Foucault News

Done, E.J., Murphy, M., Knowler, H.
University-based professional learning for women teachers and the ‘to care’ or ‘to lead’ dilemma
(2016) Professional Development in Education, 42 (4), pp. 610-627.

DOI: 10.1080/19415257.2014.948690

Abstract
The authors consider the recasting of teaching as leadership with reference to school principals or heads and claim that many women teachers decline such senior roles and instead prioritize an ethics of care in resistance to neoliberal performative educational cultures. A future-orientated poststructuralist version of authenticity or authentic practice derived from Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault and Grosz is introduced that does not risk reinforcing gender stereotypes and a consequent political marginalization of women teachers. Grosz mobilizes the concept of authentic futurity in relation to feminism, but the authors contend that this concept might usefully provide women teachers with a less potentially marginalizing lexicon of resistance, and facilitate localized initiatives informed by an affirmative poststructuralist ethics embracing contingency and relationality. Care is interpreted as supporting virtual potentialities and their actualization. The Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts of ‘becoming-woman’ and ‘becoming-imperceptible’ are explained in relation to ‘active listening’ as a leadership ‘skill’. The importance of university-based professional learning in addressing variations in professional capital and problematizing tired neoliberal discourses concerning leadership, teacher quality and ethics is emphasized throughout the paper. © 2014 International Professional Development Association (IPDA).

Author Keywords
feminist-poststructuralist ethics; leadership; professional learning

Welsh, J.
Governing Academics: The Historical Transformation from Discipline to Control
(2016) International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, pp. 1-24. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1007/s10767-016-9228-4

Abstract
Given the transformation in the government of academic life over recent decades, the article attempts to derive a political critique of the changing psychosocial conditions of academic life via a historical juxtaposition with the nomos of the labour camp in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. The aim is to address the need to think beyond normative disciplinary power, to explore a distinctly capitalist governmentality in relation to Foucault’s genealogy of power and to elaborate the techniques and practices of an emergent ‘meta-disciplinary’ technology of labour control in academia. Therefore, a broadly Foucauldian analysis on these questions will be undertaken, and augmented with Marxian and post-Freudian insights into the role of capital accumulation dynamics, in order to texture the conventional presentation of governmental rationality. The result is a metonymic presentation of the ‘camp’ as a physiological structure of capitalist Modernity, whose imprint can be discerned in numerous social and institutional settings, in this case Academia and the Gulag. From this outcome, insights into the transformation of living and labouring in academia, and the effects on psychological and intellectual well-being stemming from the new complex of control can be derived. The piece concludes with some thoughts on strategies of intellectual survival in academia, on counter-conducted techniques of subjectification and on possible means of resistance in the meta-disciplinary idiom. © 2016 Springer Science+Business Media New York

Author Keywords
Camp; Governmentality; Gulag; Labour; Meta-disciplinary; Society of control; University

Gillies, D. and Mifsud, D. (2016) Policy in transition: The emergence of tackling early school leaving (ESL) as EU policy priority, Journal of Education Policy, 31:4, 443-465,
DOI: 10.1080/02680939.2016.1196393.

Abstract
This paper explores, from a Foucauldian perspective, the emergence and nature of the current EU education policy priority issue of ‘early school leaving’. The paper suggests that a number of problematisations developing from the failure to secure Lisbon Strategy objectives have served to create a much stronger focus on the issue of young people deemed to be leaving education and training early in EU states. In examining how EU policy discourse positions such young people (subjectivation), the paper highlights how this has narrowed to a concern with young people as economic problems and principally positioned as economic units which are required to be more productive. Education and training are understood as investments in human capital and as the principal means to secure the dominant global economic position desired by the EU. The paper suggests, however, that human capital theory has been modified within this approach so that merely being retained in an educational setting is seen as proxy for the investment which education and training represent. This is a weaker policy position than previously espoused but, born of economic crisis, one which addresses related EU political aims of softening youth unemployment figures, dampening associated unrest and reducing risks to social cohesion.

Mifsud, D.
‘Decentralised’ neoliberalism and/or ‘masked’ re-centralisation? The policy to practice trajectory of Maltese school reform through the lens of neoliberalism and Foucault
(2016) Journal of Education Policy, 31 (4), pp. 443-465.

DOI: 10.1080/02680939.2015.1121409

Abstract
The politics of the later part of the twentieth century have been marked by the emergence of neoliberalism, which has consequently impregnated the global policy climate with neoliberal technologies of government. It is within this political scenario of hegemonic neoliberal discourse that I explore one aspect of school reform in Malta – contrived school networking as mandated by the policy document ‘For All Children to Succeed’ (FACT), issued in 2005, by which Maltese primary and secondary state schools were geographically clustered into 10 colleges. I explore the influence of neoliberalism and the presence/absence of its characteristics, namely, State central control, the ‘empowerment’ agenda and the tension between autonomy and accountability. This is done both through policy analysis and policy reception – I carry out a documentary analysis of FACT and present this together with the leaders’ views, collated from interviews and observation, after being subjected to narrative analysis and interpreted through Foucault’s concepts of discourse and governmentality. Despite the gradual unfolding of the decentralization process, there is a very strong presence of State central control. Besides methodological significance for policy scholarship, this article has particular philosophical implications for educational policy, practice and theory within the infrastructure of globalized neoliberal governmentality. © 2015 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
Accountability; discourse; Foucault; governmentality; neoliberalism; policy analysis; school reform