Governmentality Studies in Education

Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality originated in a lecture series in the late 1970s at the Collège de France and soon became the basis for a range of historical and contemporary studies across the social sciences and humanities. The concept in part rests on a simple but powerful idea that links government to the freedom of the subject in a novel understanding of liberal politics. It also provides an analytics of power based on the examination of actual practices. This is the first collection to use Foucault’s concept in relation to the field of education where it has a natural home given that much educational theory and practice in the liberal tradition at least since Kant has been directed at the goals of autonomy and self-government. The volume has three sections: a general section on Foucault and governmentality with contributions from some of the world’s leading scholars in the area, including Colin Gordon, Jacques Donzelot, and Thomas Lemke; and two sections devoted to governmentality and education, the first outlining Anglo-American perspectives, the second, focusing on European perspectives, with contributions from leading scholars such as Tom Popkewitz, James Marshall, Tom Osborne, Michael Peters, Mark Olssen, Tina Besley, Hermann J. Forneck, Bernadette Baker, Susan Weber, Susanne Maurer, Linda Graham, and Maarten Simons and Jan Masschelein, among many others.