“Doing” cultural studies: Chua Beng Huat on popular culture

Focusing on the relationship between Chua Beng Huat’s sociological thinking before the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies project and his more recent famous works on consumption and popular culture, this essay seeks to understand how he has produced a methodology and a mode of authority that is effective for the context he inhabits in Singapore as well as resonant for scholars working elsewhere. After discussing his interest in large rather than ‘cult’ popular cultures, his emphasis on the detail of government processes as well as popular practices, his economically-grounded concept of consumption and his materialist approach to texts, I read his work on ‘nostalgia for the kampung’ as modelling an Inter-Asian way of doing Cultural Studies that helps us ask questions and develop concepts for our own local contexts.     

Playful hyper responsibility: toward a dislocation of parents’ responsibility?

Over the past 10–15?years, state-funded schools have begun to require parents to assume an undefined and infinite personal responsibility. In this article, we investigate how schools organize responsibility games to respond to this challenge and how these games affect the concept of responsibility. We point to a dislocation in the way parents are assigned responsibility, because the definition of responsibility is not only a question of formulating rules or providing advice. We argue that what emerges is a kind of playful hyper responsibility that identifies responsibility as the participation in a process of public exploration by parents of the definition of their specific responsibilities. This has several consequences, one of which is that it becomes difficult to have a political discussion about what can reasonably be expected of parents.     

Educational policy‐making in post‐communist Ukraine as an example of emerging governmentality: discourse analysis of curriculum choice and assessment policy documents (1999–2003)

Educational policy‐making in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) is still building upon the ambivalences and uncertainties of post‐communist transformation. The international support, expertise and discourses – coupled with communist legacies, stalled democratic developments and national discourses – produce unique effects on education in each of these countries. This paper is an attempt to conceptualise educational policy‐making (with its disparities between ‘democratised’ discourses and ‘Sovietised’ practices) as a form of emerging governmentality or governmentality‐in‐the‐making on the level of the state, using Ukraine as a case study. Analysing policy‐making through the perspective of emerging governmentality brings into focus the genealogy of post‐independent reforms, which is (as a part of the technologies of government) threaded into a broader governmental project of restructuring the state and legitimising its rationality. The final empirical part of the paper presents a discourse analysis of selected curriculum choice and assessment policy documents (1999–2003) and embedded in them the complex interplay of internal and external discourses, which work together to construct and justify the emerging governmental rationality of post‐communist Ukraine.     

“It’s Groundhog Day”: Foucault’s Governmentality and Crisis Discourses in Physical Education

ABSTRACT

Dominant discourses in physical education research center on subject-wide crisis. This is despite repeated calls to address enduring concerns about how physical education is taught. In short, the subject seems caught in Groundhog Day (defined by Oxford Dictionaries (n.d.) as “a situation in which a series of unwelcome or tedious events appear to be recurring in exactly the same way”). This article scrutinizes this position through Foucault’s lens of governmentality, which focuses particularly on power/knowledge relations and their relationship to subjectivity. Through this lens, research functions as a shaper of contemporary understanding and becomes a means for intervention by “experts.” The article is structured as a conversation between authors about dominant discourses in physical education research and issues of governmentality. It argues that research approaches such as action research are framed within other power/knowledge relations and may provide a way to wake up on a new day.