  We explain a new approach to the representation theory of the partition
category based on a reformulation of the definition of the Jucys-Murphy
elements introduced originally by Halverson and Ram and developed further by
Enyang. Our reformulation involves a new graphical monoidal category, the
affine partition category, which is defined here as a certain monoidal
subcategory of Khovanov's Heisenberg category. We use the Jucys-Murphy elements
to construct some special projective functors, then apply these functors to
give self-contained proofs of results of Comes and Ostrik on blocks of
Deligne's category Rep(S_t).
