Comment: I have been asked to clarify the relationship between a WPR approach and governmentality studies.

Both WPR and governmentality studies are informed by Foucault-influenced poststructuralism. Hence, there are many overlaps in premises and analytical projects. In particular there is a focus on governmental practices – i.e. on how governing, read broadly, takes place.

Remembering that governmentality studies constitute a wide field with many variations, it is possible to identify four main themes pursued both in WPR and in governmentality studies:

• Ÿpolitical rationalities (ways of thinking about what governing entails);
• the technologies and instruments involved in governing;
• Ÿthe “subjects” of government, or the diverse forms of persons that are presupposed and also delivered by governmental activities;
• Ÿthe problematizations through which governing takes place (adapted from Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 9; see also Bacchi 2012).

In terms of shared premises in WPR and governmentality studies, I would highlight the following:

• a conception of governing as including but beyond the state;
• a rejection of grand theorizing in favor of a focus on singular 
“events” and mundane practices;
• a conception of power as relational and productive;
• the centrality of knowledges (discourses) in governing processes;
• the usefulness of identifying “family resemblances” among problematizations to characterize political rationalities;
• the usefulness of comparisons among problematizations for making 
judgments about potential deleterious effects;
• a genealogical focus; and
• a view of “subjects” as constituted in practices.

(from Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 45)

To these I would add that governmentality studies and WPR both adhere to Foucault’s nominalist critique (see Alasuutari 2010 in Bacchi 2012: 5).

Turning to differences between WPR and governmentality studies, a major distinction is how the two approaches engage with governmental problematizations. Inda (2005: 8; emphasis added) explains the way in which governmentality scholars deploy the concept of problematization. As he says, for governmentality scholars,  “government is inherently a problematizing sphere of activity – one in which the responsibilities of administrative authorities tend to be framed in terms of problems that need to be addressed”.  He continues:

Guided with this perspective on governments, the governmentality literature tends to explore how certain events, processes, or phenomena become formulated as problems. Moreover, they are often concerned with investigating the sites where these problems are given form and the various authorities for vocalizing them. To focus on government, then, is to attend, at least on some level, to its problematizations– to the ways intellectuals, policy analysts, psychiatrists, social workers, doctors, and other governmental authorities conceptualize certain objects as problems. It is to focus on how government is bound to the continual classification of experience as problematic. (Inda 2005: 8)

While in WPR there is a shared interest in how rule is thought and made practicable through problematization, I argue that WPR provides access to a broader canvass to explore this topic. The key question becomes where to find problematizations.I suggest that governmentality scholars in the main tend to follow Foucault’s lead and look for problematizations in the “specific situations in which the activity of governing comes to be called into question, the moments and the situations in which government becomes a problem” (Dean 1999: 27).

By contrast, as I explain in Analysing Policy: What’s the Problem Represented to be?(Bacchi 2009: 31), a WPR approach “makes the case that every policy [and indeed every program and governmental technology], by its nature, constitutes a problematisation”.  The WPR approach, through its seven forms of questioning and analysis (see Bacchi WPR CHART;Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 20), assists researchers to tease out and interrogate the implicit problematizations in each and all of these sites. This expansion of the understanding of problematization beyond “specific situations” and “crisis” points (see Bacchi 2012: 2, 5) means that instead of being “relatively rare” (Dean 1999: 27), problematizations are ubiquitous.

In Analysing Policy (Bacchi 2009: 31) I explain other points of contrast between WPR on the one side, and Foucault and some governmentality theorists on the other. Specifically I put in question the suggestion that problematizations are due to some pre-existing set of “difficulties” that spark a response from governments, taking issue with this characterization in Foucault:

Actually, for a domain of action, a behavior, to enter the field of thought, it is necessary for a certain number of factors to have made it uncertain, to have made it lose its familiarity, or to have provoked a certain number of difficulties around it. These elements result from social, economic, or political processes. (Foucault 1984: 4-5)

In WPR, by contrast, the analytic target is the shape of implicit problematizations (or problem representations) in specific proposals, including policy proposals and other forms of proposal (see Bacchi 2018: 6-7). These problematizations are not driven by pre-existing changes in social conditions. In my view this shift from “putative conditions” that provoke “responses” to the implicit problematizations in all policies creates more analytic space to contest the ways in which policies and other proposals constitute “problems” as particular sorts of problems.

Finally, WPR emphasizes the need to interrogate assumed categories of analysis wherever they appear – i.e. in all forms of governing texts and in research. For example, in Analysing Policy, I draw attention to  and query the way in which the governmentality scholar, David Garland (2001: 90), draws upon rising crime rates as part of his analysis, leaving the term “crime” unproblematized. Along related lines, I find Fraser and Gordon’s (1994) genealogy of “dependency” compelling, while the governmentality scholar, Mitchell Dean (1999: 66), is skeptical about this form of critique.

WPR brings together a concern both with the ways in which concepts are embedded in governmental practices and programs (highlighted by Dean), and with the uneven power relations involved in shaping the meaning of concepts (recognized by Fraser and Gordon). These concepts, I would argue, can be subjected to critique without assuming that “the oppressed are able to achieve an actual or potential greater access to truth”, which Dean (1999: 64) contends is necessary to this form of criticism (see entries in Research Hub on “subjugated knowledges”, 3 Sept. and 17 Sept. 2018).

In short, WPR provides a “tool” for interrogating problematizations in forms of proposal, broadly conceived (see “Buildings as proposals”, Research Hub, 14 Jan., 2018). The analytic strategy it offers, starting from proposals and looking back to see – or “reading off” – how they constitute “problems” as particular sorts of problems, opens up a wide field of contestation around diverse governing practices. The accompanying focus on contested concepts (Bacchi 2009: 8-9) supports this project.

REFERENCES

Alasuutari, P. 2010. The nominalist turn in theorizing power. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 13, 403-417. doi:10.1177/1367549410377579

Bacchi, C. 2012. Why Study Problematizations? Making Politics Visible. Open Journal of Political Science,Vol 2, 1-18.

Bacchi, C. (2018). Drug Problematizations and Politics: Deploying a poststructural analytic strategy, Contemporary Drug Problems, 45(1): 3-14.

Bacchi, C. and Goodwin, S. 2016. Poststructural Policy Analysis: A Guide to Practice.NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Dean, M. 1999. Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. London: Sage.

Foucault, M. 1984. Polemics, Politics and Problematizations, based on an interview conducted by P. Rabinow. Trans. L. Davis, in Essential Works of Foucault, Vol 1, Ethics. NY: New Press.

Fraser, N. and Gordon, L. 1994. A Genealogy of Dependency: Tracing a Keyword of the US Welfare State. Signs, Vol 19, No 2, pp. 309-36.

Garland, D. 2001. The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

COMMENT: The entries over the last month or so have prompted me to consider how I have modified my views and arguments over the years. I do not wish to bore you with a potted autobiography so I will keep these comments brief.

Basically I wish to “confess” that my position on a range of issues has altered between my earlier works and some later contributions. I would like to suggest that this shift in positions should be expected rather than decried; hence, the quotation marks around “confess”. Indeed, I am suggesting that applying forms of self-problematization (see last entry), by their nature, impels researchers to revisit stances we have adopted and concepts we have used previously – that is precisely what self-problematization is intended to achieve! Unfortunately, however, researchers seldom discuss in a public forum possible tensions in their work brought about by new reading and new thinking. My hope is that “early researchers” might take heart from hearing an “old hand” reflect on this issue.

The concept I wish to trouble is “reflexivity”. In a 2009 publication (Bacchi 2009) I endorse something I call “reflexive framing”. A recent article diplomatically takes me to task for using a concept that appears to endorse a rational, self-contained subject who can “stand back” and “reflect” on their views (Ikavaldo and Brunila draft 2018: 12). I accept this criticism. Two years after my chapter on “reflexive framing” was published, I agreed to give a paper on reflexivity as a keynote address at a conference on gender mainstreaming (BACCHI MADRID KEYNOTE 2011). This task compelled me to sort through the debates around the topic more carefully.

In a sense this keynote address illustrates what happened to my thinking when I asked the WPR questions of my earlier (2009) stance on reflexivity. Thinking of this earlier position (2009) I needed to consider the deep-seated assumptions underpinning a claim that reflexivity constituted the “problem” as an unwillingness to examine one’s presuppositions (Question 2 Bacchi WPR CHART). Specifically, I needed to consider the kind of subject produced or enacted in a claim of this sort. As Ikavaldo and Brunila (2018) point out, reflexivity presumes a rational, self-contained actor. As a result, the concept is circular (see BACCHI MADRID KEYNOTE 2011: 7-8). These are the reasons I moved towards the alternative of “self-problematization”, but a change in wording does not really alter the sense of some ability to “distance oneself” from one’s “beliefs” (note that in 2011 on p. 18 I decided it was acceptable to retain the term “reflexivity”).

To move forward theoretically I engaged with performativity theory, the “turn to practice” and an ontology of becoming [see last entry]. I found Annemarie Mol (2002) particularly helpful. Mol (2002: 38) makes the point that people’s identities “do not precede their performances, but are constituted in and through them”. It follows that we are produced as particular kinds of subjects through the practices in which we engage. Hence, attention needs to be directed to identifying “reflexive” practices that produce us as “reflexive” subjects.

In the 2011 paper I argue that WPR constitutes such a “reflexive” practice. Step 7 (see Bacchi WPR CHART) specifies the need to apply the WPR questions to our own proposals. This undertaking is not simply a recommendation to (somehow) become “reflexive”; it involves an active practice of critical self-problematization.

It calls upon all researchers and practitioners to examine their own proposals for change, to consider how those proposals represent the “problem” under scrutiny, to identify the unquestioned presuppositions that underpin that thinking and to listen to alternative problematisations. (Bacchi 2011: 18)

Hence, it draws on and supports the performative principle that subjects are produced through practices. The hope is that “applying these six questions to our own policy proposals allows us to consider the extent to which we may inadvertently be complicit in oppressive modes of governing” (Bacchi 2011: 11).

This example illustrates that I came to be more skeptical about the concept of reflexivity as I spent more effort researching its genealogy and premises. My hope is that the application of self-problematization, as illustrated in this story of my changing views on the topic of “reflexivity”, encourages other researchers to undertake a close examination of the concepts they adopt and how those concepts produce “problems” as particular sorts of problems with specific effects (Bacchi 2018: 7).

REFERENCES

Bacchi, C. 2009. The issue of intentionality in frame theory: The need for reflexive framing. In E. Lombardo, P. Meier & Verloo, M. (Eds.), The Discursive Politics of Gender Equality: Stretching, Bending and Policymaking. London: Routledge, pp. 19-35.

Bacchi, C. 2011. Gender mainstreaming and reflexivity: Asking some hard questions”. Keynote address, Advancing Gender+ Training in Theory and Practice, Conference at Complutense University, Madrid, 3 February.

Bacchi, C. 2018. Drug Problematizations and Politics: Deploying a Poststructural Analytic Strategy.  Contemporary Drug Problems, 45(1): 3-14.

Ikavalko, E. and Brunila, K. 2017. Coming to discursive-deconstructive reading of gender equality. International Journal of Research & Method in Education, December. Draft copy.

Mol, A. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Comment: In the last entry I clarified a distinction between “situated knowledge” as a challenge to transcendental knowledge claims, and “situated knowledges” as “preferred” knowledges in Haraway (1988). The first position is commonly adopted in critical poststructural theorizing and is often roundly criticized for being “relativist”. The argument here is that, if all knowledges are “situated”, there are no epistemological grounds for preferring one “knowledge” over any other. The further claim is that such a position leaves us floundering in a world without meaning.

This common critique of poststructuralism – indeed I faced just this critique at the Swedish Political Science Association (SWEPSA) Conference in Malmo where I delivered the keynote address on 3 October 2018 – was dealt with in the last entry. There I made the case that the insistence on the politics of knowledge production in Foucault-influenced poststructuralism shifts the focus from primarily philosophical issues about “truth” to concerns with the political production and effects of knowledge (“truth”) claims. Poststructuralism thus constitutes a skeptical rather than a relativist stance on knowledge claims, articulating how systems of thought work through the world, constituting it in definite ways as they do so (Bletsas 2010; Chia 1996; Foucault 1984a).

Unsurprisingly, this issue has led to considerable reflection by critical scholars on their own knowledge claims. Haraway (1988: 584, 586; emphasis in original) emphasizes that “there is no immediate vision from the standpoints of the subjugated” and that “how to see from below is a problem requiring at least as much skill with bodies and language, with the mediations of vision, as the ‘highest’ technoscientific visualizations”. Writing about the field of organization studies, Chia (1996: 32) highlights that “if it is true, as many meta-theorists maintain, that all organizational accounts are paradigmatically circumscribed, this must reflexively apply to their own accounts”. And so, he argues, “The thorny question of reflexivity becomes, therefore, an inevitable one”.

Chia (1996: 32-34) mentions that one response to this “thorny question” or “reflexivity quagmire” has been to adopt a more modest and even ironical stance to proposed theories – a stance labeled “meta-reflexivity” in Latour (1988). But, as Chia says, such a response treats reflexivity as an epistemological problem, obscuring its “deeper ontological character”. Here Chia proceeds to contrast an ontology of being-realism, which “emphasizes the primacy of permanent and static states”, to an ontology of becoming-realism, which “privileges a thought style in which movement and the becoming of things are accentuated” (see entry on 3 September 2018). This shift in focus from how things “are” to how they “become” redirects attention to the “primary organizing micro-practices” involved in their becoming. A study of such practices, as explained above, involves a political rather than an epistemological undertaking.

Chia (1996: 49) argues that, to facilitate this focus on continual becoming, it follows that poststructural theoretical products must be “self-deconstructing”. Other researchers offer specific ways to enact this proposition. Todd May (2006: 94 ff.) suggests that it is possible to produce a “genealogy of genealogy”. Norma Rudolf (2017: 8) deploys a form of “autoethnography” developed “in dialogue” with participating South African communities “to question many of my own western assumptions that have been normalized as truth”. In line with these interventions, Step 7 in WPR (Bacchi WPR CHART) calls upon researchers to apply the other questions in the approach to their own proposals in a form of self-problematization. I distinguish self-problematization, as developed in WPR, from reflexivity because it institutes a practice of the self, applying the WPR questions to our own proposals (see next entry). For example, applying Question 3 to our own proposals incites exactly the form of “genealogy of genealogy” Todd May envisions.

Chia’s (1996: 49) call for “self-deconstructing” theories is accompanied by the suggestion (following Latour 1988: 174) that poststructuralists ought to produce “throw-away explanations” instead of “dogmatically using theories we generate to try to explain everything”. While I certainly agree with the critique of dogmatic theory, elsewhere, Joan Eveline and I (2010: 157) question the notion of “throw-away explanations”.  This conclusion, we suggest, appears to assume that all explanations are equally dispensable. In contrast we highlight the hierarchal organizing of discursive relations illustrated, for example, through the way in which medical discourse is privileged over the home birth movement.

Rudolf (2017: 79) explores the operation of power relations in the hierarchy of knowledges in her careful deployment of the concept of “subjugated knowledges”, showing precisely how that concept can be useful. She emphasizes how “evidence-based” policymaking in South Africa “prioritises scientific knowledge over other knowledges” and thus influences “who can speak, when, where and with what authority” (Ball 1990: 17-18 in Bacchi 2009: 237). With Somé (1995) she highlights the desirability of “making African cosmology more accessible to the West” without “judging one worldview as better than the other” (emphasis added). She appeals to Santos’ (2007: 1) call for “global cognitive justice” (Santos 2007: 1), challenging the tendency simply to “add-on” local and indigenous knowledges to the dominant western view of knowledge. At the same time, with Cross (2015: 53), she emphasizes that hierarchies of knowledge are not fixed but are locally constituted and reconstituted in the policy arena through “dynamic compromises between competing forms of knowledge and knowledge producers” in the changing political context.

In the next entry I consider the extent to which I apply Step 7 in WPR in my own work – something I have been asked about – with some unpleasant surprises.

REFERENCES

Bacchi, C. 2009. Analysing Policy: What’s the Problem Represented to be?  Frenchs Forest: Pearson Education.

Ball, S. J. 1990. Politics and Policy Making in Education: Explorations in Policy Sociology. NY: Routledge.

Chia, R. 1996. The Problem of Reflexivity in Organizational Research: Towards a Postmodern Science of Organization. Organization  3(1): 31-59.

Cross, M. 2015. Knowledge hierarchies and the politics of educational policy in South Africa. Education as Change, 19 (2), 37-57.

Eveline, J. and Bacchi, C. 2010. Power, resistance and reflexive practice. In C. Bacchi and J. Eveline (eds) Mainstreaming politics: Gendering practices and feminist theory.Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press.   pp. 139-62.

Haraway, D. 1988. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.  Feminist Studies14(3): 575-599.

Latour, B. 1988. The Politics of Explanation: An Alternative. In S. Woolgar and M. Ashmore (eds)Knowledge and Reflexivity: New Frontiers in the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Sage.  pp. 155-76.

May, T. 2006. The Philosophy of Michel Foucault. Chesham: Acumen.

Rudolph, N. 2017. Hierarchies of knowledge, incommensurabilities and silences in South African ECD policy: Whose knowledge counts? Journal of Pedagogy, 1.

Santos, B. de Sousa 2007. Beyond abyssal thinking: from global lines to ecologies of knowledges. Review of African Political Economy, 30 (1).

Somé, M. P. 1995. Of water and the spirit: Ritual, magic and initiation in the life of an African shaman. New York: London Penguin.

Comment: In the last entry I raised for discussion a distinction between “subjugated knowledges”, as used by Foucault (1980), and “situated knowledges”, in the classic article by Haraway (1988). Without oversimplifying Haraway’s argument, her references to “situated knowledges” and “‘subjugated’ standpoints” as “preferred” positions makes an epistemological claim to “better knowledge” for groups positioned as oppressed. By contrast Foucault (1980: 83) describes “subjugated knowledges” – including the knowledges of the psychiatric patient, the ill person or the delinquent – as “disqualified, illegitimate knowledges” (Foucault 1980: 83). He is not making an epistemological claim as to their contents but a political claim as to their tactical usefulness in challenging the “centralizing powers” of “an organized scientific discourse”. The aim in Foucault, through genealogies, is to play off subjugated knowledges against “the rights of a science that is in the hands of the few” (Foucault 2003: 9).

This distinction between “subjugated knowledges” (in Foucault) and “situated knowledges” is further complicated by another argument frequently made in contemporary critical social and political theory, an argument that directs attention to all forms of knowledge as situated. Here the point of the analysis is to challenge the idea of transcendental knowledge by showing that knowledge is a social product, reflecting specific circumstances and influences (Bacchi 2009: 234). In this sense all knowledges are, to borrow from John Law (2009: 3), “contexted truths”.

This argument, that all knowledge is (socially) situated, can (understandably) lead to references to “situated knowledge” (Vitelloni 2018), or even “situated knowledges”. However, the implication of this usage contrasts starkly with references to “situated knowledges” as “preferred” perspectives in Haraway. In the first instance, the argument is that, since all knowledge claims are situated, there are no epistemological grounds for privileging one claim over any other. In the second instance, “situated knowledges” become “preferred”“partial perspectives” (Haraway 1988: 584) – clearly an epistemological claim.

The argument that all knowledges are situated and none is to be preferred in epistemological terms is an argument often used to typecast poststructural thinking as relativist. However, the insistence on the politics of knowledge production, elaborated in the last entry, shifts the focus from primarily philosophical issues about “truth” to concerns with the political production and effects of knowledge (“truth”) claims. Poststructuralism thus constitutes a skeptical rather than a relativist stance on knowledge claims, articulating the ways systems of thought work through the world, constituting the world in definite ways as they do so (Bletsas 2010; Chia 1996; Foucault 1984a).

In this situation it is incumbent on researchers to clarify the sorts of claims they are making when they draw on these languages. In WPR I recommend using Foucault’s concept of “subjugated knowledges”, with a clear explanation that the term does not involve a claim to “truth” (it is not an epistemological claim). I might on occasion also refer to knowledges as situated or “contexted” as a way to challenge any assumed transcendental status for knowledge. However, I avoid the phrase “situated knowledges” (in the plural) given its historical association with Haraway’s position on “situated knowledges” as “preferred” “partial” perspectives.

Barry’s comments on “the political” suggest the reasons I distance myself from claims that oppressed groups have privileged access to “truth”. He says:

an action is political . . . to the degree to which it opens up new sites and objects of contestation. And it is anti-political to the extent that it closes down the space of contestation (2001, p. 194, emphasis in original).

In my view epistemological claims close down the space of contestation. Therefore, I endorse Foucault’s call for “indispensable restraint” that “records the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality” (Foucault, 1984b: 76).

I have been thinking that even the language of “subjugated knowledges” appears to retain some sense of knowledge as a “thing” or essence. Here it may be possible to follow John Law’s (1994: 14) suggestion that we need a sociology of verbs rather than of nouns (see also Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 94 n1). Hence we could refer to “knowledging practices” as an alternative to “knowledges”.

In the next entry I would like to follow up these brief reflections with consideration of the implications of this stance for researchers, which Robert Chia (1996: 31) characterizes as “the reflexivity quagmire”. Due to an overseas trip I will not be able to make an entry for several weeks.

Kind regards

Carol

References

Bacchi, C. 2009. Analysing Policy: What’s the Problem Represented to be?Frenchs Forest: Pearson Education.

Bacchi, C. and Goodwin, S. 2016. Poststructural Policy Analysis: A Guide to Practice.NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Barry, A. 2001. Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society. NY: A & C Black.

Bletsas, A. 2010. Poverty in the “age of affluence”: A governmental approach.PhD Thesis, Politics Department, University of Adelaide.

Chia, R. 1996. The Problem of Reflexivity in Organizational Research: Towards a Postmodern Science of Organization. Organization  3(1): 31-59.

Foucault, M. 1980. Two lectures. In C. Gordon (Ed.)Michel Foucault power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977 by Michel Foucault. NY: Pantheon Books.

Foucault, M. 1984a. What is Enlightenment? In P. Rabinow (Ed.) The Foucault Reader. NY: Pantheon Books.  pp. 32-50.

Foucault, M. 1984b. Nietzsche, genealogy, history. In P. Rabinow (Ed.). The Foucault Reader. London: Penguin.

Foucault, M. 2003. Society must be defended. In M. Bertani & A. Fontana (Eds), Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76, Macey, D. (trans.). NY: Picador.

Haraway, D. 1988. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.  Feminist Studies14(3): 575-599.

Harding, S. 1993. Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: “What is Strong Objectivity?” in L. Alcoff and E. Potter (eds) Feminist epistemologies. NY: Routledge, pp. 49-82.

Law, J. 1994. Organizing Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell.

Law, J. 2009. The Greer-Bush Test: on Politics in STS, version of 23rd December 2009, available at http://www.heterogeneities.net/publications/Law2009TheGreer- BushTest. See also J. Law 2010. The Greer-Bush test: on politics in STS. In M. Akrich, Y. Barthe, F. Muniesa, and P. Mustar (eds.). Débordements: Mélanges offerts à Michel Callon. Paris: Ecole des Mines, pp. 296–281.

Vitelloni, N. 2018. Situating the syringe. International Journal of Drug Policy

COMMENT: I am prompted to prepare this entry because I am concerned that there may be some terminological and conceptual confusion around “situated knowledges” (Haraway 1988), “situated knowledge” (Vitelloni 2018) and “subjugated knowledges” (Foucault 1980), and would like to open up a conversation on the matter. I think the topic is important because of the need to find ways to put in question conventional theories about “knowledge production”. The topic is tied also to questions about the kinds of claims researchers wish to make in relation to qualitative material based on interviews and participant observation. This entry and the two following entries engage these questions.

To begin, I suggest that “situated knowledges”, as in Haraway (1988), and “subjugated knowledges”, as in Foucault (1980), are not interchangeable terms, though they are sometimes treated as such (Haraway 1988; St Pierre 2013: 648). I can understand why this occurs. The two terms sound similar and appear to do similar things, drawing attention to “minority” or “oppressed” “points of view”. However, when Foucault introduced the concept of “subjugated knowledges”, this goal was not one he shared.

Without oversimplifying Haraway’s (1988: 584) argument, her references to “situated knowledges” as “preferred” positions makes a claim that “vision is better from below” (583), that is, from groups positioned (or situated) as oppressed: “they seem to promise more adequate, sustained, objective, transforming accounts of the world”. While Haraway qualified this claim carefully, “situated knowledges”, as used here, makes an epistemological claim, a claim that some people are better positioned (situated) than others to produce “knowledge”.

Haraway uses the term “‘subjugated’ standpoints” to make the same claim, indicating a direct link to feminist standpoint theory. Sandra Harding (1993: 56) elaborates the argument:

Standpoint theories argue for “starting off thought” from the lives of marginalized peoples; beginning in those determinate, objective locations in any social order will generate illuminating critical questions that do not arise in thought that begins from dominant group lives.

She describes these marginalized “starting points” as “epistemologically advantaged” (Harding 1993: 56).

In Poststructural Policy Analysis: A Guide to Practice (Palgrave Macmillan 2016: 48), I, with Susan Goodwin, point out that, when Foucault introduced the concept of “subjugated knowledges”, he was making a political claim about knowledges, not an epistemological claim. His expressed concern was with the tactical usefulness rather than the content of “subjugated knowledges”. He clarified his specific concern in his elaboration of genealogy as a form of critique:

We are concerned, rather, with the insurrection of knowledges that are opposed primarily not to the contents, methods or concepts of a science, but to the effects of the centralising powers which are linked to the institution and functioning of an organised scientific discourse within a society such as ours … it is really against the effects of the power of a discourse that is considered to be scientific that the genealogy must wage its struggle (Foucault, 1980:84; emphasis added).

“Subjugated knowledges”, in Foucault, include forms of “erudite” knowledges and “disqualified” knowledges. “Erudite” knowledges consist of “blocks of historical knowledges that were present in the functional and systematic ensembles, but which were masked”. The role of critique is “to reveal their existence by using, obviously enough, the tools of scholarship”.

The second grouping of “subjugated knowledges” are those

that have been explicitly disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naive knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity (1980: 82).

His examples include the knowledges of the psychiatric patient, the ill person or the delinquent.

The analytic task is to bring all these knowledges to the fore, to contribute to an “insurrection of knowledges” in order to challenge “the centralising powers linked to the institution and functioning of an organised scientific discourse” (Foucault 1980: 84). To “emancipate” “subjugated knowledges” from “subjection” renders them  “capable of opposition and of struggle” and of being used “tactically” (Foucault 1980: 84).

How does this position differ from the meaning of “situated knowledges” as used by Haraway and many others (see above)? Put simply, Foucault is not claiming that any particular group has privileged access to “truth”; rather, he insists that truth claims are always political claims. In Foucault, the thing to examine in relation to “psychological knowledge”, for example, is its effects, not its truth. What needs to be questioned resides “in the political character of what it creates rather than in the epistemic character of its claims” (May 2006: 94-95).

At stake in this view is not an alternative epistemological position, but a contrasting ontology that is prior to epistemological principles. In opposition to an ontology of being, which asserts the primacy of “things” (such as “knowledge”), a poststructural ontology recognizes an ontology of becoming, “in which the processual becoming of things is given a fundamental role in the explanatory schema” (Chia 1996: 31). The central focus in the latter position becomes the study of “reality-constituting practices” – political practices – that shape how “knowledge” has come to be taken-for-granted as “truth”. “Knowledge” then is an effect of power relations rather than some “thing” to be pursued.

The implications for research are significant. St Pierre (2013) points out that much qualitative research (including the use of interviews and participant observation) relies on some sense of research subjects as the sources of foundational knowledge based on “experience” (see for example Vitelloni 2018 on “drug users [sic] situated experience”). This position bypasses relevant questions about subject formation and subjectification (see Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 49-51). By contrast, “subjugated knowledges” can be drawn upon as a challenge to established knowledge frameworks without reverting to epistemological claims.

WPR creates space to bring in “subjugated knowledges” under Question 4 on silences (see Bacchi WPR CHART). The term, however, needs to be used carefully to ensure that it is NOT mistaken to be a synonym for “situated knowledges”. There is no claim that these accounts offer access to “truth”; rather, there is insistence on the need

to entertain the claims to attention of local, discontinuous, disqualified, illegitimate knowledges against the claims of a unitary body of theory which would filter, hierarchise and order them in the name of some true knowledge and some arbitrary idea of what constitutes a science and its objects. (Foucault 1980: 83).

Attention is thus “redirected” from the justification of particular knowledge claims to “an examination of the workings of primary organizing micro-practices which generated stabilized effects such as ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’” (Chia 1996: 31).

The next entry further complicates this picture (sorry!).

References

Chia, R. 1996. The Problem of Reflexivity in Organizational Research: Towards a Postmodern Science of Organization. Organization  3(1): 31-59.

Foucault, M. 1980. Two lectures. In C. Gordon (Ed.) Michel Foucault power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977 by Michel Foucault. NY: Pantheon Books.

Haraway, D. 1988. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.  Feminist Studies14(3): 575-599.

Harding, S. 1993. Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: “What is Strong Objectivity?” in L. Alcoff and E. Potter (eds) Feminist epistemologies. NY: Routledge, pp. 49-82.

May, T. 2006. The Philosophy of Michel Foucault. Chesham: Acumen.

St. Pierre, E. 2013. The posts continue: becoming. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 26(6): 646-657.

Vitelloni, N. 2018. Situating the syringe. International Journal of Drug Policy.