Critical tools for interrogating the Quality Agenda

Discourses, Standpoints, Absences, and

Hegemonies

AIMS

Offer some theoretical tools that we can use to critique.

Not s directly theorising ‘quality’ per se, but more philosophical, looking at social change, ‘Social Thoery’.

Need to work out what this would mean.. Creative work

Traces of the pastPost-structuralism

Michel Foucault• Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975)• The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966)

Post-Structuralismwhat we think of as a social ‘structure’ e.g. poverty, is actively created, through discursive mechanisms, ‘Regimes of truth.

Discourses

Tracing past legacies – an ‘archaeology’ – to write a history of the present

‘Productive power’ Power operates not to limit what we do (power over someone), but operates to create certain worlds ( and not other)

'One must remember that power is not an ensemble of mechanisms of negation, refusal, exclusion. But it produces effectively. It is likely that it produces right down to individuals themselves.'

Michel Foucault. (2004). 'Je suis un artificier'. In Roger-Pol Droit (ed.), Michel Foucault, entretiens. Paris: Odile Jacob, p. 113. (Interview

conducted in 1975. This passage trans. Clare O'Farrell).

Standpoint Theory

From..Standpoint feminism… Women’s truth..Therefore experience basedSituated knowledgeChallenges universal truth….

Rather perspectives, multiple truthes.Knowledge from somewhere and FOR someoneEmphasis on oppression, voices etcEssentialism leanings (e.g. only a women, a Maori,

can understand/speak. Political)

Knowledge is socially situated – knowledge is based on experience, and different situations result in different knowledges. But more than this is at stake. Oppressed groups “can learn to identify their distinctive opportunities to turn an oppressive feature of the group’s conditions into a source of critical insight about how the dominant society thinks and is structured. Thus, standpoint theories map how a social and political disadvantage can be turned into an epistemological, scientific, and political advantage.”

Harding, Sandra. 2004. “Introduction: Standpoint Theory as a Site of Political, Philosophic, and Scientific Debate” in The Feminist Standpoint Theory

Reader: Intellectual & Political Controversies, 2004, New York and London: Routledge, 1-15.

“Oppositional postmodernism”Boaventura De Sousa Santos

A Sociology of Absences‘consists of an inquiry that aims to explain that what does not exist is in fact actively produced as nonexistent, that is, as a noncredible alternative to what exists.’ (Santos, 2004 The World Social Forum: A Users Manual:14. Available

Online at www.ces.uc.pt/bss/documentos/fsm_eng.pdf.

‘I do not romanticise the local, the South, or the periphery. I do not romanticize, I take sides.’

(Santos, 1998: 138)

logics of hegemonic rationalityThe first derives from the monoculture of knowledge and rigor of knowledge (…) turning modern science and high culture onto the sole criteria of truth and aesthetic quality, respectively.

The second logic resides in the monoculture of linear time, the idea that history has a unique and well-known meaning and directions. This meaning and direction have been well formulated in different ways in the last two hundred years, modernization, development and globalization.

The third logic is the logic of social classification, based on the monoculture of naturalization of differences. It consists in distributing populations according to categories that naturalize hierarchies. (…) According to this, nonexistence is produced as a form of inferiority.

The forth logic of production of non-existence is the logic of the dominant scale: the monoculture of the universal and the global: according this the scale that adopted as the primordial determines the irrelevance of all other possible scales. In western modernity, the dominant scale appears under two different forms: the universal and the global.

The fifth logic of non existence is the logic of productivity. It resides in the monoculture of the criteria of capitalist productivity and efficiency, which privileges growth through market forces. (Santos, 2004: 15-17)

Constellating the tools

Tools can be used together – they are not separately applied to a situation…

SO..

We can look at the ways that Discourses have created absences, or use a standpoint to become aware of an absence

Global South

Women

Indigenous People

Poor Rural Communities

Write an alternative

Declaration of Education for xxxxxxx

with a focus on your group

Preamble

Aims

Next Week

Research an educational Project in your chosen case that study location that claims to offer quality.. Write a critique of this initiative or project.