Foucault News

Caroline Bath, Conceptualising listening to young children as an ethic of care in early childhood education and care (2013) Children and Society, 27 (5), pp. 361-371.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1099-0860.2011.00407.x

Abstract
This paper focuses on recent discourses and practices of listening to young children, in order to highlight listening as an ethical practice in early childhood education and care settings. The paper asks how discourses of listening should be viewed in theoretical terms and explores the work of a diverse range of authors who define autonomy and rights issues as relational. Central to the paper is a consideration of feminist critique of Foucault’s ethics of care argument. To contextualise this, the paper discusses examples of recent research in the field of listening to young children and highlights issues facing the status of the early years workforce. In summary, the paper contends that an ethical view of listening can bring adults and children together in democratic care practices which challenge conceptions of childhood and reconnect ideas of care and education.

Author Keywords
Childcare; Early years; Education; Ethics; Participation

Shira Wolosky, Foucault at School: Discipline, Education and Agency in Harry Potter, Children’s Literature in Education, 45, 285–297 (2014)
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-013-9215-6

Abstract
The formative power of children’s literature is both great and suspicious. As a resource of socialization, the construction and experience of children’s literature can be seen as modes of disciplinary coercion such as Michel Foucault has anatomized. Harry Potter, as a “craze” phenomenon, has attracted particular controversy due to its intense commercialization and dissemination, raising questions about its socializing roles. Here I argue that Harry Potter itself addresses, represents, and reflects on socializing disciplines as both psychological and socio-historical processes, with special focus on and implications for educational scenes and methods. Discipline is shown to be inevitable and necessary, but not only in the coercive ways of Foucault. It is no less important for constructing the self in positive senses. Hogwarts, as the central site of action, becomes a stage for a wide variety of educational models and disciplinary modes and goals. These range from Dolores Umbridge, whose classroom is coercively disciplinary in full Foucauldian sense; through Snape’s abuses of power, Albus Dumbledore’s modelling of educational and moral values, and Harry’s own role as student-teacher exemplifying educational principles which Jerome Bruner and others have called a “community of learning.” This variety of educational experiences explores the possibilities through which discipline emerges not only as coercive, but also as formative in ways that are maturing, strengthening, and rewarding: a possibility with strong implications for questions of socialization and creativity in general. Harry Potter concludes with a reconstitution of self and society, in a way that endorses discipline even as it suspects its coercive abuses. This becomes not only a personal project but an explicitly social and political one, requiring both critique and investment in culture. Socialization then is shown to be a process of formation that is not merely coercive but creative.

Shira Wolosky received her Ph.D. from Princeton University and was Associate Professor of English at Yale before moving to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her books include Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War, Language Mysticism, Poetry and Public Discourse, The Riddles of Harry Potter and Feminist Theory across Disciplines. Her awards include a Guggenheim, ACLS and Fulbright Fellowship, a Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies of Princeton University and a Drue Heinz Visiting Professorship at Oxford University.