Browsing by Subject "Foucault"
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Item Challenging hegemony in education: specific parrhesiastic scholars, care of the self, and relations of power(Texas A&M University, 2007-04-25) Huckaby, M. FrancyneThis dissertation explores how five specific intellectuals challenge hegemony in education and society, and express uncomfortable truths about hegemony faced by local communities in their academic practices. Their actions of free speech in regards to dangerous truths are similar to those of the ancient Greek parrhesiastes. This word, parrhesiastes, was used to describe the male citizen in ancient Greece, who had and used his rights to free speech or parrhesia. The activity of speaking freely, parrhesiazesthai, however, is not without its risks. Such speech is dangerous to the status quo, as well as the parrhesiastes. The activity is engaged despite the consequences and the parrhesiastes faces dangers and risks. It is argued that the five scholars who participated in this study are specific parrhesiastic scholars. They are specific intellectuals in their relations with academia, communities, and movements; and parrhesiastes in their actions to assure their rights to and exercise of freedom. While the ancient parrhesiastes served a critical and pedagogical role in transforming citizens to serve the best interests of the city, the specific parrhesiastic scholar, in the case of these five scholars, argues for changes in society for the benefit of citizens whose interests have been ignored or trampled. Foucault acknowledged that the work of specific intellectuals could benefit the state to the detriment of local communities or could work to transform the state to include the interests of specific communities. Specific parrhesiastic scholars choose the latter. The focus of this study is the intersection of technologies of the self with technologies of power. This intersection, which Foucault terms governmentality, comes closest to a utilitarian exploration of resistance to power and the formation of freedom, and understanding of how individuals negotiate their particular positions in truth games for resistance and freedom. The basic conditions necessary for parrhesiazesthai are "citizenship" and understanding the distinction between positive and negative forms of parrhesia. The parrhesiastic practices of the five scholars are explored through three analytical frames: (1) self-knowledge and resisting repression, seduction, and desire; (2) political activity and tactics; and (3) the self within systems of subjugation.Item Managing the meltdown rhetorically : economic imaginaries and the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008(2010-08) Hanan, Joshua Stanley; Cherwitz, Richard A., 1952-; Cloud, Dana L.; Brummett, Barry; Darwin, Thomas J.; Longaker, MarkFrom September 19th through October 3rd, 2008, Congress debated the largest government bailout in America history—the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (EESA). Those sixteen days generated a vibrant conversation regarding the nature and severity of America’s economic crisis and the proper role of government in responding to such juggernauts. In this dissertation I explore the rhetoric generated by this bill and its context in hopes of illuminating the more general role of rhetoric in mitigating and exacerbating crises in capitalism. My hypothesis is that, in a global capitalist economy increasingly dependent on immaterial production (i.e., finance, the Internet, mass media, etc.), economic crisis rhetoric has become as essential to economic order as monetary and fiscal policy. To explore this claim, I focus on two key rhetorical tensions that drove much of the crisis rhetoric produced. The first of these battles is a rhetorical struggle over the spatial delineation between Wall Street and Main Street, while the second is a conflict between Keynesianism and neoliberalism in a rhetorical contest over the values of government interventionism. By analyzing a variety of policy and expert discourses that constitute the parameters of these discrete areas of debate, I argue that all rely on moral and ethical appeals to substantiate their meaning and validity. At the same time, I contend that these discourses are indebted to logics of institutional form and therefore cannot be abstracted from the financial and political contexts in which they reside. This insight leads me to forward a new theory of economic crisis rhetoric called the economic imaginary. By beginning with real economic events and then taking into account the discursive and extra-discursive forces that “overdetermine” its mediated understanding, the economic imaginary offers us a more empirical and cartographic account of how economic rhetoric actually operates in society.Item Radical self-care : performance, activism, and queer people of color(2014-05) McMaster, James Matthew; Gutierrez, Laura G., 1968-Queer people of color in the United States are perpetually under siege politically, psychically, economically, physically, and affectively in the twenty-first century under capitalist white supremacist heteropatriarchy. Radical Self-Care, connects radical artivist performance in Austin, Texas with the theoretical genealogies of queer of color critique, women of color feminism, queer studies, and performance studies in order to propose a program for queer of color survival, sustainment and political revolt. Radical self-care is the holistic praxis that names the confluence of two distinct but inextricable processes developed in the first two chapters of this thesis. In chapter one, I take up the Generic Ensemble Company’s workshop production of What’s Goin’ On? as a case study in order to theorize the ‘performative of sustenance,’ a mechanism of queer worldmaking and queer world sustainment defined by its erotic and utopian affects. Chapter two, through a discussion of reproductive rights activism at the Texas state capitol, reformulates the concept of ‘parrhesia,’ the Socratic practice of ‘free speech’ taken up by Foucault in discussions of the care of the self, into a performance praxis of speaking truth to power with the potential to interrupt hegemonic systems of oppression. The final chapter explicates the ways in which these two mechanisms converge and operate as a dyad in the holistic process of radical self-care through an analysis of Fat: The Play, a devised work that premiered in Austin by and about fat queer femmes. Ultimately, Radical Self- Care aspires to offer queers of color a methodology of queer world sustainment that is also a program of political intervention, grounded in solidarity politics, into those systems of oppression that too often characterize queer of color existence as a project of survival rather than a project of flourishing.Item The Achievement Gaps and Mathematics Education: An Analysis of the U.S. Political Discourse in Light of Foucault's Governmentality(2013-08-06) Indiogine, Salvatore Enrico PaoloThe research question that I posed for this investigation is how the principles of Foucault?s governmentality can shed light on the political discourse on the achievement gaps (AGs) at the federal level. The AGs have been for some years now an actively researched phenomenon in education in the U.S. as well as in the rest of the world. Many in the education profession community, politicians, social activists, researchers and others have considered the differences in educational outcomes an indication of a grave deficiency of the educational process and even of the society at large. I began this work with a review of the educational research relevant to the above mentioned research question. Then I presented my research methodology and de- scribed how obtained my data and analyzed them both qualitatively and quantitatively. The results of the analysis were discussed in the light of federal legislation, the work of Foucault on governmentality, and the relevant literature and woven into a series of narratives. Finally, I abstracted these narratives into a model for under- standing the federal policy discourse. This model consists of an intersection of eight antitheses: (1) the rgime of discipline versus the apparatuses of security, (2) the appeal to danger versus assurances of progress or even success, (3) the acknowledgement of the association between the AGs and the ?disadvantage? of the students and the disregard and even prohibition of the equalization of school funding, (4) the desire for all students to be ?equal,? but they have to be dis-aggregated, the (5) injunction of research based instruction practices imposed by an ideology-driven reform policy, (6) we expect equal outcomes by using market forces, which are known to produce a diversity of results, (7) the teacher is a ?highly qualified? professional, but also a functionary of the government, and finally (8) the claim to honor local control and school flexibility versus the unprecedented federalization and bureaucratization of the schools, which is a mirror of the contrast between the desire to establish apparatuses of security in schools and the means to establishing them through rgimes of discipline.Item Writing with care : Yan Lianke and the biopolitics of modern Chinese censorship(2015-05) Chambers, Harlan David; Tsai, Chien-hsin, 1975-; El-Ariss, TarekAuthor Yan Lianke's experiences with censorship frame this investigation into the relationship between life, politics, and writing in modern China. As Yan's case shows, Chinese censorship goes beyond textual redaction, seeking to reform the very life of political subjects. The effects of this move to bridge politics and life are best demonstrated by acts of internalized censorship (e.g., "self censorship"), widespread in China's modern cultural scene. The historical genealogy of internalized censorship reveals it to be part of a broader Chinese Communist Party program of thought work, engaged in remolding the lives of political subjects. Revisiting the fundamentals of Michel Foucault's biopolitical theory, I argue that this form of censorship plays a key role in the party’s biohistory, the historical institutionalization of power aimed at radically politicizing life itself. The first chapter of this report sketches out the historical foundations of Chinese biopolitics. Regimes of thought work are shown to have been developed as disciplinary techniques of censoring and censuring, systematically deployed to correct individuals' ideological errors. Re-imagining disobedience as illness, the state sought to cure its citizens through "disciplinary care." The Communist Party has thus established institutions seeking to completely fold life into politics; consequently, top-down techniques like censorship have reemerged in the bottom-up phenomenon of internalized censoring. The second chapter returns to the novels of Yan Lianke to argue that his literature responds to the legacy of thought work with a distinct form of "literary care." His recent novels restage historical events in order to narrate confrontations between writers and institutions of state power. Through these encounters, Yan's writing unfolds literary care as a strategy to shield non-normative forms of life against powers aiming to rectify their ideological idiosyncrasies. Literary care thus affirms ways of being that exceed exclusively political interpretive frameworks. In the face of censorship, Yan Lianke does not dream of an autonomous sphere of artistic expression, nor does he campaign for a simplistic notion of intellectual liberty. Instead, Yan Lianke writes with literary care, never neglecting relations between life and politics but maintaining that one is not reducible to the other.