Foucauldian analysis and 'the best interests of the child'

In this thesis I have developed a theoretical framework using Michel Foucault’s metaphor of the panopticon and applied the resulting discursive methodology to prominent risk assessment texts in Tasmanian Government child protection services. From the analysis I have developed an innovation poststructural practice of discursive empathy for use in child protection social work. Previous research has examined discourses such as madness, mothering, the family and masculinity using Foucault’s ideas and argued that each is a performance of social government. However my interest is in ‘the best interests of the child’ as governmentality; risk as the apparatus through which it is conducted and child abuse its social effect. In applying a discursive analysis, practices of risk assessment are therefore understood to actually produce intellectual and material conditions favourable to child abuse, rather than protect children from maltreatment. The theoretical framework produces in this thesis incorporates three distinct components of Foucault’s interpretive analytics of power: archaeology, genealogy and ethics. These components provide a structure for discourse analysis that is also a coherent methodical practice of Foucault’s notion of ‘parrhesia’. The practice of parrhesia involves social workers recognised that social power is subjectively dispersed yet also hierarchical. Using this notion I have analysed ‘the best interest of the child’ as a panopticon and argued that child abuse is a consequence. This thesis therefore demonstrates how child protection social workers can expose the political purpose involved in the discourse ‘the best interests of the child’, and in doing so challenge the hostile intellectual and material conditions that exist for children in our community. In concluding, I identify how discursive empathy is a readily accessible skill that social workers can use to practice parrhesia in a creative way.

Retribution, deterrence and reform : the dilemmas of plagiarism management in universities

Universities face constant scrutiny about their plagiarism management strategies, policies and procedures. A resounding theme, usually media inspired, is that plagiarism is rife, unstoppable and university processes are ineffectual in its wake. This has been referred to as a 'moral panic' approach (Carroll & Sutherland-Smith, forthcoming; Clegg, 2007) and suggests plagiarism will thwart all efforts to reclaim academic integrity in higher education. However, revisiting the origins of plagiarism and exploring its legal evolution reveals that legal discourse is the foundation for many plagiarism management policies and processes around the world. Interestingly, criminal justice aims are also reflected in university plagiarism management strategies. Although universities strive for deterrence of plagiarism in a variety of ways, the media most often calls for retribution through increasingly tougher penalties. However, a primary aim of the justice system, sustainable reform, is not often reported in the media or visible in university policies or processes. Using critical discourse analysis, this paper examines the disjunction between media calls for increased retribution in the wake of moral panic and institutional responses to plagiarism. I argue that many universities have not yet moved to sustainable reform in plagiarism management.

Media discourse and Iraq's democratisation : reporting the 2005 constitution in the Australian and Middle Eastern print media

This paper analyses in detail the coverage of two milestones in Iraq's shift towards democracy: the drafting and approval of the constitution by Iraq s interim government (August 2005) and the ratification of this constitution via the Iraqi polls (October 2005). Aside from some rudimentary quantitative analysis, a critical discourse analysis method is utilised to compare and contrast the discursive practices used in three of Australia s leading daily newspapers (The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age) with three Middle Eastern English-language papers (The Daily Star, Anadolu Agency and the Jordan Times). The paper finds that the Australian print media continues the neo-Orientalist tradition of media coverage of Middle Eastern democracy, while the Middle Eastern press eschews these discourses in favour of a more open, varied debate on Iraq s constitution and the future of democracy across the region.

Neoconservatism as discourse: virtue, power and US foreign policy

Neoconservatism in US foreign policy is a hotly contested subject, yet most scholars broadly agree on what it is and where it comes from. From a consensus that it first emerged around the 1960s, these scholars view neoconservatism through what we call the ‘3Ps’ approach, defining it as a particular group of people (‘neocons’), an array of foreign policy preferences and/or an ideological commitment to a set of principles. While descriptively intuitive, this approach reifies neoconservatism in terms of its specific and often static ‘symptoms’ rather than its dynamic constitutions. These reifications may reveal what is emblematic of neoconservatism in its particular historical and political context, but they fail to offer deeper insights into what is constitutive of neoconservatism. Addressing this neglected question, this article dislodges neoconservatism from itsperceived home in the ‘3Ps’ and ontologically redefines it as a discourse. Adopting aFoucauldian approach of archaeological and genealogical discourse analysis, we trace itsdiscursive formations primarily to two powerful and historically enduring discourses ofthe American self — virtue and power — and illustrate how these discourses produce aparticular type of discursive fusion that is ‘neoconservatism’. We argue that to betterappreciate its continued effect on contemporary and future US foreign policy, we needto pay close attention to those seemingly innocuous yet deeply embedded discoursesabout the US and its place in the world, as well as to the people, policies and principlesconventionally associated with neoconservatism.

Science into policy? Discourse, coastal management and knowledge

The world's coastal resources are under pressure, even more so under climate change with 90% of the world's population living near or along our coastal zone. Ecologically, this zone is also the most productive, and the mainstay of economic livelihoods on a global scale. Managing the coast effectively is crucial, but as an area it remains contested. Despite multiple efforts to manage the coast, it remains a contested space. This paper offers a reflection into the ways in which different discourses influence and impact on one specific dimension of coastal zone management-the transmission of science into the policy domain. Using historical and discourse analysis, we find that the science-policy interface is largely constructed within two knowledge discourses: (i) scientific knowledge and (ii) local knowledge. This arbitrary separation into a binary discursive landscape mitigates against science-policy integration in practice especially given each discourse in itself, encompasses multiple forms of knowledge. We argue that in order to better understand how to build scientific research outputs into policy, decision makers and researchers need to understand how knowledge works in practice, overcome this dichotomous construction of knowledge and specifically, re-construct or transition the notion of 'science as knowledge' into 'all knowledge types' into policy.

‘Out of the loop’: early childhood educators gaining confidence with unfamiliar policy discourse

It has been seven years since the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) was introduced in Australia and four years since the National Quality Standard (NQS) was implemented. To gain insight into how educators are understanding practice in the Australian early childhood and care context, the study draws on a praxeological frame where educators have the opportunity to inquire and critically reflect on practice in a supported research environment. Data were analysed using critical discourse analysis, enabling a close examination of participant reflections and understandings about practice. Findings reveal that educators are confident when describing their teaching using familiar educational discourse, whereas educators were apprehensive when confronted with new and unfamiliar concepts. The third finding illustrates the ways educators gain confidence with unfamiliar policy discourse. The study’s findings add to limited empirical evidence about how early childhood educators understand key concepts introduced by the EYLF and NQS.

Media/ting change: the print media's role in mediating education policy in a period of radical reform in Victoria, Australia

This paper draws upon critical discourse analysis, cultural studies and communication theory, studies on media and educational reform, and the work of Bernstein, Bourdieu and Luhmann in particular, to explore how the print and media 'mediated' a period of educational change marked by moves to self-management in schools in Victoria, Australia. It considers how the media was mobilized by various education stakeholders, and in turn informed relations between schools and government, through policy discourses and texts. It considers why and how particular themes became media 'issues', how schools and teachers responded to these issues, and how the media was used by various stakeholders in education to shape policy debates. It is based on a year-long qualitative study that explored critical incidents and representations about education in the print media over a year in the daily press. It illustrates the ways in which a neo-liberal Victorian government mobilized the media to gain strategic advantage to promote radical education reform policies, considers the media effects of this media/tion process on schools and teachers, and conceptualizes how school and system performance is fed from and into media representations, public perceptions and community understandings of schools and teachers' work.

Collaborative knowledge creation in electronic mail

With organisational work increasingly performed by the collaboration of distributed groups, an improved understanding is needed of the co-creation of knowledge in emerging virtual structures. We explore the potential of the ubiquitous organisational tool, electronic mail (e-mail), for supporting collaborative knowledge creation in such settings. This research draws on a case study of knowledge creation occurring in e-mail conversations in a large Australian university and adopts a discourse analysis research approach. We describe a model of collaborative knowledge creation derived from the study and identify a preliminary set of key factors for organisational knowledge tools and their use by groups to support collaborative knowledge creation. The paper also provides insights into the role of e-mail in collaborative knowledge creation, not only in facilitating this process, but in shaping a participatory, multi-perspective, team-based approach to knowledge building. Organisational implications arising from this type of knowledge creation are also discussed in the paper.

Mobile subjectivities positioning the nonunirary self in critical feminist and postmodern research

Most scholarly work is written from the perspective of the author being a unitary subject occupying a sole, rational, and unified position. This article argues that scholarship may be enhanced by the author adopting multiple subject positions as a methodological framework. Such an adoption is advantageous in working against the romance of the notion of a single truth while also maintaining teleological values congruent with critical and feminist agendas. This article outlines the conceptual development of this methodological framework, the rationale for its development, an explication of the concept of multiple subjectivity, and an exemplar of its application within nursing research.

Constructing the Australian musical child

This paper makes use of Foucauldian discourse analysis to examine some of the current directions in Arts education and Music Education, in particular, that are being promoted by education authorities in Australia. Foucault's concept of discourse, and analytical procedures developed from his ideas, have been much discussed recently but have not been applied very rigorously or very widely other than by Foucault himself. This paper will introduce some of the basic concepts and demonstrate how application of these concepts can identify, explain or elucidate basic misconceptions that are currently being promoted as the way forward in arts education.

Curriculum development and implementation has become an important focus for educational policy in the past ten years. Inspired by the work of the Federal Labour government between 1989 and 1994 which developed the national curriculum Statements and Profiles, many states have adopted a model of centralized curriculum development in which learning is mapped out for all students up to the age of eighteen. These learning "profiles" have been developed and disseminated at great expense in terms of time, money and effort. They represent a considerable investment of educational resources. Typically, however the resulting curriculum documents are complex, difficult to understand and use, and can appear unrelated to many of the normal practices in school. This has placed teachers in the position of having either to ignore them or to work against much of their own training and personal assumptions about what constitutes music education.

It will be suggested that there are some basic flaws in the way that many curriculum documents in Australia have conceived of music education and learning. With recent new developments in Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia, there is no indication that this process of profiling student development is really devoted to improving our understanding either of learning or of teaching. In fact, it would appear to be developing a life of it's own, oblivious to the practices and structures of our educational systems. It will be suggested that a more realistic assessment of our practices needs to form the basis of our frameworks and that they should not be developed as abstract theoretical models.

Sustainable knowledge management systems: integration, personalisation and contextualisation

Many knowledge management (KM) systems have proven unsustainable to date, exhibiting low quantities and quality of knowledge, with systems falling into disuse. In this paper, we provide and explore a model for sustainable KM systems, focusing on the advantages to be gained from integrating knowledge work with everyday work practices, and enabling sensemaking through personalisation and contextualisation. We employ a discourse analysis of email as an exemplar of a sustainable KM system, thereby identifying a number of key characteristics for sustainable KM systems. Our model for sustainable KM systems adds to existing KM theory and, more immediately, assists companies by providing an understanding
of the kinds of characteristics likely to make KM systems more effective, and sustainable in the long term.

Knowledge development and creation in email

Newly created knowledge is increasingly viewed as a highly valuable source of competitive advantage for business. Email is explored in its recently recognized role as a place of organizational knowledge development and creation, employing discourse analysis of email conversations as the research approach. This paper describes a knowledge development lifecycle derived from the empirical study, and provides insight into the nature of knowledge development and creation in organizations. We found that in selected email conversations, employees naturally and intuitively build purpose driven new knowledge incrementally and iteratively, crystallizing knowledge under construction by submitting it repeatedly to a range of key stakeholders for comment, until a 'consensus' is reached regarding the outcome. Our findings identify the process of knowledge qualification in organizational knowledge creation, and suggest that organizational knowledge may be politically constructed. The research results have the potential to assist organizations in understanding and facilitating processes and conditions for knowledge creation and development. The study also highlights the potential for email as a key component in a company's formal KM strategy.

Mlearning for India : any potential?

The trend towards mLearning is attributed to the growth of knowledge based societies (UNESC0,2005). In this paper, we examine if there is a case for mLearning in India, a developing nation with certain unique contributory factors such as rapid diffusion of mobile communication technologies negating the need for fixed line infrastructure; and the rising demand for flexible learning approaches by the eager, upwardly mobile, middle class population. Our research is informed by learning theory of constructivism that seems to underlie flexible adult learning in modem contexts. A speculative ongoing debate is examined through the lens of critical discourse analysis, to present an outlook for India. We open a launching platform for empirical work in India that would enable building of relevant models by extrapolating findings from this initial research. More significantly, the stakeholders in mLearning such as mobile technology/service providers, education providers and organisations that foster staff development in particular may be beneficiaries from the findings of this preliminary research.

E-governance-inhibitor or facilitator for democracy and citizen empowerment?

Democracies of the globalised world has been have been striving towards citizen empowerment in the recent decade where E-Governance is perceived as a facilitator. Democratic governments in general feel that being accessible online 24/7 to the average citizen not only makes them transparent, but also empowers the average citizen. In this process, citizen data privacy, information sharing across nations and uniform accessibility to electronic services delivery, emerge as pertinent issues. Through a critical discourse analysis, we take a deeper look at the perception of egovernance being a catalyst in empowering citizens in the global progress towards electronic democracies.

Are metropolitan planning frameworks healthy? The case of Melbourne 2030

This paper presents preliminary findings of a project investigating the integration and application of ecological public health principles in Melboume 2030, the Victorian Government's urban planning blueprint for Melboume for the next 30 years. The study examines the political, organisational, social, and inter-personal factors that impact on the integration and application of broad health considerations into urban planning policy in Victoria. We are testing the premise that achieving integrated planning requires a systematic integration of government activity across sectors. Using discourse analysis and key informant interviews, we examined relevant government policy and legislation and its implementation against world's best practice. Preliminary findings show that the degree of leadership in relation to deploying the mission, and implementation processes sustain or impede integrated planning at a whole-of-government and intersectoral level.

These findings may inform a much-needed national agenda on promoting health through integrated planning. Findings will identify future research directions and action to bridge the gap between urban planning and health planning systems