Foucault, Truth-Telling, and New Materialism: Critically Engaging Educational Research

• In Event: 65.051 - New Theoretical Directions

Abstract

I advocate for renewed considerations of responsibility and risk that draw from Foucault’s articulation of parrhesia and critical readings of Deleuzian notions of becoming and sense-making. Parrhesia productively intersects with principle tenets of new materialism even as it foregrounds an engaged form of methodology as social justice work. Given this year’s AERA conference theme involving justice and educational research, it seems especially important to consider how our understandings of necessary social change draw upon a lineage of assumptions regarding being and doing—those becomings that extend from our everyday practices of educational research. For social justice to be more than the extension of normalizing practices we need critical approaches that embrace parrhesiastic positionings.

Author

• Aaron M. Kuntz, The University of Alabama