Poverty as atmosphere: finding creativity within challenging behaviour

This conceptual paper rethinks challenging behaviours relate to poverty enacted by young people in educational settings. We theorise poverty through Deleuze and Guattari's immanent philosophy and specifically their schizoanalysis, and concepts of the Body-without-Ogans (BwO) (full, empty and cancerous). Accordingly, poverty is viewed as a productive atmosphere of accumulative affects related to everyday experiences of scarcity of food, care, warmth and financial precarity. These affects are registered on the BwO creating a specific kind of atmosphere that gradually thickens, often spawning repeating patterns of behaviours that young people habitually enact to shield themselves from pain. The methodology involved a series of arts-based workshops in an alternative high school in England to first attune to and then support specific young people's creative expression. We describe five episodes derived from a schizoanalysis of fieldwork events: Earth's atmosphere; Atmosphere of place and poverty; Max takes it to the edge; Sol is held in space and, Dean's Ontological Collapse. They illustrate how negative desire/energy shaped by atmospheres of poverty, (cancerous and empty BwO) were transformed into intense and engaged connections (full BwO) facilitated through art materials. Artful praxis enabled the energy that propels repeating patterns of behaviour to generate creative connections, experiences and becomings.