In the Belly of the Beast: Rethinking Power/Knowledge and Resistance as Multiple and Complex

• In Event: Interrogating Governing Discourses in Early Childhood and Childhood Studies and Policies Through a Foucauldian Lens

Abstract

Have we passed a point when Foucault’s (1980) theorizations of the power/knowledge relationship are relevant for analysis of educational discourse and policies? Few of us doubt the need to address inequities inherent in current education policies. Neo-Gramscians might say we must capture and change the commonsense—shared understandings about norms, issues, ideas and practices that the public seem to take for granted as making-up everyday life. This author suggests that in order to capture and change the commonsense our analyses of taken for granted concepts and ideas must address varied and complex responses to those norms. Foucault (1980, 1991) has provided a toolbox for just such analyses through conceptualizations of power/knowledge relationships that, for the purpose of this study will center around his concepts of normalization and governmentality. The objective of this undertaking is to raise questions about how our own normalization of the very idea of resistance. The author writes from the perspective of an academic who finds herself situated “in the belly of the beast.” It is a narrative analysis of her own experiences teaching in a small work college located in the Appalachian mountain region of southeastern Kentucky. In the paper the author will utilize a Foucauldean perspective to examine her own narrative of student/community response to current educational practices and policies—particularly common core standards and standardized testing. In addition to her own narrative of community response she will examine program materials and decisions and policies enacted by the state department of education. She will take a multi-disciplinary approach setting her own analysis in relationship to: a) other current analyses and calls for action and resistance and b) analyses of Appalachian culture and identity (Billings, Norman, Ledford, 1999, Snyder, 2014).

In the end, the author suggests that resistances are multiple and local to the extent that communities responses to reconstruction and/or reiterations of normalizations cannot be divorced from the manner in which they have already come to understand themselves in relation to a variety of social and cultural normalizations.

Author

• Devorah I. Kennedy, Alice Lloyd College