Cultivating Resilient Students? Revisiting Foucault's Analysis of Subjectivity, Truth-Telling, and Care of the Self

• In Event: 34.076 - Genealogical Tours and Control Societies: Threads of Truth and Power in Educational Research

Abstract

Education has come to be part of de-radicalisation strategies by prevention of violent expression in school. In educational policy, radicalisation among students is described as an internal threat. The response to this threat is to equip students with capacities for building resilience to radicalisation by self-reflection and coping with uncertainty in general. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s late work on ethics and subjectivity, I show that governing practices deployed in prevention of radicalisation produce the desirable resilient subject. I problematise the discourse of resilience in prevention of radicalisation and explore the constitution of one’s citizenship in education through the ethical notions of parrhēsia (truth-telling) and ‘care of the self’ and the possibility of new subjectivities.

Author

• Anki Bengtsson, Stockholm University