Bronwyn Davies

Neoliberalism and education

The discourses and practices of neoliberalism, including government policies for education and training, public debates regarding standards and changed funding regimes, have been at work on and in schools in capitalist societies since at least the 1980s. Yet we have been hard pressed to say what neoliberalism is, where it comes from and how it works on us and through us to establish the new moral order of schools and schooling, and to produce the new student/subject who is appropriate to (and appropriated by) the neoliberal economy. Beck (1997) refers to the current social order as the ‘new modernities’ and he characterizes the changes bringing about the present forms of society as having been both surreptitious and unplanned, that is, as being invisible and difficult to make sense of. In eschewing a theory in which anyone or any group may have been planning and benefiting from the changes, he falls back on the idea of natural and inevitable development, and optimistically describes the changes of the last two to three decades as the inevitable outcome of the victories of capitalism. The authors’ approach is not so optimistic, and they do not accept the idea of the natural inevitability of the changes. The approach that is taken in this issue is to examine neoliberalism at work through a close examination of the texts and talk through which neoliberal subjects and their schooling have been constituted over the last two decades. In this Introduction the authors provide their own take on the way the present social and political order has emerged as something that its subjects take to be inevitable.

Subjectification: the relevance of Butler’s analysis for education

In this paper I explore the process of subjectification (sometimes also called subjectivation, or simply, subjection) through which one becomes a subject—a process that Butler describes in terms of simultaneous mastery and submission, entailing a necessary vulnerability to the other in order to be. I examine the conceptual work Butler has undertaken to extend the Foucauldian concept of subjectification, and I draw on some encounters between teachers and their students in order to make these processes of subjectification understandable in the context of education. I conclude the paper with some notes toward an ethics of classroom practice.

The (Im)possibility of Intellectual Work in Neoliberal Regimes

In this paper a critique of neoliberal regimes within universities is developed. Neoliberal discourse is deconstructed and the dangers of it for intellectual work are considered. Neoliberal subjects (those subjected through neoliberal discourses) are defined and guidelines for thinking about education within (and against) neoliberal regimes are developed.

The ambivalent practices of reflexivity

Reflexivity involves turning one’s reflexive gaze on discourse—turning language back on itself to see the work it does in constituting the world. The subject/researcher sees simultaneously the object of her or his gaze and the means by which the object (which may include oneself as subject) is being constituted. The consciousness of self that reflexive writing sometimes entails may be seen to slip inadvertently into constituting the very (real) self that seems to contradict a focus on the constitutive power of discourse. This article explores this site of slippage and of ambivalence. In a collective biography on the topic of reflexivity, the authors tell and write stories about reflexivity and in a doubled reflexive arc, examine themselves at work during the workshop. Examining their own memories and reflexive practices, they explore this place of slippage and provide theoretical and practical insight into “what is going on” in reflexive research and writing.

The Discursive Production of the Male/Female Dualism in School Settings

In this paper, the discursive practices through which males and females are created as opposites and through which people become identifiably one or the other are analysed. It is shown how gender is created by individuals and within individuals as they learn the discursive practices through which to locate themselves as individuals and as members of the social world. Particular focus is given to the narratives through which children learn what it means to be male or female, and through which they become locked into (and thus limited by) masculine and feminine subject positions. The special place of the images and metaphors embedded in those narratives in constituting individual psyches, and in setting up patterns of belief and desire organised around a dualistic pattern of maleness and femaleness will be a central focus of the paper.

Becoming schoolgirls: the ambivalent project of subjectification

In this article, the authors examine the concept and practices of subjectification; that is, the processes through which we are subjected, and actively take up as our own the terms of our subjection. They use Judith Butlers theorising of subjection both as a starting point for working with their own memories of being subjected in school settings, and as the theoretical basis of their analysis of subjectification. Their method of working, which they refer to as collective biography, is derived from Haug et al. s methods developed in Female Sexualization . Their memories focus on aspects of the achievement of the individual, appropriate(d) schoolgirl subject who simultaneously constitutes herself and is constituted through discourse. They analyse the illusion of autonomy through which modern subjects are made possible, and the inevitable ambivalence that is experienced as schoolgirls take themselves up appropriately within the possibilities made available to them. Through re-membering their own pasts, and the embodied and emotional detail through which we became (and go on becoming) subjects, they open up for inspection the contradictory ground of the humanist subject, and in particular the feminine humanist subject, as it is achieved in educational settings.

Agency as a Form of Discursive Practice. A Classroom Scene Observed

In this paper an analysis of the concept of agency is undertaken. The traditional or agonistic definition of agency which assumes that to be a person is to have agency is rejected in favour of a definition that shows the way in which agency may be discursively constructed as a positioning made available to some but not to others. This analysis is then applied to an episode in a primary school classroom to see whether the discursive practices in that classroom can be said to position the students as agentic. The particular classroom was chosen on the basis of the teachers explicit wish that his students be agentic, but what the analysis shows is the extreme complexity involved in actually carrying this off, given all of the contradictory beliefs and practices that militate against children actually being agentic.

Constructing and Deconstructing Masculinities through Critical Literacy

ABSTRACT This paper is set out in three parts. The first is a theoretical discussion about the ways in which we become gendered through the particular discursive patterns made available to us in our culture(s). The second provides a detailed analysis of a classroom in which the teacher, Mr Good, is working with the boys in his class to try to get them to take themselves up as literate in ways that might more usually be eschewed by boys who achieve hegemonic masculinity. The third part develops a definition of critical literacy that follows from the first two parts and which is relevant to the teaching of literacies to boys.

Introduction : poststructuralist lines of flight in Australia

This collection of papers is by Australian researchers working in the field of Education. My request to them was to reflexively examine their own take-up of poststructuralist theory. Some of the writers reflect on their own autobiography and the place of poststructuralist theory in it, both as researchers and as subjects in the educational spheres they inhabit. For some the impact has been profoundly personal, generating lines of flight into new lives, new possibilities unanticipated and unimagined at the outset of their research. For others the impact is more on how they think about and conduct their research. For still others, the take-up is an ambivalent one, with misgivings about the loss of some of the powers of structuralism. Some of the writers have chosen not to delve into their personal trajectories but have preferred instead to examine the way poststructuralist theorizing guides the analyses they are undertaking in current research projects. This collective, reflexive musing on the impact of poststructuralist theorizing on the processes of selving, on research work and on educational work, makes visible the ways poststructuralist theory works to ‘trouble foundational ontologies, methodologies, and epistemologies, in general, and education in particular’ (St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000, p. 2). St Pierre and Pillow, citing Butler, write about the power of poststructuralist theory to generate new practices and new forms of agency for individual subjects:

Constituting the feminist subject in poststructuralist discourse

In this article, we describe a collective biography that we convened in order to revisit the site of the radical theoretical break with the liberal humanist individual marked by the poststructuralist work of Henriques and colleagues and the feminist poststructuralist work of Weedon. These writers suggest that the new subject of poststructuralist theory will be more open to the changes desired by feminist and social justice movements. They describe the break with the liberal humanist subject as a break that heralds new possibilities of personal and cultural transformation. In this article, using the medium of collective biography stories, we revisit the relation between the liberal humanist individual and the transformative possibilities poststructuralist writers envisaged for the new subject of poststructuralism. We situate the discussion in the context of our transformation into neoliberal subjects over the last three decades.