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Who's Afraid of Foucault? History, Theory, and Becoming Subjects
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2017
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According to historian-philosopher Michel Foucault, “Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics' of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.” If each society has a regime of truth, it can be inferred that each scholarly discipline or field of study has its own general politics of truth which regulates its intellectual conditions, boundaries, and memberships. Consequently, Foucault's assertion leads me to ask: What regime of truth operates in the field of history of education? What types of discourse does it accept as true and deem as false? How does it distinguish between and sanction true and false statements? What value and status are conferred upon those charged with saying what counts as true and those considered saying what counts as false or unacceptable? What are the effects of such a regime on the field's analytical and methodological development as well as on its practitioners?
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References
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22 One major field in history that has generated robust discussions and debates in relation to Foucault and poststructuralism is women and gender history. See, for instance, the special issues and articles in the Journal of Women's History “vol. 15, no. 1, 2003; vol. 16, no. 2, 2004; vol. 16, no. 4, 2004; vol. 20, no. 1, 2008”. By no means extensive, my online search of U.S. historians who mobilize Foucault reveals that “1” few historians use terms like Foucault, poststructuralism, or even social, cultural, or critical theory to describe their work; “2” there are very few U.S. historians who use Foucault and are employed in history departments in the United States, like Gail Bederman at the University of Notre Dame; and “3” most historians of the United States who use Foucault are not employed in history departments, like Lisa Duggan at New York University and Emma Pérez at University of Colorado, Boulder. See, Bederman, Gail, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 “Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996“; Duggan, Lisa, Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence and American Modernity “Durham, NC: Duke University Press”.Google Scholar
23 I deeply appreciate the research assistance and insights of Alexander Means and Anna Kim, both doctoral students in Sociology and Equity Studies in Education at OISE/UT. Their painstaking work and our discussions helped to shape the content and form of this section.Google Scholar
24 This review is not exhaustive of all history of education journals since other major journals still remain to be examined, such as Paedagogica Historica “based in Europe” and History of Education Review “based in Australia and New Zealand”, journals of education history in other countries and regions, and those that are not written in English. One of the journals in our review, Historical Studies in Education, based in Canada, is a bilingual journal that publishes English and French articles. One of the articles that utilizes Foucault is written in French, and unfortunately neither I nor my graduate students can read French. This review also focuses on the most recent ten years, not accounting for Foucault's impact on history in general and on history of education in particular before 1999. For instance, the English translation of Foucault's first major book Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason was initially published in 1971. One of the first historians in the United States to engage Foucault's ideas, Hayden White, published Metahistory in 1973. Hence, there has been a 20 + year period from the 1970s to the 1990s that Foucault's insights have been circulating in the English-speaking academe.Google Scholar
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34 According to Foucault, “The archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events. But the archive is also that which determines that all these things said… are grouped together in district figures, composed together in accordance with multiple relations, maintained or blurred in accordance with specific regularities…. [It] defines at the outset the system of its enunciability… [and] the system of its functioning.” Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language “New York: Pantheon, 1972”, 129.Google Scholar
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