Knowing Foucault, knowing you: ‘raced’/classed and gendered subjectivities in the pedagogical state

Abstract

This article evaluates the continuing contemporary relevance of Foucauldian analyses for critical educational and social research practice. Framed around examples drawn from everyday cultural and educational practices, I argue that current intensifications of psychologisation under neoliberal capitalism not only produce and constrain increasingly activated and responsibilised educational subjects but do so via engaging particular versions of feminisation and racialisation. Like Hacking’s ‘looping effect’, Foucauldian ideas may themselves now figure within prevailing technologies of subjectivity but this means we need more, as well as more than, Foucault.