From Subjectification to Subjectivity in Education Policy Research Relationships

Burman, Erica

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-58984-8_4

Cited by 6 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…The analysis here draws on a range of discursive approaches, informed in particular by Foucauldian approaches attending to power/knowledge relations (Ball, 2013; Burman, 2016, 2017a; Foucault, 1983, 2011 [1970]) alongside a feminist intersectional sensibility (Cho et al, 2013; Collins and Bilge, 2016) to the ways gender, class, and racialisation–among other mutually configuring social positions–appear or disappear within the text. Debates on psychologisation and neoliberalism (De Vos et al, 2010; Parker, 2014a,) show how these moderate or interact with claims around societal or, alternatively, individual responsibility or causation.…”

Section: Analytical Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Explicit documentary sources supporting the Manifesto's claims are read alongside wider sociocultural resources forming its conditions of possibility (Foucault, 1983(Foucault, , 2011(Foucault, [1970) while also attending to how such re-presentations perform those very policies advocated. This article, then, interrogates the Manifesto as a key exemplar disclosing wider social-political parameters of social regulation and resistance at play within such policies (Burman, 2017a;Burman et al, 2017). Its apparent displacement in late 2017 (George, 2017; UK Government, 2017)-far from making this analysis redundant-invites interrogation of how apparently different policy orientations coexist or transition to other (old or new) agendas.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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(Re)sourcing the Character and Resilience Manifesto: Suppressions and Slippages of (Re)presentation and Selective Affectivities

Burman

2018

Sociological Research Online

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This article offers a critical discursive reading of the 2014 Character and Resilience Manifesto (hereafter the Manifesto), focusing on the sources and legitimation strategies supporting its claims. As an All Party Parliamentary Group on Social Mobility document, the Manifesto traces both old and new discursive tropes framing policy strategy on education and social care, extending into current political agendas around mental health and well-being and even child safeguarding and securitisation. While the Manifesto’s supposed evidence-based claims draw extensively on a specifically commissioned literature review undertaken by Gutman and Schoon, problems are identified with how this is represented in the Manifesto, including significant omissions and slippages within Gutman and Schoon’s text and between this and the Manifesto. Analysis highlights exaggerations of the claims made in Gutman and Schoon’s review in the Manifesto while important conceptual clarifications (between resilience and coping and the non-generalisability of resilience) are overlooked. Commentators’ cautions over the evaluation and comparability of current programmes also fail to appear. Beyond such asymmetries, a common narrative identified across both texts reformulates emotions away from their ‘soft’, culturally feminised, associations to become ‘hard and tough’, and abstracted from relationship and (sociopolitical) context. Clearly, such gendering of emotions can be situated in relation to wider discourses of feminisation, alongside others de-emphasising classed and racialised inequalities. Overall, the Manifesto performs its own rhetoric, manifesting its own buoyancy to resist critical engagement and further the contemporary moral doctrine of inciting voluntarist optimistic subjects, devoid of attention to class, gender or racialised inequalities.

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Section: Analytical Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

(Re)sourcing the Character and Resilience Manifesto: Suppressions and Slippages of (Re)presentation and Selective Affectivities

Burman

2018

Sociological Research Online

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“…'Becoming psychological' through the psychological gaze is also about ensuring people constantly 'feel' the need to work upon and improve the self in specific ways (Burman, 2017). The gaze here is focused on identifying and then working on the 'sad' subjectivities of unemployed, helping to reform them into "feeling good" about themselves and boosting 'self-esteem'.…”

Section: Sadmentioning

confidence: 99%

Becoming 'unemployed': Mapping and (re)constituting subjectivity within jobactive

Stambe¹

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This project utilised a Foucauldian-inspired critical psychology perspective to rethink how it is possible to study unemployment. The study drew on critical psychology, governmentality studies and critical methodology to reconsider how research can reconnect the economic, political, institutional, material and affective factors that coordinate to produce a particular form of unemployment. This PhD examined the problem of research methods in psychology and governmentality studies, particularly in relation to how to research unemployment. By drawing on key insights of this literature, and returning to first principles of a Foucauldian-inspired poststructuralist study, this research utilised a quasiethnographic design to trace how elements are held together in policy and everyday practices in an employment service provider in South East Queensland. The study was motivated to examine the conditions of possibility for unemployed subjectivities outside of the dominant psychological and policy explanations. Here, the research attended to the broader processes, materialities, and the daily social practices that (re)produce unemployment as a certain type of problem, and in doing so, also (re)produce unemployment as a certain object. In an attempt to maintain (meta)theoretical coherence, this study also attended to the way unemployment was produced as a certain type of problem through the enactment of research methods. The objective was to research unemployment and unemployed subjectivity in ways that do not (re)produce 'psycomplexified' understandings of unemployment which are often taken as 'self-evident' in employment services as well as research. In short, this PhD explored how it is possible to not think about unemployment as we have so far (Fryer, 2019). This study extended on the latest methodological debates in governmentality studies by attuning research focus to the how methods, especially the interview, are implicated in the power-knowledge nexus. In governmentality studies, quasi-ethnographic methods are presented as innovative ways to hold together macro and micro governing practices. This study used a critical reading of policy, interviews and observations in one Employment Services provider in South East Queensland to highlight how the unemployed are produced as such through the practices used to govern them. Namely, I discuss how unemployment is produced as a problem of the unemployed who require reformation into an affective subject ready to withstand the ebbs and flows of the market.

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“…Foucault's concepts of discourses and subjectivities have helped me to construct RQ 1. Policies and curriculum documents may shape the lecturers' thinking in ways that lead them to either adopt or resist the dominant discourses (see Ball, 2015a;Burman, 2017). Alfaruqi's (1989 and Al Attas' (1993) concept of Islamisation of Knowledge (IK) also lies behind the construction of RQ1 and the subsequent analysis of data in particular in the examination of the curriculum and policy document of the IU.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The goal of this chapter is to employ Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA) to see how different regimes of truth and subjects such as lecturers, students, ELT Method, and World English(es) are constructed by national policies and university curriculum documents. The purpose of this FDA is to investigate the effect of curriculum and policy texts (Walshaw, 2007) on the subjects themselves, as will be further addressed in Chapter Six (see Ball, 2015a;Burman, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Situating English Language Teaching in Indonesia within a Critical, Global Dialogue of Theories: A Case Study of Teaching Argumentative Writing and Cross-Cultural Understanding Courses

Wahyudi¹

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<p>This dissertation aims to critically examine lecturers’ discursive statements in interviews and English Language Teaching (ELT) classroom practices in Indonesia, primarily in the teaching of Argumentative Writing (AW) and Cross Cultural Understanding (CCU) courses at two universities (Multi-Religious and Islamic University) in Java. This study uses poststructural and interdisciplinary lenses: Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA); Connell’s (2007) ideas of Southern Theory, Kumaravadivelu’s (2006b) Post Method Pedagogy, and Al-Faruqi’s (1989) and Al-Attas’ (1993) Islamisation of knowledge, as well as the critiques of these theories and other postcolonial voices. The critical examination of ELT practices through poststructural and interdisciplinary lenses in an Indonesian context is urgent, as teaching practices at present are subjected by competing regimes of ‘truth’ including Western, neoliberal, Southern, and Islamic discourses. The data were collected from curriculum policy documents, semi structured interviews, stimulated recalls and classroom observations from seven lecturers. The data were then transcribed and analysed primarily using FDA and also discussed in relation to other interdisciplinary theories, the critiques of these theories, and other relevant postcolonial literatures. Within the analysis there is a particular focus on how ELT Methods and World Englishes are enacted, negotiated, or resisted by lecturers. This study strongly suggests that Western discourses have dominated other regimes of truth, as evidenced in the privileging of process and genre approaches, global Northern structures of AW essay, as well as an emphasis on American and British English in AW courses and the privileging of those two dominant English varieties in CCU courses in most contexts. The study also suggests there are tensions between religious discourse and emerging neoliberal discourses in national policies and university documents and some lecturers’ language. Southern discourses seem to have been marginalised and seem to be only resorted to support the use of Western discourses in the classroom teaching. The use of FDA and interdisciplinary lenses, along with their critiques and other postcolonial voices, are underexplored in current studies of ELT practices. Therefore, this study extends scholarship in the ELT field and makes a case for exposing lecturers to counter discourses, such as Southern and Islamic discourses, in order for them to be able to critically negotiate or appropriate Western and neoliberal discourses in their teaching practices.</p>

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From Subjectification to Subjectivity in Education Policy Research Relationships

Cited by 6 publications

References 43 publications

(Re)sourcing the Character and Resilience Manifesto: Suppressions and Slippages of (Re)presentation and Selective Affectivities

(Re)sourcing the Character and Resilience Manifesto: Suppressions and Slippages of (Re)presentation and Selective Affectivities

Becoming 'unemployed': Mapping and (re)constituting subjectivity within jobactive

Situating English Language Teaching in Indonesia within a Critical, Global Dialogue of Theories: A Case Study of Teaching Argumentative Writing and Cross-Cultural Understanding Courses

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From Subjectification to Subjectivity in Education Policy Research Relationships

Cited by 6 publications

References 43 publications

(Re)sourcing the Character and Resilience Manifesto: Suppressions and Slippages of (Re)presentation and Selective Affectivities

(Re)sourcing the Character and Resilience Manifesto: Suppressions and Slippages of (Re)presentation and Selective Affectivities

Becoming 'unemployed': Mapping and (re)constituting subjectivity within ​​​​​​​jobactive

Situating English Language Teaching in Indonesia within a Critical, Global Dialogue of Theories: A Case Study of Teaching Argumentative Writing and Cross-Cultural Understanding Courses

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Becoming 'unemployed': Mapping and (re)constituting subjectivity within jobactive