Repositioning of special schools within a specialist, personalised educational marketplace - the need for a representative principle

This paper considers how notions of inclusive education as defined in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Salamanca Agreement (1994) have become dissipated, and can be developed and reframed to encourage their progress. It analyses the discourse within a range of academic, legal and media texts, exploring how this dissipation has taken place within the UK. Using data from 78 specialist school websites it contextualises this change in the use of the terms and ideas of inclusion with the rise of two other constructs, the 'specialist school' and 'personalisation'. It identifies the need for a precisely defined representative principle to theorise the type of school which inclusion aims to achieve, which cannot be subsumed by segregated providers. It suggests that this principle should not focus on the individual, but draw upon a liberal/democratic view of social justice, underlining inclusive education's role in removing social barriers that prevent equity, access and participation for all

Structure and play: rethinking regulation in the higher education sector

This paper explores possible tactics for academics working within a context of increasing regulation and constraint. One suggested tactic is to move outside of a creativity-conformity binary. Rather than understanding creativity and conformity as separable, where one is seen as excluding the other, the authors consider the potential of examining the relationships between them. The theme of 'structure and play' illustrates the argument. In the first part of the paper, using various examples from art and design - fields generally associated with creativity - the authors explore the interrelatedness of creativity and conformity. For example, how might design styles, which are generally understood as creative outcomes, constrain creativity and lead to conformity within the design field? Is fashion producing creativity or conformity? Conversely, the ways in which conformity provides the conditions for creativity are also examined. For example, the conformity imposed by the state on artists in the former communist bloc contributed to a thriving underground arts movement which challenged conformity and state regulation. Continuing the theme of 'structure and play', the authors recount a story from an Australian university which foregrounds the ongoing renegotiation of power relations in the academy. This account illustrates how programmatic government in a university, with its aim of regulating conduct, can contribute to unanticipated outcomes. The authors propose that a Foucauldian view of distributed power is useful for academics operating in a context of increasing regulation, as it brings into view sites where power might begin to be renegotiated

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

A culture of silence: modes of objectification and the silencing of disabled bodies

Throughout history different practices have attempted to silence the experiences of disabled people. In this paper we explore some of these practices including the medical, familial, and self-subjugating practices English-speaking Canadian polio survivors experienced throughout their lives. We analyze participant’s experiences of silence and silencing through a Foucauldian lens, drawing on the three modes of objectification to explain the institutional and cultural discourses around polio subjects that acted upon and through the polio body to silence it. Participants’ oral history accounts demonstrate how sociocultural and medical practices effectively silenced survivors from speaking about their polio experiences. However, the trope of silence is also uprooted within oral history traditions. We will demonstrate how participants broke their silence and shifted their perspectives on polio and disability, and how this process contributed to their resistance of hegemonic conceptualizations of disability as defective

Designed to fail : a biopolitics of British Citizenship.

Tracing a route through the recent 'ugly history' of British citizenship, this article advances two central claims. Firstly, British citizenship has been designed to fail specific groups and populations. Failure, it argues, is a design principle of British citizenship, in the most active and violent sense of the verb to design: to mark out, to indicate, to designate. Secondly, British citizenship is a biopolitics - a field of techniques and practices (legal, social, moral) through which populations are controlled and fashioned. This article begins with the 1981 Nationality Act and the violent conflicts between the police and black communities in Brixton that accompanied the passage of the Act through the British parliament. Employing Michel Foucault's concept of state racism, it argues that the 1981 Nationality Act marked a pivotal moment in the design of British citizenship and has operated as the template for a glut of subsequent nationality legislation that has shaped who can achieve citizenship. The central argument is that the existence of populations of failed citizens within Britain is not an accident of flawed design, but is foundational to British citizenship. For many 'national minorities' the lived realities of biopolitical citizenship stand in stark contradistinction to contemporary governmental accounts of citizenship that stress community cohesion, political participation, social responsibility, rights and pride in shared national belonging

The paradox of tenant empowerment: regulatory and liberatory possibilities

Tenant empowerment has traditionally been regarded as a means of realising democratic ideals: a quantitative increase in influence and control, which thereby enables "subjects" to acquire the fundamental properties of "citizens". By contrast governmentality, as derived from the work of Michel Foucault, offers a more critical appraisal of the concept of empowerment by highlighting how it is itself a mode of subjection and a means of regulating human conduct towards particular ends. Drawing on particular data about how housing governance has changed in Glasgow following its 2003 stock transfer, this paper adopts the insights of governmentality to illustrate how the political ambition of "community ownership" has been realized through the mobilization and shaping of active tenant involvement in the local decision making process. In addition, it also traces the tensions and conflict inherent in the reconfiguration of power relations post-transfer for "subjects" do not necessarily conform to the plans of those that seek to govern them

Beyond power:unbridging Foucault and Weber

Today, very few would doubt that there are plenty of reasons to liken Weber’s and Foucault’s theories of power. Nevertheless, their respective works have divergent ethical and ontological preoccupations which should be reconsidered. This paper explores Foucault’s account of a historical episode in Discipline and Punish and Weber’s theory of life spheres, uncovering evidence that there is a need to reassess the conceptual bridges which have been built so far. The exploration reveals a radical difference between a monological theory of power (Foucault) and a multidimensional approach to power (Weber). Yet by unbridging the two thinkers and focusing on other aspects of their theories along with their ideas about power, we also find that alternative links between the two frameworks may offer a more promising critical theory

Towards practice-based studies of HRM: an actor-network and communities of practice informed approach

HRM may have become co-terminus with the new managerialism in the rhetorical orthodoxies of the HRM textbooks and other platforms for its professional claims. However, we have detailed case-study data showing that HR practices can be much more complicated, nuanced and indeed resistive toward management within organizational settings. Our study is based on ethnographic research, informed by actor-network theory and community of practice theory conducted by one of the authors over an 18-month period. Using actor-network theory in a descriptive and critical way, we analyse practices of managerial resistance, enrolment and counter-enrolment through which an unofficial network of managers used a formal HRM practice to successfully counteract the official strategy of the firm, which was to close parts of a production site. As a consequence, this network of middle managers effectively changed top management strategy and did so through official HRM practices, coupled with other actor-network building processes, arguably for the ultimate benefit of the organization, though against the initial views of the top management. The research reported here, may be characterized as a situated study of HRM-in-practice and we draw conclusions which problematize the concept of HRM in contemporary management literature

The discourse of Olympic security 2012 : London 2012

This paper uses a combination of CDA and CL to investigate the discursive realization of the security operation for the 2012 London Olympic Games. Drawing on Didier Bigo’s (2008) conceptualisation of the ‘banopticon’, it address two questions: what distinctive linguistic features are used in documents relating to security for London 2012; and, how is Olympic security realized as a discursive practice in these documents? Findings suggest that the documents indeed realized key banoptic features of the banopticon: exceptionalism, exclusion and prediction, as well as what we call ‘pedagogisation’. Claims were made for the exceptional scale of the Olympic events; predictive technologies were proposed to assess the threat from terrorism; and documentary evidence suggests that access to Olympic venues was being constituted to resemble transit through national boundarie

Caring for the collective: biopower and agential subjectification in wildlife conservation

types: ArticleCopyright © 2014 PionPost Print. Srinivasan, K. 2014. The definitive, peer-reviewed and edited version of this article is published in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 32, Issue 3, pp. 501 – 517 DOI:10.1068/d13101pThis paper explores turtle conservation in Odisha, India, to map the complicated ways in which animal well-being is pursued in the contemporary world. Using insights from Foucault’s work on biopolitics, it offers an account of conservation as population politics, questioning the entanglement of harm and care that infuses this space of more-than-human social change. In doing this, the paper elaborates the concept of agential subjectification in order to track the mechanisms that underlie the asymmetric circulation of biopower in human–animal interactions and to develop Foucauldian scholarship for the examination of present-day manifestations of the ‘will to improve’.RGS‑IBGCulture and Animals Foundatio