1 / 10

Materializing Foucault?

Diversity, Democratisation and Difference: Theories and Methodologies. Materializing Foucault?. Dr Barbara Crossouard Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research (CHEER), University of Sussex, UK. http://www.sussex.ac.uk/education/cheer. Two Provocations ….

marc
Download Presentation

Materializing Foucault?

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Diversity, Democratisation and Difference: Theories and Methodologies Materializing Foucault? Dr Barbara Crossouard Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research (CHEER), University of Sussex, UK http://www.sussex.ac.uk/education/cheer

  2. Two Provocations … Accusation that Foucault reduced everything to ‘language’ ‘Language has been granted too much power.’ (Barad, 2008)

  3. Reducing everything to ‘language’? • Suggests persistence of understandings of language within representational epistemologies • F’s oeuvre providing extensive critique of the episteme of modernity • Problematisation of relations of ‘words’ and ‘things’ • Power/knowledge • Disciplinary power: incorporated in the body • Mathematicisation of empirical knowledge – including ‘establishing a mathematics of qualitative orders’ (F, 2002:63) • Fields of knowledge and disciplinary practices through which the individual became knowable QUA individual

  4. Governing the Academy • Higher education as an economic good • Research knowledge expected to serve economic needs • Audit culture – metric regimes spanning local -- global • Representational epistemologies = tyranny of transparency • Affective regime that denies affect but produces high affective burden • Complicity with the game!! • Not docile bodies, but self actualizing, auditable individuals

  5. Qualitative research….where are the ruins? • Crisis of representation?? • Patti Lather - ‘Working the ruins’ of older understandings of research? • MacLure (2013) – what damage was actually done? • Turns gaze back on practices of qualitative research - to find little change

  6. Agential realism • Proposing new onto-epistem-ology • Fusion of different disciplinary fields • Posthumanistperformativity - new language for analysing the social and its materialities – phenomena, apparatus, boundary -making through ‘agential cuts’ • Critique of representational epistemologies • Claim that the material has been neglected / language over-privileged ‘Language has been granted too much power. [..] Language matters. Discourse matters. There is an important sense in which the only thing that does not seem to matter any more is matter. ’ (Barad, 2003:801)

  7. Provoked… • Barad (1998) analysis of ultrasound technology puts the technology centre stage, as the apparatus which makes an agential cut • Queries extent Foucault recognised ‘inseparability of the observing apparatus and observed’ (1998: 99) • Resistance to Butler’s (1993) ‘it’s a girl’ – privileging language over the material. • Research into doctoral viva voce • What could be seen as equivalent to the sonogram as ‘apparatus’? • How is the material and how is language implicated in this event?

  8. R: I I couldn’t deal with written exams because I’d get so het up about them and it’s something that I’d never managed to cope with […] So I was put at my ease - they were doing nothing to engender these nerves, but I just didn’t quite calm down because it was just so enormous for me. Do you see what I mean? BC: Yes I think I do – so what you’re saying is that it wasn’t the examiners themselves that provoked this nervousness, it was your sense of the occasion. R: Absolutely not. Yes it was purely the sense of occasion […] this whole idea of this tradition of a viva, this history behind it, thousands of people have done this before, and that’s not comforting, you’re now part of that history, that tradition - and I found that quite awe-inspiring.

  9. The examination A meticulous observation of detail, and at the same time a political awareness of these small things, for the control and use of men, emerge through the classical age bearing with them a whole set of techniques, a whole corpus of methods and knowledge, descriptions, plans and data. And from such trifles [..] the man of modern humanism is born. (Foucault 1977: 142)

  10. Some non-conclusions… • Thank you to Karen Barad for the provocation… • Also for a new language which encourages attention to the materialities of the production of our research knowledges and our co-implication in this • For an onto-epistemology that resists the individualisation of contemporary neoliberal regimes • For leaving me with questions about the extent that the materialities of language seem intrinsic to intra-action and how this becomes meaningful • In the material-discursive mangle of intra-action, how can we account for language?? • More diffractive work needed – speech acts.. Butler and performative contestation… Deleuze,…?? To be continued…

More Related