Underachievement in school is seen as a failure in traditional theories of education. An alternative construction of school underachievement, from the point of view of Michel Foucault? s approach to power and George Kelly's principle of elaborative choice, is offered as the subject matter of this paper. Instead of being construed exclusively as a measure of good education school success can be seen as the effect of normalization based on the power of discourses dominating in a society. In the same time, underachievement can be seen as a form of resistance to dominant discourse, as well as a way of defining identity in accordance with marginalized discourses whose significance is not recognized or respected from the point of school authorities. The prevailing tradition of European rationality treats poor achievement as a case of norm deviation. The individual perspectives are discounted as irrational and disordered behavior, requiring treatment. Kelly however, asserts that claims of irrationality reflect poor understanding of individual perspectives. When individuals resist the dominant discourse and underachieve despite their abilities, they are making an active choice which should be understood from their point of view. The choice someone makes is always an elaborative choice. Thus underachievement may be construed as resistance to power, based on the principle of elaborative choice.
The chapter engages with another popular approach to visual international politics: visuals as a site of resistance to power, both through producing critical artwork and by ethically witnessing international crises. To trace these issues, the chapter analyzes the work of Ai Weiwei, a world-famous artist-activist whose ethical witnessing creatively resists China’s authoritarian party-state. It shows how Ai’s art presents ideological resistance to state power, in both the traditional sense of liberal resistance to authoritarian state oppression and the hermeneutical sense, in which it is necessary to decode his work for its “meaning” as the social construction of the visual. The chapter then considers how Ai’s documentary film Human Flow (2017) provokes transnational resistance through its “visual construction of the social”—and of the global. It thus examines how visual art can serve as an ethical witness to resist reigning political regimes, and how it also can excite affective communities of sense to creatively resist reigning political aesthetics. Chapter 6 thus highlights the need to appreciate the dynamic tension that entangles cultural governance and resistance.
This article examines the ways Rebecca Solnit’s Savage Dreams (1994) (re)maps two key locations in the American West. The text centres on Yosemite National Park and the Nevada Test Site, locations emblematic of histories of colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism and the military
in the United States. Considering how Solnit constructs a counter-map of these places, this article argues that by tracing ‘lines of convergence’ on a landscape deemed empty by the dominant culture, Solnit both documents and is part of resistance to power structures upheld by traditional
cartography. Using an ecofeminist framework based on drawing connections in the face of the dominant culture’s emphasis on fragmentation and separation, I discuss how Solnit exposes the silence and violence of the map. I then consider the ways she constructs a ‘testimonial network’
that counters both. Finally, I suggest that Solnit’s textual counter-map prompts us to re-read the traditional map on connective, ecofeminist terms.
This article focuses on the ambiguous ideological work of citizen-produced humor in protest. Using the case of the 2017 Romanian anti-corruption protests as empirical data, the article shows how humor can simultaneously signal grassroots creativity and resistance to power structures, and reproduce conservative gender and class hierarchies. Unlike other types of texts, humor presents itself as an innocent and light message, absolved of the need for critical scrutiny. However, protest studies need to engage in a more nuanced way with the ideological articulation of democratic politics via protest humor by asking not only how humor helps protest communication, but also how it achieves shared enjoyment, for whom, and to what consequences for the ideological articulation of democratic politics. The article concludes by proposing that researcher reflexivity can afford a new sensitivity to the ambiguousness of protest humor.
In this article, we provide a dialogical piece of writing inspired by our performative conversation, presented at the European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry 2019. Emboldened by our activist stance that conference presentations and writings can resist arborescent models that dictate the “right” sort of academic, we seek an active engagement with such hierarchical power structures. By engaging in experiential accounts provided through transcript excerpts from conversations, we show how grappling with concepts like power, hierarchy, and insider/outsider groups within a conference space is alive and complicated. Coming to realize that we are already becoming part of an in-group within this prestigious space, we push against the walls of comfort to show our own resistance to power—while also realizing that denying power is exactly the opposite from what we want academics to do.
FORMER WEST (2008–2016) is a long-term contemporary art research, education, publishing, exhibition and discursive project that aims at developing a critical understanding of the legacy of the radical resistance to power in 1989, in order to both imaginatively reevaluate the present
and speculate about global futures. It employs the “retroperspective” method – allowing for imaginative thinking and acting through both global pasts and future prospects simultaneously. The work of art plays a critical role in this context and is understood as a “document”
through which to re-read the recent course of history otherwise than the way in which we’ve gotten to know it, demonstrating thus the imaginative potential of artistic practice in shaping and transforming the world.
The current research sheds new light on the power dynamics between a national majority and minority in the context of inter-group conflict, specifically Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel. Drawing on Giddens, it broadens the dualistic approach to power suggested by the literature to demonstrate how the manifestation of power depends on the interpretation actors give to their social positioning in different life contexts. Drawing on 32 in-depth interviews with undergraduate students on their daily experience of power, four themes emerge reflecting the co-creation and alteration of power dynamics through reflexivity and agency: insecure power, ambivalent power, subversive power and internal power. The results provide empirical support for the role of agency and subjectivity in the manifestation of social power. The discussion explores the various ways in which these themes come into play in the socio-political context of Israel.
Françoise Proust explains that where Foucault established a cartography of power, she is interested in elaborating an “analytic of resistance.” This, she elaborates, would be “the transcendental of every resistance, whatever kind it be: resistance to power, to the state of things, to history; resistance to destruction, to death, to war; resistance to stupidity, to peace, to bare life.”
Choosing school underachievement as a way to resist power
