Deborah Youdell

Subjectivation and performative politics—Butler thinking Althusser and Foucault: intelligibility, agency and the raced–nationed–religioned subjects of education

Judith Butler is perhaps best known for her take‐up of the debate between Derrida and Austin over the function of the performative and her subsequent suggestion that the subject be understood as performatively constituted. Another important but less often noted move within Butler’s consideration of the processes through which the subject is constituted is her thinking between Althusser’s notion of subjection and Foucault’s notion of subjectivation. In this paper, I explore Butler’s understanding of processes of subjectivation, examine the relationship between subjectivation and the performative suggested in and by Butler’s work, and consider how the performative is implicated in processes of subjectivation—in ‘who’ the subject is, or might be, subjectivated as. Finally, I examine the usefulness of understanding the subjectivating effects of discourse for education, in particular for educationalists concerned to make better sense of and interrupt educational inequalities. In doing this I offer a reading of an episode of ethnographic data generated in an Australian high school. I suggest that it is through subjectivating processes of the sort that Butler helps us to understand that some students are rendered subjects inside the educational endeavour, and others are rendered outside this endeavour or, indeed, outside student‐hood.

School Trouble: identity, power and politics in education

Prologue Part I: Troubling Ideas 1. The Politics of Schooling 2. Tactics for Political Practice 3. Theorising Political Subjects Part II: Troubling Schools 4. Troubling School Knowledges 5. Schoolings Unruly Subjects 6. Everyday Political Pedagogy 7. Political Feeling in the Classroom 8. Pedagogies of Becoming 9. Becoming-Radical in Education

Wounds and reinscriptions: schools, sexualities and performative subjects

Boys in school, homophobia, and forms of masculinity are currently the focus of significant debate in and about education and schools. Much of this discussion takes as given the sexual orientation, and therefore sexual identity, of the students of whom it speaks and mobilizes equal rights discourses on behalf of gay and lesbian students. This paper offers an alternative view of the school level processes at work around these issues. The paper takes up Judith Butlers ongoing engagement with Foucault and her recent rearticulation of Althusser and Bourdieu to analyse data generated through school ethnography in Britain and Australia. This analysis details the processes through which gender and sexual identities are constituted inside schools; illustrates the mutually constitutive relationship between gender and sexuality in contemporary discursive frames; and demonstrates how students resist wounded homosexual identities and constitute legitimate Other selves through their day-to-day practices.

Diversity, Inequality, and a Post-Structural Politics for Education.

This paper considers the contribution to understanding educational inequalities offered by post-structural theories of power and the subject. The paper locates this consideration in the context of the ongoing endeavour in education studies to make sense of, and identify ways of interrupting, abiding educational exclusions and inequalities. The paper examines the potential of Judith Butlers work, in particular her engagement with Foucaults concepts of productive power and subjectivation, and the articulation of these ideas with the notion of the performative constitution of subjects, for making sense of the processes through which students come to be particular sorts of subjects of schooling. The paper argues that taking up these understandings not only enables us to better understand the endurance of particular configurations of educational inequalities, it also opens up new possibilities for interrupting these through a post-structural politics that seeks to displace prevailing discourses and constitute students differently through everyday practices of preformative reinscription.

Queer outings: uncomfortable stories about the subjects of post‐structural school ethnography

In this paper, I consider the abiding value as well as the limits of queer; navigating the contradictions of a politics and ethnographic practice based on a refutation of an abiding subject; resisting subjectivation and needing recognition; and ‘coming out’ in school ethnography framed by queer theory. The paper moves from the work of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, borrowing Pillow’s notion of uncomfortable reflexivity and grafting the notion of the uncanny onto post‐structurally informed ethnography via the work of Britzman and Delany. In bringing these ideas together, the paper is an exercise in the discomfort provoked by both telling uncertain stories of the sort that are usually left untold about school ethnography and looking for glimpses of the uncanny in and through these. The paper suggests that attempts to engage what ‘escapes’ from or ‘falls away’ in the telling of uncomfortable stories help us to engage what is unspeakable in the normative framing of the school and adult–student relations within them and are a useful reminder of the impossibility of knowing completely or with certainty. This, I suggest, offers useful insights into ethnography and ethnographic writing and reading that we might characterise as ‘after‐queer’.

The new IQism: intelligence, 'ability' and the rationing of education

Bad blood, feeble-mindedness, genetic inferiority, eugenics … these terms are associated with another age: they are the discredited and disgraced language of a pseudo- scientific tradition that wrought incredible injustice during the 20th century and are widely viewed with contempt. Such terms are no longer used but, we will argue, the same underlying approaches continue to exert a powerful influence on the policy and practice of contemporary education. This is the new IQism where talk of ‘ability’ replaces (and encodes) previous talk of intelligence.

Assembling, Disassembling and Reassembling "Youth Services" in Austerity Britain.

This paper moves from a reading of processes that are transforming public services in ways that amount to a dismantling of the welfare state in the UK. In order to interrogate these processes, the paper focuses on ‘youth’ and ‘youth services’. Framed by an analysis of the aggressive disinvestment of ‘austerity’, we take up Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the assemblage as a tool to map and understand the apparently disparate factors or components that come together to produce a ‘youth service assemblage’ and its disassembly and reassembly. As we do this we demonstrate the usefulness of assemblage as way of encountering the productivity of relations across components and avoiding an account that over-states the force or scope of ‘policy’. The paper concludes that by analysing in terms of assemblage, new challenges for thinking about politics emerge, in particular the limits of thinking in terms of a resistant political subject and the need to engage ambiguity.

Fabricating ‘Pacific Islander’: pedagogies of expropriation, return and resistance and other lessons from a ‘Multicultural Day’

This paper is concerned with the potential for pedagogic practices that unsettle race hierarchies and open up possibilities for young people who are minoritised and excluded through these race hierarchies to be recognised as legitimate students and learners. It explores these possibilities through an analysis of an ethnographic account of the dance, song and musical practices of a group of ‘Pacific Islander’ students, their peers and their teachers at a ‘Multicultural Day’ event at a high school in Sydney, Australia. The paper demonstrates how processes of subjectivation constitute, and are the sites of struggle over, race hierarchies and brings these analyses together with an exploration of students’ and teachers’ identifications and investments and their struggles over recognition and subjectivity. Through these analyses the paper extends existing critiques of multicultural pluralism, demonstrating the fundamentally flawed nature of Multicultural Days of this sort and the pluralist multiculturalism that they are part of. The paper goes on to consider how teachers informed by critical race pedagogy might act to undercut race hierarchies and how discursive spaces might be created and sustained in which ‘Pacific Islander’ and ‘student’ and ‘learner’ are recognisable. The paper engages Judith Butler’s thinking on the inseparability of the Same and the Other and the promise of an open-ended and enduring invitation to ‘give an account of oneself’, considering whether we might begin to imagine this invitation as pedagogy.

Bioscience and the sociology of education: the case for biosocial education

Abstract This article makes a case for biosocial education as a field of research and as a potential framework for education practice. The article engages with sociology of education’s contemporary interests in embodiment and affect, the possibilities offered by concept studies, and uses of assemblage and complexity theory for thinking about educational phenomena. It also considers broader social science and political theory engagements with epigenetics and neuroscience. The article examines the legacy of the biology/sociology split and the risks, limits, and potentialities of degrounded collaborative trans-disciplinary biosocial research. It considers developments in biosciences that may have particular resonance and promise for education, in particular the epigenetics of care and stress and the metabolomics of diet. The article argues that sociology of education should engage with bioscience to interrogate the folding together of the social, cultural, biographical, pedagogic, political, affective, neurological, and biological in the interactive production of students and learning.

A biosocial education future

This paper explores how social justice orientated education research might engage with emerging ideas and approaches from the new biological sciences, and suggests a biosocial future for empirical education research that connects molecular biology – epigenetics, nutrigenomics and neuroscience – with sociology of education. In beginning to consider what the biosocial means for education the paper works through two pressing questions ‘what happens when we learn?’ and ‘are relationships important in the classroom?’, bringing together emerging evidence across sociology, pedagogy, molecular biology and neuroscience. The paper shows how what we ask, how we go about doing research, and the sorts of answers that we might offer all shift with a biosocial orientation. While valid concerns continue to be raised by critical education researchers over some of the directions of research in the biological sciences and the policy uses of this, this paper advocates collaborative, inter-disciplinary research across social and biological sciences. Such biosocial research, it is argued, has the potential to develop hybrid conceptual frames; pose new types of questions; envisage research methodologies and methods in new ways; and offer profound new insights into the making of inequality.