Who's Afraid of Foucault? History, Theory, and Becoming Subjects

This article explores the epistemological innocence of the field of history of education. The author's interrogation of the field's regime of truth and its effects intends to enact what he is conceptualizing as a "self-reflexive historiography," a historiography that attends to the ways in which the field has constituted and turned historians of education into subjects. Here, the author draws on Foucault's doubled use and meaning of the term "subject": "subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his ["sic"] own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power that subjugates and makes subject to." This article enacts a self-reflexive historiography by examining both the author's process of becoming a historian of education as well as the academic conditions and scholarship that have constituted and shaped his subject formation. The article is divided into three main sections and a conclusion. First, it examines the ways in which Foucault and poststructuralism have been engaged in the discipline of history and in the field of history of education. Second, it telescopes specifically to the field of history of education by investigating the interpretive and methodological techniques of Foucault that have been adopted and extended by education historians. Third, in the author's use of Foucault's theory of history as a junior faculty member, it outlines how Foucault's analytics of archaeology, genealogy, and technique of the self are used in his book project on empire and education. Throughout the article, he highlights the conditions of resistance to and possibility of Foucaultian and poststructuralist theories in history of education to raise questions about the field's regime of truth, its logics, operations, and effects. (Contains 52 footnotes.)