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 …
•
Accusation that
Foucault reduced
everything to
‘language’
•
‘Language has been
granted too much
power.’
(Barad, 2008)
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
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
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
Agential realism
• Proposing new onto-epistem-ology
• Fusion of different disciplinary fields
• Posthumanist performativity - 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)
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?
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.
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)
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 coimplication 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 intraaction, how can we account for language??
• More diffractive work needed – speech acts..
Butler and performative contestation…
Deleuze,…??
To be continued…