Discourse, Power, and Resistance Down Under

213 Pages·2012·5.841 MB·English

by  Peter Bansel (auth.), Mark Vicars, Tarquam McKenna, Julie White (eds.)

DISCOURSE,POWER,ANDRESISTANCEDOWNUNDER
TRANSGRESSIONS: CULTURAL STUDIES AND EDUCATION

Volume 88

Series Editor:
Shirley R. Steinberg, University of Calgary, Canada

Founding Editor:
Joe L. Kincheloe (1950-2008) The Paulo and Nita Freire International
Project for Critical Pedagogy

Editorial Board

Jon Austin, University of Southern Queensland, Australia
Norman Denzin, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, USA
Rhonda Hammer, University of California Los Angeles, USA
Nikos Metallinos, Concordia University, Canada
Christine Quail, McMaster University, Canada
Ki Wan Sung, Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Korea

This book series is dedicated to the radical love and actions of Paulo Freire,
Jesus “Pato” Gomez, and Joe L. Kincheloe.

Cultural studies provides an analytical toolbox for both making sense of educational practice
and extending the insights of educational professionals into their labors. In this context
Transgressions: Cultural Studies and Education provides a collection of books in the
domain that specify this assertion. Crafted for an audience of teachers, teacher educators,
scholars and students of cultural studies and others interested in cultural studies and
pedagogy, the series documents both the possibilities of and the controversies surrounding
the intersection of cultural studies and education. The editors and the authors of this series
do not assume that the interaction of cultural studies and education devalues other types of
knowledge and analytical forms. Rather the intersection of these knowledge disciplines
offers a rejuvenating, optimistic, and positive perspective on education and educational
institutions. Some might describe its contribution as democratic, emancipatory, and
transformative. The editors and authors maintain that cultural studies helps free educators
from sterile, monolithic analyses that have for too long undermined efforts to think of
educational practices by providing other words, new languages, and fresh metaphors.
Operating in an interdisciplinary cosmos, Transgressions: Cultural Studies and Education is
dedicated to exploring the ways cultural studies enhances the study and practice of
education. With this in mind the series focuses in a non-exclusive way on popular culture as
well as other dimensions of cultural studies including social theory, social justice and
positionality, cultural dimensions of technological innovation, new media and media
literacy, new forms of oppression emerging in an electronic hyperreality, and postcolonial
global concerns. With these concerns in mind cultural studies scholars often argue that the
realm of popular culture is the most powerful educational force in contemporary culture.
Indeed, in the twenty-first century this pedagogical dynamic is sweeping through the entire
world. Educators, they believe, must understand these emerging realities in order to gain an
important voice in the pedagogical conversation.
Without an understanding of cultural pedagogy’s (education that takes place outside of
formal schooling) role in the shaping of individual identity – youth identity in particular –
the role educators play in the lives of their students will continue to fade. Why do so many
of our students feel that life is incomprehensible and devoid of meaning? What does it mean,
teachers wonder, when young people are unable to describe their moods, their affective
affiliation to the society around them. Meanings provided young people by mainstream
institutions often do little to help them deal with their affective complexity, their difficulty
negotiating the rift between meaning and affect. School knowledge and educational
expectations seem as anachronistic as a ditto machine, not that learning ways of rational
thought and making sense of the world are unimportant.
But school knowledge and educational expectations often have little to offer students
about making sense of the way they feel, the way their affective lives are shaped. In no way
do we argue that analysis of the production of youth in an electronic mediated world
demands some “touchy-feely” educational superficiality. What is needed in this context is a
rigorous analysis of the interrelationship between pedagogy, popular culture, meaning
making, and youth subjectivity. In an era marked by youth depression, violence, and suicide
such insights become extremely important, even life saving. Pessimism about the future is
the common sense of many contemporary youth with its concomitant feeling that no one can
make a difference.
If affective production can be shaped to reflect these perspectives, then it can be reshaped
to lay the groundwork for optimism, passionate commitment, and transformative educational
and political activity. In these ways cultural studies adds a dimension to the work of
education unfilled by any other sub-discipline. This is what Transgressions: Cultural Studies
and Education seeks to produce – literature on these issues that makes a difference. It seeks
to publish studies that help those who work with young people, those individuals involved in
the disciplines that study children and youth, and young people themselves improve their
lives in these bizarre times.
Intentionally left as blank
Discourse, Power, and Resistance
Down Under
Editedby
MarkVicars
VictoriaUniversity,Melbourne,Australia
TarquamMcKenna
VictoriaUniversity,Melbourne,Australia
and
JulieWhite
LaTrobeUniversity,Melbourne,Australia
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Resisting and re/counting the power of number: The one in the many
and the many in the one 1
Peter Bansel

The research assistant: Invisible and silenced, exploited and
disposable 9
Iris Dumenden

Conveying the role of evidence in the development, conduct and
applications of qualitative research 21
Lisa Gibbs

Developing and enacting an ethical framework and method for
cross-cultural research 27
Norah Hosken

Gay and Queer coming out into Europe (Part 1): Fragmentary
Tales of crossing national/cultural borders 41
Angelo Benozzo, Neil Carey, Tarquam McKenna and Mark Vicars

Gay and Queer coming out into Europe (Part 2): Fragmentary
Tales of crossing national/cultural borders 59
Angelo Benozzo, Neil Carey, Tarquam McKenna and Mark Vicars

Rhizomatics and the arts: Challenging conceptions of rural
teaching 77
Genevieve Noone

Writing ‘race’ into absence? Post-race theory, global consciousness
and reflexivity 95
Satoshi Sanada

How the ‘I’ sees it: The maker, the researcher and the subject at the
juncture of memory and history 107
S tefan Schutt and Marsha Berry
vii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Qualitative inquiry as transformation and agency: The black sheep
and workplace mobbing 121
Linda Shallcross, Sheryl Ramsay and Michelle Barker

Ethnography as the (occasional) act of refusing correct knowledge
and secure understanding: Three tales from three fields 135
Erica Southgate

Managed universities: Vietnam and the West 151
Thi Tuyet (June) Tran and Julie White

Presumptuous methodology: Troubling success, failure and
research design 161
Julie White, Jane Grant, Jean Rumbold and Bruce Rumbold

The role of artful practice as research to trace teacher epiphanies 175
Julie Arnold

The ‘conscientious scholar’: Balancing the roles of researcher,
playwright and daughter 189
Mary-Rose McLaren

Problematizing racism in education: A comparative analysis of
critical race theory and postcolonial theories using
autoethnography 199
Saran Stewart

viii
PETER BANSEL
RESISTING AND RE/COUNTING THE
POWER OF NUMBER
The one in the many and the many in the one
In this chapter I turn the themes ‘power,’ ‘discourse’ and ‘resistance’ to
contemplation of the place of qualitative accounts of experience within
contemporary managerialist audit cultures and their preoccupation with quantity,
number and counting. I specifically critique and resist the power and status of
number and quantity as key indicators of what matters and what counts. I do this
through play with and on vocabularies of ‘number’ and ‘counting,’ and through
laying out an account of my thinking about discourse, narrative, subjectivity and
experience. In contesting the privileged status of numerical counting, I elaborate a
theoretical, philosophical and epistemological approach to subjectivity and narrated
biographical accounts of experience. In so doing, I write-over one form of
accounting (numerical) with another (narrative). I also resist recourse to validation
by a vocabulary of number – where quantity is a proxy for significance, validity
and quality – and emphasise the extent to which qualitative accounts of any ‘one’
are understood as simultaneously those of ‘many.’
My resistance to managerialist and reductionist uses of number for the purposes
of audit and validation is extended to certain iterations of discourse and discourse
analysis, and to aspects of neoliberalism as a mode of government. I resist over
determined accounts of the operation of discourse in the constitution and regulation
of the subject, as well as the reduction of the subject to positions within fixed
discursive repertoires. In relation to neoliberalism, I resist a preoccupation with
number and quantification that places greater value on quantitative data for
determining the value of anything and everything; and the neoliberal preoccupation
with the individual, individuality and individualism. Where once Margaret
Thatcher (an early enthusiast of neoliberalism) announced, ‘there is no such thing
as society. There are individual men and women’ (quoted Women’s Own magazine,
October 31, 1987), I’m suggesting instead that there is no individual. Rather, I give
an account of the subject as a co-constitutive relation with others. This is in part, a
contemplation on the ethics of numbers and their relation to the accounts we might
give of the subjects they describe, measure and quantify.
RESISTING NUMBERS
Numbers, says Rose (1999a, p. 197), have achieved ‘an unmistakable power within
technologies of government.’ Within neoliberal political reason, numbers operate
M. Vicars et al. (eds.), Discourse, Power, and Resistance Down Under, 1–8.
© 2012 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.
BANSEL
as diagnostic instruments promising to align the exercise of public authority with
the values, beliefs and well-being of citizens. Numbers help constitute and regulate
the domains upon which government operates, mapping the internal characteristics
of the spaces of population, economy and society. Numbers are political – because
political judgements are implicit in the choice of what to measure, how to measure
it, how often it should be measured and how to interpret and represent the results.
Espeland and Stevens (2007) make the point that measurement doesn’t simply
account for the social worlds it depicts, but actively intervenes in them – leading
people to think and act differently. Acts of measurement both create and reproduce
social boundaries and categories, and ameliorate complexity through the
production of distinctions between categories of people. Measurement turns all
difference into quantity – and through this process qualitative differences become
quantitative ones. The turning of qualities into quantities creates new objects of
measurement and new relations among them.
And yet, as Rose (1999a, p. 198) points out, whilst numbers seem indispensable
to politics, they also appear to depoliticise whole areas of political judgement. That
is, they redraw the boundaries between politics and objectivity by purporting to act
as transparent technical means for making judgements, prioritising problems and
allocating resources. Numbers, and the professional and specialist knowledges and
professional techniques that are associated with them, become implicated in the
creation of specific domains – discursive, technical, practical, personal, political
and social. In this way numbers, and the technical expertise associated with them,
can come to dominate political debate and public imagination. This gives rise to
the quantification – that is ‘the production and communication of numbers’ – of all
aspects of social phenomena, as well as the proliferation of new regimes of
measurement and technologies of counting (Espeland & Stevens, 2008, p. 401). In
these ways, all social phenomena have a primarily metrical relationship to one
another. But how else might the relationship between social phenomena be
accounted for? What counts as evidence? How exhaustive (and exhausting) does
our counting need to be to be credible?
RE/COUNTING THE SUBJECT
Questions of transparency, validity, objectivity and truth form the boundaries of
what passes as evidence. There is a constitutive relationship between quantification
and practices of government that is intensified within democratic neoliberal
government in capitalist economies, where everything that counts is reduced to a
number. These numbers are given political and social currency that is invariably
converted into a monetary value that can be measured and traded in a globally
competitive market economy. This leads to the reification of accounting as a
technical practice that produces legitimacy, shapes preferences, organisational
structures and practices, as well as the forms of visibility which support and give
meaning to decision making (Power, 2003). Scientistic assumptions behind
measurement and statistical sampling privilege algorithmic technologies that
idealise calculation and enumeration as a series of logical steps through which:
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