the history-student-in-place’s experience of learning history. Teachers could plan lessons that offer opportunity for direct engagement with the materiality of these objects. For example, when learning about the condition of soldiers in the trenches during the First World War, that focus could be on the place of learning (the classroom). Rather than starting with trying to imagine the experience of the soldiers, the current experience of learning in place, the heated classroom, the comfortable chairs, clean clothes, dry shoes and so on could be the starting point. This interrogation of the classroom as a place could stretch to the school building, the school site, the local area (village, town, city and so on) as well as the region the classroom was in. This is a subtle shift in terms of facilitating students’ historical thinking. It is very important that educators are committed to using place as a starting point to engage with the how and where of historical thinking rather the just the what. The aim is not to compare past/present places, something that would risk using presentist ideas to imagine the past, but to engage with the history-classroom-as-place in such a way that it is not bracketed out as a container or site of learning but is part of the learning. While this may not necessarily directly overturn assumptions about the concept of the human, it is a subtle more-than-human experiment that challenges certain assumptions about distance and the human.

Beyond the objects inside the classroom, a teacher could invite students to bring in objects from their homes/lives/outside the classroom that connect to the past. It could be that students are asked to bring in objects that have a connection to a particular event, such as the First World War. This could be narrowed down so the focus was on a particular theme within the period, perhaps frontline fighting, recruitment, conscription and/or propaganda. By bringing objects into the history classroom and working with them in place they become part of the history-student-in-place’s experience of learning the past. This directly challenges the idea of there being a beyond the classroom by inviting objects from outside into the classroom, which is the place where histories are being told/constructed. The randomness of the group of objects students bring into the classroom space is significant. Say, for example, the collection included family relics, books from the library, photographs of visits to First World War memorials or battlefields, novels, history books other than those provided by the school, there is scope to discuss how these are different types of traces of the past and how, when brought together in place, they create a story, narrative or knowledge about the First World War particular to the history classroom. This negotiation of the past and how a certain history of the First World War emerges in the classroom maintains a distance between the past and present but engages with how the students (humans) are entangled with the objects they bring to the classroom and is playful about the distance that separates past from present, human from non-human, historical (history student) from historical actor.

The second way of utilising the history-student-in-place is through a different method of exploring historical significance. This engagement with place connects with other scholarship in history education that seeks to interrogate place, such as Harcourt’s (2016) attempts to give meaning to local places by interrogating historical significance and place, and Taylor (2004) and Wooley’s (2004) engagements with critical geography to think about meaningful location and conflicting concepts of place. The history-student-in-place offers a view that historical significance is particular to place rather than being solely about a judgement made in the mind about the past.

This approach provides a different way of thinking about local histories or the impact of locality on classroom history-making practices. Engaging with place could include school visits to local places and sites of historical importance, visits from local historians, spokespersons or experts and/or interviews with people with an understanding of the local area, including student family members, long-serving teachers or local community leaders. Staying with the example of the First World War, visits could be to local places that remember the war such as memorials or graveyards, village or town halls. Teachers might ask students to engage with identical or very similar material in the classroom and then in another place, for example, at a memorial. This might be simply reading from a textbook, reading First World War poetry, looking at photographs of men leaving for the front or fighting at the front, or evidence related to the home front. Engaging with the same material provides the opportunity for comparing history education experiences in different places.

For this to be a successful experiment, the types of questions teachers ask of their students is of the utmost importance. Questions need to focus on place; on the particulars of the place the students are in and the impact the place has on what they are learning. Rather than presuming that history is always learnt inside a history classroom, a focus on place might (hopefully) reveal to students that the classroom is one place where history-making occurs. Ideally teachers would compare different places across the course of a period of study. The above examples about the First World War could be combined in an enquiry or sequence of lessons to investigate place and the experience of the First World War.

The benefits of the history-student-in-place are that it does not require a drastic shift in teachers’ practice. They can teach history lessons as they have previously done (in whatever style they prefer) but with the addition of paying attention to place, preferably as a starting point. What it does require is that history educators let go of the assumption that the classroom is a neutral container where history education happens and consider it as agentive space. This requires a subtle ontological shift about what it means to be a human in a place. The additional benefit of the history-student-in-place is if place is adopted as a concept when teaching Western-informed history education, any introduction of other kinds of history-making practices can be presented in a manner that does not other them as belonging outside the history classroom, they are simply history-making practices happening in another place. If we think back to Marker’s example with the Bering Land Bridge, how might the concept of place have assisted the teacher? By framing the history classroom as a place (usually) informed by the Western discipline of history where scientific evidence and the reality of the past are understood in a certain way there may have been the opportunity to discuss other realities of the past (Indigenous in this case), the places these realities are told, emerge and are constructed. There are of course no guarantees that discussions would follow this trajectory, but the purpose of the more-than-human experiment and using the concept place as a starting point is to see how it might provide history teachers with additional tools for these kinds of conversations.

There are limitations and risks associated with the history-student-in-place. First, thinking about English classrooms, the term Indigenous might be co-opted to teach a certain national narrative. While some think teaching a uniform, coherent, national narrative filled with specific historical events and substantive terms is what history education should be about (Gibb, 2015), the history-student-in-place is not a theorisation of the classroom that contributes to this. In fact, the history-student-in-place is intended to disrupt this vision of history education by emphasising that historical narratives that emerge in classroom are emerging in place and therefore cannot be uniform. It is also the case that dangerous and powerful views from the far-right that position British or English ‘indigeneity’ as under threat from various forces is on the rise (Richardson, 2024). There are, therefore, considerable risks that educators must be aware of when bringing an Indigenous-informed concept into the classroom. In other places, for example Canada, the attempted co-option of the term ‘Indigenous’ by the far-right in the same way as in England is less likely, but the impact of such narratives is a significant issue for all history educators to consider.

Second, there is a risk of adopting a problematic pan-Indigenous approach that collapses disparate Indigenous scholarship into a broad category. Adopting a theoretical lens drawn from Indigenous scholarship emerging from (mainly) British Columbia in Canada to disrupt how students are thinking historically in a classroom in London in England would not be able to honour specific Indigenous understandings of place. The history-student-in-place is a riff on Indigenous place, rather than a direct usage, and an experiment with a more-than-human concept, but the risk remains, which is why a posthuman approach that draws on agent ontologies other than Indigenous scholarship is both interesting and a necessary additional perspective.

Posthuman approach

Posthuman agent ontologies include a wide range of theories and concepts from new materialism, post-qualitative inquiry, affect theory, the ontological turn and Deleuze’s philosophy (see Ahmed, 2010; Bennett, 2010, 2013; Braidotti, 2010; Colebrook, 2017; Gamble et al., 2019; Healy and Mulcahy, 2021; Hein, 2016, 2017; Hickey-Moody, 2013; Kinchin and Gravett, 2020; Ringrose, 2011; St. Pierre, 2021, 2023). The different strands of posthuman scholarship offer different ways of disrupting and challenging Deleuze’s dogmatic image of thought to varying degrees, making way for a more-than-human experiment that avoids the potential pitfalls of adopting an Indigenous-informed concept. My doctoral work focused on the Deleuzian concept of affect to formulate the concept of historical affect for the history classroom, which provides the second tangible more-than-human concept for history educators to experiment with.

Affect’s role in historical affect works in a similar way that place works for the history-student-in-place; it informs a specific concept for the history classroom. Just as place challenges and disrupts the assumptions (time, distance, the human) that underpin the inside of the history classroom, so does affect. Deleuze’s affect is one way of thinking with and about his philosophy. Deleuzian concepts bleed into one another. The body-without-organs, difference, virtual, lines of flight, rhizome, becoming, eternal recurrence are all other ways of talking about affect (Coleman and Ringrose, 2013; Hein, 2016; Massumi, 1996). What is important about affect for our current purposes is how it challenges the assumptions that underpin historical thinking.

Deleuze’s philosophy challenges the past/present divide through difference; pure difference (Al-Saji, 2004; Williams, 2011) or positive difference (Hein, 2016), a mathematical impossibility. Difference is ‘monstrous’ (Deleuze, quoted in Hein, 2016, p. 135), ‘the power of affirming chaos’ (Deleuze, 1969, p. 273), a singularity (everything changes with every new event) and paradoxical. The past, on a Deleuzian account, is difference and without order. Another Deleuzian way to describe this is to say the past is virtual. This means the past is there, it is not nothing, it exists virtually, not as a monolith or a block but as duration (May, 2012, pp. 46–52) but there is only duration or process, and this process is a force of difference: chaos. This makes it distinctly different to the past/present separation that is the assumption for history education because the past exists as duration outside the human mind and, unlike natural or scientific time, the past (and time in general) exists as something.

As well as there being no separation of past/present, there is also no distance at all in Deleuze’s philosophy because ‘immanence … is all there is’ (St. Pierre, 2019, p. 5), meaning there is no transcendence, no universal, no God, no metaphysical baggage, no assumptions, only immanence. It is a flat ontology, rather than a two-world ontology (where there is transcendence/immanence). There can be no distance between past/present or historical actor/history student or anything else because there is only immanence. Thinking back to Deloria’s critique of Western history as inseparable from its Christian beginnings, Deleuze’s philosophy purposely and decidedly breaks free from these roots. Deleuze (1969) is clear that ‘one cannot conserve the self without also holding on to God. The death of God essentially signifies, and essentially entails, the dissolution of the self: God’s tomb is also the tomb of the self’ (p. 304). This does away with the concept of the human. It is therefore the case that Deleuze’s philosophy breaks down the assumptions about time, distance and the human that condition historical thinking.

Deleuze’s radical use of Nietzsche’s eternal return in his philosophy (Leigh, 1978; Ward, 2010) is significant when considering the history classroom because, as Lundy (2008) argues, there is scope to argue that Deleuze transformed Nietzsche’s history for the future into a philosophy for the future. From Nietzsche, comes the idea that the past returns and when the past returns, as a virtual, different force, we perceive it as affect. Seigworth and Gregg (2010) argue there is no single, generalisable theory of affect, but it is about the capacity of a body to affect and be affected and all incarnations of affect are attempts to grasp at the forces of life that are somewhere beyond cognitive knowledge and conscious thought (see also Zembylas, 2007). When the past is perceived as affect, we understand the past as something that acts as a force upon us and not something we can master in our mind, as Collingwood advocates.

Affect is therefore a potential. It ‘is both a process and a product’ (Zembylas, 2007, p. 26, emphasis in original): a process in which a body acts upon another, and a product as the capacity of a body to affect and be affected. This means that a body (human or other) can produce affect and be affected by another body producing an affect. It is not the case that affect can be defined as either cause or effect because affect is a force. As Healy and Mulcahy (2021) state, ‘we are not so much concerned with what pedagogic affect is as what it does and how it might do more’ (p. 555, emphasis in original). If affect is about the body’s capacity to affect and be affected, then in educational settings the interest is in what affect is doing to teachers, learners and other (human and non-human) bodies. In the case of historical affect, this interest extends to how the past is emerging, or how histories are being told/constructed/reconstructed, in the history classroom. Historical affect is in fact an answer to a problem put forward by Kõster et al. (2019) that there is a need in history education to understand the ‘complexity of the classroom’ (p. 12). Paying attention to affect is a way of attuning to this complexity and thinking about how the past returns and affects students in the history classroom.

Whereas with the history-student-in-place, the past was in place, with historical affect, the past is a creative force of difference stretched out at surface level across all parts of the classroom assemblage. Assemblage is another posthuman-informed concept. Bennett (2013) describes assemblages as ‘living, throbbing confederations’ (p. 23). These confederations have ‘physical parts (people, places, objects) … [and] … non-physical parts (actions, theories, emotions) … that are actively linked together through relations’ (Kinchin and Gravett, 2020, p. 5). For historical affect, the history classroom can be thought of as an assemblage. There is no inside/outside to this classroom assemblage because this requires a distance that is not there in Deleuzian philosophy.

Part of the purpose of this article is to provide specific practices informed by concepts for history teachers in the classroom to change their teaching practice, to experiment with. Unlike the history-student-in-place, it is difficult to provide theoretical examples of what teachers might do with affect. My doctoral work (ongoing) uses historical affect as a theoretical orientation for an empirical project about how the past emerged as significant for year 9 (13–14-year-old) students learning about the causes of the First World War and an emerging idea from this project is that everything changes with every new history lesson. Rather than the past vibrating in the mind, as Collingwood theorises, the past vibrates in assemblage, and in classroom settings this means the complexity of the classroom is part of the way histories are told/constructed/reconstructed. An interesting way of approaching historical affect is therefore to think about how teachers might pay attention to affect when it happens.

Stewart (2007), when talking about affect, describes it as an insistent feeling that ‘everyone knows something is not quite right’ (p. 42). This is an attitude that could be described as a ‘visceral prompt’, a ‘hunch’ (Hickey-Moody, 2013, p. 82). If we return to Marker’s story of an Indigenous student in a Canadian history classroom, their experience of the collision of Western and Indigenous history-making practices could be described as a moment of affect because the past, as a virtual force, impinged upon the student’s body and alerted them to something. They had a hunch that something was not quite right. An understanding of historical affect and the way the past emerges in assemblage might, in similar fashion to thinking about the history-student-in-place, provide teachers with a language to talk about different theories of time and/or the past.

Turning to another example in history education literature, Hammond (2001), when discussing teaching about the Holocaust to year 9 students in England, asks, can we ‘really ever tell if pupils have been moved or disturbed on a deeper level?’ (p. 22). Evidence that teaching strategies have been successful in achieving these ‘elusive learning outcomes’ (p. 22) is, in this case, the students’ silence, illustrating a ‘quiet appreciation of [the Holocaust’s] true horror’ (p. 15). This elusive learning outcome could also be discussed as an example of historical affect, a collective moment where affect impinged itself on the classroom assemblage. Again, historical affect provides a language through which to talk about these ineffable moments that happen during history lessons.

Using Deleuzian affect is an interesting move for history education because, following what Kleinberg says about the discipline of history needing to change to be relevant rather than retreat into the past, there is a need to embrace ‘temporal anarchy’ (Kleinberg, 2023, p. 272). Opening to temporal anarchy is not without precedent in history education via ideas related to historical consciousness. What Deleuze’s philosophy encourages is for history educators to pay attention to these moments in their history classrooms. It is a practical way of using what happens in history classrooms to challenge common-sense assumptions, on the part of teachers and students, as it forces us to accept that the way the past emerges is constantly in process and, ultimately, out of our control. The past as affect cannot be subdued or wrangled to conform to certain ‘frameworks’; it is untimely.

There is a sense that perhaps historical affect adherence to chaos plunges us into nothingness. Deleuze (1969) is clear that without the self or transcendence we do not fall into meaninglessness because ‘deeper than any ground is the surface and the skin’ (p. 145), meaning the surface of the real, immanence, the complexity of any given state-of-affairs is more meaningful than any supposed ‘universal’ ideas. For the history classroom, this means that what happens in the classroom is more interesting than any frameworks that might ground it. Turning towards the history classroom in this way there is no choice but to encounter it as a place full of affect because affect ‘cannot but be perceived’ (Massumi, 1995, p. 35, emphasis in original). Ultimately, what this means is that for history educators to use affect in their history classrooms they simply need to pay attention to it.

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Conflicts of interest statement

The author declares no conflicts of interest with this work. All efforts to sufficiently anonymise the author during peer review of this article have been made. The author declares no further conflicts with this article.