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.

An archaeology of West Polynesian prehistory

There can be little doubt on linguistic evidence that East Polynesia was first settled from West Polynesia. The author argues, however, that the related archaeological record has been made to fit with this dominant interpretative paradigm. Her objective assessment of the material evidence contradicts the popularly held view.

The Archaeology of No man's land: Indigenous camps at Corindi Beach, mid-north coast New South Wales

At Corindi Beach on the mid-north coast of New South Wales are five twentieth century campsites located on the fringes of the township, beside the town racecourse, an area called by local Aboriginal people 'No man's land'. These campsites are important symbols of the self-sufficient lifestyle followed by the Corindi Beach Indigenous community in the twentieth century and are a physical reminder of cross-cultural relationships between local people over the last hundred years. In a collaborative research project with Yarrawarra Aboriginal Corporation, these places are being documented through studying oral history, the cultural landscape and the material culture left behind at these places.

Kristeva and an archaeology of sources and translation

Pinder examines Julia Kristeva's essay "Stabat Mater," a focus of psychoanalytical, historical and cultural concepts which require very careful consideration. In order to illustrate the complexity of these linguistic and cultural interrelationships, she looks first at Kristeva's own original essay in French to see what light her method of construction may throw on her particular ideas, then examines some translations of the essay into English to see if there is anything lost by attrition or gained by accretion.

On-track to what? Foucauldian analysis of Victorian post-compulsory education policy

Current ideas of adolescent development portray a slow steady movement toward adulthood. These notions developed hand in hand with social practices that evolved in the latter half of the 19th century and contemporaneously with modernisation. During this period conceptions of adolescence included longer stays in school, organised leisure activities, juvenile justice policies and the protection of youth from child labour. Lesko (2001) works from a position that the modern age is defined by time, an understanding that events and change are meaningful in their occurrence in and through time. She examines adolescence as partaking of panoptical time which is condensed and commodified; a time framework that compels us - scholars, educators, parents, and teenagers - to attend to progress, precocity, arrest, or decline" (2001 p.41). Panoptical time can be used to explore how ideas of what is 'normal' development can be used to privilege particular ways of being an adolescent, to monitor who is deemed to be 'at risk' of not conforming to that model and to govern their behaviour. A Foucauldian analysis suggests the formation of 'at risk' identities reflects historically specific discourses. An understanding of how these and other discursive constructions are formed opens the way for resistance. This presentation explores the recent implementation of On-Track and On-Track Connect within Victorian government policy and explores the experience of a Local Learning and Employment Network in implementing the policy.

A Foucauldian strategy for vocational education and training research

Vocational education and training (VET) is an area of research dominated by positivist approaches. Such approaches complement the behaviourist educational philosophy known as 'competency-based training' (CBT) that underpins Australia’s VET system. This paper reflects on a quandary encountered by researchers examining the history of competency based education at a TAFE institution in South Australia. The issue was how to account for a series of mutations in the way CBT was understood and practised that subverted the largely unquestioned expectation of progress. The researchers found that Foucault’s 'genealogical' approach allowed for the construction of a mode of intelligibility that lends the history a disturbing cogency. At the centre of this construction is an understanding of CBT as a highly permeable system whose configurability supports the reticulation of multiple forms of power.

Ploughzone archaeology on an Australian historic site

Archaeologists are often confronted with sites featuring post-occupation disturbance. At rural sites, this disturbance often comes in the form of agricultural activity, such as ploughing and grazing. These disturbances can call into question the value of site spatial relationships and broader data integrity. Between 2006 and 2007, archaeologists from La Trobe University and New Zealand-based consultancy firm Geometria carried out a programme of fieldwork at an 18411861 cottage in Gippsland, Victoria. The site is now an open grazing paddock that has been ploughed on several occasions in the past. The survey techniques used by the archaeological team, which included geomagnetic survey and artefact surface scatter mapping, allowed for testing the integrity of the ploughed archaeological deposits prior to excavation, and provide a case study for the applicability of ploughzone archaeology techniques to Australian historic sites.

Maritime archaeology and trans-oceanic trade : a case study of the Oranjemund Shipwreck Cargo, Namibia

Routine sand dredging for alluvial diamonds at Oranjemund on the southern coast of Namibia exposed remnants of a long forgotten Portuguese merchant ship believed to have wrecked in the 1530s. The rescue excavations yielded over 40 tons of cargo consisting of thousands of gold and silver coins, tons of copper and lead ingots, and large quantities of ivory together with food refuse, part of personal possessions and the superstructure of the ship. This paper discusses the cargo from the shipwreck. The varying provenances show that overland inter-and intra-regional networks fed into the maritime trade between Europe and the Indian sub-continent. As such, the wreck is a lens through which we can view what was happening on the seas as well as on land. Finally we consider wider issues raised by this discovery relating to the protection and management of such material wherever it may be found in future.

Indirect government controls over Australia's social security expenditure : a Foucauldian analysis

Purpose – The aim of this study is to examine how the use of indirect government control mechanisms is used as a means of holding government agencies such as job network providers and recipients of social security benefits accountable. The mechanisms of indirect government will be examined using Michel Foucault's discourses on disciplinary power, surveillance and normalisation.

Design/methodology/approach – The mechanisms of indirect government are investigated through a survey questionnaire and focus group interviews. The questionnaire is assessed and analysed using descriptive statistics and principal component analysis with varimax rotation.

Findings – It is found that the rationing and disciplinary mechanisms of the breaching regime, through a process of disciplinary power, surveillance and normalisation, combine to help hold government agencies and recipients of social security benefits accountable, which in turn helps control the level of social security expenditure.

Originality/value – The current study extends our understanding of the functions of indirect government by providing an applied example of how the process of government works indirectly through government agencies and the abundant rules and regulations that underpin such bureaucracies.

Critical policy sociology : historiography, archaeology and genealogy as methods of policy analysis

In recent times critical approaches to educational policy studies have been subject to increasing interrogation over methodological issues, often by critical policy researchers themselves. In the main, their reflexive posturings have been informed by critique which proceeds that beyond brief descriptions of research logis tics and a general commitment to the methodologies of a critical orientation, critical policy analyses offer few explicit accounts of the connections between the stories they tell about policy and the data used to tell them. As a way of addressing these silences, this paper proposes three methodological approaches within which to explore and explain matters of policy, each generating its own particular view of the (policy) issues worth looking for, where they can be found and how to look for them. Drawing on research into the production of Australian higher education policy during the late 1980s and early 1990s, the paper illustrates the characteristics of these approaches, referring to them as policy historiography, policy genealogy and policy archaeology. Without claiming absolute distinctions between their interests, the paper couples policy historiography with the substantive issues of policy at particular hegemonic moments, policy genealogy with social actors' engagement with policy, and policy archaeology with conditions that regulate policy formations.