Session Information
23 SES 09 B, Education Policy Formation and Contestation
Paper Session
Contribution
This paper investigates a rhetoric used to legitimise whole of government security strategy / intervention and by way of example the justification for the inclusion of education and literacy into an apparatus of security. The purpose of this paper is to examine the emergence of literacy and education in connection to Australian governmental concerns about national, geopolitical and global security. Each of these categories, literacy, security and government, are the focus of significant independent inquiry and occupy distinct spaces in academic literature. Events, opinions and questions about government, literacy and security also occupy significant space in the political and popular imagination. Taken independently, questions about literacy and security generate academic, public and private debate, over concerns about the material effects of government policy and intervention. When taken together these categories emerge as interrelated elements in broader processes of government strategy within and between nations. Governmental assumptions about sovereign rule, national identity and the effects of globalisation are examined for their use as strategies of biopolitical government.
My analysis will draw principally on Foucault’s theory of bio-political government. Foucault (2007) has suggested that the apparatus of security is the essential technical instrument of governmentality and in critiquing the biopoliticization of security identifies at least four strategies of a security apparatus:
• the definition and production of milieu which I read as the the temporal, spatial and cultural relations - for governmental intervention
• government of events and uncertainty
• techniques of normalization, including the management of cases, risks, dangers and crisis
• management of population through knowledge and uses of desire, probabilities, and variation in population.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Bauman, Z. (2005) Education in Liquid Modernity, Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 27(4), 303 — 317. Bauman, Z. (2007) Liquid times: living in an age of uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity Press. Deleuze, G., Guattari, F. (2004). A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Continuum. Dean, M. (1999) Governmentality – Power and Rule in Modern Society, London, Sage Publications. Dillon, M. (2008) Underwriting Security, Security Dialogue, 39(2-3), 309-332. Duffield, M. (2010) The Liberal Way of Development and the Development Security Impasse: Exploring the Global Life-Chance Divide, Security Dialogue, 41(1), 53-76. Held, D. et al (eds.) (1999). Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press. Held, David and Anthony McGrew (eds) (2007). Globalization Theory: approaches and controversies. Cambridge: Polity Press. Janks, H. (2010). Literacy and power. New York: Routledge. Fairclough, N. (2003) Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research, London, Routledge. Foucault, M. (2007) Security, Territory, Population, Lectures at the College de France 1977-78, New York, Palgrave-Macmillan. Foucault, M, (2003) What is critique, in Rabinow, P. and Rose, N (Eds) The Essential Foucault: selections from essential works of Foucault, 1954 – 1984. New York, New Press. Lazzarato, M. (2009) Neoliberalism in Action: Inequality, Insecurity and the Reconstitution of the Social, Theory Culture Society, 26(6), 109–133. Taylor, R., and Naidoo, K. (2004) Taking global civil society seriously, in Taylor, R (Ed.), Cre-ating a Better World: Interpreting Global Civil Society, Kumarian, Bloomfield. United Nations, (2004) A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, Report of the Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, New York: United Nations. Urry, J. (2005) The Complexity Turn, Theory Culture Society, 22(5): 1–14
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