Excavating widening participation policy in Australian higher education: subject positions, representational effects, emotion

This article uses Foucauldian discourse analysis to identify two subject positions within Australia\u27s Widening Participation higher education policy. Purpose The massification of higher education is a definitive feature of the late twentieth century. Widening Participation (WP) policy is a recent manifestation of this phenomenon in Britain and Australia. This article uses Foucauldian discourse analysis to identify two subject positions within Australian WP higher education policy, that of the cap(able) individual and the proper aspirant. The article also traces the feeling-rules associated with these subject positions to ask critical questions about neo-liberal social justice. Design/methodology/approach A Foucauldian discourse analysis was conducted on a range of policy documents relating the higher education during the period 2008-2013. Using Bacchi’s (2012) ‘what is the problem represented to be?’ (WPR) approach, two subject positions and their attendant feeling-rules are identified.    Findings The two subject positions, the cap(able) individual and the proper aspirant, represent a quintessential neo-liberal subject who possesses ‘natural’ ability, hope for social mobility and is highly individualised and entrepreneurial in disposition. As a reinvention of social justice approaches to higher education, WP has wide emotional and common sense appeal derived from its links into older discourses on social justice, meritocracy and the redemptive promise of education and childhood hope.  A new neo-liberal appropriation of social justice, WP neglects critical historical, social and contextual factors related to educational inequity

Resilience: an all-encompassing solution to global problems? A biopolitical analysis of resilience in the policies of EC, FEMA, UNDP, USAID, WB, and WEF

This thesis examines the use of resilience in international policy-making. A concept that originally meant an ability of ecosystems to absorb disturbance has not only been welcomed in many disciplines outside ecology, but lately become popular in the policies of international organisations that claim resilience as a solution to various ‘global problems’ such as climate change, underdevelopment, or economic crises. The study contributes to the ongoing critical discussion on the governance effects of resilience. Here, the Foucauldian theory of biopolitics and the concept of governmentality are useful. Resilience now addresses human systems and communities with concepts from natural sciences, thus making it a biopolitical phenomenon. Specifically, the thesis asks how mainstreaming resilience affects the pursuit of agendas in six organisations: European Commission, Federal Emergency Management Agency, United Nations Development Programme, United States Agency for International Development, World Bank, and World Economic Forum. Using Foucauldian discourse analysis, the study is thematically divided into adaptive, entrepreneurial and governing aspects of resilience. Each part explicates how truth, power and subjectivity are constructed in the discourse. The analysis shows that contrary to the policy claims, resilience does not function as a solution but is constitutive of the problems it attempts to solve. The current policy discourse confirms pre-existing practices and power relations, and further problematizes issues on the agendas. The thesis confirms that the policies are trapped in a neoliberal biopolitics that has problematic implications for human subjectivity and political agency. It further concludes that if resilience is to have any practical relevance and positive effects, the policy discourse has to be changed, for which current critical accounts do not offer a plausible direction. Therefore, a distinction between resilience as a policy tool and social resilience is needed, whereby the use of resilience as a policy solution is reduced to disaster risk reduction and similar technical functions, and social resilience is recognised as a communal capacity that cannot be subject to policy regulation

Surrender to Win: Constructions of 12-Step Recovery from Alcoholism and Drug Addiction.

This article focuses on the ways in which members of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and Narcotics Anonymous (NA) construct themselves as being in recovery from addiction. In this original study, data were taken from nineteen participants. They were analysed using Willig’s (2013) six-stage Foucauldian discourse analytic method. This method is suited to enabling the analyst to locate discourse resources used by participants within broader, dominant, discourses, and for exploration of the implications of these constructions for subjectivity and practice. This article presents a discussion of analytic findings. Mainstream academia has often constructed 12-Step recovery as a largely totalising discourse. This is likely to have negatively prejudiced health professionals and may help explain relatively low referral rates into 12-Step resources for addicted clients. However, our analysis suggested that participants constructed themselves not as subjected by AA and NA discourse, but as drawing on it in ways aligned with agency, in order to practice care of the self in pursuit of various ethical goals. This implies 12-Step recovery to be less antithetical to, and indeed more aligned with, humanistic practitioner values than is perhaps often assumed to be the case. This finding suggests that practitioners may need to consider reappraising their view of 12-Step recovery. The discussion will therefore focus on the agency-structure dialectic that seemed to be at the heart of participant constructions of addiction and recovery. It is also is a finding which points to an urgent need for more qualitative studies in the currently under-researched, and hence perhaps poorly understood, area of 12-Step recovery from addiction

Repurposing the (super)crip: media representations of disability at the Rio 2016 Paralympic Games

Mega-events attract ever larger media audiences, and the 2016 Rio Paralympics were no exception. As audiences grow, media coverage extends to ever more varied domains, which are themselves then colonised by an increasing range of discourses. One of main discourses to develop since the early 2000s has been that of the so-called “supercrip”, one which challenges the notion of “impairment” often connected with disability by foregrounding the para-athletes’ triumph over adversity, celebrating instead their courage, grit and perseverance leading to athletic success and personal and increasingly national prestige. In this article we analyse the continuing importance of the supercrip discourse in coverage of the Rio Paralympics, but also move on to highlight its tactical alignment with other – both competing and complementary – discourses of nationalism, sexualisation, militarisation and celebritisation. We analyse textual and visual manifestations of these discourses using both Critical Discourse Analysis and Foucauldian discourse analysis. We conclude by paying particular attention to the increasing visibility of discourses which, while acknowledging the potentially positive role of the supercrip discourse in focussing on athletic success, repurpose that discourse by foregrounding instead the day-to-day experiences of belittling misrepresentation and neglect, including political neglect

Foucauldian Peacekeeping: On the Dispersion of Power and the Futility of Change

Foucault is widely known for the radical nature of his work, for his idiosyncratic approach to history, and for his reconfiguration of the concept of power. Curiously though, his conceptions of history and power might act to undermine their potential to incite radical critique of systems of education and wider society; resulting in a more patient, restrained and ultimately conservative scholarship than you would at first expect. The apparent points of similarity between Michel Foucault, Herbert George Wells and the reformist, statistician and eugenicist, Karl Pearson, will be outlined in order to exemplify this apparent danger. Whilst Foucault would be at odds with Pearson’s authoritarian view of education, the Foucauldian account of power seems, oddly, to lead to agreement with Pearson on the futility of revolutionary change

STRATEGY AS DISCURSIVE PRACTICE IN A BRAZILIAN PUBLIC UNIVERSITY: A LOOK UNDER THE PERSPECTIVE OF CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

The aim this article a critical discursive analysis of the “management plan” genre of a public institution of higher education, from 2012 to 2015, located in southeast Brazil. The aforementioned plan is inserted in the discursive practice of strategic management, specifically the institutional, bureaucratic management, and is used as an instrument for decision-making. The goal of this analysis will be to discuss the first step of the “management plan”, named “organizational policies”. We can see that, while elaborating declarative sentences, there is an evaluation of the statements regarding what is to be considered relevant to the institutions by means of the ideological discourse on neoliberal ideals and market behavior. The adoption of market-oriented managerial tools has been a constant in public administration. The public administration looks for bases of organizational practices in the private sphere. This mimicry is still present in the field, and the search for new managerial practices still crosses the imaginaries of the public managers. However, the increasing incorporation of a market-oriented, neoliberal logic, mainly in the adoption of strategic planning, can still be verified. The conclusion presented in this paper serves to foment the debate on the strategies formulated for the Brazilian public service and the methodological applicability of the critical discourse analysis. This meets the emerging need to systematize and integrate distinct theoretical and methodological approaches in the field of organizational studies when strategy is studied as a social and discursive practice

Adult education and publishing Canadian fiction in a global context: a Foucauldian analysis

This paper draws upon findings from a research study on the relationship between fiction, citizenship, and lifelong learning. It includes interviews with authors from several genres, publishing houses, and arts councils. This paper explores many of the ambivalent outcomes of the shifting power elements in publishing that can simultaneously benefit and disadvantage the publication of a national body of fiction. Although focused on the Canadian context, fiction writers and publishers around the globe face similar challenges. Using a Foucauldian analysis, it considers the importance of fiction and adult learning in shaping discourses of citizenship and critical social learning. (DIPF/Orig.

Making The Policy-Makers: Askesis, Or To Continuously Work On Oneself

This paper uses a Foucauldian discursive approach to shed light into how organisational actors are ‘made’ to act as strategists, incorporating into their work practices the demands and expectations of what it means to be a strategist in a specific context at a specific time. It draws on a Foucauldian understanding of governing and self formation to explore the ways in which actors work on themselves in order to act meaningfully as strategists. I argue that, rather than organisational identities being static or finished, organisational actors actively say and do things in their continual attempts to attain a more complete, acceptable and congruent identity. In contexts with high degrees of uncertainty and heavily power- and conflict-laden relationships, both discourses of how strategy is made and the practices involved in it can be seen as exercises (askesis) which strategists actively perform to better embrace their responsibility of rendering the future governable for others. The paper brings together the literatures on identity and on strategic practices to show the dialectic relationship between them

Co-operative competition: a Foucauldian perspective

This paper considers the extent to which Michel Foucault's conception of power gives a useful explanation of power relations between firms. It examines the perceived shift in the nature of interfirm relations from the traditional model in which firms operate as autonomous units within a competitive industry, to the co-operative competition model whereby firms engage in co-operation at certain levels of their operations and compete at other levels. It argues that the concepts of power and competition are closely intertwined and that an understanding of how power operates can give a greater understanding of the nature of competition within an industry. However the issue of power relations in the presence of co-operative competition has not been adequately explored by the literature. An analysis of the type of power reflected in interfirm relations is held as being the key to understanding the simultaneous existence of co-operation and competition between firms