Disruptive events: elite education and the discursive production of violence

Abstract

This paper considers the discursive production of violence in the context of educational markets. Drawing on a larger study of sexually violent incidents that occurred in an elite private boys' school in Sydney, Australia, in 2000, the paper examines disciplinary traditions and communicative practices surrounding these events. Insights from Michel Foucault and Michel de Certeau inform the analysis of market‐inflected features of school cultures, and their reconfiguration in violent acts by educational consumers. The paper aims to bring the intersection of school cultures and policy contexts into the matrix of factors considered in relation to school violence, and argues that institutional and social discourses that normalise and reproduce hierarchies of status and worth are complicit in the symbolic and material production of violence.