Discourse: Education, Theory of Politics, and Politics of Theory

Abstract

In this paper, I revisit and reflect on my own and my research partners’ attempts at investigating the relationship between education and politics through the lens of discourse theory and discourse analysis methodology. This auto-analytical reflection corresponds to the shift in discourse studies from a technically understood discourse analysis to a more generally conceived discourse-analytical approach (Howarth & Torfing, 2005). Revisiting my own analyses made me understand better not only the specificity of the ways of conducting discourse studies in which I have been involved but also some lessobvious ontological assumptions and methodological problems of discourse studies. One such issue is that as long as discourse analysis is powerful in how it shows power relations, and thus politics within non-political phenomena like education, its application to political theory may reveal how its desire for construing social totalities grounds it in the pedagogical.