Spaces of Power/Knowledge

Abstract

In this paper, I argue for a consideration of Foucault’s power/knowledge doublet as a spatial, analytic methodology for the use of studying the productive effects of practices in education. A spatial reading involves disentangling the complex production of subjectivity as an effect of power/knowledge relations and practices. A power/knowledge reading of the multiple effects of social, cultural, and material practices within relations of power/knowledge illustrates how educational subjects are in a continual process of constructing and transforming their selves and their worlds through their interactions with others. In particular, I sketch what this spatial methodology looked like in the context of an ethnographic study that I conducted on southern girls’ subjectivity and education. I conclude that a Foucauldian spatial methodology that analyzes power/knowledge practices within educational contexts shows that people and their practices are not causal results of educational discrimination or injustice but are ever-changing, interpretive effects of complex relations of power/knowledge that converge and are made visible by people’s responses.