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Ethics, Subjectivity, and Sociomaterial Assemblages: Two Important Directions and Methodological Tensions

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Abstract

Research that explores ethics can help educational communities engage twenty-first century crises and work toward ecologically and socially just forms of life. Integral to this research is an engagement with social theory, which helps educators imagine our shared worlds differently. In this paper I present two theoretical-methodological directions for educational research that centres ethics: Ethics and (human) subjectivity; and Ethics-in-assemblage. While both approaches might be seen as commensurable, they can also be seen as quite divergent. Using Michel Foucault’s later work on subjectivity and ethics, as well as recent work in Anthropology, I present a methodological direction for research into ethical subjectivity, how students come to see themselves as self-reflective ethical actors. Relevant here is the tension between ethics and politics, individual and collective modes of being, as both are crucial to both struggles for justice on a damaged planet. The second direction involves a sociomaterialist approach that employs Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘assemblage’ as well as Karen Barad’s notion ‘entangled responsibility’ to show that ethics can also be seen to co-emerge with/in phenomena that exceed human relations. In short, exploring ethics through educational research means simultaneously examining ethics as subjectivity and ethics as co-emergent larger assemblages/phenomena.

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Notes

  1. Ethics can be defined in different ways, and at the outset using a broad dictionary understanding is useful. Ethics can be seen as a mode of inquiry in deliberating ‘good and bad’ and/or choosing a correct/desirable form of action (Ethics, n.d). Starting broad allows researchers to see ethics in all of its manifestations (business ethics, ethics of war, sexual ethics, etc.).

  2. The subject I refer to is a more structuralist/poststructural view of bodies/subjectivity; one constituted by its environment.

  3. See Laird’s (2017) essay that outlines what it might mean to teach about living and habitability in the Anthropocene.

  4. De Marzio (2012) also derives the term ethical subjectivity from Foucault’s later work in order to map (ethical) self-transformation of teachers.

  5. Following Foucault, Szkudlarek (2007) challenges us to think of regimes of modern governance as largely ‘pedagogical’, again one reason being that they involve the conduct of conduct.

  6. Freedom is a ‘tension-point’ between self and the collective. This can be seen in religious practices that simultaneously maintain order in a community on one hand, and promote the equality of members on the other. This makes the exercising and restriction of freedoms central to religious life (Karatani 2014).

  7. Both Foucault and Butler follow Althusser by positing that a subject comes into being through a process of address. To understand the constitution of subjectivity is to ask the question after it has already happened.

  8. Olssen (2006) also notes that Foucault’s foray into ethics involves how to survive and engage in self-preservation, and that this constitutive ethical practice engages the relation between power and freedom.

  9. Niesche and Haase (2012) outline Foucault’s concepts of ethical subjectivity to study teacher (ethical) subjectivity.

  10. I have not directly addressed a distinction commonly made between morals (principles for discerning right and wrong) and ethics (practices related to what should be done in relation to an ethos) here, but do maintain that reflexive ethical practice is not the same as a moral code.

  11. Simons and Masschelein (2010) identify education as a place where subjects can orient away from governmentality toward political/pedagogical subjectivation (becoming political-subject).

  12. Edwards and Fenwick (2015) discuss the perceived lack of tangible politics in sociomaterialisms and new materialisms, and claim these approaches do succeed in recasting static political boundaries.

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Bazzul, J. Ethics, Subjectivity, and Sociomaterial Assemblages: Two Important Directions and Methodological Tensions. Stud Philos Educ 37, 467–480 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-018-9605-8

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