Foucault's Discourse Analysis Research Articles

The Role of Power Relations and Identification in Collaborative Knowledge Construction at Single Gender Online Forum

This short paper describes a research project that aims at exploring how identification and power relations contribute to learners’ knowledge construction in single gender online forum. This multiple case studies take place at five online classes in two female universities in Saudi Arabia. Data is collected from semi-structured interviews and group discussions. Qualitative content analysis of online discussions is used to investigate the extent in which collaborative knowledge construction was achieved by participants utilizing Gunawardena et, al. 1997 tool. In addition, Foucault discourse analysis is used to explore learners’ power relations and identification. The initial findings of the pilot study suggest that learners have imposed several power relations strategies in the discussion’s forum such as maintaining norms of online discussions; (2) maintaining norms of a good classmate; (3) criticizing, comparing and assessing each other's posts; (4) displaying personal information; (5) checkingothers' intellectual activities and messages; (6) comparing between oneself and others' actions and ways of thinking; (7) categorizing oneself and others ; and (8) excluding and including others. These behaviors were organized under three themes: normalisation, surveillance, and classification. Initial findings also showed that participants revealed parts of their identities while interacting with each other. The research will continue to investigate how these practices are influenced by the social and cultural settings and how this contributes to the quality of knowledge construction in online discussion forum.

Feminilidades e Masculinidades no Cariri Cearence: 'Na Escola não se Fala Sobre Isso!'

The main objective of this research is to problematize discourses about gender, femininities, and masculinities in the school context of Cariri, Ceará, from the students’ perspective. The research included 13 students from state public schools in a municipality in the state of Ceará, who participated in collective interviews conducted via a digital platform. We employed Foucault's discourse analysis to examine the empirical material. The results obtained evidenced the invisibility of sex education at school, as well as gender representations based on the biological and binary order, the non­recognition of multiple femininities, masculinitiesor other gender identities.

Ortnamnspolitiken i svenska Pommern: En diskursanalytisk och kontaktonomastisk studie

The article presents the results of a pilot investigation into the seventeenth-century name policies associated with large-scale cadastral mapping of the Swedish conglomerate state and their implementation in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The material studied consists of the Land Survey’s directives issued by the Swedish Crown between 1628 and 1700, as well as 759 place name attestations excerpted from the B I volume of cadastral maps of the Wolgast District from 1694. The article reveals how both practical and symbolic aspects of political discourses are evident in the regulations of place name collection and processing. Particular attention is paid to the Swedification discourse analysed by the tools native to Foucaultian discourse analysis and proximisation theory. The Wolgast material shows that the Swedish land surveyors did not comply with the instructions to Swedify or translate Pomeranian names. The tentative explanation offered builds on the idea of linguistic and cultural proximity between the German-speaking region and the Swedish land surveyors.

Foucault Dan Diskursus Media Siber

The availability of cybermedia offers many options that vary for discovering and consuming information similar to the ability to generate it. Cybermedia has also given rise to new methods for people to interact and build relationships in society, posing problems for researchers in the communication study field, particularly in dissecting new kinds of multi-modal communication. The research objective is to learn more about how Michel Foucault's discourse analysis applies to the cybermedia discourse. The findings of this study show that Foucault's notions, as found in The Birth of the Clinic, The Archeology of Knowledge, and Technology of the Self, are still relevant in addressing the difficulties of cybermedia research. The Foucaultian approach to social media focuses on sharing processes, which are the foundation of social media. Another aspect of Foucault's media philosophy is "constant awareness and visibility."

Os memes de Lula na Operação Lava Jato

O objetivo deste artigo é analisar memes sobre a condução coercitiva do ex-presidente Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, em 2016. A fundamentação teórico-metodológica está ancorada na Análise do Discurso de linha foucaultiana. O corpus analisado, memes retirados de três sites noticiosos e de jornais online, desconstroem a imagem de Lula graças às suas filiações a formações discursivas opostas a ele. O campo simbólico das imagens torna-se uma arena para a confrontação ideológica e a disputa de sentidos, no contexto sócio-histórico de crise política instaurada pela Operação Lava Jato. Compreendemos que, no cenário da interatividade e da convergência midiática, o dito e o não dito coexistem na superfície dos memes, construindo significações a partir dos jogos de visibilidade e de invisibilidade das imagens. No movimento discursivo das imagens analisadas, observamos a construção de efeitos derrisórios calcados no corpo do petista.

Educação Matemática e Currículo Escolar: um estudo da matemática praticada no ensino técnico agrícola

Este artigo tem como objetivo discutir a educação matemática praticada na disciplina de matemática e suas articulações com o dispositivo da tecnocientificidade no curso Técnico em Agropecuária do Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia do Rio Grande do Sul Campus Sertão (IFRS-Sertão). Os aportes teóricos que lhe dão sustentação encontram-se, principalmente, nas formulações de Michel Foucault e seus comentadores. O material de pesquisa é composto por entrevistas realizadas com recém-formados do IFRS-Sertão, bem como documentos institucionais – projeto pedagógico atual – e materiais escolares desses estudantes. O exercício analítico sobre esse material (realizado na perspectiva da análise do discurso foucaultiano e por meio da abordagem de Storytelling) possibilitou concluir que: a) na atualidade o princípio pedagógico que conduz o currículo da formação do Técnico Agrícola no IFRS-Sertão é o “aprender pela pesquisa’; b) o discurso da educação matemática que opera, na atualidade, no curso Técnico em Agropecuária do IFRS-Sertão pode ser considerado como um dos vetores (mas não o único) que constituem o dispositivo da tecnocientificidade.

The Metaphor of "War on Drugs" and "Mass Murder" in the Philippines: discourse analysis, power relations, and an interview with President Rodrigo Duterte

This article offers an analysis of statements pronounced by Rodrigo Duterte in an interview produced by Al Jazeera. It shows how Duterte tried to legitimize the extrajudicial killing of more than 3.500 citizens through these statements and rhetoric, a discourse dependent and effective through the metaphor of “war on drugs”, constructing drug dealers and users as threats , enemies to be “legitimately” killed. Drawing on Foucault's Discourse Analysis (1971), it argues that although war on drugs is a metaphor, and not war in the literal or modern sense, it is mobilized within a discursive strategy previous to, during, and after presidential elections; it is a juridical-political discourse on drugs and security that results in confrontations, hunting, punishment, and, in the limit, the exclusion or extermination of declared enemies. It also delineates the electoral context and the historical level of analysis, discussing the role of discourse analysis for critical security studies.

A Análise Foucaultiana do Discurso e sua Utilização em Pesquisa Etnográfica

RESUMO O artigo discute alguns conceitos fundamentais da arqueologia proposta por Michel Foucault como estratégia de análise da dimensão discursiva da realidade para, na sequência, apresentar a forma como esse modo de análise do discurso foi utilizado em uma pesquisa etnográfica concreta. Demarca-se a especificidade da análise foucaultiana do discurso em relação a outros tipos possíveis, a partir da discussão sumária dos principais resultados alcançados pela pesquisa. O objetivo é elucidar a pertinência do uso da AD em pesquisas qualitativas, especialmente a etnográfica. Deixa-se sugerida a necessidade de se abarcar na análise a dimensão genealógica das relações de poder envolvidas em toda prática discursiva.

History and citizenship: Does the reformed Greek Cypriot primary history curriculum include myths and legends that represent the 'other'?

This paper investigates the elements in ancient Greek myths that refer to the 'other' in the recently reformed Greek Cypriot history curriculum's primary phase programmes of study (MoEd, 2016). The article's opening section analyses the conceptual nature of such myths and their presence in modern curricula. It goes on to identify in these myths the presence of any foreign, different or genderbased 'other', and whether they are included in Greek Cypriot textual or visual teaching material about myths and legends. The article also considers the extent to which this material refers to characteristic, dominant female figures who play a leading role in classical myths and local historical narratives – figures associated with numerous Cypriot place names, traditions, historical accounts and fiction. The paper builds on Said's (1989) concept of otherness, post-colonial theory and Foucault's discourse analysis (Given, 2002) to consider in particular how the myth of Aphrodite, the gendered woman 'other', was marginalized during Venetian, Ottoman and British colonial rule of Cyprus from 1489 to 1960. More generally, it examines the significance of teaching ancient Greek myths as an aspect of Greek Cypriot citizenship education.

O discurso pedagógico da ciência em operação na Rede Nacional de Educação e Ciência: Novos Talentos da Rede Pública (RNEC/NT)

Resumo Este artigo objetiva analisar como alguns grupos da Rede Nacional de Educação e Ciências: Novos Talentos da Rede Pública (RNEC/NT), da região sul do país, operam o que temos chamado discurso pedagógico da ciência em cursos para professores e estudantes da Educação Básica. Para tal, utilizamos descrições de cenas enunciativas de cursos desses grupos e os analisamos a partir da análise de discurso foucaultiana. Concluímos que existem três movimentos de pedagogização da ciência nos cursos analisados: na organização pedagógica geral do curso; no ensino, ou como denominamos na "pedagogização" do método científico; e na variação de metodologias para o ensino de ciências. É possível dizer que cursos como estes possibilitam ao professorado compreender a importância desses dois campos de saber para sua prática docente: o discurso pedagógico e o discurso científico.

The Field of Foucaultian Discourse Analysis: Structures, Developments and Perspectives

The article outlines the field of FOUCAULTian discourse analysis. The FOUCAULTian concept of discourse is introduced, and methodological positions and methodological developments are sketched. Compared to other qualitative social research approaches, the different researchers and research groups that have adopted the FOUCAULTian concept of discourse are not linked by a fully integrated common research paradigm. However, they share common methodological problems and areas of methodological research resulting from various references to FOUCAULTian positions. In the last decade, different research groups have become aware of these shared commonalities, so that one can speak of an emerging field of FOUCAULTian discourse analysis rather than an emerging paradigm. The article gives insight into the discourse analytic research in selected countries, discusses the internationalisation of FOUCAULTian discourse analysis and highlights current trends and perspectives.

The Influence of the Arabian Nights on Modern Young Adult Literature: Midwinter Blood and in Darkness as Examples

Derrida and Blanchot [1] may be right when they consider genre as an imposition on a text. They seem to agree that a text achieves its singularity status only by “exceeding genre conventions”. They are also compelling when both of them, though in different ways, speak about the death of the author, the omniscient divine figure behind the text. Barthes proposes the name of the “scriptor” to replace the authoritarian authority of the “author”; whereas Blanchot goes deeper and implies that the moment of death of the author is the very moment of his immortality. Any hint of labeling or categorization limits the text and leaves the door open to the Gramscian notion of hegemony or the Foucauldian concept of power. The endeavor in this small paper, the Influence of the Arabian Nights on Young Adult Literature, is based on Kristeva’s/Barthes’ notion of intertextuality [2] and Foucault’s discourse analysis. Intertextuality in the Barthian sense is based on a triangular relationship between the text, the reader and the potential other texts; whereas Foucault discourse analysis is based on five steps described in depth by Gavin Kendall; Gary Wickham (1999: 42). [3] In this way my comparative analysis is no longer typological (based on category) but rather topological (based on degrees or continuum). In his “the literary mind’, Mark Turner (1996) writes the following: “but not even she, meaning Shahrazad, for all her looking into the future, can know that her performance during the next thousand and one nights will bring her a reputation as the greatest literary mind ever” (P: 8). Turner ‘s compelling insight cannot be taken for granted if the main concern of the writer is to deconstruct the complex theme of story and projection in the parable from which, according to him, “we have a cognitive basis from which language can originate.”(P: 168). The aim of this paper is to avoid the impressionism that may result from ad hoc personal opinion and consider the whole Arabian nights as a multi-dimensional genre or better canon genre from which artists continue to be inspired. The novelty in this study may be summarized in two points. First, it attempts to consider One Thousand and a Night as a canon genre that in a way proves the limitation of classical genre categorization/nomenclature and pushes us to introduce new terms in genre theory such as the notion of the canon genre and even the concept of anti-genre [4] which will be dealt furtively in this paper. Second, it attempts to study its degree of influence on modern young adult literature represented by Midwinter Blood and in Darkness both Winners, successively, of the 2013 and 2014 Michael L. Printz awards. If we question/deconstruct the discourse in the Foucauldian sense in order to find the absence that is hidden by the presence we may come to the conclusion that Midwinter Blood and In Darkness revolve around a few themes and three major literary techniques.

Religion in New Zealand's State Primary Schools

Around 42 per cent of state primary schools provide ‘Bible in Schools’ (BiS) classes in New Zealand under the ‘Nelson system’ of voluntary religious instruction. Parents may opt their children out, but in practice most do not. By contrast, the New Zealand Curriculum 2007 recognises cultural diversity but makes little provision for education about diverse religions and worldviews at the primary or secondary level, and educationalists advocate the development of tolerance in preference to conceptual understanding of religion. This paper draws on interviews with school principals, teachers, parents, BiS volunteers and other key stakeholders. Adopting a Foucaultian discourse analysis and critical realist epistemology I identify material and discursive constraints embedded in current religious instruction practices that undermine government and state school accountability regarding BiS programmes, along with changes that would better serve New Zealand’s commitment to respecting diversity. Against the promotion of Christian religious instruction and uninformed tolerance within the curriculum, I assert the need for a review of BiS programmes and for the introduction of education about diverse religions and worldviews in New Zealand schools.

Young women’s construction of their post-cancer fertility

Younger women diagnosed with cancer often face compromised fertility as a result of their treatment. However, previous research has adopted a biomedical model of fertility and utilised hypothetico-deductive research methods which have not allowed for full exploration of women’s subjectivity. This study explored younger women’s construction of their fertility post-cancer, and their discussions of fertility with healthcare professionals, from a social constructionist epistemology. Semi-structured one-to-one interviews were conducted with eight women aged 18–26, across a variety of cancer types. Foucaultian Discourse Analysis identified three subject positions associated with fertility concerns: ‘Inadequate woman: Accepting the motherhood mandate’; ‘Adequate woman: Resisting the motherhood mandate’; and ‘Survival of the fittest: Woman as genetically defective’. Implications of these subject positions included feelings of inadequacy, fear and devastation; feeling undesirable to romantic partners; and concern about passing on cancer-positive genes. In describing healthcare professional interactions, women adopted positions of ‘Satisfied patient’; ‘Passive recipient patient’; or ‘Resisting the passive patient position’. Accounts of inadequate information provision were associated with anger and frustration, whereas feeling adequately informed was associated with satisfaction at making decisions about fertility preservation. These results suggest that fertility is of importance to young women cancer survivors, and that compromised fertility can negatively impact subjectivity.

Promiscuous Analysis in Qualitative Research

This article troubles the seductive nature of coding based on its potential to fulfill the desires for systematicity, procedure, and clarity. I attempt to explicitly narrate what it is I think I do when I “analyze” data in my empirical work. Building on the notion of promiscuous feminist research, I delineate more explicitly how promiscuity became the hallmark of my inquiry while conducting research at a high-achieving, high-poverty urban school. I also discuss how materiality is entwined with theoretical thinking and explore how a promiscuous deployment of Foucaultian discourse analysis and Critical Race Theory (CRT) helped me to see how race works in schools in a more complicated way than if I had used one or the other framework loyally or prescriptively.

"Garbled demography" or "Demographization of the social"? A Foucaultian discourse analysis of German demographic change at the beginning of the 21st century

"Garbled demography" or "Demographization of the social"? A Foucaultian discourse analysis of German demographic change at the beginning of the 21st century

A análise do discurso diante de estranhos espelhos: visualidade e (inter)discursividade na pintura

Este artigo intenciona compreender a dimensão discursiva das pinturas por meio da análise do discurso ancorada em Michel Foucault. Recorta-se a figura do espelho em pinturas canônicas com vistas a observar seu funcionamento discursivo enquanto elemento do enunciado artístico visual. Apresenta três partes: a primeira, que determina o lugar ocupado pelo discurso estético nos trabalhos de Michel Pêcheux e de Michel Foucault; a segunda, que se concentra na análise de três pinturas europeias, a saber, As meninas, de Velásquez; Um bar em Folies-Bergère, de Manet; e As ligações perigosas, de Magritte; e a terceira parte, que discute a intersecção entre visualidade e interdiscursividade a partir (a) das reflexões de M. Foucault acerca do discurso estético e (b) da figura do espelho presente nessas pinturas.

Children's school reading and curriculum innovation at the edge of Empire

Purpose– Using the example of a “school paper” titledThe Children's Hour, developed in South Australia in the late nineteenth century, the purpose of this paper is to show the way that the colonial margins could act as sites of innovation in curriculum and pedagogy and not just as importers of ideas from the imperial centre.Design/methodology/approach– The analysis on which the examination ofThe Children's Houris based is a combination of Foucaultian discourse analysis and a genealogical approach to curriculum history which tracks different formations of techniques and programmes for shaping the human subject.Findings–The Children's Hour(1889-1963), featured the innovative use of literature and other genres, and provided new ways to shape the identities of school students and teachers. School papers were strongly implicated in the discursive construction of both a global/imperial and local/Australian identities and represent an informative case of the ways in which teaching and learning practices have been highly mobile in the field of reading.Originality/value– This research shows that the humble school reading text is an overlooked site for examining processes of the constitution of national identity and the citizen subject. It is also a reminder of the significance of communications technologies in the formation of, and struggles over, national/imperial imaginaries and that the school is an important site for studying these processes.

Editorial: looking forward

This is my third editorial (Ward 2010 2011), and it will be my shortest. Over the last twelve months this journal has continued to do what it does best – publish ‘ground breaking geographical research and scholarship across the field of geography.’ And why wouldn't it? We have built on the changes we outlined this time last year (Ward 2011), most noticeably the revamped Reviews format, which now does more than simply ‘review’‘books’. A small number of other changes have also been made during 2011, in order to improve our ‘offer’, if you like, to potential authors and to readers of Area. First, to support the two Editors the journal's Editorial Board has been expanded to include Sara Kindon from Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. Sara has written about participatory action research and the use of participatory video in geographic research, as well as about youth geographies, feminist fieldwork and gender and development, and is a great addition to Area's Editorial Board. She joins me, Paul Wood (Loughborough University), Jurgen Essletzbichler (University College London) and Mark Whitehead (Aberystwyth University). Sara may not be the last new Board member either, as we continue to strive to achieve a sustainable balance between the day-to-day editorial work and the more strategic objectives of the journal. Of course, we do not have a monopoly on good ideas. So, we are open to suggestions you may have about changes you would like to see in Area. We can't guarantee we'll take them all on board but we will listen. Second, over the course of 2011 Area began inviting its authors to write pieces for Geography Directions (http://www.geographydirections.com). These short blog entries are based on the longer papers published in the journal and provide another way of reaching out to others with our work. They are free to access, and the journal's first author-led entry was written by Anna Davies and Ruth Doyle (Trinity College Dublin) and was entitled ‘Sustainable futures and household water usage.’ Several more have been written subsequently, including by Cian O'Callaghan (National University of Ireland) entitled ‘Urban plans lost but not forgotten in a time of financial crisis’, by Dave Bassens (Ghent University) entitled ‘Goldman Sachs rules the world, Islam style?’ and by Ilan Kelman (Center for International Climate and Environmental Research – Oslo) entitled ‘Floods should not mean disasters.’ Others are in the pipeline and are something to bear in mind when you submit your papers to the journal, as we hope you all will! This will not be the end of the journal's use of a range of technologies, as we strive to enhance the impact of the work published in Area. Third, this issue sees the first ‘Classics Revisited’ section in the journal. This will return to important papers published in Area and consists of a commentary from the original author(s), as well as a couple of shorter pieces by others on the original paper's legacy. The first in the series sees Jamie Peck (University of British Columbia) and Adam Tickell (University of Birmingham) revisit their 1994 Area paper, ‘Jungle law breaks out: neoliberalism and global-local disorder’. Not only is it one of the most cited papers in the journal's history, but it marks a very early attempt by geographers to grapple with something called ‘neoliberalism’. Did any of us really know then quite how much geographers would write on this subject? I doubt it. Julie MacLeavy (University of Bristol) and David Wilson (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) provide their thoughts on both the original and the follow-up by Peck and Tickell. From now on every year will see a Classics Revisited section. Finally, I am delighted to announce that Karin Schwiter at the University of Zurich has won the 2011 Area Prize for her paper ‘Anticipating the transition to parenthood: the contribution of Foucaultian discourse analysis to understanding life-course patterns’. Karin's contribution is a theoretically sophisticated, methodologically rigorous and empirically rich piece of work, one that epitomises the kind of research the journal wishes to publish. Honourable mentions also go to Lee Johnson (Simon Fraser University) for ‘Greening the campus without grass: using visual methods to understand and integrate student perspectives in campus landscape development and water sustainability planning’ (co-authored with Heather Castleden) and Kimberley Peters (University of Sheffield) for ‘Sinking the radio ‘pirates’: exploring British strategies of governance in the North Sea, 1964–1991’. Of course, these papers, like all the others we publish every year, had to have been reviewed by a number of you. So, thank you to the 160 plus reviewers used by Area during 2011. You know who you are, and so does everyone else, thanks to our list in the last issue!

Exception and Deputization under Today's NDP: Neo-liberalism, the Third Way, and Crime Control in Manitoba

AbstractThis article examines the discourses of crime and safety mobilized by Gary Doer's provincial NDP government in Manitoba between 1999 and 2009. Through a Foucaultian discourse analysis of statements made by Manitoba NDP members in the Legislative Assembly—in particular, the language and preconceptions drawn on by government members when speaking about matters of crime and safety—the authors assess the role of Third Way and neo-liberal rationalities of crime governance in a provincial crime-control assemblage that seeks to foster “security” beyond the limits of federally defined criminal law. Based on this analysis, the authors discuss how the Manitoba NDP is engaged in a process of “deputizing” public service and communities for purposes of crime control.