Editor: To provide extra material for my Master of Education coursework students, I will be posting up quite a bit of material in the education area over the next month. These posts will be scheduled at a different time of day from other posts. The Foucault and education posts will all be tagged in the education category on the blog.
As always, please send on any Foucault related news from any arena for posting on Foucault News.
Waslander, S., Hooge, E., Drewes, T.
Steering Dynamics in the Dutch Education System
(2016) European Journal of Education, 51 (4), pp. 478-494.
DOI: 10.1111/ejed.12188
Abstract
Based on detailed empirical analyses, we paint a layered picture of emerging steering dynamics. Inspired by Foucault, we put the focus on roles stakeholders define both for themselves and others, how they give sense to policy, how they work together in policy elaboration and implementation, and the subtle and sometimes deceitful function of soft policy instruments such as information, communication, support and research. The policy to stimulate ‘schools as learning organisations’ in secondary education in the Netherlands is used as a case study. The Dutch education system is one of the most decentralised en complex systems in the world. While central Government aims to turn schools into learning organisations, it has no formal responsibility nor any direct means of control in this area. The study draws information from (1) relevant government reports, policy documents and websites and (2) semi-structured interviews with key actors. Data analysis consisted of data reduction through coding and memoing, data displays in tables and networks, and drawing and verifying conclusions. In the ground layer of the steering picture, we reconstruct how ‘schools as learning organisations’ came to be a topic for Government policy. The next layer identifies 20 (networks of) actors who play a substantial role in steering. The mutual relationships between the main actors are manifold, while funding appears to be an important means for the Ministry to position actors in a steering network. A wide array of steering modes was identified. The last step in our analysis adds a dynamic element to the picture, as we look at how different actors interact, starting with how actors envision their own steering roles and the role of others. The non-complementary role definitions that were identified in the documents, were confirmed in the interviews. Our results illustrate, in Foucault’s terminology, different processes of responsibilisation and normalisation. Above all, the study illustrates that the theoretical framework provides a promising starting point for the empirical study of steering dynamics in complex education systems. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Author Keywords
Education system; Foucault; learning organisation; new public governance; the Netherlands
Wendy Brown, In the account of Neoliberalism. 2016
European Graduate School Video Lectures
Published on Jan 25, 2017
http://www.egs.edu Wendy Brown, Professor of Philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS. Saas-Fee Switzerland. August 13 2016.
Wendy Brown is Professor of Political Science at the University of California Berkeley. Her research interests include the history of political and social theory, Continental philosophy, and critical theory, together with the examination of contemporary capitalism. In her research into the problems that plague contemporary capitalism and neoliberalism, she employs theoretical works of Michel Foucault, Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Frankfurt school.
In 1983, Wendy Brown received her doctoral degree from Princetown University. She subsequently taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz and also at Williams College. Since 1999, she has been teaching at the University of California, Berkeley.
Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (2005) consists of seven articles which were all written for some particular occasion. Brown emphasises this trait of her book and claims that “such occasions mimic, in certain ways, the experience of the political realm: one is challenged to think here, now, about a problem that is set and framed by someone else, and to do so before a particular audience or in dialogue with others not of one’s own choosing.” Every essay in this book begins with a particular problem: what is the relationship between love, loyalty, and dissent in contemporary American political life?; how did neoliberal rationality become a form of governmentality?; what are the main problems of women’s studies programs?, etc. According to Brown, the aim of these essays is not to produce definitive answers to the given questions but “to critically interrogate the framing and naming practices, challenge the dogmas (including those of the Left and of feminism), and discern the constitutive powers shaping the problem at hand.”
In Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (2006), Wendy Brown subverts the usual and widely accepted conception that tolerance is one of the most remarkable achievements of the modern Western world. She argues that tolerance cannot be perceived as a complete opposite to violence, but that can also be used to justify violence. In order to substantiate this thesis, Brown associates tolerance with figures like George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Samuel Huntington, Susan Okin, Michael Ignatieff, Bernard Lewis, and Seyla Benhabib and claims that “tolerance as a political practice is always conferred by the dominant, it is always a certain expression of domination even as it offers protection or incorporation to the less powerful.”
Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (2010) examines the revival of wall-building in the contemporary world. She shows that the function of these walls is ultimately problematic because they cannot stop crimes, migration, or smuggling, cannot play a defensive role in the case of a war like they did in the past, and they cannot do anything against potential terrorist attacks. However, even if they cannot stop all these threats, walls still have an important symbolic function which Brown explores in her book.
Her most recent work Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (2015) uses Michel Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics to analyze the hollowing and evisceration of democracy under neoliberal rationality. Brown describes neoliberalism as a furtive attack on the very foundation of democracy. She treats “neoliberalism as a governing rationality through which everything is “economized” and in a very specific way: human beings become market actors and nothing but, every field of activity is seen as a market, and every entity (whether public or private, whether person, business, or state) is governed as a firm. Importantly, this is not merely a matter of extending commodification and monetization everywhere, as in the old Marxist depiction of capital’s transformation of everyday life. Neoliberalism construes even non-wealth generating spheres—such as learning, dating, or exercising—in market terms, submits them to market metrics, and governs them with market techniques and practices. Above all, it casts people as human capital who must constantly tend to their own present and future value.” To be saved, democracy again needs to become not only the object of theoretical rethinking but also of political struggle.
Bori, P., Petanović, J.
Constructing the entrepreneurial-self: How Catalan textbooks present the neoliberal worker to their students
(2016) Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 14 (3), pp. 154-174.
Abstract
Since the year 2000 and the massive arrival of immigrants to the Spanish region of Catalonia, the Catalan language has vastly augmented its number of students. In the meantime, the Catalan government continues to apply educational and language policies from the EU related to the new public management and knowledge economy. Neoliberal technologies and policy initiatives include creating a responsible, self-managing, self-enterprising worker. By drawing on Foucault’s concept of governmentality, this paper analyses work related units in six series of textbooks for teaching Catalan to adults taking into account the governmental rationality of neoliberalism. The study concludes that Catalan language textbooks may function as instruments of subject formation promoting the self-management of a future Catalan worker and helping to create enterprising individuals. © 2016, Institute for Education Policy Studies. All Right Reserved.
Author Keywords
Catalan language; Entrepreneurship; Governmentality; Neoliberalism; Textbooks
A Foucauldian Take on Border Violence and Mediterranean Acts of Escape, Maurice Stierl, 04/25/16
Audio of lecture
Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Law and Society, Townsend Center for the Humanities: Course Thread on Law and the Humanities, and the Institute of European Studies.
The unauthorized mass-movements of 2015, when more than a million people crossed maritime borders into European space, demonstrated more clearly than ever before that Europe’s deterrence politics had failed. The necropolitical obstacle course created by its border regime proved unable to prevent these disobedient mobilities. What we witness today, while often termed a “migrant or refugee crisis,” is in fact a crisis of the European project. Current processes of internal re-bordering along sovereign nation-state lines and logics significantly undermine Europe’s supposed post-national ethos and trans-border imaginary. In this talk Stierl explores “Europe in crisis” and relates to some of the experiences he made through his own activist involvement in “border struggles,” as part of the activist collective ‘WatchTheMed Alarm Phone’ that has created a “hotline” for people in distress at sea. Advocating the freedom of movement and seeking to democratize maritime borderzones, the collective has created a presence in spaces seemingly reserved for sovereign state actors and has facilitated the safe arrival of thousands of travelers. In this talk he also draws from three “moments” in Michel Foucault’s writing and thought that help us think conceptually through the relationship between (migrations’) excess and (borders’) control and prompt us to reflect on the ways in which “Mediterranean acts of escape” transform the European socio-political landscape and community.
Nussbaum, A.M.
“I am the Author and Must Take Full Responsibility”: Abraham Verghese, Physicians as the Storytellers of the Body, and the Renewal of Medicine
(2016) Journal of Medical Humanities, 37 (4), pp. 389-399.
DOI: 10.1007/s10912-014-9312-6
Abstract
Abraham Verghese proposes to renew medicine by training physicians to read the right texts—literary fiction and patients’ bodies—with skilled attention. Analyzing Verghese’s proposal with reference to Foucault’s idea of the “clinical gaze,” I find that Verghese conceives of patients as texts that only physicians can read, meaning that physicians become the storytellers of the bodies, lives, and deaths of the people they meet as patients. I conclude that Verghese’s project is unsustainable and alternatively propose thinking analogically of physicians as ship captains who maintain therapeutic distance to reopen interpretative spaces for communities outside of medicine. © 2014, Springer Science+Business Media New York.
Author Keywords
Abraham Verghese; Literature and medicine; Medical education; Michel Foucault; Physician/patient communication
Andrew Wilkins, Rescaling the local: multi-academy trusts, private monopoly and statecraft in England, Journal Of Educational Administration And History, Published online: 01 Feb 2017
10.1080/00220620.2017.1284769
Abstract
For the past six years successive UK governments in England have introduced reforms intended to usher in less aggregated, top-down, bureaucratically overloaded models of service delivery. Yet the ‘hollowing out’ of local government has not resulted in less bureaucracy on the ground or less regulation from above, nor has it diminished hierarchy as an organising principle of education governance. Monopolies and monopolistic practices dominated by powerful bureaucracies and professional groups persist, albeit realised through the involvement of new actors and organisations from business and philanthropy. In this paper I adopt a governmentality perspective to explore the political significance of large multi-academy trusts (MATs) – private sponsors contracted by central government to run publicly funded schools – to the generation of new scalar hierarchies and accountability infrastructures that assist in bringing the gaze of government to bear upon the actions of schools that are otherwise less visible under local government management.
KEYWORDS: Neoliberalism, marketisation, private monopoly, academies, governmentality, statecraft
Patricio Lepe-Carrión, Predicación, verdad y sujeto colonial: genealogías de la obediencia en contexto mapuche, Chasqui. Revista Latinoamericana de Comunicación N.º 132, agosto -noviembre 2016 (Sección Ensayo, pp. 245-260)
Resumen
El presente texto examina las formas de predicación jesuita, contenidas en el esquema de subjetividad cristiana, y que entran en juego con las estrategias de conquista, expansión y explotación en el reino de Chile durante el siglo XVII. Se propone una lectura del pasado colonial, de sus relaciones de poder imbricadas en las ‘tecnologías del yo’, en el marco de un proyecto Fondecyt de Iniciación (nº11140804) que tiene como objeto de análisis los efectos de despolitización que tiene la Educación Intercultural durante las últimas décadas de postdictadura. El eje que orienta este trabajo está en pensar cómo el núcleo de la subjetividad mapuche (weichafe) ha sido durante siglos el foco de interés en las políticas o prácticas de dominación imperial.
Palabras clave
gubernamentalidad; predicación cristiana; tecnologías del yo; sujeto colonial; mapuche
Patricio Lepe-Carrión, Intercultural Education in Chile: Colonial Subjectivity and Ethno-Governmental Rationality, SISYPHUS Journal of Education volume 3, issue 3, 2015, pp. 60-87
Abstract
This article is the product of research conducted in the frame of FONDECYT Research Initiation project nº 11140804, entitled “Education and Cultural Racism: Evidence and Discursivities in Agents Who Implement the Bilingual Intercultural Education Program (PEIB)”, jointly conducted by the University of Chile’s Department of Pedagogical Studies and the University of Sao Paulo’s Faculty of Education Postdoctoral Program. The text explores the problem of “cultural racism” in intercultural education programs developed for Mapuche indigenous children in Chile. In order to do so, we first examine the production of subjectivity during the colonial era and later the emergence of ethnic issues in the current government agenda. Our evidence and analysis display how the degradation of indigenous peoples is objectified in the Chilean State’s discursive practices, perpetuating social and economic inequality through the production and administration of identities, as well as efficiently controlling ethnic conflicts.
Keywords
Racism, Governmentality, Intercultural education, Mapuche people, Chile
Announcing the
International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs
In December 2016, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded a three-and-a-half year, $1,525,000 grant to the University of California, Berkeley and $1,020,000 to Northwestern University to establish the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs (ICCTP). The task of this international consortium is to document, connect, and support the various programs and projects that now represent critical theory across the globe, especially in light of contemporary global challenges to thinking about democracy, violence, memory, and the critical tasks of the university. The Consortium rests on the view that critical theory is not only an important interdisciplinary field of research and teaching within the university, but crucially informs the university as an institution charged with the task of safeguarding and promoting critical thought. The Consortium is co-directed by Professor Judith Butler (UC Berkeley) and Professor Penelope Deutscher (Northwestern University).
As a special project of the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley, the Consortium maintains a multi-lingual website, criticaltheoryconsortium.org, that provides information on critical theory programs and initiatives throughout the world, seeking to connect projects that have for too long remained unknown to one another. The website features an interactive map and a growing directory of nearly 300 critical theory programs, centers, and projects from throughout the world, including programs in Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, the United States, Europe and its peripheries, the Balkans as well as the Middle East, Russia, and East Asia. The website links to journals and publishing series, archives, organizations and networks, summer institutes, fellowships and potential scholarly affiliations. The platform is currently searchable in English, Spanish, and French.
The Consortium will also publish a book series, Critical South, with Polity Press supporting translations from Spanish, Portuguese, and French, as well as an online journal called Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory, and will convene biannual conferences focused on contemporary critical issues of global concern. The Consortium also invites international scholars to engage with faculty and students through UC Berkeley’s Program in Critical Theory. Under the direction of Northwestern University, a curricular initiative of the Consortium, Critical Theory in the Global South, will develop new teaching curricula reflective of critical theory’s global reach in conjunction with an associated program of international faculty and graduate student exchange and a translation project. It will allow the establishment of new international cooperative relations among critical theory scholars through cross-university projects linking institutions in Latin America, North America, and South Africa. The Consortium also supports the University of California, Irvine Libraries Critical Theory Archive Research Resources Development Project, which will expand the Archive to more clearly reflect the global reach and shape of the field.
With all of these initiatives, the Consortium seeks to establish the new global contours of critical theory today, supporting critical thought both inside and outside the university in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, and seeking collaborative ways to become more responsive to pressing global challenges. The Consortium undertakes both to preserve and to galvanize the study of critical theory in its myriad global forms, underscoring the crucial place of critical thought in the university and in its various public engagements and worldly obligations. The Consortium also aims to incite new forms of collaborative research among a wide range of regions and languages, connecting the disconnected and foregrounding the periphery in an effort to respond critically to contemporary global challenges. These include evaluative metrics and forms of censorship that devalue or suppress the critical and transformative potential of thought itself.
For more information, please contact: info.ictconsortium@berkeley.edu
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