Foucault and Education: retrospect and prospect
29 January 2014,
ICOSS, University of Sheffield
Conference website
Update September 2025. Conference site as it is archived on the Wayback Machine
Conference Program
10:00am REGISTRATION AND COFFEE
10:30am INTRODUCTION:
Ansgar Allen, University of Sheffield,
Carrie Paechter, Goldsmiths, University of London
10:45am KEYNOTE:
‘The Use and Abuse of Michel Foucault in Educational Studies’
Stephen Ball, Institute of Education, University of London
11:45am COFFEE
12:00am DISCUSSION PAPERS (2 parallel streams, 2 papers per stream, 35 min per paper)
CONFERENCE ROOM BOARDROOM GLASS ROOM
‘Not reform but resistance: Foucault, education and ontology’
Nick Peim, University of Birmingham
‘A genealogy of the struggle over school education in Chile: Allende’s last months’
Paula Mena, University of London
‘Biopower and Border Control: The Banning of the Hijab in French Schools’
Emily Berckley, University of Leeds,
‘Educational places: mobilising Foucault’s heterotopoanalysis for 21st century education’
Philip Tonner, University of Oxford
‘From a disciplinary school to a school of control: Foucault and education after Deleuze’
Samuel Matuszewski, University of Nottingham
‘Moving away from Bourdieu and reproduction: Foucault, resistance and gender in secondary school’
Ali Meghji, University of Cambridge
1:10pm LUNCH
2:00pm KEYNOTE:
‘Knowing Foucault, Knowing You’
Erica Burman, School of Education, University of Manchester
3:00pm COFFEE
3:15pm DISCUSSION PAPERS (3 parallel streams, 3 papers per stream, 35 min per paper)
CONFERENCE ROOM BOARDROOM GLASS ROOM
‘Post-Foucault, Posthuman: The case of dis/ability’
Dan Goodley, University of Sheffield
‘Foucault and the educational field: the French case as mirror’
Luca Paltrinieri, Collège Internationale de Philosophie, Paris
‘Disruptive technologies in higher education: innovation and the episteme’
Michael Flavin, King’s College London
‘Removing the ‘bias’ towards inclusion: the on-going relevance of disciplinarity in relation to the Coalition Government’s approach to Special Educational Needs’
Jane McKay, University of Chester
‘Substituting ‘Lemon and Milk’: The peculiar legacy of Foucault to the 21st century university’
Mujadad Zaman, University of Cambridge
‘Toward a New Concept of Education’
Iuliia Reshetnikova, Slovenian Academy of Sciences & Arts.
‘What does Foucault have to say about an individual with autism?’
Hui-Fen Wu, University of Sheffield
‘Foucault: relevant since 1784’
Peter Harrison, University of Sheffield
5:00pm PANEL DISCUSSION:
Stephen Ball, Erica Burman, Carrie Paechter, Ansgar Allen
5.30pm CONFERENCE CLOSES
5.45pm RETIRE TO THE RED DEER
(just round the corner at 18 Pitt St)
A note for presenters: Individual papers are allocated 35 minutes. We encourage presenters to leave time for discussion. Please could you let the chair of your session know in advance how much time you want to leave. We would be grateful if you would also act as chair for a presentation in your session.
Keynotes:
‘The Use and Abuse of Michel Foucault in Educational Studies’
Professor Stephen J Ball
Institute of Education, University of London
S.Ball@ioe.ac.uk
ABSTRACT
Michel Foucault is a stimulating, frustrating and elusive scholar. He systematically evaded the sort of categories and identities that we are used to using in the western academic tradition.
I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning … My field is the history of thought. Man is a thinking being. (25 October 1982)
Indeed his work is defined by his attempts to find a position outside of the human sciences from which to see the social world and to see the human sciences themselves as a part of that social world – a space that is both liberating and perhaps impossible. His work is extensive, complex and often difficult and it is not of a piece, although he did make claims about the integrating principles of his work, which rest on the topics and questions that preoccupied him rather than the ideas he brought to bear. In 1983 Foucault described his work of the previous 20 years as having been ‘to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human being are made subjects’ (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983 p. 208). Prado (1995 p. 56) however, cautions that ‘Foucault’s efforts to present his work as more homogenous, coherent, and focused than it was should be judiciously assessed’. His work has a developmental trajectory in the sense of building, moving, changing overtime, with distinctive points of transition, although also some lines of thought were abandoned and dead ends reached. In part in this presentation I want to talk about the style of Foucault’s scholarship and about his anti-essentialism – no truth, no freedom, no subject – and about what happens if we take Foucault really seriously.
Educational studies has taken up Foucault’s work primarily in two respects – the work on power and discipline drawing on Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality Volume 1, and the work of governmentality, mainly drawn from secondary sources, in what is called the British school of governmentality studies – Rose, Burchell and others. Most of this latter originates in his 1978-79 College de France Lectures The Birth of Biopolitics. Peters and Besley (Peters and Besley 2007 p. 3) say ‘in the field of education scholars and theorists deform him … they abuse him in countless ways; they unmake and remake him; they twist and turn him and his words…’ or as Marshall (Marshall 1989 p. 98) puts it: ‘it is far from clear that the theoretical radicalness of the work has been grasped’. The earlier work on discourse and the later work on truth are much less often attended to, although many claim to use Foucauldian discourse analysis, and attempts at genealogical work are few and far between. I want to suggest some ways in which discourse, truth and genealogy may be of use to us.
Dreyfus, H. L. and P. Rabinow (1983). Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Marshall, J. (1989). “Foucault and education.” Australian Journal of Education 2(1): 97-111.
Peters, M. and T. Besley, Eds. (2007). Why Foucault? New Directions in Educational Research. New York, Peter Lang.
Prado, C. G. (1995). Starting with Foucault: An Introduction to Genealogy. Boulder: Co, Westview Press.
BIOGRAPHY
Stephen J Ball is Karl Mannheim Professor of the Sociology of Education at the Institute of Education, University of London since 2001 (and previously taught at Sussex University 1975-1985 and King’s College London 1985-2001) and Editor of the Journal of Education Policy since 1985. His work is in ‘policy sociology’ and he has conducted a series of 12 ESRC funded studies which focus on issues of social class and policy and has received research funding also from Leverhulme, Joseph Rowntree, Education International, British Academy, Department for Health, Cancer Relief Macmillan and others.
Recent books include: Global Education Inc. (Routledge 2012); How Schools do Policy (with Meg Maguire and Annette Braun) (Routledge 2012); Networks, New Governance and Education (with Carolina Junemann) (Policy Press 2012), Foucault, Power and Education (Routledge 2012), The Education Debate (2nd Edition 2013). He is author of 19 books, mainly in the field of education policy analysis, and more than 150 journal articles. His work has been translated into nine languages. He has given numerous keynote and public lectures around the world (most recently the Vere Foster Lecture in Dublin), and has been interviewed on radio and television many times in relation to educational issues.
He has an honorary doctorate from Turku University, Finland, and the University of Leicester, and is visiting professor at the University of San Andres, Argentina. He was elected as an Academician of Social Science in 2000 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 2006, the first sociologist of education to be so recognised.
‘Knowing Foucault, Knowing You’
Professor Erica Burman
Manchester Institute of Education, University of Manchester
Erica.Burman@manchester.ac.uk
ABSTRACT
This paper evaluates the continuing contemporary relevance of Foucauldian analyses for critical educational and social research practice. Framed around examples drawn from everyday cultural and educational practices, I argue that current intensifications of psychologisation under neoliberal capitalism not only produce and constrain increasingly activated and responsibilised educational subjects but do so via engaging particular versions of feminisation and racialization. Like Hacking’s ‘looping effect’, Foucauldian ideas may themselves now figure within prevailing technologies of subjectivity but this means we need more, as well as more than, Foucault.
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