Governmentality, subject-building, and the discourses and practices of devolution in the UK

This paper uses a Foucauldian governmentality framework to analyse and interrogate the discourses and strategies adopted by the state and sections of the business community in their attempts to shape and influence emerging agendas of governance in post-devolution Scotland. Much of the work on governmentality has examined the ways in which governments have developed particular techniques, rationales and mechanisms to enable the functioning of governance programmes. This paper expands upon such analyses by also looking at the ways in which particular interests may use similar procedures, discourses and practices to promote their own agendas and develop new forms of resistance, contestation and challenge to emerging policy frameworks. Using the example of business interest mobilization in post-devolution Scotland, it is argued that governments may seek to mobilize defined forms of expertise and knowledge, linking them to wider political debates. This, however, creates new opportunities for interests to shape and contest the discourses and practices of government. The governmentalization of politics can, therefore, be seen as more of a dialectical process of definition and contestation than is often apparent in existing Foucault-inspired writing.

Too much information? : Drama teachers’ perceptions of the value of subject knowledge

This paper reports on research into what drama teachers consider they really need to know as drama specialists. In the first instance the very concept of knowledge is discussed as it pertains to education in the arts as is the current situation in England regarding the extent to which new drama teachers’ subject specialist knowledge has been formally accredited and what the implications of this may be to an evolving curriculum. The research itself initially involved using a questionnaire to investigate the way in which drama teachers prioritised different aspects of professional knowledge. Results of this survey were deemed surprising enough to warrant further investigation through the use of interviews and a multiple-sorting exercise which revealed why the participants prioritised in the way they did. Informed by the work of Bourdieu, Foucault and Kelly, a model is proposed which may help explain the tensions experienced by drama teachers as they try to balance and prioritise different aspects of professional knowledge.

Resilience or resistance? The value of subject knowledge for drama teachers

This paper reports on research undertaken by the author into what secondary school drama teachers think they need to possess in terms of subject knowledge in order to operate effectively as subject specialists. ‘Subject knowledge’ is regarded as being multi faceted and the paper reports on how drama teachers prioritise its different aspects. A discussion of what ‘subject knowledge’ may be seen to encompass reveals interesting tensions between aspects of professional knowledge that are prescribed by statutory dictate and local context, and those that are valued by individual teachers and are manifest in their construction of a professional identity. The paper proposes that making judgements that associate propositional and substantive knowledge with traditionally held academic values as ‘bad’ or ‘irrelevant’ to drama education, and what Foucault has coined as ‘subjugated knowledge’ (i.e. local, vernacular, enactive knowledge that eludes inscription) as ‘good’ and more apposite to the work of all those involved in drama education, fails to reflect the complex matrices of values that specialists appear to hold. While the reported research focused on secondary school drama teachers in England, Bourdieu’s conception of field and habitus is invoked to suggest a model which recognises how drama educators more generally may construct a professional identity that necessarily balances personal interests and beliefs with externally imposed demands.

The representation of delayed intentions: a prospective subject-performed task?

To-be-enacted material is more accessible in tests of recognition and lexical decision than material not intended for action (T. Goschke J. Kuhl, 1993; R. L. Marsh, J. L. Hicks, & M. L. Bink, 1998). This finding has been attributed to the superior status of intention-related information. The current article explores an alternative (action-superiority) account that draws parallels between the intended enactment effect (IEE) and the subject-performed task effect. Using 2 paradigms, the authors observed faster recognition latencies for both enacted and to-be-enacted material. It is crucial to note that there was no evidence of an IEE for items that had already been executed during encoding. The IEE was also eliminated when motor processing was prevented after verbal encoding. These findings suggest an overlap between overt and intended enactment and indicate that motor information may be activated for verbal material in preparation for subsequent execution.

Robustness of mutual information to inter-subject variability for automatic artefact removal from EEG

The externally recorded electroencephalogram (EEG) is contaminated with signals that do not originate from the brain, collectively known as artefacts. Thus, EEG signals must be cleaned prior to any further analysis. In particular, if the EEG is to be used in online applications such as Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) the removal of artefacts must be performed in an automatic manner. This paper investigates the robustness of Mutual Information based features to inter-subject variability for use in an automatic artefact removal system. The system is based on the separation of EEG recordings into independent components using a temporal ICA method, RADICAL, and the utilisation of a Support Vector Machine for classification of the components into EEG and artefact signals. High accuracy and robustness to inter-subject variability is achieved.