Archaeological, Alethurgical, and Dispositif Analysis: Discourse Studies on Higher Education in Poland from a Post-Foucauldian Perspective

Helena Ostrowicka

doi:10.18778/1733-8077.17.1.8

Authors

Helena Ostrowicka Kazimierz Wielki University, Poland https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2500-9581

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/1733-8077.17.1.8

Keywords:

Discourse Studies, Archaeological Discourse Analysis, Alethurgical Discourse Analysis, Dispositif Discourse Analysis, Higher Education, Michel Foucault

Abstract

At the present stage of the reception of Foucault’s ideas, various theoretical and methodological trends coexist, within which the concepts of Michel Foucault are used fruitfully in empirical research. One of them is discourse studies understood as an inter- and transdisciplinary research area. This article distinguishes and describes three post-Foucauldian strategies of discourse analysis, the combined use of which in one research project is a proposal to integrate concepts scattered in Foucault’s various works. The strategies distinguished (archaeological, alethurgical, and dispositif) are characterized by the different analytical categories, understanding of discourse, and its relations with knowledge and power. The article presents selected results of the complementary use of concepts such as knowledge formation, alethurgy, confession, or the dispositif in the empirical research on the reform of higher education in Poland.

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Author Biography

Helena Ostrowicka, Kazimierz Wielki University, Poland

Helena Ostrowicka is a PhD, Hab., Associate Professor, Dean of the Faculty of Pedagogy, and Head of the Department of Research Methodology and Discourse Studies at Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz, Poland. Her research areas are: policy and educational discourse analysis, reception of Foucauldian ideas in educational research, science and higher education policy, discourses on the youth and citizenship. She is the author of five monographs (i.a., Regulating Social Life: Discourses on the Youth and the Dispositif of Age 2019, Palgrave Macmillan; co-author: The Dispositif of the University Reform. The Higher Education Policy Discourse in Poland, 2020, Routledge) and many articles published, among others, in Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, Educational Philosophy and Theory, Higher Education Research & Development, European Educational Research Journal.

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