Adriana S. Benzaquén

Bio: Adriana S. Benzaquén is an academic researcher from Mount Saint Vincent University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Human science & History of childhood. The author has an hindex of 4, co-authored 8 publications receiving 431 citations.

An Illusory Interiority: Interrogating the discourse/s of inclusion

Abstract: It is generally accepted that the notion of inclusion derived or evolved from the practices of mainstreaming or integrating students with disabilities into regular schools. Halting the practice of segregating children with disabilities was a progressive social movement. The value of this achievement is not in dispute. However, our charter as scholars and cultural vigilantes (Slee & Allan, 2001) is to always look for how we can improve things; to avoid stasis and complacency we must continue to ask, how can we do it better? Thus, we must ask ourselves uncomfortable questions and develop a critical perspective that Foucault characterised as an ‘ethic of discomfort’ (Rabinow & Rose, 2003, p. xxvi) by following the Nietzschean principle where one acts ‘counter to our time and thereby on our time ... for the benefit of a time to come’ (Nietzsche, 1874, p. 60 in Rabinow & Rose, 2003, p. xxvi). This paper begins with a fundamental question for those participating in inclusive education research and scholarship—when we talk of including, into what do we seek to include?

The Product of Text and 'Other' Statements: discourse analysis and the critical use of Foucault

Abstract: Much has been written on Michel Foucault's reluctance to clearly delineate a research method, particularly with respect to genealogy (Harwood, 2000; Meadmore, Hatcher & McWilliam, 2000; Tamboukou, 1999). Foucault (1994, p. 288) himself disliked prescription stating, ‘I take care not to dictate how things should be’ and wrote provocatively to disrupt equilibrium and certainty, so that ‘all those who speak for others or to others’ no longer know what to do. It is doubtful, however, that Foucault ever intended for researchers to be stricken by that malaise to the point of being unwilling to make an intellectual commitment to methodological possibilities. Taking criticism of ‘Foucauldian’ discourse analysis as a convenient point of departure to discuss the objectives of poststructural analyses of language, this paper develops what might be called a discursive analytic; a methodological plan to approach the analysis of discourses through the location of statements that function with constitutive effects.

‘Securitization’ revisited: theory and cases:

Abstract: Securitization theory seeks to explain the politics through which (1) the security character of public problems is established, (2) the social commitments resulting from the collective acceptance t...

On affective labor in post-fordist italy

Abstract: This article explores the role that compassion plays in the building of a post-Fordist laboring public in Italy. By exploring how the state has made compassion productive through new regimes of voluntary labor, this piece shows that compassion operates not as a mitigating force against, but as a vehicle for the production and maintenance of a new exclusionary order precisely because it allows for the emergence of a fantasy of spontaneously available public emotion. Affective labor is a desired form of activity for marginalized members of Italian society because it allows them to approximate the form of social belonging that was centrally institutionalized and cultivated within Fordist societies—that of the capacity to belong to and be publicly recognized by the world through waged work. Fordism thus appears not as an era past, but as an object of desire and mourning that still retains much social force as people attempt to recapture or at least approximate Fordist forms and feelings of stability and belonging.

Agroecology as a territory in dispute: between institutionality and social movements

Abstract: Agroecology is in fashion, and now constitutes a territory in dispute between social movements and institutionality. This new conjuncture offers a constellation of opportunities that social movemen...