Restructuring of social and political theory in education: Foucault and a social epistemology of school practices

Educational Theory

Volumn 47, Issue 3, 1997, Pages 287-313

  Popkewitz, Thomas S ^a   Brennan, Marie ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON   (United States)

^b CENTRAL QUEENSLAND UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0002737528     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.1997.00287.x     Document Type: Article

References (100)

1. We borrow the phrase "sea-migration" from the social-intellectual historian, H. Stuart Hughes, The Sea Change: The Migration of Social Thought, 1930-1965 (New York: Harper and Row, 1975). Our intent, however, is not to suggest a single movement of ideas from continental Europe, but to recognize a certain globalization of ideas.
2. For general discussions of Michel Foucault's contributions
3. see Howard Dreyfus and Peter Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,' 1983]
4. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Govemmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)
5. Gérard Noiriel, "Foucault and History: The Lessons of a Disillusion," Journal of Modern History 66547-68.
6. Michel Foucault, Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori, trans. R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991).
7. One of the first books in education to explore this was Stephen Ball, ed., Foucault and Education: Disciplines and Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1990).
8. Michel Foucault, "What is Enlightenment?" in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 50.
9. Thomas S. Popkewitz, "Social Science and Social Movements in the U.S.A.: State Policies, the University, and Schooling," in Education in the Late 20th Century, Essays Presented to Ulf P. Lundgren on tlie Occasion of his Fiftieth Birthday, ed. Donald Broady (Stockholm: Stockholm Institute of Education Press), 45-79.
10. Stuart Hall, "The Problem of Ideology - Marxism without Guarantees," Journal of Communication Inquiry, 10 (1986): 28-43.
11. See Peter Wagner, The Sociology of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 1994).
12. Nikolas Rose, The Death of the Social! Re-figuring the Territory of Government, Economy, and Society, in press.
13. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990).
14. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Scoial Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).
15. Also see James Donald, Sentimental Education; Schooling, Popular Culture and the Regulation of Liberty (London: Verso, 1992)
16. Ian Hunter, Rethinking the School; Subjectivity, Bureaucracy, Criticism (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994)
17. Rose, The Death of the Social! Michael Shapiro, Reading the Postmodern Polity: Political Theory as Textual Practice (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1992)
18. Valerie Walkerdine, School Girl Fictions (London: Verso, 1990).
19. Sec, for example, Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia; A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
20. See, for example, Michael Fullan and Suzanne Stiegelbauer, The New Meaning of Educational Change, 2d ed. (New York: Teachers College Press, 1991).
21. Thomas S. Popkewitz, A Political Sociology of Educational Reform: Power/Knowledge in Teaching, Teacher Education, and Research (New York: Teachers College Press, 1991).
22. Robert J. Young, White Mythologies: Writing, History and the West (New York: Routledge, 1990).
23. This self-reflectivity, which Bourdicu calls an "epistemological vigilance" also applies in this study as well. Such self-reflectivity is always difficult as resistences operate within power relations and not outside of them. Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Claude Chamboredon, and Jean-Claude Passeron, The Craft of Sociology: Epistemological Preliminaries, trans. Richard Nice (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1991).
24. See Popkewitz, Political Sociology of Educational Reform.
25. Lynn Fendler, "What is it Impossible to Think? A Genealogy of the Educated Subject/7 in Foucault's Challenge: Discourse, Knowledge, and Power in Education, ed. Thomas Popkewitz and Marie Brennan (New York: Teachers College Press, in press).
26. Judith Butler, Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of "Postmodernism," in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992).
27. Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective" Feminist Studies 14 (1988): 575-99.
28. Bourdieu, Logic of Practice.
29. Jana Sawicki, "Feminism and the Power of Foucauldian Discourse" in After Foucault: Humanistic Knowledge, Postmodern Challenges, ed. Jonathan Arac (New Brunswick, N.Y.: Rutgers University, 1988), 161-78.
30. These practices are not totalizing and without ambiguities and resistances, as Sawicki, "Feminism and the Power of Foucauldian Discourse" acknowledges.
31. Valerie Walkerdine, The Mastery of Reason; Cognitive Development and the Production of Rationality (New York: Routledge, 1988).
32. Jennifer Gore, "Disciplining Bodies: On the Continuity of Power Relations in Pedagogy," in Popkewitz and Brennan, Foucault's Challenge.
33. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
34. See, for example, Mary Tiles, Bachelard: Science and Objectivity (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1984)
35. Melvin Richter, "Conceptual History (Begriffsgeschichete) and Political Theory," Political Theory 14 (1986): 1219-30.
36. Young, White Mythologies.
37. Butler, Contingent Foundations and Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discourse Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993).
38. Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, vol. 3, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage House, 1988);
39. "Michel Foucault, The Political Technology of Individuals," in Technologies of the Self, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Huttan (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 145-62;
40. also Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault; John Rajchman, Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). In feminist theory, see Sharon Nicholson, Gender and History, The Limits of Social Theory in the Age of the Family (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986);
41. Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructural Theory (London: Basil Blackwell, 1987)
42. Michelc Barrett and Anne Phillips, Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press);
43. Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
44. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings by Michel Foucault, 1972-1977, trans, and ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 117.
45. Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 161.
46. Ian Hacking, "The Archeology of Foucault" in Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 39.
47. Mitchell Dean, Critical and Effective Histories; Foucault's Methods and Historical Sociology (New York: Routledge, 1984), 3-4.
48. See. for example, Ulf P. Lundgren, Between Education and Schooling: Outlines of a Diachronic Curriculum Theory (Geelong, Australia: Deakin University Press, 1991);
49. David Hamilton, Towards a Theory of Schooling (London: Falmer Press, 1989);
50. Tomas England, "Rethinking Curriculum History-Towards a Theoretical Reorientation." Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association: Symposium on Curriculum History, Chicago, April 1991. We use the words "community" and "society" as distinctions that are of historical significance. The former involves time/space relations that were local; the latter involves more abstract conceptions of self as a citizen of a nation, as a worker, or as an ethnic group within some larger sets of relations. As these abstract notions of society are made part of one's definition of self, it changes the meaning and relationships in which communities are defined. For discussion of these concepts in relation to changing terrains of politics, see, Rose, in press.
51. Thomas Popkewitz, The Formation of School Subjects: The Struggle for Creating an American Institution (London: Palmer Press, 1987).
52. Ingólfur Asgeir Jóhannesson, "Principles of Legitimation in Educational Discourses in Iceland and the Production of Progress," Journal of Educational Policy 8 (1993): 339-51.
53. Young, White Mythologies, 50.
54. Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
55. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3d. ed., trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953)
56. Bernadette Baker, "Childhood-as-rescue in the Emergence and Spread of the U.S. Public School" in Popkewitz and Brennan, Foucault's Challenge.
57. Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interest, trans. Jeremy Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971);
58. Jiirgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, vol. 1, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1981);
59. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action. Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, vol. 2, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987);
60. Richard Bernstein, ed., Habermas and Modernity (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1985).
61. See, for example, Yves Sintomer, "Power and Civil Society: Foucault vs Habermas" Philosophy and Social Criticism 18 (1992): 357-79. One can also understand the Frankfurt School as a reaction to fascism, while French social thought was a more general critique but at the same time responsive to its colonial wars in the post-World War II period, and Young, White Mythologies
62. Also see James Marshall, "Foucault and Educational Research," in Ball, Foucault and Education, 11-29, on the distinction of power.
63. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Pantheon, 1965);
64. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1973);
65. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology at Medical Perception, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 1975);
66. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979).
67. Dennis Carlson, Teachers and Crisis: Urban School Reform and Teachers' Work Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992)
68. See, for example, Lois Weis and Michelle Fine, eds., Beyond Silenced Voices: Class, Race, and Gender in United States Schools (Albany: State University of New York, 1993).
69. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision arid Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1990), 6.
70. See Robert Kuttner, The End of Laissez-faire: National Purpose and the Global Economy after the Cold War (New York: Alfred A, Knopf, 1991)
71. Robert Lekachman, Greed is not Enough, Reaganomics (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982).
72. Also, see Popkewitz, A Political Sociology of Educational Reform.
73. See Thomas S. Popkewitz, ed., Changing Patterns of Power: Social Regulation and Teacher Education Reform (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993).
74. See, for example, James Lad wig, Academic Distinctions: Theory and Methodology in the Sociology of School Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 1966).
75. Thomas Dumm, Democracy and Punishment: Disciplinary Origins of the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987).
76. Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak, "The Politics of Translation" in Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates, ed. Michele Barrett and Anne Phillips (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), 177-200.
77. Thomas S. Popkewitz, The Spatial Politics of Urban and Rural Education: Discourses of Teaching as Systems of Exclusion (New York: Teachers College Press, forthcoming).
78. See, for example, Ball, Foucault and Education.
79. Foucault, "Governmentality," 103.
80. Colin Gordon, "Governmental Rationality: An Introduction" in The Foucault Effect, ed, Burchell, Gordon, and Miller, 30.
81. Foucault, "Governmentality" 87.
82. Foucault, Discipline and Punish.
83. Foucault, "Governmentality" 104.
84. Keith Hoskin,"Education and the Genesis of Disciplinarity: The Unexpected Reversal," in Knowledges: Historical and Critical Studies in Disciplinarity, ed. Ellen Messer-Davidoff, David R. Shumway, and David J. Sylvan (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 277.
85. Foucault, The Order of Things and Hoskin, "Education and the Genesis of Disciplinarity," 280.
86. Hoskin, "Education and the Genesis of Disciplinarity" 281.
87. William Green, "Post-Curriculum Possibilities: English Teaching, Cultural Politics and the Postmodern Turn,"The Journal of Curriculum Studies, in press.
88. Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
89. One needs to read current literature theory, andfeminist scholarship, as well as critiques of postmodernism in education to realize how political a question the privileging of the subject is. See, for example, bodily response to postmodernism which ironically argues for forms of analysis that Clarke rejects; John Clarke, New Times and Old Enemies. Essays on Cultural Studies and America (London: HarperCollins, 1991).
90. See, for example, Landon Beyer and Daniel Liston, "Discourse or Moral Action? A Critique of Postmodernism" Educational Theory 42, no. 4 (Fall 1992): 371-93.
91. See, for example, Frank Pignatelli, "What Can I Do? Foucault on Freedom and the Question of Teacher Agency" Educational Theory 43, no. 4 (Fall 1993): 411-32 where he moves from a problematized theory to dialectical theory of change without any notice of the shift in the grounds of argument.
92. Butler, Contingent Foundations.
93. Also see Young, White Mythologies, 50.
94. Butler, Contingent Foundations, 7.
95. David Blacker, "Intellectuals at Work and in Power: Toward a Foucauldian Research Ethic" in Popkewitz and Brennan, Foucault's Challenge.
96. See Dibier Eribon, Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991) and Miller, Passion of Michel Foucault.
97. Young, White Mythologies.
98. David M. Rasmussen, "Reflections on the 'End of History', Politics, Identity, and Civil Society," Philosophy and Social Criticism 18, 234-50.
99. It is an interesting side note to our discussion that Foucault's work has been influential in institutional reforms in multiple countries. This occurred without posturing an epistemology of progress in his scholarship. He rejected the privileging the intellectual through arguments about some universal notion of the intellectual bringing progress through the a prior positioning of the "subject."
100. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis, the Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: The Free Press, 1990).