From Assessing Knowledge to Assessing Performance
This chapter proposes that GTA programs are part of a larger trend in which medical education expanded its control over the professional socialization of medical students through an increasing array of knowledges and practices—or call “technologies of affect”—that seek to measure, harness, and manage the affective capacities of medical students. As the affective economies of healthcare shifted, new forms of governance via expert knowledges and technologies were necessary in order to prepare physicians-in-the-making for a changing landscape of clinical practice in which emotion figures centrally. Thus, this chapter also shows that reconfiguration of expertise and affect via research on medical education in this way is both highly evident in the GTA session and explains its durability and relevance.