Becoming carving-bodies in teacher education – affective student experiences

ABSTRACT In this paper I use a feminist corpomaterial lens to examine how students are shaped by and shape their education. The analysis, based on individual and group interviews with twelve student teachers, shows how intersectional somatic norms in teacher education produce situations where students feel forced to educate, inform and take responsibility for others’ learning when it comes to knowledge concerning their own identities and/or social justice issues. The educational assemblages examined impact both the education and participants. I discuss how the created concept of ‘becoming carving-bodies’ might enhance the understanding of student experiences. Becoming carving-bodies entails, for example, acts of caring for oneself and for others. However, it can also drain students’ energy and limit students’ chances of developing and learning. Furthermore, students may need to avoid appearing too emotional in order to be taken seriously.


Introduction
Even though formal access to higher education in Sweden has increased drastically over the last 80 years (Swedish National Agency for Higher Education 2006), students still experience discrimination and exclusion in university settings.Previous studies on minoritized students' experiences in higher education (see below) have highlighted the occurrence of minority stress (Meyer 2003) and micro-aggressions (subtle offenses) (Pierce 1970).In this study I go beyond uncovering the stressors and discrimination that minoritized students face in higher education to examine students' narratives about how norms related to intersectional power dynamics impact them and their education.In doing so, I focus on feminist corpomateriality, which encompasses feminist theories on 'the materiality of bodies and corporeality' (Lykke 2010, 107).
The participants in the present study consist of twelve student teachers from eight Swedish universities who self-identify as breaking norms related to an intersectional power dynamic or had an interest in discussing such norms.The participants quoted in the present paper disrupt, for example, a white-, cis-, hetero-, male-and able-bodied somatic student norm in teacher education.Through the participant narratives (collected through individual and group interviews), I examine how regulatory somatic norms in teacher education produce situations where students are forced, or feel forced, to represent, educate, inform and take responsibility for other's learning processes.This is when it comes to knowledge of their own identities or social justice concerns.I am interested in how these situations impact the students and their education, and in analyzing how these processes unfolds, while placing focus on the production, multiplicity, complexity, and nuances of the activities included.As a result of this, I suggest the concept of 'becoming carving-bodies' as a potential way to frame the student experiences and possibly better understand the complexities of teacher education.
The turn to corpomateriality is a turn towards analytical tools that can draw attention to details and nuances of bodies and materiality that risk being obscured with another analytical focus.Following Haraway's notion of how encounters shape all actors, human and nonhuman (Haraway 1994, 65), as well as Puwar's idea of how bodies 'constitute and are constituted by' spaces (Puwar 2004, 32), I am interested in how teacher education students are shaped by and shape their educations.This is to potentially create an understanding of the complex processes involved in student teachers' experiences of their educations (the notion of teacher education is elaborated in the section 'Theoretical thinking technologies' below).
The aim of this paper is to contribute knowledge on the consequences of power structures in higher education, and teacher education in particular, from a feminist corpomaterial perspective.In doing so, it is guided by the following research questions: . How are student-bodies shaped by teacher education assemblages? .How do student-bodies shape teacher education assemblages?These questions are examined in relation to the here developed concept of becoming carving-bodies in order to further understand this phenomenon.I explain the theoretical concepts included in the research questions below.Paying attention to these processes, through student teacher narratives, can create an understanding of the micro-processes permeating education and in turn offer insights moving towards a more equal, accessible and just education.

Previous research
Previous studies have shown that in university settings, minoritized students are met with prejudice and stereotyping, leading to a stressful learning environment, as well as psychological suffering (Ogunyemi et al. 2020, 108, 114).One example from Goldberg, Kuvalanka, and Black (2019) who examines the experiences of trans students who left college shows that they had put significant amounts of energy into handling cisnormativity, and at times, transphobia, which affected their health and academic performance.For example, the students faced exclusionary processes at their institutions, such as an absence of gender-inclusive bathrooms or difficulties when changing names.Furthermore, the researchers point to examples of trans students having to educate other classmates on trans issues, which caused significant stress (2019,388,390).Similarly, previous research on Black students' strategies for coping with micro-aggressions highlight the drain on students' energy from educating others about their own situatedness (Morales 2021, 73).Additionally, Fries-Britt and Griffin (2007, 520) shows that the energy Black students put into educating others, such as their white peers, on issues related to stereotypes of and ideas about Black people, might reduce the amount of energy left for academic pursuits.
Here I build on the relatively new 'complex, non-linear' (Strom, Mills, and Abrams 2021, 201) approaches to teacher education and teacher learning, framed by concepts such as feminist posthumanism, neo-materialism and feminist new materialism, which have contributed tools that aid in understanding complex educational processes (Strom, Mills, and Abrams 2021).One example where assemblage and affect are combined with Critical Race Theory, is Ohito's (2019) autoethnographic study of a Black teacher, supervising a white pre-service teacher at his internship placements, showing how an ideal of the disembodied teacher, reproduced in teacher education, hinders the student teacher 'to recognize teaching and learning as constituted by the racial markings on the body ' (2019, 262).This work provides an understanding of how comprehending embodiment and racialization as entangled is key for pre-service teachers' preparation to engage in teaching, where they will meet pupils who might be subjected to racism.In 2017, Strom and Martin suggested the concept of 'becoming-teacher' to acknowledge and analyse the non-linear process of teacher learning.They emphasize the relational elements and the spatial and material dimensions of teaching, facilitating an analysis of teacher development as a multifaceted process in which a variety of factors (human and non-human) play a part (2017,8,106,119).Moreover, Adams (2021) builds on the idea of 'becoming-teacher' by analysing three teachers' experiences, finding that the concept allows 'potentially freeing subjectivities to emerge that innovate rather than replicate the practice of teaching and teacher education ' (2021, 403).Whereas Adams claims that the concept of becoming allows an analysis in which the teacher/student relationship is not built on a power relation (2021,401), my aim in using it is to both challenge the teacher/student binary and retain an understanding of power structures as forming the conditions for those relationships.

Theoretical thinking technologies
The present paper is grounded in perspectives of feminist corpomateriality, where bodily, material, and spatial aspects of analysis are in focus.More particularly, the concepts of intersectionality, somatic norms, affect and assemblage are of relevance to frame the analysis.
With the aim of understanding how societal power structures affect participants' experiences, told from their various positions and defining the concept of 'norms', I turn to intersectionality.Hill Collins (2019) defines intersectionality as a way to think about how overarching systems of power intersect and at the same time connect to inequalities, i.e. 'how mutually constructed power relations shape social phenomena ' (2019, 43).With a corpomaterial framework, I consider bodily and spatial aspects of these structures and norms.Regarding somatic norms, Puwar emphasizes how spaces and bodies are connected: Some bodies are deemed as having the right to belong, while others are marked out as trespassers, who are, in accordance with how both spaces and bodies are imagined (politically, historically and conceptually), circumscribed as being 'out of place'.(Puwar 2004, 8) While analysing a reciprocal corpomaterial process of shaping and being shaped, theories of affect might allow for useful tools.Affect is 'what allows the body to be an open system, always in concert with its virtuality, the potential of becoming' (Pellegrini and Puar 2009, 37).In this context, affect is a description of the passage, force, result or intensity of an encounter in which power is decreased or increased, creating new embodied connections (Mulcahy 2012, 11).Furthermore, using the idea of affect combined with an intersectional approach allows a comprehension of affective connections as permeated by power structures and societal hierarchies (Zembylas 2021, 2, 6).In this sense, an affective response to a particular situation might or might not facilitate a student's ability to partake in their education.
I understand the situations, encounters, events and educational programmes I describe here as assemblages.Assemblages are contextualized collections of actorshuman and non-humanthat produce specific practice of teaching.Here, 'elements (humans, nonhumans, actions, or events) are defined by their relations and functions as part of an assemblage, not by any inherent properties they possess' (Strom and Martin 2017, 7).The relationality of assemblages could be understood as related to Karen Barad's (2007) idea of intra-action, where 'intra-action' signifies the mutual constitution of entangled agencies' which 'recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action ' (2007, 33, italics in original).Mulcahy (2012) as well as Strom and Viesca (2021) points out that bringing the notion of assemblage into analysis supports an idea of pedagogy as a collectively distributed activity, a 'multiply produced, co-constructed phenomena' (Strom and Viesca 2021, 218).In other words, understanding educational events as assemblages acknowledges how various human and non-human actors are active in shaping the potentiality of teaching and learning.Furthermore, '[p]ower and affect are part of every educational assemblage, and if we do not attend to both, we will reproduce more of the same' (Strom, Mills, and Abrams 2021, 207).In this sense, somatic norms, which are connected to power relations, are, next to affect, to be understood as parts of assemblages.The assemblages of the teacher education contain, for example, exams; words formulated in emails; student-bodies; teacher-bodies; Facebook groups, course readings, teaching methods, course content, and PowerPoint presentations.The students are both a part of and constitute their education, while simultaneously being shaped by and shaping it.
Above I argue for combining an intersectional perspective with the corpomaterial concepts of bodies, affect and assemblage.Puar explains the combination of attention to affect, assemblage and intersectional perspectives as '[…] the focus here is not on whether there is a crime taking place, nor determining who is at fault, but rather asking, what are the affective conditions necessary for the event-space to unfold?' (Puar 2012, 61).In the present study this reasoning is applied, as mentioned, by examining how students shape and are shaped by their educations, rather than establishing the fact that limiting norms exist.

Becoming carving-bodies
Creating new concepts for scientific analysis is one way for research to effect social change, and it can also make research engaging (Coleman and Ringrose 2013, 8).Coleman and Ringrose elaborate on Deleuze's idea of 'concept' as 'neither a pre-existing theoretical framework into which empirical material is fitted and interpreted, nor a notion that springs from empirical research […].Rather, concepts do things' (Coleman and Ringrose 2013, italics in original).To deepen my analysis of the participants' experiences, I propose the concept of 'becoming carving-bodies'.
Change within assemblages could be defined as 'becomings', a multiple transformation, where '[a] shift from being to becoming, in the context of a theory of teacher learning-practice, means that learning and practices are not static, but are ongoing processes constructed as part of, and in relation to, the situated elements of an assemblage' (Strom and Viesca 2021, 220).Franklin-Phipps (2017, 385) addresses the concept of becoming, interpreted from Deleuze and Guattari (1987), when researching how white schooling spaces affect Black girls, which Franklin-Phipps pairs with the concept of affect to open fluidity in the analysis and avoid getting stuck on fixed ideas of categorizations.
Merriam-Webster defines 'carve' as 'to cut with care or precision'.In this context, the concept of carving might facilitate an understanding of both the activity that participants initiate and the mutual affective processes in play in participants' narratives.I choose the concept of carving to illustrate how this process not only impacts the material being carved but also the body performing the carving.For example, the muscles of the arms and hands might get tired, the neck might get tense, and breathing might be altered.
Here, with the concept of bodies, I am building on the interpretations from feminist and educational research of Spinoza's understanding of bodies as collective multiple entities that shape and are shaped by complex affective connections (Probyn 2004, 37).Grosz argues that Deleuze and Guattari's understanding of the body as 'a discontinuous, nontotalizable series of processes, organs, flows, energies, corporeal substances and incorporeal events, speeds and durations ' (1994, 164) could be productive to feminist theorization when undertaking the challenge of understanding bodies beyond binary ideas of, for example, body and mind.
In this sense, student teachers becoming carving-bodies depends on the multiplicities of educational assemblages, where affective processes are activated through various elements coming together: for example, when course literature, through the choices made by teacher bodies, meets with student-bodies and historical power structures (as in the example of Hanna, presented in the analysis).These encounters create becomings: that is, something is shifting and changing when the student-body, as a multiple entity, is affected and starts carving (for example educating).
To sum up, the notion of becoming carving-bodies offers an understanding of student experiences as complex, interlaced processes and considers embodied and material connections, as well as reciprocal impacts on student-bodies and educational assemblages.With the support of this concept, I analyse how the participants both critique their teacher education and simultaneously express a longing for, and creating of, 'elsewheres' (see Bargetz 2019).Analysing with the concept of 'becoming carving-bodies' includes an intersectional corpomaterial understanding of how, in this case, student teachers both shape and are shaped by their educational programmes.

Methodology
I chose to gather the empirical material through interviews based on my interest in understanding teacher education from students' perspectives and experiences.In line with the overarching corpomaterial approach, I emphasize the arrangements of the meetings with the participants, the materiality of the interviews, the room, the furniture, the spatialityor as in most cases; the virtual spacethe software, the relationship between me as researcher and the participants, and the relationship among participants in the case of group interviews.I focused on the intra-action (Barad 2007) of various actors and how they came together in the encounters.One potential limitation of interviews, from a corpomaterial perspective, is the possible default human focus that emerges from this method.I have sought to address this limitation throughout the project by continually returning my analytical focus to bodies and materiality.In the end, I chose this method over, for example, observational research because my interest in intersectional perspectives led me to ground my analysis in the participants' situated knowledges (Haraway 1988, 590).
In 2020, individual interviews with each of the twelve student teachers took place, as well as two follow-up group interviews, in which six of the students participated.The group interviews were organized as dialogues where I presented excerpts from the individual interviews to the participants, allowed them time for individual reflection and then led a group discussion of the excerpt.Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, ten of the individual interviews took place virtually, as did both of the group interviews.The individual interviews lasted approximately 60-90 min, while the group interviews were roughly two hours each.All interviews were recorded and transcribed.
My analysis was based on both the individual and the group interviews as a whole and used a thematic approach.Thematic analysis is, according to Braun and Clarke, a tool for 'identifying, analyzing and reporting patterns ' (2013, 178), where the researcher performs the role of sculpting the data.In this study I was guided by my chosen theoretical concepts, and hence the method could be considered a theoretical thematic analysis (2013,175).In keeping with the theoretical thematic approach, I chose extracts that illustrated the theme I sought to explore (Braun and Clarke 2013, 249): here, the theme being 'to educate others'.I combined thematic approach, with a focus on pattern-finding, with a rhizomatic mapping.This methodological tool enables an analytical process, highlighting connections through a more tuberous construction, rather than following well-delineated, linear themes (inspired by for example Strom 2014;2015).With the rhizomatic element, connections between codes went beyond static categorizations of themes.The theme of carving student-bodies, elaborated on in this paper, was first singled out in the material from the individual interviews, and then highlighted and deepened in the group interviews, where I was guiding the participants to elaborate further on this topic under the heading of 'to educate others'.An intersectional understanding of the underlying structures of various incidents that were describedacts of for example ableism and racismallowed me to make rhizomatic connections between themes and identify these structures in other parts of the material as well.I present examples of rhizomatic connections when connecting examples where participants referred to, for example, cis-normativity in relation to the extract used to illustrate the theme 'to educate others', with other examples of expressions of the same power structures found in the material, but within other themes.
At the time of the interviews, the participants were all enrolled in one of the lengthier Swedish education programmes (i.e.training to become preschool, elementary school or subject teacher).I embrace the idea of participants' right to self-identification (see Cavanagh 2010; Slater, Jones, and Procter 2018), and therefore the participants chose or approved the used pronouns, terms and pseudonyms.The participants gave informed consent by signing a consent form designed following the recommendations of the Swedish Ethical Review Authority.The project was approved by the Swedish Ethical Review Authority. 1   The affectivity of shaping and being shaped by teacher education Below I elaborate on how the participants shape their education while the education simultaneously shapes student-bodies.I give historical and previous research as a context for the situations the participants shared.I use affect, assemblages, somatic norms and intersectionality as theoretical lenses to interpret the events the participants describe, in an attempt to put into words how the various reported situations unfolded.Moreover, I show what the concept of 'becoming carving-bodies' might do with the analysis.

An assemblage of teaching the teacher
Expressions of racism were not uncommon in participants' descriptions of their academic experiences.In one example, Naima narrated an event in which students make fun of accents while reading pupil texts aloud in class.In another example, Linnea recalled a student who said, in class, that she did not like brown people.Here, I further analyse Hanna's narrative on how she educated a teacher on the use of a racist concept.Hanna describes herself as an Afro-Swedish woman.[…].But then until the year after.Then the teacher said that 'just so you know, we are using this book, it will say this in this book, so that you know'.And also said that a student the year before had brought this up, 'but we will use it because it is useful, but … there are incorrect terms in this book'.And there well that yes I hope somehow that it can change, but it, then it takes a lot for it to do so.We might understand Hanna's reflection and action as based on her own situatedness in the world: that is, as a body with the experience of, as she words it, 'having afro-origin', and hence a body with knowledge of the historical colonial violence inscribed in words and concepts such as the n-word.Hanna is the only one reacting, and she furthermore decides to share her knowledge with the teacher.
In her work on racism in institutional settings, Ahmed shows how a person who brings up issues of racism can be perceived as the one 'bringing it into existence' (Ahmed 2012, 162).In this narrative, the teacher might perceive Hanna as bringing racism into existence; accordingly Hanna then has to deal with the white fragility of the teacher saying, 'I am not a racist'.Zembylas, referring to Giroux, argues that 'racism is an affective construct' (Zembylas 2013, 178) in which private feelings are organized by societal structures.In this case, the affect of racism could be structuring the teacher's emotional response.The narrative demonstrates how the assemblage of a course, i.e. 'the various components of the classroom […] [are] working collectively to shape teaching practices' (Strom 2015, 322), and how this assemblage affects Hanna in the direction of educating in her own education.By understanding the assemblage of the described event as 'patterns of relations' (Puar 2012, 60-61), we might recognize that Hanna is not only affected by the course literature.Instead, the reaction is produced by the assemblage, that is, the combination of relations between the historical knowledge of Hanna's Afro-Swedish-student-body, the teacher's failure to acknowledge the terms used in the book prior to the seminar, the other students' uncritical stance towards the book's content.These actors, placed in the context of the teacher education, shape the assemblage where Hanna is affected towards acting and educating, through emailing the teacher.She is, in this non-linear process, becoming (Strom and Viesca 2021, 220) carving-body, in an aspiration for change and creating space for non-white student-bodies in teacher education.Here, the concept of becoming carving-body captures the complexity of the productive assemblage, Hanna's subsequent actions, and the teacher's responses, in which the teacher changes how she contextualizes the literature in the course.The carving (emailing) seems to create an initial teacher-understanding of how to deal with racist concepts inscribed with colonial heritage in a way that is sensitive to the fact that some students are privileged by racism while others are violated by it, and the inequality this creates in educational settings.Thinking with assemblage enables an understanding of the teacher's potential learning, in this case, as emerging from the encounters with, and relations to, the materiality of the education.Hanna's process of becoming carving-body is activated through the relations between historical structures of racism, the book, the seminar, the other student-bodies and the emails.

The multiplicity of becoming and educating on behalf of others
Many of the participants of the present study testify how cisnormativity saturates their education.They give examples of teachers who use binary language and the absence of trans representation in course content.Katrin, who is a queer, racialized as white, non-binary trans person, shares in her individual interview the story of how a teacher in one of her courses opposed the pronoun they (hen in Swedish).The teacher even put a question in the exam of the course that asked the students to give three reasons why the pronoun hen was not needed.

K:
I mean, I hit the roof.Hehe.
[…] the pronoun hen was kind of my gateway after all to be able to come out as a trans person.So I had that with me, how important it is, to kind of be able to, get the possibility to just feel it, before you kind of take the next step that is actually really scary to take […].That was at least my, eh, experience of it.And, we had wild discussions in the classroom me and her.
[…] And then this came on the exam also then, and that was well, I think that it was her way of showing that it is me who decides.
[…] K: On that, on that answer, or on that question so, kind of, well I gave suicide statistics on trans people, and, wrote that a good reason to stop using the pronoun hen is of course that trans people still commit suicide, so soon they will be nothing but a memory, and then I gave statistics on that.
[…] E: Mm. What, how did kind of other classmates react and eh … other students?K: The most common … yes, the worst is well that the most were on the teacher's side.[..] And there were also those who said they were intersectional feminists and so on, that they, they went straight over to the teacher's side, because it was there that they got the grade, […].So that … and it was well like there that I also realized how lonely I am.
[…] And that, I kind of therefore have to do something about it.The use of hen as a personal pronoun has increased in Sweden since the beginning of the 2000s.At first it was mainly proposed by activists, such as the queer feminist and antiracist magazine Ful (Wojahn 2015, 110, 139).Since 2015, hen has been included in the Swedish Academy Glossary (SAOL), where it is defined as both a gender-neutral pronoun for people in general and a pronoun for those who do not identify as either man or woman (Svenska Akademiens ordlista 2015; Wojahn 2015, 245).While it is important to emphasize that many non-binary trans people and others use hen as a pronoun throughout their lives, Katrin described hen as 'a way in'as a steppingstone to be able to come out as a trans person.In this case, hen is, by the teacher, defined as 'not needed', and the students are required to agree with this definition when writing answers that would be graded.The teacher's actions might be interpreted as an affective response emerging from a historical tradition of societal power structures.Katrin's response, the frustrated educating answer to the exam, and the subsequent statement about needing to do something for other trans people, might be understood as if agency is happening and connections are being drawn.Probyn states that 'an affective response is hugely complex and is in part the result of an embodied history to which and with which the body reacts, including how the classroom is conceived and practiced' (Probyn 2004, 29).The embodied history present in this moment is a history of invisibility, hypervisibility and violence against trans people.The embodied history also includes Katrin's personal history of using the pronoun hen and coming out.Katrin's student-body could in this situation be understood as fragmented in affect (Probyn 2004, 37-38), opening for connections.The connections are grounded in the past but at the same time endeavouring towards the future, towards 'doing something', but also towards the classmates, looking for support, and the teacher, aiming for change.Katrin's answer to the examination question could be understood as the result of Katrin becoming carving-body, capturing how she, a body with historical inscriptions and experiences, is manifesting frustration and expressing a desire for another kind of educationan education she is simultaneously creating by informing of the life situation of trans people.
However, for Katrin herself, the cost of becoming carving-body is taxing.When I asked her how this situation impacted her, she answered: K: Ehm, well, I was not feeling good.And then well some other stuff also happened, and then I went on sick leave.[…] I took a study break for a year, I did.This narrative can be analysed as if the student-body is not a stable entity, 'but a series of processes of becoming' (Grosz 1994, 12).The above-described affective assemblage of the teacher-body, other student-bodies, the words on the paper of the exam, pushes Katrin in the direction of becoming non-student.The consequence of this situation jeopardizes her future as student teacher.The concept of sick leave indicates an illness, but here it might also be of importance to turn to a de-pathologization of negative feelings (Cvetkovich 2012, 5) (hence, not perceiving 'sick leave' as merely related to an individualized idea of being sick) to understand the broader picture of Katrin both becoming carving-body and becoming non-student, as affective processes reinforced by the education itself.As a trans person, Katrin cannot even begin to imagine affinity with, or being mirrored by, the content of her educational programme.She comments, 'I might get to work to represent others' (Katrin, Pos.310).One example of how she takes action on this is that she is starting up an LGBTQ student group at her university, hence, again, carving out space for others.
The solidarity-aspect of taking action, educating, speaking up and informing others is something also highlighted in Alva's narrative.Even though universities have formal regulations to support hard-of-hearing and Deaf students, Alva, who is a Deaf woman, shares, both in the individual and the group interview, how she consequently informs and educates teachers on how to make the education more accessible for Deaf and hard-of-hearing students.Hence, the situatedness of being Deaf therefore also entails becoming carving-body, as Alva indicates, in not only teacher education but also throughout life.Alva emphasizes that knowledge of the needs of Deaf students and pupils, and in particular the right to sign language, is not very well spread in society in general.One reason why she informs and educates others is to make teachers more aware when they meet other hard of hearing or Deaf pupils.

Embodied negotiations and energy loss
Occasionally, the participants experience how lecturers and other students change their behaviour related to the participants actions of informing, educating and taking a stand.But many times, they feel as if they are not heard, or as if they need to repeat the same information over and over again.This, in turn, impacts their energy levels.
Alva explains that much of the treatment she receives from teachers is positive, but that there is a general lack of knowledge about how to meet the needs of Deaf students.Educating others takes some extra energy from her, but she also points out that educating is something she is used to (Alva, Pos.84-92).Alva's experience aligns with research showing that Deaf students come to accept the fact that they are responsible for informing lecturers with little or no knowledge about accessible teaching for Deaf students.Kermit and Holiman (2018) relate this to internalized oppression, where students may adopt the implicit message communicated by lecturers: that Deaf students' learning is not the priority but comes second to hearing students'.
Naimawho describes herself as a working-class, non-white woman and an intersectional feministusually finds herself educating teachers and other students on issues of racism and sexism, among others.In the individual interview Naima says: [W]e put so much energy on that […], yes but as you said, that trying to complete, both when it comes to the teachers, but also the students, that we don't get any space to develop, because we adjust, partly, yes actually our whole person, to that space, that we don't want to take so much space, not be designated as that one that always, that is annoying, that should point out something or, try to make people think differently […].I am thinking so awfully much, like this 'can I say this here now', 'no, or should I say this here now, do I want to, what happens then, hmmm', […], then you are so awfully jaded, every time, you get home, and then it is just, it might have been two or four hours you have been there.(Naima,Pos. 247) Naima's energy is drained by both the effort of educating, as well as the internal negotiations where she has to decide what she can say and when, and what the potential fallout of speaking up might be.She does not get space to develop within the education.This experience aligns with the prementioned research on Black students' experiences (Morales 2021, 73) of how energy that could be put into utilizing the education (learning, reading, participating in discussion) is currently put into educating others, and negotiating with oneself on whether one should or not.The consequence of trying to carve out space in the education, for oneself and for others, is that the actual space for participating in the education might shrink for the engaged students.In this sense, becoming carvingbody might include less participation for students.
Other participants describe similar forms of negotiations taking place, internal conversations where they decide whether to intervene and start explaining or educating in a situation.Ebbaa middle-class bisexual woman, racialized as whiteputs it like this in the group interview: [Y]ou try to save your own energy, […] you try to […] calculate, how will this play out now, if I say like this, then will this one say so, you try to kind of feel the teacher […], will I be met with resistance, or will it be a discussion.(Group interview 1 Pos.82-82) Both Ebba and Naima mention how they adjust and avoid speaking up at times in order to not be perceived as 'that person': i.e. an uncomfortable person that others find annoying.Alva points out a similar experience in the group interview: The use of words such as battling and fighting (which Ebba also employed) acknowledges the bodily experiences of these events as hard, exhausting and depleting.The described affective assemblages making students becoming carving-bodies seem to have draining emotional consequences for several of the participants.
Petra, a middle class heterosexual cis-woman, racialized as white, says in the group interview, that the idea is communicated to her, that when she explains things in class, she feels a pressure to be '[…] good at putting things into words all the time, and explain in [..] kind of exciting way' (Group interview 1 Pos.66).On a similar note, Naima explains in her individual interview how in one situation she tried to hide her feelings.She was attending a lecture where the lecturer was using a stigmatizing concept referring to Romani people.During the break, Naima went to the teacher to tell him what she thought about the use of this concept.As she approached him, she started to shake.Naima herself connects this to a fear that the teacher (or others) would not understand her.Furthermore, she says that she needs to formulate herself '[…] so that one does not show emotions, one shouldn't do that.Because then it becomes that this is just personal, and no facts or anything' (Naima Pos.283).
Here, the shaking body is an embodied affect, where Naima is forced to 'hold back'.As hooks has pointed out, '[w]henever emotional responses erupt, many of us believe our academic purpose has been diminished' (1994,155).These ideas of embodied emotional responses as unprofessional or unacademic might be even more pressing for a nonwhite woman.As Puwar states, men have become associated with reason, and women with their bodies (2004,16), where the body contains expressions of (female) emotionality, and for racialized minorities and women, to acknowledge and 'draw attention to their own bodies is almost to undermine their claim to professionalism ' (2004, 132).Additionally, women racialized as non-white risk being stereotyped as 'the fiery Latina' or 'the angry Black woman'.And trans people are often associated with abnormality or illness.The risk of being stereotyped might intensify when a person already marginalized by such assumptions displays negative feelings publicly (Ahmed 2010, 65-67;Ngai 2005, 7;Malatino 2019, 129).Understanding the participants' experiences as becoming carving-bodies, enables a comprehension of these processes as reciprocal, where students are both impacted by and have an impact on their educations.This concept allows for an understanding of how assemblages of teacher-bodies, other student-bodies and materiality redistribute the energy flow of the assemblages, affecting the participants towards internal negotiation, emotional masking and accommodation in their actions.

Discussion
The analysis has manifested on how student teachers are shaped by as well as shape their educations while contributing knowledge on the consequences of power structures in teacher education, from a feminist corpomaterial perspective.In practice, this showed how somatic norms, related to intersectional power dynamics, create assemblages of affective processes related to the participants educating, informing, completing, and speaking up at their educations, here framed by the notion of becoming carvingbodies.These analyses build on previous research of how minoritized students are impacted by educating others at their institutions (Fries-Britt and Griffin 2007;Goldberg, Kuvalanka, and Black 2019;Morales 2021), as well as studies combining critical perspectives on power with a focus on bodies and materiality (Ohito 2019); they show, in line with previous research, how student teachers' becomings, as parts of teaching-assemblages, could be understood as non-linear processes of change (Adams 2021;Strom and Martin 2017).I am further inspired by previous teacher education research that uses theoretical concepts to 'think with' (see, for example, Ailwood and Ford 2017;Strom and Martin 2017).Analysing with the notion of becoming carving-bodies provides a way of perceiving student bodies and teacher education as composites of multifaceted processes.Acknowledging these affective ranges of becoming might counteract simplistic, static categorizations of students (see Franklin-Phipps 2017) and by extension counteract dualistic hegemonies.
In the case of Hanna, becoming carving-body, means taking responsibility for her own learning process and that of others, allowing us to understand these processes as a series of connections between human and non-human actors.Furthermore, through the new teacher-body-attentiveness, becoming carving-body means shaping the future teacher education.Hanna offers her reactions and advice to the teacher educator and through this creates something else.
Becoming carving-body could, with respect to Alva's and Katrin's experiences, be interpreted as an act of simultaneously carving spaces for oneself and for others.Inspired by Bargetz's idea of new materialism as aspiring for a future of care, commonality and connection (Bargetz 2019, 182), I interpret Katrin's and Alva's becoming carving-bodies as consisting of caring both for themselves and for others in similar situations who either currently share their space at the university or who might enter that educational space in the future.While understanding bodies as always entangled with and in relation to other bodies, caring for oneself and caring for others might be connected.
When Alva's, Naima's, Ebba's and Petra's experiences are considered in the last section of the analysis, their becoming carving-bodies could be understood as simultaneously energy-draining and entailing somatic norms of cautiousness, not appearing overly emotional, and being engaged, private or irrational.Hence, becoming carving-bodies includes requests to 'keep it together' and to be a vocal, calm and clear person who is able to explain things in an interesting way.For Alva, who belittles her own experience of carving, this also entails an affectivity of understanding oneself as 'being used to it', which could be a strategy to balance energy levels.In this way, becoming carvingbody might be an invisible and unconscious process.
Carving, in this sense, is a multiple, affective, bodily and spatial activity related to power dynamics.It is a material process in which the participants' bodily activities mould and shape the materiality of their education, when they simultaneously constitute their education and express a 'longing for elsewhere' (Bargetz 2019), a dissatisfaction with the current state of events and a movement towards something else.Here, the concepts of 'becoming' and 'bodies' enhance an understanding of how this is an ongoing series of processes that encompass the complexity of developments attached to assemblages.The participants carve or aim to carve out space, one piece at a time, and through this they aspire for another kind of education.The concept of becoming carving-bodies might provide an understanding of these activities as open-ended, embodied, emotional, active, persevering, persistent and diligent.At the same time, the participants are affected by the educational assemblages in, for example, the sense that they are bodily impacted, such as shaking; they feel depleted from educating and negotiating; they adjust to others' ideas that they should not take up space and show emotions; and they might even, as in the case of Katrin, feel forced to take sick leave from their education.
This paper shows how knowledge and attentiveness to both critical perspectives of how power structures operate on the macro and micro levels in society, as well as the insights provided by applying corpomaterial approaches, are crucial to understanding student teachers' experiences of their education.In addition, the insights from this article can serve as a foundation in the move towards change by lending nuance to our understanding of the complexity of power structures, bodies and materiality in teacher education, whether for teacher educators, university organizations or policymakers, in the effort to achieve a more equitable and just education.The implications of the paper might be to think differently about teacher education: for example, challenging the neoliberal idea of students as individualized customers (see Strom and Martin 2017).More practical implications might be a call for increased resources for teacher education and training for university personnel in applying intersectional and corpomaterial perspectives.
[T]o speak up, it depends a lot on if you dare, if I feel secure in myself, or if I have the energy to do it.If I think it's worth putting energy into explaining something.It can sometimes be yes and sometimes no.And sometimes you just don't have the energy to fight.(Group interview 2 Pos.94) : [W]e got to read a historian named Eric Hobsbawm, and it was sort of a big part of the course to read […] that whole book.And then it said on maybe just one page in the book, but the only time that Black people were mentioned by that historian, it was with the n-word.[…]Iwas a bit late on reading that particular book,[…].Read it through then a week later and just what the fuck.No one in class had reacted.E: Ok.H: The teacher had not said, done anything.The book was very useful otherwise.Me, like, for me it is like this, you don't have to censor all offensive words.But you […] have to contextualize for students that, like this, this historian is using this concept, because he only uses the n-word to describe Black people.And me then, with afro-origin, got like this.Emailed the teacher and just 'why didn't you say anything, do you think this is okay?'.[with a bright nervous voice] 'Noo, yes but, I have actually, I definitely do not agree, I am not a racist, nananaa'.[with regular voice] 'But why didn't you say something?' [with a bright nervous voice] 'Eeee' H