This article analyses the relations that teachers and school leaders establish with themselves and with others—especially those who would seek to govern them—through the professional and personal–professional activities that increasingly accompany pedagogical and administrative practice today. Specifically, the article seeks to analyse the conditions under which such ‘ethical-governmental’ relations have become possible and to clarify the lines of power, truth and ethics that are in play within them. In this way, it is argued, their intelligibility may be recovered; their contingencies (...) disclosed. The article first posits a non-psychologised, ‘enfolded’ notion of the self on which analysis rests before turning to an analytics of government of the conditions themselves. An important element within this entanglement of diverse events, discourses, practices and foldings is the ensemble of policies and practices developed by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership. The article argues that the programmes of this national agency are a salient and widespread force for acting upon teachers’ and school leaders’ self-constitution as a subject of their own actions—a subject which, in consequence, is enjoined to be more agile, self-reliant, engaged and entrepreneurial than its ‘routine-bound’ predecessors; a subject we describe as the ‘adaptive professional’. (shrink)

This article analyses ‘performance government’ as an emergent form of rule in advanced liberal democracies. It discloses how teachers and school leaders in Australia are being governed by the practices of performance government which centre on the recently established Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) and are given direction by two major strategies implicit within the exercise of this form of power: activation and regulation. Through an ‘analytics of government’ of these practices, the article unravels the new configurations (...) of corporatized expert and academic knowledge—and their attendant methods of application—by which the self-governing capacities of teachers and school leaders are being activated and regulated in ways that seek to optimize the performance of these professionals. The article concludes by outlining some of the dangers of performance government for the professional freedom of educators and school leaders. (shrink)

We analyse the electronic portfolio in higher education policy and practice.While evangelical accounts of the ePortfolio celebrate its power as a new eLearning technology,we argue that it allows the mutually-reinforcing couple of neoliberalism and the enterprising self to function in ways in which individual difference can be presented, cultured and grown, all the time within a standardised framework which relentlessly polices the limits of the acceptable and unacceptable. We point to the ePortfolio as a practice of government, arguing that grander (...) policy coalesces out of a halting, experimental set of technological instruments for thinking about how life should be lived. (shrink)

Numbers of European hamsters in the Dutch Province of Limburg have been subject to much scrutiny and controversy. In the late nineteenth century, policymakers who considered them too numerous set up eradication programs. In the second half of the twentieth century, even when its domestic relative increasingly circulated as a pet in urban spaces, the numbers of European hamsters in the rural areas collapsed. Large-scale preservation campaigns and reintroduction programs ensued. According to some media, all this has turned the European (...) hamster into the most expensive undomesticated animal of the Netherlands. A whole network of institutions became involved to save the species – ranging from local activist organizations, over zoos and universities, to federal ministries and international organizations. The interactions between the Dutch and ‘their’ hamsters, this article argues, were inscribed in various forms of biopolitics. The article highlights the changing discursive framings and spatial practices that have shaped the management of Cricetus cricetus over time and calls attention to the diversity of living and non-living agents that produced the multispecies choreographies of the present-day Limburg landscape. Finally, it alerts us to the kinds of agency that reside in the numbers of non-human animals. (shrink)

Gay men have been severely affected by the AIDS crisis, and gay subjectivity, sexual ethics, and politics continue to be deeply influenced by HIV to this day. PrEP (Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis) is a new, drug-based HIV prevention technique, that allows disentangling gay sex from its widespread, 40 yearlong association with illness and death. This article explores PrEP's fundamental impact on gay subjectivity, sexual ethics, and politics. It traces the genealogy of gay politics regarding homophobia and HIV stigma, suggesting a new biopolitical (...) and body political framework that accounts for the agency of activists as well as pharmapower, and proposing that PrEP is an example of democratic biopolitics. Highlighting the entanglement of medical technology, sexual ethics, and politics, the article shows how conservative and homonormative gay politics developed as a reaction to HIV stigma and how, by overcoming this stigma, PrEP enables a new era of intersectional queer politics and solidarities. It thereby develops a Foucauldian account of sexual liberation beyond the repression hypothesis that accounts for the ambivalence of sexual subjectification and the political potential of sexuality. (shrink)