Progress, Public Health, and Power: Foucault and the Homemakers' Clubs of Saskatchewan^*

Abstract

From 1911 to 1979, the Homemakers' Clubs of Saskatchewan mobilized and monitored extensive study and action in the field of public health. This article explores how these clubs exhorted women to strive for progress, and encouraged women to internalize such striving as fundamental to their own identities. The techniques used included encouraging commitment to shared goals, making such goals personal, structuring action, requiring women to report their thoughts and actions, rewarding certain behaviors, and linking those behaviors with emotionally compelling causes. Rooted in a Foucauldian conceptual framework, this article contributes to the sociological understanding of subject formation and governance.

Diversity in Midwifery Care: Working toward Social Justice

“…Health‐care settings are political spaces that enact and reproduce relations of power. Although often presented as sites of caregiving, treatment, and cure, they are of course, also, “scenes in which subjects are being created so as to fit into relations of power” (Frank and Jones :180; also see McLean and Rollwagen ). Our interviews with midwives revealed a variety of ways in which these clinicians work to unsettle and challenge status quo relationships of power in their everyday work.…”

Education for Freedom? “Living Room Learning” and the Liberal Arts of Government

“…The design of the present study reflects my previous research on adult education among the Inuit (McLean, 1997) and among rural homemakers (McLean & Rollwagen, 2008), as well as research by historical sociologists of education such as Curtis (1988), Meadmore (1993), andPaterson (1988). Such work has demonstrated that a full understanding of the social and psychological impact of education must move beyond the study of ideological pronouncements, public policies, and even the substantive content of curricula and lessons, to consider the structure of the pedagogical, evaluative, and administrative practices that shape the experience of those who participate in educational interactions.…”

“…The work of Michel Foucault has been integral to the efforts of many people to think critically about freedom and government. Overviews of the relevance of Foucault’s work to adult education have been provided by Brookfield (2001), Fejes (2008), and McLean (1996), and numerous studies have examined adult education from a foucauldian perspective (English & Irving, 2008; Fejes & Nicoll, 2008; McLean & Rollwagen, 2008).…”

No “haughty and inaccessible ivory tower”: Laval University and Adult Education, 1930–1965

“…In English-speaking Canada, the earliest, sustained university extension initiatives der, 1997;MacAulay, 2002;Welton, 2013) and universities in Western Canada and Montreal (Cormack, 1981;McLean, 2007aMcLean, , 2007bMcLean, , 2007cMcLean, , 2008McLean, , 2009McLean, , 2011McLean & Damer, 2012;McLean & Rollwagen, 2008, 2010Welton, 2003). Notably, there has been little published about Canadian university extension work focused on urban or francophone settings, or about the adult education work of universities who did not establish centralized extension units.…”