Foucault and
Educational
Research
Pauline Whelan
whelan.pauline@gmail.com
Leeds Metropolitan University
June 7th, 2014
Overview of the Day
• Intro to Foucault
• Workshop in pairs applying Foucauldian
Approach
• Workshop in pairs identifying how Foucault’s
work might be helpful to your own research
project
• Large group discussion
Overview of the Talk
• Who was Foucault?
• Key works and ideas
• Examples from Education Research
• Theoretical and Political Utility of Foucault
• Challenges of ‘applying’ Foucault
• Criticisms
Intro to Foucault
• 1926 – 1984
• Poststructuralist
• Political activist
• Professor of History of
Systems of Thought at
College de France from
1970
Key Works
• Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of
Reason (1964)
• The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception
(1963)
• The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
(1966)
• Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975)
• Archaeology of Knowledge (1969)
• History of Sexuality, Vol 1 : An Introduction (1976)
• History of Sexuality, Vol 2: The Use of Pleasure (1984)
• History of Sexuality, Vol 3: The Care of the Self (1984)
Key Themes
"It seems to me that the real political task in a society such as
ours is to criticize the working of institutions which appear to be
both neutral and independent; to criticise them in such a manner
that the political violence which has always exercised itself
obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight
them" (Michel Foucault, 1974, 171).
• Critiques of madness (History of Madness; The Birth of the Clinic)
• Explorations of knowledge production over historical time periods
(The Order of Things; The Archaeology of Knowledge),
• Analysis of modern prison systems and disciplinary societies
(Discipline and Punish)
• Sexuality (History of Sexuality)
Key Ideas and Approaches
“My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is
dangerous, which is not exactly the same a bad. If everything is
dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads
not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism. I think that the
ethico-political choice we have to make every day is to determine
which is the main danger. ”
•
•
•
•
‘Perpetual critique’
There is no external position of certainty
Everything is historically and socially contingent
Power/Knowledge: No knowledge that can be separated from the
effects of power; no power that doesn’t depend upon or mobilise a
set of knowledges
• Sees the role of the intellectual as a ‘destroyer of evidence’
(Foucault, quoted in Peters and Besley, 2007, p. 159)
• Two key political impulses (Frow, 2014)
• 1. Nietzschean ‘romanticism’, transgression, breaking of norms
• 2. Critic of liberalism and modernity
• History can make things more fragile
Rejection of Key Humanist
Assumptions
• Language is transparent
• There is a stable, coherent self
• Reason and its ‘science’ – philosophy – can provide an
objective, reliable, and universal foundation of knowledge
• That knowledge acquired from the right use of reason will be
true
• That by grounding claims to authority in reason, the conflicts
between truth, knowledge, and power can be overcome
• That freedom consists of obedience to laws that conform to
the necessary results of the right use of reason
(adapted from Flax, 1990a, pp. 41–42, in St. Pierre, 1996)
Poststructuralism in
educational research?
[T]he poststructuralist educational researcher is less ready to
assume the ‘reality’ of certain social or cultural forms, the
official line of thought, the neutrality of certain methods, or the
dynamics of educational research and policy in terms of a
transparent, consistent, or coherent process . . . Finally,
poststructuralist researchers are developing a better
philosophical sense of what is at stake when one comes to do
research, gaining a healthy skepticism for what counts as
‘knowledge’, ‘education’, ‘research’, and ‘science’, and
questioning the apparent naturalness of these categories (Peters
& Burbules, 2004, p. 100).
Power
‘Where there is power, there is resistance’
•
•
•
•
Dispersed rather than top-down or centralised
Does not belong to individuals
Power exists in social relations
Power is always present
• “‘We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of
power in negative terms: it ‘excludes, ’it ‘ represses,’ it ‘
censors, ’ it ‘ abstracts, ’ it ‘ masks, ’ it ‘ conceals ’.’’ (Foucault,
1984, p.298)
• Rather, power is productive; it ‘produces reality’
Disciplinary Power - 1
• key shift from state power to disciplinary power (shift
from physical punishment dispensed by sovereign power
to dispersed and insidious form of social surveillance and
self-regulation/’normalisation’)
• 3 key modes of control within modern disciplinary
society: surveillance, normalization, examination
• Control - from others’ knowledge (often
‘expert’/specialist knowledges) but also individuals
internalise norms of scientific discourses and then selfpolice and self-regulate themselves (they are therefore
both objects and subjects of disciplines)
The Panopticon
“Hence, the major effect of
the Panopticon : to induce in
the inmate a state of
conscious and permanent
visibility that assures the
automatic functioning of
power. So to arrange things
that the surveillance is
permanent in its effects, even
if it is discontinuous in its
action;…in short, that the
inmates should be caught up
in a power situation of which
they are themselves the
bearers. (Foucault, 1979)”
Disciplinary Power - Example
• "The NRC report (2002) strongly recommends that educational
research be organized into a “cohesive community with selfregulating norms” (p. 22). Such a research community will
“acquire the values of the scientific community,” will “foster
objectivity through enforcement of the rules of its ‘form of
life,’” and will train scientists in “certain habits of mind” that
will be policed by the “watchfulness of the community as a
whole” (p. 53).
• The deployment of disciplinary power (St Pierre, 2002)
• “results in one group controlling the production of reason,
science, knowledge, and researchers themselves. No doubt,
certain theorists will be disciplined right out of this “cohesive”
community of scientists, as they have been disciplined right
out of the NRC report.“ (St. Pierre, 2002)
Theories of Discourse
• Poststructural theories of discourse, like poststructural
theories of language, allow us to understand how
knowledge, truth, and subjects are produced in language
and cultural practice as well as how they might be
reconfigured. (St. Pierre, 2000)
• ‘Discursive Practices’ highlights
• a) multiplicity of readings and interpretations of
discourse
• b) the inseparability of the textual and the material
Discourse - 1
“provides a privileged entry into the poststructural mode of analysis
because it is the organized and regulated, as well as the regulating and
constituting, functions of language that it studies: its aim is to describe
the surface linkages between power, knowledge, institutions,
intellectuals, the control of populations, and the modern state as
these intersect in the functions of systems of thought “
(Bove, 1990)
“Foucault’s theory of discourse illustrates how language gathers itself
together according to socially constructed rules and regularities that
allow certain statements to be made and not others.‘‘ It enables us to
understand how what is said fits into a network that has its own
history and conditions of existence ’’ (Barrett, 1991, p. 126). Even more
important, the rules of discourse allow certain people to be subjects of
statements and others to be objects. Who gets to speak? Who is
spoken? Discourse can never be just linguistic since it organizes a way
of thinking into a way of acting in the world. “
(St. Pierre, 1996, p.485)
Discourse - 2
• Changed the way we think about language and how it
operates in the production of the world
• The questions are no longer ‘what is discourse?’ or ‘what does
discourse mean?’
BUT
• How does discourse function?
• How is it produced and regulated?
• What are its social effects?
(Bove, 1990 in St. Pierre, 1996)
• Discourse is productive and can therefore be resisted and
reconfigured
• Allows us to understand how knowledge, truth, and subjects
are produced in language and cultural practice
Discourse and Truth
“The important thing here, I believe, is that truth isn’t outside
power, or lacking in power. ... Truth is a thing of this world : it is
produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it
induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of
truth, its ‘ general politics ’ of truth : that is, the types of
discourse which it accepts and makes function as true ; the
mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true
and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned ;
the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition
of truth ; the status of those who are charged with saying what
counts as true. “ (Foucault, 1977, p. 131)
• Truth can therefore be destabilized; it is always bound to
discourse and is always historically and socially-contingent
Archaeology: 1
• Three key elements:
• Historical conditions
• Assumptions
• Power relations
• “The purpose of archaeology is to study the history of statements
(knowledge), to describe the ‘‘systems of rules, and their
transformations, which make different kinds of statements possible’’
(Davidson, 1986)
• Archaeology aims to write a 'history of the present'.
• Power is heavily implicated in knowledge production (What can be
said? Who can say it?)
• Not about dates, facts, causal explanations, narratives of linear
progress
• Presents a disruptive analysis
• Emphasises fragility and precarity
• Focused on the relation between truth and knowledge
Archaeology - 2
• how language has been used to construct binaries, hierarchies,
categories, tables, grids, and complex classification schemes that are
said to erect an innate, intrinsic order in the world (Archaeology of
the Human Sciences)
• Structures are ‘‘ discovered’’, named and slotted into existing and
ever-increasing classificatory schemes.
• Example from feminist Foucauldian research: Since women are
usually on the wrong side of binaries and at the bottom of
hierarchies, feminists have troubled these structures that often
brutalize women. For instance, feminists believe that the first term
in binaries such as culture/nature, mind/body, rational/irrational,
subject/object” is male and privileged and the second term is female
and disadvantaged. In order to preserve their distinctions, binaries
are more flexible than one might think and operate in subtle ways.
(St. Pierre, 2002)
Genealogy - 1
• Some slippage between archaeology and genealogy as modes of
historical critique
• Archaeology (truth & knowledge); Genealogy (truth & power)
• What is accepted as true or false within certain knowledges?
• ‘Regimes of truth’:
Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘ general politics ’ of truth : that
is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true ;
the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true
and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned ; the
techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth ;
the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.
(Foucault, 1980, p. 131)
• Goal is to identify ‘regimes of truth’ to show how they produce
certain knowledges within particular contexts
Genealogy - 2
• ‘Effective history’
• the aim is to identify and disrupt previously accepted norms and
‘truths’ through a meticulous tracing of the historical
emergence and trajectories of conventional assumptions
• no “facts to be interpreted: rather, facts are constructed out of
the researcher’s ‘will to truth’ “
• ‘Foucault offers us less than a structured ‘methodology’ of
genealogy. What he does offer is a set of profound philosophical
and methodological suspicions toward the objects of knowledge
that we confront, a set of suspicions that stretch to our
relationships to such objects, and to the uses to which such
related knowledges are put.’ (Hook, 2005, p.4)
Combining Genealogy &
Discourse Analysis– Example
• To expose and denaturalise common-sense assumptions around
Widening Participation
• To engage in a critical tactical project of critique that challenges the
power effects of dominant institutional practices
• Trace and identify the emergence of dominant discourses of
Widening Participation
• (How) Students are codified in classificatory schemes – ‘gifted and
talented students’, ‘students with the potential to succeed in higher
education’
• How do these WP discourses relate to broader discourses (e.g. of
neoliberalism, of the marketisation of higher education)
• How is power negotiated in and through these discourses (e.g. how
are institutional hierarchies perpetuated/resisted through the
admissions discourses of universities?)
Foucauldian Questions for
Educational Researchers
• Not about asking what education is but instead:
• How does it operate in certain historical time
periods?
• What kinds of power relations govern the
process?
• What bodies of knowledge are called into being?
• Which institutions are involved?
• What forms do the interactions take? And with
what effects?
(Deacon, 2006)
Criticisms
• No alternatives provided; ‘merely’ a project
of critique
• ‘I will not prescribe solutions’ (Foucault)
• Project of perpetual critique stifles action
• No grounds on which to judge
power/knowledge claims
• If power is omnipresent and ubiquitous, is
analysing it redundant?
• Is Foucault just enacting another ‘regime of
truth’/just another discourse to be critiqued?
Problems for Foucauldian
Analysts
• No clear ‘method’ - archaeology/genealogy are guides
• Foucault’s ‘tool box’ does not contain well-specified tools
• Definitional quagmire – ‘genealogy’, ‘archaeology’,
‘discourse’
• Philosophical debates – postructrualism/postmodernism
• Scope and diversity of his work lead to multiple and
conflicting interpretations
• Sits within broader ‘problems’ of qualitative research
(See Burman & Whelan, 2011)
Foucauldian Influences
• One of the most cited theorists across the social sciences
• Foucauldian Discourse Analysis
• Critical Discourse Analysis – Norman Fairclough
• Foucauldian Discourse Analysis – Ian Parker, Erica
Burman
• Genealogical approach to DA – Derek Hook
• Queer Theory – destabilized identity categories, paved
the way for queer theory, identity without essence
• Antipsychiatry/Critical psychiatry/Critical psychology –
challenging the fixity of diagnostic categories and the
truth claims made, psychiatry as a tool of social control