Institutional Dynamics

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

Abstract

This presentation discusses how contemporary educational institutions govern through frameworks of moral care, affect, and inclusion by analyzing three distinct yet overlapping sites of institutional dynamics: green citizenship education, special education in China, and curriculum representations of disability. Together, these analyses demonstrate how emotional, spatial, and visual regimes produce stratified educational subjects and reproduce social hierarchies under the guise of benevolence, reform, or global responsibility.
The first strand of this inquiry explores how greenness operates as a governing actant in climate education reform. Framed through Foucauldian governmentality (Foucault, 1991a) and affect theory (Ahmed, 2004; Berlant, 2011), the analysis shows how youth are mobilized emotionally—through hope, guilt, and grief—to perform green global citizenship. Using discourse analysis of policy frameworks such as UNESCO’s Education for Sustainable Development (UNESCO, 2017), the paper argues that schools are positioned as moral laboratories where students are taught to internalize responsibility for the climate crisis. This emotional governance obscures systemic environmental injustice (Murphy, 2009) and limits opportunities for collective political resistance.
The second strand uses Foucault’s concept of heterotopia (Foucault, 1986) to examine the institutional stratification of children with disabilities in China. Through comparative analysis of three schooling types—mainstream schools, public special schools, and private “minban” institutions—this section reveals how inclusion rhetoric conceals biopolitical paternalism (Foucault, 2003a) and bureaucratic stratification. Drawing on ethnographic data, policy texts, and institutional case studies, the paper demonstrates how these sites function as heterotopias: seemingly inclusive, yet deeply hierarchical. The state governs disability through differential placement, distributing legitimacy, care, and exclusion across institutional types.
The final section takes up curriculum violence in special education by analyzing how ableist ideologies are embedded in curricular images and legitimized through disciplinary discourse (Goodley, 2014). Drawing from lived experience and visual-textual analysis, the authors show how curriculum enacts harm and produces disabled students as passive, pitiful, or burdensome. The theoretical framework extends Foucauldian power analysis by integrating Jacques Rancière’s theory of aesthetic politics (Rancière, 2004) and anarchist commitments to anti-coercion and non-domination (Graeber, 2004). This section concludes by offering a tentative theory of “Disability Education” that resists hierarchies and envisions non-coercive, liberatory pedagogies grounded in mutual care and self-determination.
Across all three strands, this presentation shows that educational institutions do not merely respond to social difference—they actively shape, govern, and stratify it. Whether through environmental citizenship, disability placement, or curriculum design, schools operate as sites of emotional regulation and biopolitical ordering. The analyses foreground the material and affective consequences of moral governance in education, revealing how reform discourses mask structural exclusions.
By placing these inquiries in dialogue, the presentation contributes to Foucauldian scholarship in education by mapping the institutional textures of difference and imagining alternatives. It calls for deeper critique of emotional and moral frameworks in policy and pedagogy and offers tools for disrupting institutionalized harm while envisioning liberatory possibilities across global contexts.

Authors

• Ezequiel Gomez Caride, Universidad de San Andrés

• Jinting Wu, University at Buffalo - SUNY

• Michael Edmond Skyer, University of Tennessee