Emerging Trends and Global Perspectives

• In Event: Foucault in Education: Generative Dialogues on Power, Knowledge, and Resistance Across Theory, Practice, and Method

Abstract

This presentation explores how Foucauldian approaches continue to offer a fruitful manner to be ‘untimely’ to the imperative of ‘crises’ and the demands that research be immediately ‘relevant’ to the world as-is. These strands demonstrate the need to continually engage and rethink the workings of power, resistance, historical inquiry, the question of truth, and the functions of institutions within specific socio-historical contexts. They exemplify how Foucault demanded a restless refining, and in some cases rejecting, of methodological presuppositions (Lemke, 2011). In doing so, they also express a normative valence that Lorenzini (2023) argues is not just a negation of what is, but an affirmative, possibilizing force. This possibilizing force is an ethico-political commitment that connects struggles of the past to those of the present, while also embracing new ways of being, feeling, thinking, and acting.

The first strand analyzes South Korea’s AI Digital Textbook Reform through Foucault’s concept of governmentality, revealing a structural transformation in educational governance. AI-enhanced digital textbooks have been promoted for personalized, data-driven learning. However, they also function as surveillance tools, collecting cognitive, emotional, and behavioral data. School knowledge becomes dynamic and personalized, diminishing teachers’ traditional roles. Students are, instead, positioned as self-regulating learners through AI dashboards, emphasizing meta-intelligence and performance. The reform represents not just a technical shift but a biopolitical reconfiguration of education’s epistemic and ontological foundations.

The second strand explores the project of Islamicizing higher education in Iran since the inception of the Islamic Republic, arguing that the project of making the universities Islamic cannot be fully accounted for within prevailing frameworks of governmentality. The analysis shows how juridico-legal, disciplinary, and governmental modalities of power co-exist and are exercised concomitantly, while being applied differentially to absent and present bodies and knowledges. It thus underscores the need for context-sensitive investigations that attend to the complex dynamics through which education mediates and is mediated by diverse modalities of power.

The third strand reexamines the concept of religious legacies through a genealogical lens. Challenging the transhistorical categorisations of religions (e.g., Catholicism or Protestantism) as causal forces in the form of characteristics of national education systems, it examines how, in Mexico, the creation of a national archive also produced Catholicism as a historical force that explained the limits and possibilities of Mexican education. Focusing on the work of missionaries and their 19th-century historiographical treatment, the analysis demonstrates how material objects were intertwined with social scientific notions of development that framed Catholicism as a determinant cause of producing racial difference in Mexico (namely through the concept of Mestizaje, or racial mixture).

The fourth strand examines the moral specters underpinning standardized testing in American education tracing the convergence of religious fundamentalism and Taylorist scientific management. These seemingly disparate movements share structures of discipline, efficiency, and moral accountability. By surfacing their regimes of truth, the research renders visible how contemporary testing practices are haunted by power/knowledge relations that shape notions of success, failure, and worth, ultimately determining not just how students are evaluated, but who they are permitted to become.

Authors

• Ji-Hye Kim, Korean Educational Development Institute

• Mariam Sedighi, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Marino Miranda Noriega, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Robert Allen Smith, The University of North Carolina School of the Arts