This research workshop is concerned with the question of how post-structural theory can productively inform educational research. Commonly, post-structural theory has been seen as a critical and deconstructive medium within the educational studies and discipline: The critique of self-transparent and rational subjectivity, e.g., has primarily served to reflect and even problematize the supremacy of rationality and intentionality in educational processes. Aside from its ‘disenchanting’ moves, post-structural theory operates on a very general and abstract level. This is possibly why it has seldom been perceived as very relevant for the empirical analysis of educational phenomena.
In this workshop we firstly want to give a theoretical outline and programmatic focus of post-structural thought. We are convinced that post-structural theory provides a rich perspective for analyzing educational processes because it takes into account their openness, their indeterminacy, as well as their dynamic quality. Secondly we want to perform exemplary analyses bringing in different kind of materials (pictures, discursive formations, programs etc.). These analyses are centered around the concepts “performativity,” “contingency,” and “generativity.” These concepts will represent the programmatic frame as developed before. Thirdly, we plan an extensive discussion that relates to theoretical, methodological as well as ‘political’ issues. ‘Political’ here means the way how we focus on educational processes in comparison to other qualitative empirical approaches (and their constructions of ‘education’).
Our point of departure is what Michel Foucault has called the determinative, yet not fully determining quality of power structures. In our view, education, Bildung, the construction of identity etc. are strongly related to the ‘indeterminable gap of social reality,’ a gap that is continuously set in motion in our social – or here: educational – practices, e.g. by applying ‘technologies of the self’ (like disclosing ‘ourselves’ in our ‘history’) or by producing ‘educational knowledge’ (like the notion of learning as a labor of the self). In these (discursive and non-discursive) practices we permanently and performatively shape and re-shape the social world. As Laclau and Mouffe have put it: There is a contingent or political dimension of the social world because every identity remains ‘precarious.’
This description is, as we think, very important for educational processes because – to put it very generally – their point of departure is the ‘present in the light of the future.’ Education is necessary because we are in some sense not yet who we are. Thus, educational practices are highly bound to the introduction of a compelling openness and otherness within the present, an openness that brings about a dynamics of subjectivation. We are very much interested in the ways that this openness is constituted within the social realm and its consequences for “becoming a subject.” The different chosen materials will serve the purpose to reconstruct this openness and its performative and generative effects.
The aim of this research workshop is: 1) to discuss the ‘hiatus’ between the level of post-structural theory and educational practices, 2) to demonstrate the productivity of the above mentioned theoretical approach for empirical analyses, 3) to discuss/situate this approach in the spectrum of qualitative research.
