Subject Formation and Education

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

Abstract

This presentation investigates how educational discourse produces the figure of the student as both subject and object—one who knows and is known—through the formation of specific knowledge systems. The central aim is to revisit Michel Foucault’s early work on knowledge (savoir) and subjectivity to better understand how education as a social practice configures both what it means to be a learner and what counts as knowledge (Foucault, 1972; 1980). The study offers a renewed analytic for understanding contemporary educational formations by foregrounding early Foucauldian insights on discourse and subject construction.

The theoretical foundation lies in Foucault’s archaeological method as developed in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972) and his earlier lectures and writings, which investigate how systems of thought construct the conditions of possibility for knowledge and subjecthood. Foucault’s concept of savoir—a dispersed, pre-disciplinary knowledge circulating through discourse—serves as a critical lens for analyzing how the figures of “the student” and “education” emerge historically through discursive formations (Foucault, 1980; Lemke, 2011). This orientation departs from analyses of surveillance and governance and instead probes the epistemological grounds that make educational identities and logics thinkable.

The study employs Foucauldian discourse analysis in an archaeological register (Kendall & Wickham, 1999), excavating how dominant educational discourses stabilize the meaning of key terms such as “learning,” “student,” and “development.” Rather than establishing causal lineages, this method reveals the silent rules and assumptions embedded in statements that produce education as a knowable and governable object (Foucault, 1972).

The inquiry draws from a corpus of historical and contemporary texts—including curriculum frameworks, pedagogical theories, and policy discourse—analyzed not for normative content but for their epistemic architectures. These texts are treated as artifacts of thought, where tacit truths about knowledge, learners, and learning are encoded and naturalized. Through this excavation, the presentation identifies how “education” and “studenthood” are not universal or given categories but historically contingent formations.

Findings show that educational discourse assigns the student a paradoxical role as both knower and known, producing a subject who is simultaneously expected to embody and be shaped by knowledge. It also demonstrates that “education” itself operates as a shifting discursive object, shaped by changing configurations of thought. These insights complicate contemporary debates in curriculum theory and educational philosophy by exposing their roots in epistemic traditions rather than fixed truths.

Ultimately, this presentation contributes to Foucauldian educational scholarship by returning to Foucault’s early analytics of knowledge and discourse. In doing so, it highlights the ontological work education performs through its production of subjects and truths (Peters, 2007). It invites scholars to interrogate how our own practices of research and teaching may unwittingly reproduce dominant epistemologies—and to consider how different ways of knowing might become possible.

Authors

• Matthew Cook

• Robert J. Helfenbein, Mercer University