Online research in philosophy

This article uses social movement theory to analyse campaigns against a new type of government-sponsored school - the Academy - in four areas of England. It seeks to identify the social composition of anti-Academy campaigns, to track their encounters with proponents of the new schools and to describe the characteristic forms of their campaigning strategies. In doing so, the article aims to help place research into educational opposition and contestation closer to the centre of researchers' agendas.

This article discusses some recent attempts to develop an economic case that can justify proposals for curricular and institutional reform in education of a radical kind. It investigates the claim, which underpins current debates around a Labour Party alternative to Conservative education policy, that a new phase of development, often referred to as 'post-Fordism', of the dominant economies of the western world provides the basis, and the necessity, for a new system of education which would realise a programme of egalitarian (...) and democratic reform. (shrink)

Much has been written on Michel Foucault's reluctance to clearly delineate a research method, particularly with respect to genealogy (Harwood, 2000; Meadmore, Hatcher & McWilliam, 2000; Tamboukou, 1999). Foucault (1994, p. 288) himself disliked prescription stating, ‘I take care not to dictate how things should be’ and wrote provocatively to disrupt equilibrium and certainty, so that ‘all those who speak for others or to others’ no longer know what to do. It is doubtful, however, that Foucault ever intended for (...) researchers to be stricken by that malaise to the point of being unwilling to make an intellectual commitment to methodological possibilities. Taking criticism of ‘Foucauldian’ discourse analysis as a convenient point of departure to discuss the objectives of poststructural analyses of language, this paper develops what might be called a discursive analytic; a methodological plan to approach the analysis of discourses through the location of statements that function with constitutive effects. (shrink)