Judith Butler And Education

The work of Judith Butler has been at the forefront of both theorising the subject as a product of power and explicating possibilities for political alliances and action that are available to such subjects. Mobilising a range of philosophical resources from Hegel and Foucault to Lacan, Levinas Wittig and Arendt, her work has held a core concern with the way that the subject is made in terms of sex, gender and sexuality and has been an invaluable resource in the development of queer theory and thinking about queer practice. Butler’s scholarly work has been aimed primarily at a philosophical audience, yet her insights into the constitution, constraint and agency of subjects are profoundly political and have become invaluable resources in feminist, queer, anti-racist and anti-capitalist work. Over the last two decades she has been a major influence on research concerned with social justice in education and has changed the ways that classroom practices and relationships can be understood, transforming the way we think about both ‘teacher’ and ‘student’. This collection brings together some of the most outstanding work in education that has developed and applied Butler’s work to empirical questions, translating her philosophy for an education audience and providing compelling analyses of the ways that the subjects of education are made, how inequalities are produced in the minutiae of practice and how education’s subjectivated subjects can act politically. The chapters in this book were originally published as articles in Taylor and Francis journals.

This book provides an analysis of race and education through the lens of the work of Judith Butler. Although Butler tends to be best known in the field of education for her work on gender and sexuality, her work more broadly encompasses the functioning of power and hegemonic norms and the formation of subjects, and thus can also be applied to analyse issues of race. Applying a Butlerian framework to race allows us to question its ontological status, while considering it a hegemonic norm and a performative notion which has a significant impact on real lives. The author considers the implications of Butler’s thinking for debates; addressing diverse contemporary educational issues in which race continues to be (re)produced, such as the formation of leaner identities, the production of the good citizen, raising student aspirations, counter terrorism and surveillance in education, and qualitative research in education. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of education and race, the sociology of education and equality of opportunity.

This book provides an analysis of race and education through the lens of the work of Judith Butler. Although Butler tends to be best known in the field of education for her work on gender and sexuality, her work more broadly encompasses the functioning of power and hegemonic norms and the formation of subjects, and thus can also be applied to analyse issues of race. Applying a Butlerian framework to race allows us to question its ontological status, while considering it a hegemonic norm and a performative notion which has a significant impact on real lives. The author considers the implications of Butler's thinking for debates; addressing diverse contemporary educational issues in which race continues to be (re)produced, such as the formation of leaner identities, the production of the good citizen, raising student aspirations, counter terrorism and surveillance in education, and qualitative research in education. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of education and race, the sociology of education and equality of opportunity.

Judith Butler elucidates the dynamics of public assembly under prevailing economic and political conditions. Understanding assemblies as plural forms of performative action, she extends her theory of performativity to show why precarity—destruction of the conditions of livability—is a galvanizing force and theme in today’s highly visible protests.

“The most creative and courageous social theorist working today” examines the ethical binds that emerge within the force field of violence (Cornel West). “ . . . nonviolence is often seen as passive and resolutely individual. Butler’s philosophical inquiry argues that it is in fact a shrewd and even aggressive collective political tactic.” —New York Times Judith Butler shows how an ethic of nonviolence must be connected to a broader political struggle for social equality. While many think of nonviolence as passive or individualist, Butler argues nonviolence is an ethical position found in the midst of the political field. She champions an ‘aggressive’ nonviolence, which accepts hostility as part of our psychic constitution—but values ambivalence as a way of checking the conversion of aggression into violence. Some challengers say a politics of nonviolence is subjective: What qualifies as violence versus nonviolence? This distinction is often mobilized in the service of ratifying the state’s monopoly on violence. Considering nonviolence as an ethical problem within a political philosophy requires two things: a critique of individualism and an understanding of the psychosocial dimensions of violence. Butler draws upon Foucault, Fanon, Freud, and Benjamin to consider how the interdiction against violence fails to include lives regarded as ‘ungrievable’. By considering how “racial phantasms” inform justifications of state and administrative violence, Butler tracks how violence is often attributed to those who are most severely exposed to its lethal effects. Ultimately, the struggle for nonviolence is found in modes of resistance and social movements that separate aggression from its destructive aims to affirm the living potentials of radical egalitarian politics.

"A rather perfect textbook at the right level. It opens up issues of transgender very well and is critical in just the right tone. Much needed in media and cultural studies." - Angela McRobbie, Goldsmiths Acknowledged as one of the most influential thinkers of modern times, an understanding of Judith Butler′s work is ever more essential to an understanding of not just the landscape of cultural and critical theory, but of the world around us. Understanding Judith Butler, however, can be perceived as a complex and difficult undertaking. It needn′t be. Using contemporary and topical examples from the media, popular culture and everyday life, this lively and accessible introduction shows you how the issues, concepts and theories in Butler′s work function as socio-cultural practices. Giving due consideration to Butler′s earlier and most recent work, and showing how her ideas on subjectivity, gender, sexuality and language overlap and interrelate, this book will give you a better understanding not only of Butler′s work, but of its applications to modern-day social and cultural practices and contexts.

"This research should make us extremely sceptical that the constant search for 'higher standards' and for ever-increasing achievement scores can do much more than put in place seemingly neutral devices for restratification." - Michael W Apple, John Bascom Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Policy Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison Recent educational reforms have raised standards of achievement but have also resulted in growing inequalities based on 'race' and social class. School-by-school 'league tables' play a central role in the reforms. These have created an A-to-C economy where schools and teachers are judged on the proportion of students attaining five or more grades at levels A-to-C. To satisfy these demands schools are embracing new and ever more selective attempts to identify 'ability'. Their assumptions and practices embody a new IQism: a simple , narrow and regressive ideology of intelligence that labels working class and minority students as likely failures and justifies rationing provision to support those (often white, middle class boys) already marked for success. This book reports detailed research in two secondary schools showing the real costs of reform in terms of the pressures on teachers and the rationing of educational opportunity. It will be important reading for any teacher, researcher or policymaker with an interest in equality in education.

This book brings together a group of Judith Butler’s philosophical essays written over two decades that elaborate her reflections on the roles of the passions in subject formation through an engagement with Hegel, Kierkegaard, Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, Merleau-Ponty, Freud, Irigaray, and Fanon. Drawing on her early work on Hegelian desire and her subsequent reflections on the psychic life of power and the possibility of self-narration, this book considers how passions such as desire, rage, love, and grief are bound up with becoming a subject within specific historical fields of power. Butler shows in different philosophical contexts how the self that seeks to make itself finds itself already affected and formed against its will by social and discursive powers. And yet, agency and action are not necessarily nullified by this primary impingement. Primary sense impressions register this dual situation of being acted on and acting, countering the idea that acting requires one to overcome the situation of being affected by others and the linguistic and social world. This dual structure of sense sheds light on the desire to live, the practice and peril of grieving, embodied resistance, love, and modes of enthrallment and dispossession. Working with theories of embodiment, desire, and relationality in conversation with philosophers as diverse as Hegel, Spinoza, Descartes, Merleau-Ponty, Freud, and Fanon, Butler reanimates and revises her basic propositions concerning the constitution and deconstitution of the subject within fields of power, taking up key issues of gender, sexuality, and race in several analyses. Taken together, these essays track the development of Butler’s embodied account of ethical relations.