Making room for ‘feelings’: what's at stake for the theory of practice architectures?

This paper responds to Thelin, K. [2024. What about feelings? Elaboration on and consideration of the theoretical construct of emotions in practice and practice architectures. International Journal of Leadership in Education, 1–14] intriguing proposal that the theory of practice architectures (hereafter TPA) would benefit from an augmentation to its oft-repeated analytical mantra of ‘sayings, doings and relatings’ by adding the notion of feelings. Thelin's work is motivated by the increasing realisation amongst adherents that TPA has thus far been relatively silent on how emotions mediate practice. As such, there are ongoing efforts to think through the place of emotions in ‘the theory’. This paper shares these concerns and takes a genealogical look at TPA to argue that simply adding a dimensionality of emotion to cater for the contingencies of emotion and/or affect is insufficient to recuperate this lacuna in TPA. Instead, we offer an alternative route to theorising affect, emotions and feelings that can expand TPA's canon without introducing incoherence yet simultaneously unsettles the assumption that the social can be exhaustively understood in practice-only terms.