Foucault News

Ja’afar, Z., Md. Yusof, N., Ibrahim, N.
Revisioning history: A deconstructionist reading of a learner’s multimodal text, ‘Revenge’
(2016) Asian Social Science, 12 (8), pp. 64-73.

DOI: 10.5539/ass.v12n8p64

Abstract
Recent interest in multimodality recognizes the integration of text and image in meaning-making as representing reality. It has also been argued that with the use of digital communication, the meanings of visual and verbal data can be easily manipulated rendering them unreliable. As such, a close and critical reading of the text is required to discover what is hidden, absent, or inconsistent with it. In a deconstruction of a multimodal digital composition of a poem that involves revisioning of history, this paper privileges the absences of cultural and historical texts to signify socio-political issues. An eclectic use of theoretical concepts on meaning-making, especially those proposed by Kress and van Leeuwen, Foucault and Baudrillard, constructs the discussion of the analysis. The digital poem entitled ‘Revenge’ is deconstructed to further discover such absence in the text. The findings reveal that language and images are used by the learner as a source of power to negotiate the boundaries of identity. It has also been discovered that the message in rhetoric and visuals complement each other to support the process of meaning-making. © 2016, Canadian Center of Science and Education. All rights reserved.

Author Keywords
Absence; Deconstruction; Multimodal digital poem; Reality; Revisioning history; Socio-political

Powell, D.
Governing the (un)healthy child-consumer in the age of the childhood obesity crisis
(2016) Sport, Education and Society, pp. 1-14. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1080/13573322.2016.1192530

Abstract
In recent years, multinational food and drink corporations and their marketing practices have been blamed for the global childhood obesity ‘crisis’. Unsurprisingly, these corporations have been quick to refute these claims and now position themselves as ‘part of the solution’ to childhood obesity. In this paper, I examine how and why corporations fund, devise and/or implement ‘healthy lifestyles education’ programmes in schools. By using a critical ethnographic research approach alongside Foucault’s notion of governmentality, I interrogate what those with the ‘will to govern’ (such as corporations) wanted to happen (e.g. fight obesity, change marketing practices and increase consumption), but also what actually happened when these corporatised education programmes met their intended targets in three New Zealand primary schools. I critically examine these programmes by focusing on the ways in which three technologies of consumption – product placement, transforming children into marketers and sponsorship – attempt to govern children to be lifelong consumers of the corporate brand image and their allegedly ‘healthy’ corporate products. Although students were not necessarily naïve and easily coerced into becoming mindless consumers of corporate products, students and their teachers readily accepted that sponsorship, product placement and marketing in schools were normal, natural, necessary and mostly harmless. Healthy lifestyles education programmes represent a new ‘brand’ of health, health education and corporation. The child-citizen is governed to become the child-consumer. Corporations’ anxieties about being blamed for childhood obesity are fused with technologies of ‘healthy consumption’: the consumption of corporate products, corporate philanthropy, the corporate brand and corporate ‘education’. © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

Author Keywords
childhood obesity; consumers; critical ethnography; food and drink industry; Foucault; governmentality; Health and physical education; marketing; sponsorship; technologies of consumption

Paatela-Nieminen, M., Itkonen, T., Talib, M.-T.
Reconstructing Imagined Finnishness: The Case of Art Education through the Concept of Place
(2016) International Journal of Art and Design Education, 35 (2), pp. 229-242.

DOI: 10.1111/jade.12057

Abstract
This multidisciplinary article presents a methodology, a research project and selected outcomes from an environmental art education course for teacher students. The course is part of an art education minor at the University of Helsinki, Department of Teacher Education. The students were asked to construct their place through an intertextual art method that provided them the means to study their place open-endedly as a space of plural cultural meanings. Applying the results from their intertextual process, they reconstructed their place artistically. The end product was a personal work of art that included traces of their chosen places, and created a new meaning for it. The outcome is a visual space of compacted meanings from different places. Places contain history and memories important to identity construction. The results show that the intertextual reading extends the students’ concept of place as a space for relational and plural cultural meanings. Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, as it applies to otherness of places and spaces, was used alongside the intertextual art method. © 2016 The Authors. iJADE © 2016 NSEAD/John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Author Keywords
art education; Finnishness; heteretopia; identity; intertextual art method; local/global culture; place

Damien Page, The surveillance of teachers and the simulation of teaching, Journal Of Education Policy Vol. 32 , Iss. 1, 2017
https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2016.1209566

Full text

Abstract
Just as surveillance in general has become more sophisticated, penetrative and ubiquitous, so has the surveillance of teachers. Enacted through an assemblage of strategies such as learning walks, parental networks, student voice and management information systems, the surveillance of teachers has proliferated as a means of managing the risks of school life, driven forward by neoliberal notions of quality and competition. However, where once the surveillance of teachers was panoptic, a means of detecting the truth of teaching behind fabrications, this article argues that surveillance within schools has become a simulation in Baudrillard’s terms, using models and codes such as the Teachers’ Standards and the Schools Inspection Handbook as predictors of future outcomes, simulating practice as a means of managing risk. And if surveillance in schools has become a simulation, then so perhaps has teaching itself, moving beyond a preoccupation with an essentialist truth of teaching to the hyperreality of normalised visibility and the simulation of teaching. This article argues that surveillance – including external agencies such as Ofsted – no longer exists to find the truth of teaching, the surveillance of teachers exists only to test the accuracy of the models and codes upon which the simulation is based.

Keywords: Surveillance of teachers, education policy, teacher standards, simulation and simulacra, teacher authenticity, critical analysis