Taking as its premise the ethical responsibility of the educator towards diversity, both in students and the materiality of their knowledge production practices, this paper examines four surfaces of emergence of academic writing governmentality. These are characterised as different ‘styles’ of knowledge production: Style 1 (canonic, Western rationalist governmentality); Style 2 (bureaucratic, product-control governmentality); Style 3 (transformative, academic literacy governmentality); and Style 4 (poststructural and deconstructive governmentality). Drawing on Foucault’s genealogical approach (1991a), and a small ‘archive’ of literature and texts that regulate and/or problematise these four knowledge territories, I examine ways these complementary and competing disciplinary technologies orient us and our students differently in the ‘constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects’ (Foucault 1991a,43), in both our educational and writing practices. The findings of the study are intended to make more explicit the hegemonic rhetorical landscapes, which call us all to order in our everyday practices. They are also used to argue that Style 4 affords small possibilities of keeping power in play within the university’s ‘matrix of calculabilities’ (Ball & Olmedo 2012,103).
Henderson, Juliet
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences\Department of History, Philosophy and Culture
Year of publication: 2018Date of RADAR deposit: 2018-09-06
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