Foucault News

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

Bazzul, J.
The ‘subject of ethics’ and educational research OR Ethics or politics? Yes please!
(2017) Educational Philosophy and Theory, pp. 1-11. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2016.1270184

Abstract
This paper outlines a theoretical context for research into ‘the subject of ethics’ in terms of how students come to see themselves as self-reflective actors. I maintain that the ‘subject of ethics’, or ethical subjectivity, has been overlooked as a necessary aspect of creating politically transformative spaces in education. At the heart of egalitarian politics lies a fundamental tension between the equality of voices (or ways of being) and the notion that one way of being or one voice may be deemed more legitimate than another; which in turn puts the equality of beings into question. Building from Michel Foucault’s work regarding ethics and subjectivity, I suggest that a ‘subject of ethics’ can be viewed, in part, as a series of relations of self that form the horizon upon which a subject comes to work on themselves relative to moral codes and power relations. Ethical relations of self can be a useful concept for those interested in educational research that furthers social and ecological justice. In the conclusion of this paper I also discuss the limitations of locating ethics entirely within a constituted human subject. © 2017 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

Author Keywords
anthropology; ethics; Foucault; justice; politics; qualitative research; subjectivity

Chang-Kredl, S., Wilkie, G.
What is it like to be a child? Childhood subjectivity and teacher memories as heterotopia
(2016) Curriculum Inquiry, 46 (3), pp. 308-320.

DOI: 10.1080/03626784.2016.1168262

Abstract
Foucault’s notion of heterotopia offers a novel way to understand teachers’ conceptualizations of childhood, in juxtaposing adult memories of childhood with their present context of teaching children. Memory writing prompts were given to 41 early childhood teachers, and the resulting written narratives were analyzed as heterotopic spaces. The study follows two trajectories. First, in terms of teacher development, we examine how the construct of heterotopia can help teachers and teacher educators understand the impact of memories on their current assumptions about childhood. Second, we argue that examining the teacher’s internal experiences through heterotopia can contribute to theoretical thinking about childhood. The study’s findings suggest that it is a considerable but meaningful challenge to examine our subjective experience of childhood in relation to our understanding of children today. This process may be useful in assisting the teacher to disentangle the imagined, remembered, conceptualized and actual child, and to interrupt our tendencies to project our own experiences onto others. Perhaps, there is a childhood that exists in heterotopic spaces, not quite the subjective or psychical child, but not quite the external child either. This may be the liminal childhood that the early childhood teacher, preoccupied as (s)he is with childhood, experiences. Theorizing teachers’ subjectivities as they are linked to their memories of childhood is a complex endeavour, and Foucault’s heterotopia provides rich images of strange juxtaposition that may be useful in thinking about childhood and teaching. © 2016 the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

Author Keywords
Curriculum studies; heterotopia; memory; narrative methods; student and teacher experiences; teacher development

Hull, G.
Equitable relief as a relay between juridical and biopower: the case of school desegregation
(2016) Continental Philosophy Review, pp. 1-24. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1007/s11007-016-9372-6

Abstract
The present paper looks at the intersection of juridical and biopower in the U.S. Supreme Court’s school desegregation cases. These cases generally deploy “equitable relief” as a relay between the juridicially-specified injury of segregation and the biopolitical mandates of integration, allowing broad-based biopolitical remedies for juridically identified problems. This strategy enabled the Courts to negotiate between these forms of power. The analysis here thus suggests the continued relevance of juridical power, and also the limits of Foucault’s own analysis, which suggested that biopower tended to fully colonize juridical power by way of norms. © 2016 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

Author Keywords
Biopower; Desegregation; Education; Foucault; Juridical power; Racism

Fejes, A.
The confessing academic and living the present otherwise: Appraisal interviews and logbooks in academia
(2016) European Educational Research Journal, 15 (4), pp. 395-409.

DOI: 10.1177/1474904116636637

Abstract
In this paper, drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, I argue that academics are enmeshed in power relations in which confession operates, both on and through academics. Drawing on Foucault’s genealogy of confession, I illustrate how academics are not only invited to reflect on performance, faults, temptations and desires in their work and private life, but as teachers they mobilise the same kind of technology in relation to students. These power relations are connected to wider changes in society, where discourses on New Public Management have become all pervasive in organising and governing public institutions. The examples of the use of appraisal interviews and logbooks as governing techniques illustrate how government currently operates through the freedom of the individual. The paper ends with a discussion on how books of life could introduce a different relation of the self to the self in academia, and thus provide opportunities to live the present otherwise. © The Author(s) 2016.

Author Keywords
academia; appraisal interviews; Confession; Foucault; higher education; logbooks