Truth-Telling, Educational Inquiry, and Affirmative Ethical Practice

• In Event: 52.066 - Foucault, Postfoundations, and the Complexities of Contemporary Educational Experiences

Abstract

In this paper I overlay Foucault’s lectures on biopower, governmentality, and truth-telling with Braiddoti’s affirmative ethical claims on the posthuman and Lazzarato’s recognition of refusal as an ethical act. I do so in specific response to the ubiquity of negative critique within contemporary research that claims the critical mantle. Yet, this latter approach unnecessarily mimics and even accelerates the neoliberal project it so hopes to dismantle. In counter-distinction, an onto-epistemological framework operates from a relation approach, pointing to developing potentialities that have yet to be fully formed, or, importantly, governed. I ground my paper by focusing on select practices of critical inquiry as radical cartographies for a more socially-just future.

Author

• Aaron M. Kuntz, The University of Alabama