Foucauldian Philosophy and Implications for Educational Research examines the lectures given at the Collège de France between 1970 and 1984 by the French intellectual Michel Foucault, exploring their implications for educational inquiry and research.
The chapters in this volume offer close readings of all 13-lecture series to initiate a discussion about how each contributes to educational inquiry in the contemporary moment. The objective of this book is to consider how Foucault's lectures can serve as a viable analytical toolbox for educational researchers. The authors provide a brief contextual background for each year's lectures, summarize the key themes, and present possible research avenues for educational researchers. This book allows new readers of Foucault to glimpse his thinking and analytic processes, while offering seasoned interlocutors an in-depth understanding of how the lectures influenced his better-known works, such as Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality (Volumes I–IV), and more broadly his work on ethics, power/knowledge, truth, and the care of the self.
Recommended reading for graduate students and researchers interested in Foucault, philosophy of education, critical theory, and educational studies.
Table of Contents:
Chapter 1: Introduction: The Actualitè
David Lee Carlson and Nelson M. Rodriguez
Chapter 2: Lectures on The Will To Know, 1970-1971
Jonathan W. Crocker and M. Francyne Huckaby
Chapter 3: Lectures on Penal Theories and Institutions, 1971-1972
Joseph D. Sweet and Zachary S. Laminack
Chapter 4: Lectures on The Punitive Society, 1972-1973
David Lee Carlson
Chapter 5: Lectures on Psychiatric Power, 1973-1974
Deborah P. Britzman, Aziz Güzel, and Sheila Harms
Chapter 6: Lectures on Abnormal, 1974-1975
Jonathan Kemp
Chapter 7: Lectures on Society Must be Defended, 1975-1976
Robert Hattam
Chapter 8: Lectures on Security, Territory, Population, 1977-1978
Robert J. Helfenbein
Chapter 9: Lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics, 1978-1979
David W. Kupferman
Chapter 10: Lectures on On The Government of the Living, 1979-1980
James Salvo and Jasmin Ulmer
Chapter 11: Lectures on Subjectivity and Truth, 1980-1981
Nelson M. Rodriguez
Chapter 12: Lectures on The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 1981-1982
Michael A. Peters
Chapter 13: Lectures on The Government of Self and Others, 1982-1983
James Salvo
Chapter 14: Lectures on The Courage of Truth, 1983-1984
Aaron Kuntz
About the Author :
David Lee Carlson is Professor of Qualitative Inquiry and Curriculum Studies at Arizona State University and has published over ten books and 45 articles. He is a member of the Professors of Curriculum Honorary Society.
Nelson M. Rodriguez is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The College of New Jersey, where he serves as Coordinator of the Sexuality and Queer Studies Program. His scholarship spans the fields of queer and gender studies, Foucault studies, critical pedagogy and cultural studies, and education.
Review :
This book brings Michel Foucault’ lectures at the Collège de France into conversation with educational inquiry, expanding Foucauldian scholarship beyond his published works. Curated chronologically, each chapter is anchored in a different lecture series, offering historically situated analyses while opening up pressing questions for education. The entire volume moves chapter by chapter through disciplinary power, biopower, governmentality, truth-telling, and the ethical care of the self, asking the overarching question on what this can do for education in the present. This collection invites readers to engage the lectures alongside its chapters, thinking with Foucault to problematize the taken-for-granted practices that structure schools, curricula, and education research. For readers encountering these lectures for the first time and for seasoned Foucauldian scholars, this book is a timely and intellectually compelling contribution that highlights the enduring political significance of educational inquiry today.
-Sun Young Lee, Associate Professor, School of Education, Wichita State University
David Lee Carlson & Nelson Rodriguez have done us all a great favor by pulling this collection of essays on Foucault's work together. They astutely observe in their introduction that Foucault does not need another work introducing his ideas to authors. Today Foucault is ubiquitous, even hegemonic, in a way he would never have endorsed. His work is often cited to justify the necessity of historicizing the subjectivity of others, but his work and this insistence is rarely historicized. What we need is a way to see both the necessity of Foucault and the necessity of seeing beyond him. Carlson, Rodriguez, and the authors contributing to this book have provided us with the syllabus for such an engagement. I found myself imagining a seminar where we read Foucault's original works alongside the essays about those works in this book. What a delight that would be. This text will be of great value to instructors who want to teach advanced undergrads and graduate students about Foucault in a generative way.
-Jerry Rosiek, Professor and Department Head of Education Studies, University of Oregon
The work of Michel Foucault has had an extraordinary influence on fields across the humanities and social sciences, including education and, specifically, on curriculum theory. In the mid-1970s I was introduced to Foucault’s work by my brilliant then doctoral student at the University of Rochester - Peter M. Taubman - whose doctoral dissertation explicates his early work and its significance for gendered curriculum studies. Since then and over the decades I have studied Foucault’s work extensively, concentrating on his later work and as referenced in curriculum theory, such as in the important scholarship of James P. Burns. So it is with a long-standing appreciation for Foucault’s oeuvre that I proclaim the volume David Carlson and Nelson Rodriguez have assembled - this very volume - among the most important books published since Foucault appeared on the North American scene sixty years ago. My congratulations to Professors Carlson and Rodriguez - and to the distinguished contributors - for this invaluable volume.
-William F. Pinar, Tetsuo Aoki Professor in Curriculum Studies, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
What a wonderful idea for a book. Not only do we get a careful exposition of each of Foucault’s College de France lectures, the chapters also use Foucault’s toolbox to interrogate that which we call education. This is a rich resource for students seeking access to Foucauldian ideas and for those wanting to think differently about education. The individual chapters are elegantly written and full of important insights. This collection clearly demonstrates the relevance of Foucault for education research.
-Stephen J. Ball, Emeritus Professor of Sociology of Education, University College London
The publishing of Foucault’s lectures at the College de France has been a significant contribution for understanding a style of reasoning that problematizes knowledge as a materiality of the present and the political of modernities. This volume’s archival inquiry into the different Foucaut lectures furthers that contribution through exploring its style of reason to rethink critical studies in education and the potentialities of resistance. The transdisciplinary essays cross multiple terrains such as queer theory, security studies, biopolitics, and hermeneutics as well as new ways of thinking of affect theory and the production of difference in the topoi of professionalization, citizenship, delinquency, and the neoliberalism, among others.
-Thomas Popkewitz, Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison
