Agency as a Form of Discursive Practice. A Classroom Scene Observed

In this paper an analysis of the concept of agency is undertaken. The traditional or agonistic definition of agency which assumes that to be a person is to have agency is rejected in favour of a definition that shows the way in which agency may be discursively constructed as a positioning made available to some but not to others. This analysis is then applied to an episode in a primary school classroom to see whether the discursive practices in that classroom can be said to position the students as agentic. The particular classroom was chosen on the basis of the teacher's explicit wish that his students be agentic, but what the analysis shows is the extreme complexity involved in actually carrying this off, given all of the contradictory beliefs and practices that militate against children actually being agentic.     

Children Through Their Own Eyes

Abstract

Over the last decade or more the private and public schools of Britain have successfully campaigned to change their image to that of ‘Independent’ schools. This paper examines the extent to which this change of title is justified. It presents data on the introduction of the Assisted Places Scheme, on changes in the tax regulations regarding charities and on the many other ways that the present government has increasingly given both financial and ideological support to these schools. It questions the degree to which it is appropriate to consider these schools as being independent.     

Inclusion and mastery: variations on the theme of subjection

This article undertakes a discursive analysis of the concepts of ‘inclusion’ and ‘mastery’ using memory stories generated in a collective biography workshop. The five authors analysed their memories from childhood and adolescence on two separate and competing concepts that currently inform educational practice: inclusion and mastery. These stories of mastery/non‐mastery and inclusion/exclusion often exceeded or transgressed dominant normative discourses concerning the competent performance of autonomous selves. Drawing on the work of several theorists, they authors explored these transgressions. In so doing, their analysis extends Butler’s theorising of the human subject as constituted through processes of exclusion and differentiation.     

Ethics and the new materialism: a brief genealogy of the ‘post’ philosophies in the social sciences

This paper explores the relation between poststructuralist theorising and new materialism with a particular focus on the work of Barad. Tracing the lines of thought, particularly as they relate to ethics, through the works of Foucault, Butler, Cixous and Deleuze the paper finds a range of concepts that anticipate and link directly with Barad’s work. Barad’s emphasis on the agency of matter, and on how matter is made to matter, is found to be new. The different analytic work that can be done with these various philosophers is explored through three intra-active entanglements; first, among preschool children and a rock, second, between a girl and a chimp raised as her twin, and third, between humans and cows.     

Heart of darkness: modeling public–private funding interactions inside the R&D black box

This paper is a first step toward closing the analytical gap in the extensive literature on the results of interactions between public and private R&D expenditures, and their joint effects on the economy. A survey focusing on econometric studies in this area reveals a plethora of sometimes confusing and frequently contradictory estimates of the response of company-financed R&D to changes in the level and nature of this category of public expenditures. Yet, a theoretical framework seldom is provided within which the empirical results are to be interpreted. Some such structure is necessary, in view of the multiple channels through which public research can affect private R&D performance, especially as not all the effects flow in the same direction. A major cause of “inconsistencies” in the empirical literature is the failure to recognize key differences among the various policy “experiments” being considered — depending upon the economy in which they are embedded, and the type of public sector R&D spending that is contemplated. Using a simple, stylized structural model, we identify the main channels of impact of public R&D. We thus can characterize the various effects, distinguishing between short- and long-run impacts that would show up in simple regression analyses of nominal public and private R&D expenditure variables. Within the context of our simple model it is possible to offer interpretations that shed light on recent cross-section and panel data findings at both high (i.e., national) and low (specific technology area) levels of aggregation.