Culture wars in education news reporting: affective atmospheres of anti-woke discourse

This paper uses affect theory to analyse how Australian education news reporting operates as a technology of political affect. Drawing on 25 education reports by the Education Editor at The Australian, we identify four interrelated techniques through which anti-woke affect is composed: crisis amplification, nostalgic restoration, binarised framing, and outrage over aberrant cases. Together these compose affective atmospheres that render progressive educators, institutions and pedagogies as threats to national order while presenting tradition and common sense as rational and necessary. Rather than simply representing political positions, the reports orient readers’ attention and feeling through threat, urgency, nostalgia and antagonism. Treating the reporter as a relay within a wider affective infrastructure, we show how an anti-woke public can cohere around a term that names no settled referent. This analysis contributes to scholarship on affect, media and education by showing how news reporting assembles political belonging, forecloses alternatives, and shapes reactionary publics.