As unintentional injuries continue to be the leading cause of hospitalization and death for toddlers between the ages of 1 1 and 4 the Centers for Disease Control has argued that child supervision is a key factor in reducing these injuries and fatalities. the ethos of caring watching is embedded in a temporal frame of anticipation and gives rise to an affectsphere of watching and to a parents’ subjectivity as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ supervisors. Third these affective relationships generate seemingly contradictory outcomes wherein children are expected to gain independence and experience injury. The affective qualities PA-824 of watching provide a critique of the individualizing forces of supervision and an analysis of subjectivities generated by gender and class. her son? Given the importance of supervision as a concept and practice in reducing injury and death what are we to make of the above scenario? Talk of ‘super- vision’ as injury prevention had little meaning to mothers in our study. For the mothers in our study ‘watching’ was equivalent to ‘supervision’ (75 per cent 81 it was the word they Rabbit polyclonal to RAB8B. used to describe part of their child-rearing work. We argue that watching as supervision is an affective state. The practice has the capacity to affect bodily motion be affected and to stop movement in the anticipation of something yet unknown. The concept of affect drawn from Spinoza (1959) often refers to a visceral capacity beyond emotion and conscious knowing it is a ‘vital force’ that moves us toward engagement in thought or action but can also leave us suspended (Massumi 2002 Clough 2007 Seigworth and Gregg 2010 Because we are always looking to notice people behaviors oddities and activities in our environment watching is taken-for- granted as something that simply happens for those with sight. Yet from a researcher watching the activities of the park patrons parents occasionally looking or completely PA-824 hovering over their child to parents pretending to watch a child the activity of visual observation can generate affective relationships that produce subjective notions of care safety and ‘good’ supervision. Attending to affect allows us to trace the pathways between what people think they should do their feelings and expectations their bodily practices in their daily endeavors (Hardt 2007 and how these activities become part of the affective labor of women (Hardt 1999 The arguments of this article assume that the affect of watching is not only contained in its anticipation of preventing injury in the present but also in its relationship to expectations for securing an expected future for the child. The emphasis on anticipation as Adams (2009) argue is a PA-824 key feature of an affective state: ‘anticipation is not just a reaction but a way of actively orienting oneself temporally’ (2009 p. 247). This temporal orientation is ultimately political and moral because the future is capitalized as the supervisor either having ‘good supervisory skills’ or presently creating a ‘safe environment’ despite the uncertainty of injury and the child’s potential. Thus this article examines how the affect of watching and anticipation generates a moral and emotional response of being or evoking demonstrations of a mother who cares for her child. There are three main points to our argument. First this article seeks to describe how watching as part of everyday life is an ordinary affect a public practice that is in broad circulation but is also intensely intimate (Stewart 2007 Watching creates what Berlant (2010a) calls an PA-824 affectsphere – an acknowledgement of knowing that connections exist before one even knows what the connections are or their potential impacts (p. 86). There may or may not be a narrative of injury or prevention to be told but rather a host of social relationships that bring with them moralities politics and physical spaces as the relationships course through the practice of watching. Watching your child demonstrates a sharing of affective relationships; that through the practice of watching you have been affected and are potentially affecting others in your encounters. Second we argue that as part PA-824 of the ethos of caring watching creates subjective understandings of good parenting while disciplining others to engage in watching behavior or run the risk of putting the child in danger. These subjectivities are given increasing moral force through the temporal nature of visual observation that not only allows for an anticipation of present risks to the child but also an anticipation of the child’s future as an independent individual. Third these affective relationships hold seemingly.