Foucault's 'What is an author' : towards a critical discourse of practice as research

A vexed issue for many artistic researchers is related to the need for the artist/researcher to write about his or her own work in the research report or exegesis. In the creative arts, the outcomes that emerge from an alternative logic of practice are not easily quantifiable and it can be difficult to articulate conclusions objectively given the emotional and ideological investments and the intrinsically subjective dimension of the artistic process. How then, might the artist as researcher avoid on the one hand, what has been referred to as 'auto-connoisseurship', the undertaking of a thinly veiled labour of valorising what has been achieved in the creative work, or alternatively producing a research report that is mere description or history?

In this paper I suggest that a way of overcoming such a dilemma is for creative arts researchers to shift the critical focus away from the notion of the work as product, to an understanding of both studio enquiry and its outcomes as process. I’d like to draw on Michel Foucault’s essay ‘What is An Author ‘ to explore how we might move away from art criticism to the notion of a critical discourse of practice-led enquiry that involves viewing the artist as a researcher, and the artist/critic as a scholar who comments on the value of the artistic process as the production of knowledge.

Foucault’s essay provides artistic researchers with a template for more objective and distanced discourse on the practice-led research process and its writing. It allows researchers to locate themselves within contexts of theory and practice and provides an analytical framework though which researchers might locate themselves and their work within the broader social arena and field of research, As I will show with reference to the work of Donna Haraway and a number of commentaries on Pablo Picasso’s Demioselles d’Avignon, an application of Foucault’s ideas need not negate those subjective and situated aspects of practice as research.

Progressive discourse in mathematics classes - the task of the teacher

This paper uses data from two mathematics lessons to explore the nature of progressive discourse and examine critical features of teacher actions that contribute to mathematics classrooms functioning as communities of inquiry. Features found to promote progressive discourse include a focus on the conceptual elements of the curriculum and the use of complex, challenging tasks that problematised the curriculum; the orchestration of student reporting to allow all students to contribute to progress towards the community's solution to the problem; and a focus on seeking, recognizing, and drawing attention to mathematical reasoning and justification, and using this as a basis for learning.

Governing employees in the "Bank": a discourse analysis of strategic change

This paper reports the findings from a study of ‘Transform’, a Bank’s strategic change program. The study was carried out by developing and applying a discursive model of strategic change to Transform. Findings are presented about how Transform was constructed from ‘grand discourses’ of business and science that were drawn on by senior management, and how a ‘local discourse’ of the self was formed at the intersection of these grand discourses. This paper is concerned with how senior management has attempted to govern employee identity and practices through the construction of Transform. In this respect Transform can be understood as a discourse which was designed to regulate identity and influence employee practices by constructing and disseminating a particular reality for the Bank and its employees.

Identifying opportunities and promoting discourse by modeling future development initiatives

Based on the development of case study research into the proposed rapid expansion of the Deakin University waterfront campus, this paper presents a computational approach to identifying and modelling future development initiatives within the urban context. The aim of the model is to augment cross-discipline discourse by generating an array of permutations that extend the range of potential design scenarios beyond the Iimits of an ad-hoc, piece-meal or discipline specific approach.

Subcultural capital and the female 'underclass'? A feminist response to an underclass discourse

It is often argued that economically marginalized young women occupy a school and post-school underclass, and that this underclass has a particular culture associated with it. Such views provoke a profound ambivalence in many of those who work with such young people. On the one hand, they are anxious to acknowledge the culture of the communities to which marginalized young women belong. On the other hand, they wish to avoid the pernicious implications of underclass theories that suggest disadvantage is the result of the culture and values of marginalized social groupings. This paper offers an overview and feminist critique of the structuralist and cultural or behaviourist strands of underclass theory. It focuses particularly on the work of Charles Murray, a major proponent of the culturalist perspective and the representation of the single mother in this discourse. It then considers how a less punitive theorization of marginalized cultures might be achieved by drawing on and adapting concepts from Pierre Bourdieu's sociology. The paper reflects on how such ideas might serve as a way of exploring how gender impacts on the forms of cultural capital available to young women in difficult economic circumstances.

Risky business: health education and the limits of risk discourse

The paper explores the ways in which risk operates as a powerful discourse that shapes what health education teachers said about and what they did in their classroom practices. The paper draws on a qualitative study that seeks to explore the dominant and contesting discourses within health education.

Interrogating the discourse of 'social literacies' in an era of uncertainty

Originally, the term 'social literacies' was used to suggest the skills, knowledge and processes for addressing multicultural teaching and learning (Kalantzis and Cope, 1983). The meaning of the phrase has since evolved to encompass widely different concepts, including for example, social 'competencies', and/or citizenship education (eg., Arthur & Davison, 2000). Clearly the discourse around 'social literacies' is shifting in response to changing educational policies, both nationally and internationally.

In this paper, we examine how constructs of 'social literacies' have been and might be deployed. Building from a review of the policy, program and theoretical literature, we pose questions concerning how 'social literacies' might be used to interrogate and rework relations, especially those of gender and culture. Questions to be considered include: will the concept of 'social literacies' enable us to better understand the processes of identity and community formations in this era of uncertainty? Which knowledges and skills are identified in the literature and positioned as critical in establishing 'productive' social relations/literacies? Additionally, we begin to theorise the degree to which such constructions of 'social literacies' might enhance and/or limit quality learning at the tertiary levels of teacher education.