Affective capture in digital school spaces and the modulation of student subjectivities

•Surveillance in school is moving from disciplinary power to encompass modulatory power structures.•As such, student behaviour is now being managed by manipulating their affective capacities through online platforms.•Student subjectivities are being constructed as reductive digital categories.•Modulatory power is creating a closer connection between school and advertising.•Although students are being managed through modulatory power, they are also engaging in acts of resistance.

Educational environments are increasingly using online technologies that aim to identify and manage students through affect. These forms of monitoring can be understood as a method of approaching students through the lens of positive psychology. Clearly, the relationship between schools, technology, and affect is not straightforward or benign. Yet, despite recent attention to the educational benefits of social and emotional intelligence, most educational discussions pay little critical attention to affect in terms of external interests regulating the behaviours and dispositions of students. This paper examines how student subjectivities are managed by the modulation of affect through online platforms in/for school. It is separated into three broad sections that capture the themes emerging as central to the relations between student populations and techniques of affectivity: sensation, intensity, and value. The paper concludes with a consideration of the implications that arise from how online technologies are used to mediate student subjectivities in secondary school.