„When we are disciplined, we can learn very well“: Schüler und Disziplin an einem Jungeninternat in Nordghana /// Arbeitspapiere / Institut für Ethnologie und Afrikastudien ; 91

Diese Arbeit analysiert den Alltag in einem gymnasialen Jungeninternat in der Upper West Region in Ghana und setzt diese Analyse in eine anthropologische Perspektive zum Staat. Angeregt durch die Überlegungen von Michel Foucault zu Disziplinarmechanismen und „Technologien des Selbst“ steht die alltägliche Disziplinierung der Schüler im Mittelpunkt dieser Arbeit. Dabei wird Disziplin nicht als restriktiv, übergeordnet und allgegenwärtig gedacht, sondern als etwas, das die Schüler aktiv mitgestalten. Einerseits sind die Schüler der Nandom Secondary School Disziplinartechniken ausgesetzt, die sich auf die Kontrolle ihrer Körper beziehen: Sie werden vereinheitlicht, klassifiziert, hierarchisiert, überwacht, geprüft und bestraft. Andererseits sind die Schüler keine übermächtigten Objekte einer totalen Institution, sondern sie wirken kreativ mit beim Flechten des Netzes aus Kontrolle und Freiräumen in ihrer Schule: Sie spielen eine wichtige Rolle bei der Kontrolle der Lehrer; sie erkennen und nutzen Freiräume, deren Rahmen sie mit den Lehrern aushandeln. Auch ihr Selbst bekommen die Schüler nicht von den Lehrern einfach diktiert. Zwar wird ihnen durch das Bild des guten Schülers eine bestimmte Sicht auf sich selbst nahe gelegt, doch wie sie dieses Bild aufnehmen, ablehnen oder umdeuten liegt in ihren eigenen Händen.

Food, passion and marginalised young people : technologies of the self in Jamie's kitchen

A passion for food that is understood in certain ways – slow, organic, not industrialised – plays a central role in the drama of the successful and popular Jamie’s Kitchen (2002) and Jamie’s Kitchen Australia (2006). Large parts of the drama in these shows revolve around an apparent lack of passion that is displayed by the marginalised, unemployed young people that are the central characters in this story. In this paper I examine the ways in which these accounts of food, passion, and the training of marginalised young people expose some of the challenges and opportunities faced by marginalised young people as they seek to transition into the uncertain and risky labour markets of 21st century capitalism. I argue that Michel Foucault’s (1988) concept of technologies of the self enables us to understand passion, and its particular manifestations in Jamie’s Kitchen, and in the training of marginalised young people, as a powerful technology of self transformation. The drama of Jamie’s Kitchen suggests that as a technology of the self passion for food promises to provide precarious, possibly temporary, forms of salvation, meaning and purpose for the young people engaged in the Fifteen Foundation’s social enterprise transitional labour market program.

Feminist Genealogies in the Writing of the Self

Maria Tamboukou links Foucauldian ideas to feminism and education. Its central argument is that the Foucauldian notion of 'technologies of the self' needs to be gendered and contextualized. This argument is pursued through a genealogical analysis of auto/biographical narratives of women educators at the turn of the nineteenth century. This is a new theoretical approach, since Foucault's work has proved to be of great interest to feminist scholars, but as yet, his theroies have only intermittently been used in educational feminist work. The genealogical analysis of situated female sujectivities has highlighted the importance of space in the 'technologies of the female self' and has reconsidered the private/public couplet. It has acted as a continuous source of uncertainty, experimenting with Foucauldian questions of what we are, of how we have become what we are, but also and perhaps most importantly of how we can become other than what we are already.

Youth, personhood and 'practices of the self'

In contrast to most previous research in the field, this paper argues that the concept of 'youth' is best understood as an example of the governmental formation of a specific type of person. It is constructed at the intersection of a variety of diverse problematisations, being produced by the processes of individuation/ normalisation and the regulation of relations of time. Within programs such as those pertinent to the management of sex, an array of technologies structure the practices by which individuals pattern their own conduct - thereby fashioning a kind of habitus. This forms part of a general strategy of enrolling the objects of these programs in their own self-reformation. Consequently, `youth' can be understood as `the doing of specific types of work on the self'. By utilising this framework, the paper not only seeks to identify and better understand some of the sexual subjectivities associated with the construction of youth, it also seeks to offer some new directions for research in the area.

Organisational change and the care of the self : stress management as ethical self-problematisation

In diverse arenas there is much discussion about the dangerousness of contemporary lifestyles, including the stressful nature of work. These stresses associated with contemporary lifestyles and work are dangerous in so far as they are conceived as placing at-risk the emotional, physical and psychic health and wellbeing of large populations. In this paper I engage with debates about the stressful nature of teachers’ work, and the ways in which teacher health and wellbeing is constructed as being central to the task of delivering more effective schools. I am not so much concerned with the nature of teacher stress as an indication of individual physical, emotional or psychic health and wellbeing. Rather I am more concerned with understanding how it is that at this particular historical juncture the self can be so widely conceived in terms of stress. Moreover, what processes make it possible at this moment to link the success or otherwise of a massive institutional process of state regulated schooling to the health and wellbeing of teachers and the management of this health and wellbeing by school managers?

Ethical Care of the Self and the Teacher in the Pedagogical Relationship: Reflections Based on the Latest Foucault

Our conception of education is that it is the responsible action whereby man becomes human, trains and faces the challenges that life and the world present, as man enters a larger, shared cultural tradition and thus joins the world. However such sharing implies that we must not just rely on tradition, but remain open to new ideas. It is essential for schooling to preserve a field where the art of living intersects with the world for which future generations are being prepared. It is in this field of intersection that this essay seeks to discuss Michel Foucault's thought, care of the self and the role played by others in the acquisition of ethical attitudes pertaining to one's conduct in life. Through reconstructing Foucault's ideas, we elaborate on the hypothesis that, before morally shaping students, teaching them values, or aiding in their skill acquisition in the sense prevailing in schooling today, it is important to understand the notion of care of the self (and how the notion implies interaction with others for effective care of the self). Care of the self is vital for thoroughly understanding the relationships between ethics and education in school. We particularly examine how Foucault's ideas and his analysis of the teacher's role in shaping the student's life conduct can help educators rethink pedagogical action in an ethical sense and find within it a certain openness to the formation of attitudes in educators and students

Youth, sex, and 'practices of the self'

The intention of this paper is to describe ways of avoiding the normalising, globalising and dichotomising tenor of previous research into 'youth'. With a specific focus upon the management of sex, it will be argued that the concept of 'youth' is best understood as an example of the governmental formation of specific types of person, and that 'youth' can be formulated in terms of 'the doing of certain kinds of work on the self'.

Becoming a 'Bastion Against Tyranny' : Australian legal education and the government of the self

Research into legal education suggests that many students enter law school with ideals about using the law to achieve social change, but graduate with some cynicism regarding these ideals. It is often argued that law schools provide a negative, competitive, and conservative environment for students, pushing many away from social justice ideals towards more self-interested, vocational concerns. This article uses Michel Foucault’s work on the government of the self to suggest another way of understanding this process. It examines a range of prescriptive texts that provide students with advice about how to study law and ‘survive’ law school. In doing so, it posits that this apparent loss of social ideals does not necessarily always signify that the student has become politically conservative or has had a negative educational experience. While these legal personae may appear outwardly conservative, and indeed still reflect particular gendered or raced perspectives, by examining the messages that these texts offer students, this article suggests that an apparent loss of social ideals can be the result of a productive shaping of the self. The legal persona they fashion can incorporate social justice ideals and necessitate specific ways of acting on those ideals. This analysis adds to the growing body of research that uses Foucault’s work to rethink common narratives of power and the shaping of the self in legal education, and provides legal educators with new ways of reflecting on the effects of legal education.

“I’m Happy with Who I Am” : A Discursive Analysis of the Self-characterisation Practices of Boys in “Behaviour” Schools

In this chapter, I draw on poststructural theories of language to examine the self-characterisation practices of 33 boys attending special schools for students with disruptive behaviour. During a semi-structured interview, each boy was asked to describe his personality and then to choose from a selection of positive/negative word pairs. The objective was to determine whether these young people would characterise themselves in positive or negative ways. Participants were then asked if there was anything they would change about themselves if they could. Responses were analysed and compared against a discourse model developed from media reports and interviews with their principals. Findings suggest that while discourse may well ‘form the objects of which it speaks’ (Foucault, 1972, p. 49) in the eyes of teachers, principals, psychiatrists and paediatricians, it also offers a means through which the constituted subject can re-author itself in a more positive frame.

The health and well-being of adolescents: a school-based population study of the self-report child health questionnaire

Purpose: To evaluate a new generic measure of adolescent health status, the self-report version of the Child Health Questionnaire (CHQ), and provide population-based data. Furthermore, we aimed to examine the impact of common adolescent illness and health concerns on their health and well-being.

Methods: A stratified, two-stage, random cluster sampling design was used to obtain a cross-sectional sample of subjects through schools. A written questionnaire included the 80-item 12-scale self-report CHQ and items measuring health concerns, illnesses/health conditions, and sociodemographics.

Results: A total of 2361 adolescents participated (response rate of 70%). Reliability was high: Tests of internal consistency and discriminant validity reported 90% of item-scale correlations >.4; all scales had Cronbach alpha coefficients >.7. Adolescents with illnesses/conditions or health concerns reported lower scores and larger differences for content-related scales, supporting content and construct validity. Statistically significant age and gender trends were observed for Mental Health, Self-Esteem, General Health, and Family Cohesion scales. Health status worsened as health concerns increased (X2 linear trend, p = .00) with deterioration in health of 5–20% on all scales for emotional health concerns (40% of sample).

Conclusions: The self-report CHQ is a reliable and seemingly valid measure of health and well-being for adolescent health research, although additional measures may be required where scales have high ceiling values. The significantly lower scores reported by adolescents with illness and/or health concerns lend support to the use of standardized health measures and longitudinal research to further examine the impact of adolescent comorbidities and their causal determinants.

Ethics, aesthetics and the transformation of the self : Foucault's practice of philosophy

Drawing in part on research carried out in the Foucault archives in Paris, the thesis both undertakes a critical assessment of Foucault's late work and attempts to reconstruct the ethical attitude which was emerging in that work. It situates Foucault's project in the context of its Nietzschean inspiration and offers a Foucauldian model of ethics as an aesthetic, transformative work carried out upon the self - as a 'spiritual exercise' in which the critical practice of philosophy takes a central role.

Compilation of the public school laws of New Mexico, 1915; containing sections 4807-5177 of the 1915 codification of the New Mexico statutes (annotated) relating to schools, school districts and state institutions; chapters 19, 29, 33, 36, 38, 45, 74,79, 81, 82, 88, and 89 of the session laws of 1915; and extracts from the state constitution relating to education.

Mode of access: Internet.