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Materializing Foucault?

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 ….

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Materializing Foucault?

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  1. 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

  2. Two Provocations … Accusation that Foucault reduced everything to ‘language’ ‘Language has been granted too much power.’ (Barad, 2008)

  3. 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

  4. 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

  5. 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

  6. Agential realism • Proposing new onto-epistem-ology • Fusion of different disciplinary fields • Posthumanistperformativity - 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)

  7. 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?

  8. 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.

  9. 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)

  10. 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 co-implication 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 intra-action, how can we account for language?? • More diffractive work needed – speech acts.. Butler and performative contestation… Deleuze,…?? To be continued…

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