Disciplinary Institution Research Articles

Carceral and colonial domesticities: Subaltern case geographies of a Delhi rescue home

This article explores a relatively rare archival account of female subjectivity, experience, mobility, and voice within a carceral institution in late-colonial Delhi. The capital’s “Rescue Home” was created to house women and girls removed from the city’s brothels under new legislation. While no brothels were closed in the first year of the laws functioning, the home accepted 18 women and girls and detailed their circumstances and experiences in its 1940 report. It was able to forcibly detain girls and was run upon disciplinary and racial lines, like other colonial institutions. But its inhabitants were not subject to detailed surveillance. Rather, their lives were ones usually beyond recording or whose stories were actively silenced. The 1940 Rescue Home report provides us with rich details of the commonplace, quotidian struggles which women and girls faced in colonial Delhi. The 18 case geographies of the Home’s inhabitants help us understand how sexuality and motherhood, education and character, and race all shaped routes into the home and destinations when people left. The accounts tell us of a carceral governmentality with influence beyond the disciplinary institution’s walls, but also of female subjects who resisted, spoke back, and absconded. This relationship between forced immobility and willed mobility suggests that brothels and rescue homes were not just connected, through the intended transfer of inhabitants, but can be directly compared as carceral domesticities.

Led Around by the Nose

Led Around by the Nose

Distance and proximity

This article focuses on interpersonal relations between staff members and juvenile delinquents detained in the State Reformatory of Mol, a disciplinary institution in Belgium, between 1927 and 1960. While historical scholarship provides ample knowledge of the history of disciplinary techniques, coercive practices and subtle resistance by detainees, it fails to address the broader spectrum of social interactions coexisting alongside formal coercion. This article argues that alongside coercive practices, there was a multiplicity of social interactions taking place within the walls of the reformatory. Ego-documents from both pupils and educators provide insight into the micro-interactions between staff members and detainees. The first sections elaborate upon the coexistence of different pedagogical styles among the staff members, depending on their function in the reformatory and on the time period. The subsequent section illustrates how pupils contested their educators’ behaviour, in particular regarding self-restraint. Lastly, it discusses the balance between face-to-face and epistolary interactions in the relation between pupils and the director, both during and after the detention. While this article does not deny the violent nature of carceral relations, it does seek to show that, to address the complexity of carceral relations, it is necessary to acknowledge the coexistence of multiple ways of interactions, their nature, and their changes throughout time.

O poder disciplinar produz, a sociologia problematiza e o PIBID- direitos humanos resiste

PIBID’s one of the most important projects implemented in Higher Education with regard to teacher training and bringing the University closer to Basic Education. Understood as a subproject, PIBID-Human Rights was inserted in a public high school in Blumenau, between 2016 and 2017, linked to the Sociology curriculum component. For about two years, the PIBID undergraduates promoted actions aimed at raising students' awareness about the importance of an education committed to Human Rights; for this, rethinking traditional teaching and creating methodological alternatives to reflect the school and its paradigms became an imperative. Conceived as a disciplinary institution, the school produces bodies, scales time and controls knowledge. Would it be possible for the PIBID-Human Rights and the Sociology curricular component to be a space of resistance to this model so deeply rooted in Education? The present work aims to understand the challenges found by the PIBID-Human Rights and the Sociology curricular component in problematizing the school paradigms and traditional methodologies. In our analyses we’ll resort to reports of PIBID- Human Rights (2016; 2017), scholars of Sociology and Education, Mills (1965) and Freire (1998;2003). The conceptual approach to school disciplining is based on Michel Foucault.

The bleary-eyed (but disciplined) patient: Hospital late night and early morning awakenings and Foucault’s disciplinary power in a healthcare panopticon

It is an old adage that when one is staying at the hospital, a sleepless night will follow. Hospitals are notoriously difficult places to sleep in. This is due to a variety of factors, but one of the primary ones are the late night and early morning disturbances caused by nurses and other medical professionals, who are taking measurements and vital signs from the patient. Explaining why this occurs requires an understanding how the hospital is organized as a political institution. Using a Foucauldian theoretical framework, we critically examine the hospital as a disciplinary institution; we find that the hospital’s organizational impetus for a “perpetual examination” drives hospital sleeplessness. While the perpetual examination is not borne out of malice and is usually vital to the health of the patient, understanding this process helps us understand why hospitals are so difficult to sleep in. While we cannot reject the process of hospitalization wholesale, understanding what drives hospitals as political institutions helps us begin to improve them; helping patient sleep is one place to start.

The Idiot as Artist:The Fantasy Boats of James Henry Pullen

The Idiot as Artist:The Fantasy Boats of James Henry Pullen

Cartografias cênicas

Este artigo tem como intento discutir o fazer teatral enquanto uma ação atravessada pelos acontecimentos no/do cotidiano escolar. Desta forma, propõe-se discutir a escola compreendendo-a como instituição disciplinar e os desdobramentos disso no/do cotidiano de seus praticantes. Para fomentar a discussão acerca do teatro enquanto ação, apresenta-se o relato de uma prática pedagógica em uma Escola Municipal da Rede Pública, localizada em São Salvador do Tocantins (TO). Portanto, pretende-se ampliar as discussões em torno do fazer teatral na escola e compreender que o teatro se insere nesse contexto, como uma ação a fim de provocar rupturas, contribuindo para as táticas que ocorrem nesse lugar.

Тюрма у міському просторі Вінниці (кінець ХІХ – початок ХХ ст.): локація та внутрішній устрій

Стаття присвячена історії Вінницької міської тюрми. На підставі архівних документів, що вводяться до наукового обігу вперше, проаналізовано такі аспекти: розташування в’язниці у міському просторі; діяльність адміністрації щодо організації тюремного життя; повсякденне життя в’язнів; відносини церкви та тюрми. Дослідження є мікроісторичним, у центрі уваги якого конкретні форми соціальних практик.

The prison-televisual complex

In 2016, the A&E cable network partnered with the Clark County Jail in Jeffersonville, Indiana, to incarcerate seven volunteers as undercover prisoners for two months. This article takes the reality television franchise 60 Days In as a case study for analyzing the convergence of prison and television, and the rise of what we call the prison-televisual complex in the United States, which denotes the imbrication of the prison system with the television industry, not simply television as an ideological apparatus. 60 Days In represents an entanglement between punishment and the culture industries, whereby carceral logics flow into the business and cultural practices of entertainment, and the demands of the attention economy – ratings, content, profitability, sharing – come to bear on the prison as a disciplinary institution. The prison-televisual complex, we argue, participates in and facilitates carceral governing practices, including the TV industry’s involvement in the classification, criminalization, and warehousing of dispossessed populations.

City-campus, or Educational Space of the City. Methodological Construct

The article considers the city from the point of view of its educational potential and in the categories of educational space, approaching the main cultural and historical forms of the city as educational institutions. With this review, at least three focus points are retained: 1) Consideration of the city space and its infrastructure as an educational space and educational infrastructure that are not reducible to usual school and university (the latter should also be culturally and historically distributed, showing their basic etymons and missions); 2) Consideration of education as an institution of educational and, more broadly, anthropological practices of the development and formation of a person, and not as a disciplinary institution and matrix; 3) Consideration of the repertoire of anthropological practices development as a practice unfolding in urban space. It is shown that these three foci act as mirrors directed at each other, mirroring and showing each other mutual potential and mutual scarcity, the need for each other. The actual wealth (thesaurus) of the urban space depends on the density, frequency and variety of connections between these areas. Next, we look at specific cultural and historical forms, such as the Temple, School, Museum, University, etc., which constitute the basic infrastructure nodes of the city space itself. These cultural institutions are considered not so much from the point of view of their internal tasks, but from the position of their place in the city, in the urban space, with regard to their place and role as special educational nodes-institutions in this space. Further, the urban space is considered in the categories of the campus city, in which this space is linked by different anthropological practices repertoires.

Conceptualizing an Adoption Pedagogy: Expanding Beyond “Teaching Adoption”

Adoption & Culture Vol. 7, Issue 1 (2019) Copyright © 2019 by The Ohio State University Conceptualizing an Adoption Pedagogy: Expanding Beyond “Teaching Adoption” JAERAN KIM, KIT MYERS, KIMBERLY MCKEE, AND ELIZABETH RALEIGH THIS SPECIAL issue on pedagogy and adoption began as a panel at the 2016 Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture Conference. In the session titled, “Adoption Pedagogy: An Interdisciplinary Discussion of Challenges, Implications, and Practices,” the presenters, representing faculty from various disciplines and at various stages in their careers, discussed what teaching adoption means for them and their students. The discussion centered on several topics that included challenging dominant narratives of adoption as rescue, best practices in teaching, integrating adoption content in courses not designed as adoption-specific, positionality and relationship to the adoption constellation, and student adoptees in the classroom. The essays included in this issue expand that conversation, addressing the epistemological possibilities and challenges when bringing together adoption and pedagogy across a broad range of academic disciplines, including American Studies , rhetoric, literature, counseling, and general undergraduate liberal arts, as well as considering adoption camps as a pedagogical space. In the past, when adoption was taught—if at all—most of the curriculum emphasized only the positive aspects, such as permanency for children, without contextualizing the loss that predates the new formation. Considering that nineteen out of twenty adults have a positive view of adoption, it is imagined as a 2 ADOPTION & CULTURE 7.1 win-win-win situation for birth parents, adoptees, and adoptive parents (“Adoption ”). However, as many who have lived and/or studied adoption know, adoption is much more complex and is, at its foundation, an extremely unequal industry . Race, class, gender, and disability status (among other factors) shape how children are transferred between first families and adoptive ones. Social institutions and cultural practices legitimize and commodify these practices. That four of the six authors in this issue are adoptees is not lost on us. Only within the past three decades has a slow shift occurred in how adoption is understood , as adoptees claim their expertise and the validity of their lived experiences. Yet, this evolution is slow to embrace the collective and individual experiences and knowledge of birth parents. As Chandra Mohanty reminds us, “who we are, how we act, what we think, and what stories we tell” are important; subjectivity and voice help us “understand our specific locations in the educational process and in the institutions through which we are constituted” (148). Included in the conversation is the recognition that positionality for adult adoptees—particularly transracial and transnational adoptees—may highlight particular tensions in the classroom related to adoption content as well as racial and ethnic identities. Transracial and transnational adoptee faculty may experience pushback simply because of their racial and ethnic status, as other faculty of color do. The pushback experienced by transracial/transnational adoptee faculty is particularly relevant given the special issue editors’ positionalities as internationally adopted persons from Asia who participate in critical adoption studies. Students who are adoptees may find their identities represented in the classroom for the first time, either as a result of the adoption course content or instructors ’ self-disclosure as adoptees. Alternatively, if part of pedagogy is to help students relate to the class material, how do we teach adoption to an audience whose members, for the most part, have at best tangential experience with adoption or whose knowledge comes only from media exposure? These essays help us consider the ways we might use pedagogy to counter the institutional (and human) tendencies that impair our ability to understand, re-imagine, and differently practice adoption. Michel Foucault reminds us that academia is a disciplinary (controlling) institution: “The disciplines characterize, classify , specialize; they distribute along a scale, around a norm, hierarchize individuals in relation to one another and, if necessary, disqualify and invalidate” (223). In “Teaching About Adoption as an Anti-Hegemonic and Anti-Racist Effort,” Patricia Sawin reflects on the task at hand, surmising “most of the students come to the course with a relatively positive opinion of adoption, seeing it as something honorable and ethical for an adult to undertake.” With these preconceptions, inviting students to question this logic can be challenging, and...

New genealogies and the courage of truth: Toward an ethics of adversarial public educational scholarship and policy activism

Science denial in the post-truth era is driven by both the rejection of empirical science and the fraudulent use of scientific language. Education policy based on junk science produced by philanthrocapitalists depoliticizes political questions by relocating complex legislative and policy issues from the realm of political and philosophical discourse to that of scientific rationality using metrics and methods that are themselves fatally flawed. Dominant configurations of institutional power also attack scholarship that both debunks spurious causal claims and establishes causal links to existential crises, which in both cases inconveniences the neoliberal capitalist project. We discuss the methodological implications of education research as the counter-conduct of policy advocacy against power claims based on both the rejection of empirical science and the production of junk science. We both discuss and model Foucault’s tactic of genealogy and his analysis of parrhēsia, or truth telling, through creating an imperfect, preliminary genealogy of the “new” post-truth era, which contextualizes contemporary technologies of alternative facts in the history of public relations and propaganda that extend to the early 20thcentury. The methodological and political tactic of genealogy could be a move toward a new ethics of adversarial public scholarship that seeks to reconfigure what counts as scholarship in academia, itself a rationalizing disciplinary institution. Considering the moment, the study of power, the academy’s roles both in subverting and perpetuating it, and the necessity of epistemological and methodological counter-conduct have perhaps never been more important.

Del fulgor al desencanto. Desafíos para el feminismo académico en la fugaz experiencia de la Carrera de Estudios de la Mujer (Universidad de Buenos Aires)

Con el objetivo de identificar algunos desafíos que supone la incorporación de programas de formación feminista en las universidades públicas, este artículo reconstruye una experiencia pionera del feminismo académico en los años ochenta en Argentina: la Carrera de Especialización Interdisciplinaria en Estudios de la Mujer (Universidad de Buenos Aires [UBA]). Metodológicamente, se realizaron entrevistas a egresadas, docentes y directivas, y se analizaron diversos documentos primarios y secundarios. Como resultado se destaca la dificultad del enfoque interdisciplinario en una institución disciplinaria, los conflictos entre las trayectorias formativas previas y la renovada posición de estudiante, y los conflictos entre las jerarquías universitarias y las dinámicas horizontales de los grupos de estudio feministas. En las conclusiones se realiza un balance de la carrera con el fin de establecer puntos posibles de comparación con otras experiencias locales y regionales.

Cormac McCarthy and the Genre Turn in Contemporary Literary Fiction

The wholesale embrace of genre fiction by contemporary literary writers is currently reorganizing the literary field. This essay looks at the role that genre has played in Cormac McCarthy’s fiction since his turn to the Western with Blood Meridian (1985). It assesses his genre fiction vis-à-vis Mark McGurl’s influential study of the importance of creative writing programs for postwar US fiction in The Program Era (2009). In contrast to the modernist aesthetic institutionalized in program era fiction, I argue that the recent genre turn significantly changes the relationship of literary fiction to reality as well as to institutions. I suggest that the turn to genre should be considered the formal response to a crisis in reality, triggered by twenty-first-century reconceptualizations of the world and our place in it, which requires new ways of representing reality. By reading McCarthy’s The Road (2006) alongside Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011), I argue that the genre turn in contemporary literary fiction also marks a turn toward institutions, one that both rejects the anti-institutionality of the program era and a return to the modern disciplinary institution in favor of rethinking a value basis for future institutions.

The Rise of the Discipline and Inspection Commission, 1927–2012

This article traces and analyzes the longitudinal changes in the operative structure, rules, and practices of the Chinese Communist Party’s disciplinary institution not for the purpose of appraising its performance in corruption control but to demonstrate how the party regulates its own enforcement agency through institutionalizing the disciplinary decision-making process. To that end, this article identifies and explains the exact measures the party has used to delegate authority to the party’s disciplinary institution in a systematic and institutionalized manner without losing control over disciplinary outcomes. It also identifies three features of the institutionalization process: concentration and centralization of disciplinary power and further depoliticization of disciplinary activities.

Humane Education

Humane Education

The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party's Disciplinary Institution (1927-2012) The Operation of the Party Anticorruption Machine

This article traces and analyzes the longitudinal changes of the operative structure, rules and practices of the Party disciplinary institution not for the purpose of appraising its performance in corruption control but to demonstrate how the Party regulates its own enforcement agency through institutionalizing the disciplinary decision-making process. To that end, this article identifies and explains the exact measures that the Party has used to delegate authority to the Party’s disciplinary institution in a systematic and institutionalized manner without losing control over the disciplinary outcome. It also identifies three features of the institutionalization process: concentration and centralization of disciplinary power and further depoliticization of disciplinary activities.

Migrant Living Spaces: Religiosity and Gender in a Disciplinary Institution

This article looks at the production of gendered pious subjectivities at an Islamic student dorm in the Netherlands, for Turkish–Dutch female students. Following the Foucauldian framework of disciplinary power, we trace how normalising disciplinary techniques are at work in the dorm. We note, however, that members of the dorm voluntarily subject themselves to this power, as they are highly committed to Islamic self-development and living in a pious universe as a mode of being. Members perceive the disciplinary sanctions on themselves as necessary. Therefore, we argue that the constitution of gendered pious subjects is a product of the interplay between agentic subjects and the disciplinary, normalising techniques of the dorm. We want to also stress, however, that gender norms become all the more binding and stringent when people are held accountable by a disciplinary institution rather than personal ethical convictions.

Reviewing the Final Function of the Disciplinary Institution of Shurta (Police) during Shiite Buyids Government Dominance on Baghdad

During Abbasid Dynasty, Shurta Institution (Police) was one of the disciplinary and security systems whose duty was establishing order and security as well as fighting against the corrupt people and criminals i.e. Ayyaran. During the third period of Abbasid dynasty, which is known as Buyids era, the institution of Shurta experienced a number of changes in comparison with the first Abbasids periods, some of which were. the direct interference of the governors of buyids in appointing Sahib Al-Shurta (Shurta administrator), paying the guaranty fee of this job to the treasury of Buyids in order to accept those jobs by those who were appointed to do so, and also political considerations in appointing Sahib Al-Shurta. In addition, at the end of the dominance of Buyids on caliphate of Abbasids and the beginning of their decline, another period of caliph’s interference was observed in appointing the administrators of the Shurta of Baghdad. This paper is aims at to study and analyze the function of this institution during the period of Buyids dominance on Caliphate of Abbasids in Baghdad (955-1068) and some of its consequences, as well as dealing with security circumstances of that period.

Spinning in the NAPLAN Ether: ‘Postscript on the Control Societies’ and the Seduction of Education in Australia

This paper applies concepts Deleuze developed in his ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, especially those relating to modulatory power, dividuation and control, to aspects of Australian schooling to explore how this transition is manifesting itself. Two modulatory machines of assessment, NAPLAN and My Schools, are examined as a means to better understand how the disciplinary institution is changing as a result of modulation. This transition from discipline to modulation is visible in the declining importance of the disciplinary teacher–student relationship as a measure of the success of the educative process. The transition occurs through seduction because that which purports to measure classroom quality is in fact a serpent of modulation that produces simulacra of the disciplinary classroom. The effect is to sever what happens in the disciplinary space from its representations in a luminiferous ether that overlays the classroom.