A Foucauldian perspective on service-learning
Chapter 5 Methodology
5.8 Data analysis
Any system of education is a political way of maintaining or modifying the appropriation of discourses, along with the knowledge and power which they carry. … What, after all, is an education system other than a ritualisation of speech, a qualification and a fixing of roles for speaking subjects, the constitution of a doctrinal group, a distribution and appropriation of discourse with its powers and knowledges? (Foucault, 1981, p. 64)
The appropriation of a Foucauldian framework for this study implies taking up the rituals of this power/knowledge nexus, and the subject positions available therein for following the doctrine. A Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA) was therefore selected as the method for analysing the data. In true Foucauldian form, however, there is no straightforward recipe for what this entails. Graham (2011) commented “it is quite difficult to find coherent
descriptions of how one might go about ‘Foucauldian’ discourse analysis, but perhaps the difficulty in locating concise descriptions is because there is no such thing?” (p. 663). In her article, she described the multiple approaches to FDA as “different horses for different courses” (Graham, 2011, p. 663). Other authors have also commented on the multiplicity and tentativeness of approaches to FDA as consistent with a post-structuralist sensibility, which rests upon doubt and uncertainty in providing complex accounts (Ball, 1995; Humes &
Bryce, 2003). Given this sensibility, research results are also framed carefully, not to be interpreted as truth, as such a claim is regarded as a rhetorical practice (Edwards & Nicoll, 2001). Rather, they are understood as enabling a different relationship with the prevailing dominant discourses, in order to see how things may be otherwise.
Having foregrounded this disclaimer about the certainty of any method employed in this genre, the notion of discourse from a Foucauldian perspective is discussed below, together with the aims of the analytic approach. Following this, I explain the ‘horse’ I chose for this
‘course’, and how this version of FDA was operationalised in this study.
Foucault argued that discourses are “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak” (Foucault, 1972, p. 49) and thus that subject positions are constantly being constructed and reconstructed through discourses. Discourse is dynamic, it includes and excludes, brings certain issues to the fore or relegates them to the background and silences them, it renders some aspects more or less important, and enacts what is considered legitimate and worthy of attention. Discourse serves to construct subject positions which participants are able to take up or reject.
The purpose of FDA is not to draw solutions from the analysis, but rather to suggest alternative relationships to the regimes of truth employed in the discourse. Drawing on
Foucault’s approach, this kind of discourse analysis seeks “to dissect, disrupt and render the familiar strange” (Graham, 2005, p. 4). FDA attempts to discover what discourse allows people to do and be. Regimes of truth permit certain patterns of interaction and exclude others. FDA examines how power and resistance are initiated within and through these discourses.
The FDA in this study focused on the interactions between the participants in the critical reflection sessions (see Wetherell, 1998). The focus was on how power practices were manifested in the interactions between the participants, and what effects these practices had. Foucault emphasised a focus on the micro-physics of power, and on how the
techniques and strategies utilised by individual subjects are appropriated and colonised to produce macro-level discourses and systems of domination (Foucault, 1980d). Further, as power and resistance co-constitute each other, an analysis of power relations necessarily involves a study of resistance (Foucault, 1982). The analysis therefore not only examined the power effects of dominant perspectives, but also the instances of resistance to these power plays, where the participants refused to be defined by the prevailing apparatus.
The analysis focused on establishing “what characterises the discursive worlds participants inhabit” and the implications of these “for possible ways of being” (Willig, 2008, p. 82).
Parker (1992) emphasised that discourses make possible different and particular types of self; he wrote, “the discourse is hailing us, shouting ‘hey, you there’ and making us listen as a certain type of person” (Parker, 1992, p. 9). In Foucauldian terms, what forms of
subjectivity did the discourse afford, and how did participants take up or reject these constructions of their selves?
To try to address this question, Thomson (2011, p. 1) suggested asking the following of the data:
• What is being represented here as a truth or as a norm?
• How is this constructed? What ‘evidence’ is used? What is left out? What is
foregrounded and backgrounded? What is made problematic and what is not? What
alternative meanings/explanations are ignored? What is kept apart and what is joined together?
• What interests are being mobilised and served by this and what are not?
• How has this come to be?
• What identities, actions, practices are made possible and/or desirable and/or required by this way of thinking/talking/understanding? What are disallowed? What is
normalised and what is pathologised?
Willig (2008) also attempted to provide guidance for FDA by suggesting the following steps (adapted below):
1. Identification of the discursive constructions – where the researcher identifies the implicit and explicit references to the discursive object.
2. Identification of discourses – where the researcher attempts to identify the wider discourses wherein the discursive constructions are located.
3. Identification of the functions of discourses (action orientation) – whereby the
researcher focuses on what the construction achieves within the text, asking “[w]hat is gained from constructing the object in this particular way at this particular point within the text?” (Willig, 2008, p. 116).
4. Identification of subject positionings. Drawing on the work of Davies and Harré (1999), Willig highlighted that “discourses construct subjects as well as objects and, as a result, make available positions within networks of meaning that speakers can take up (as well as place others within)” (Willig, 2008, p. 116). Thus, the researcher should focus on how the discourses serve to position the subjects in and of the discourse.
5. Identification of opportunities for action (practice) – requires the researcher to explore the way in which the discourses, and the positions of the subjects within those
discourses, permit or forbid them to engage in certain practices.
6. Identification of subjectivities – whereby the researcher explores the ways of being and seeing that are afforded by these discourses and positionings.
These steps are not necessarily linear or sequential, but rather iterative as they serve to construct the meanings being made of the data, at each stage. The analysis feeds into the
analysis, creating expanding spirals of construction and co-construction, always within a discursive context. The research report is itself a discursive construction, and the gaze of the researcher is a form of interpretation, in that it selects certain aspects as worthy of enquiry and marginalises others.
Given the dynamic nature of discourses, and speakers’ and researcher’s roles in their construction and co-construction, I found it necessary to move towards a pragmatic approach where I considered three levels of analysis; these are described below.
5.8.1 Levels of analysis
In her guide to approaching FDA, Graham (2011) advised looking for ‘statements’ which perform the function of formulating an object (she named this - identification). This is followed by understanding how the objects (constructed by the statements) have come to be recognisable as they are, that, is, “trace the processes involved in their constitution”
(Graham, 2011, p. 670). This was named recognition. The last phase is to trace back to the knowledge/power field that makes the statement intelligible and meaningful (classification).
The first level of analysis, in the current research, was concerned with the subjects that were constructed in the text. For this study, the subjects were the objects of interest. The overarching subject was the service-learning student, and the analysis focussed on the ways in which this subject was constructed and positioned through the discourse. (Graham’s (2011) phases of identification and recognition).
The second level of analysis focussed on how wider discourses were deployed to construct certain subjects and the consequences of this deployment. This second level of analysis located the constructions of the students within broader discourses, and explored the consequences for subjectivity. (Graham’s (2011) phase of classification).
The third level of analysis analysed the strategies and tactics that were employed in the discourses to effect these positions and subjectivities. To this end Wetherell (1998) and Baxter’s ideas were utilised for the analysis.
Wetherell (1998, p. 395) argued that:
[P]ost-structuralist theorists, with their more global view, rarely have their noses pressed up against the exigencies of talk-in-interaction. Rarely, are they called on to explain how their perspective might apply to what is happening right now, on the ground, in this very conversation.
She proposed that in order to better understand positionings and how they are brought about in talk and text, we should examine the variability in the accounts presented. She argued for exploring the inconsistent and contradictory versions that were presented in the text and to ask, “why this utterance here?” (p. 402). She advised identifying the
“interpretive repertoires” (p. 400) that were utilised by the speakers, in other words the speakers’ means of making sense in conversations, “the common sense which organises accountability and serves as a back-cloth for the realisation of locally managed positions in actual interaction” (p. 400). Interpretive repertoires are useful devices in conversation, as they ensure that one phrase (e.g. disadvantaged community) “evokes for listeners the relevant context of argumentation-premises, claims and counter-claims” (p. 401). She therefore argued for an approach that enabled consideration of the contexts (both micro and macro, immediate and historical) of conversation, alongside the repertoires and positioning made available in the talk.
Baxter (2002) took up Wetherell’s (1998) call for a more inclusive approach and proposed post-structural discourse analysis (PDA). Her approach took cognisance of how shifting power relations between and within speakers are negotiated through competing discourses and result in contradictory subjectivities. She furthered argued that the contexts of talk are negotiated through discourse (constituted in the talk) and not outside of it, and that shifting positions with different power effects are made available in this process.
She provided an exemplar of PDA where she conducted both a “denotative microanalysis”
of transcribed text and then a “connotative macro-analysis” which drew on more contextual data (Baxter, 2002, p. 833). She concluded that:
PDA provides new possibilities not only for understanding how language constructs subject identities and for learning how speech is produced, negotiated and contested within specific social contexts, but also for making
sense of the relative powerlessness or ‘disadvantage’ experienced by silenced or minority groups. (Baxter, 2002, p. 839)
The third level of analysis therefore focused on talk in interaction and its effects on available subject positions, and the possibilities of resisting these.
5.8.2 The mechanics of the data analysis process
In practice data analysis consisted of watching and listening to the recordings of the sessions, whilst re-reading and checking the transcripts. Following this I applied Willig’s (2008) six step processes by coding the data in terms of how the object (the service-learner) was being constructed in the text, and the implications of these constructions for
subjectivity, positioning and practice. The broader discourses within which this talk was happening were also identified. This six step process was followed for each session, and written up as a narrative for each session. Whilst processing the data in this manner, I also noted interesting/awkward moments in the interactions, for further analysis.
Having identified the various constructions of the service-learner I then organised these thematically, with two iterations of these themes being produced, before using a more poststructuralist lens which involved closer scrutiny of the subjectivities and the binaries apparent in the data. The contradictions in the data were examined to establish the subject positions available to the participants in the process.
The final level of analysis then involved returning to those awkward or interesting moments that I had previously noted and analysing these in terms of determining what act the
speakers were performing, what interpretive repertoires they were drawing on to what effect, and what the implications of these actions were for the interaction.
This analysis resulted in the development of three results chapters. The first results chapter provides the details of the kinds of subjects that were constructed in the service-learning process, and the contradictory subjectivities they afforded. The second results chapter then describes the two main discourses within which the subjects were constructed, and how they were deployed. It provides a collage of evidence for each discourse and then focusses
on the struggle between these discourses in this context. The final results chapter then looks at the strategies and tactics that were employed in the interactions between the participants in the process, and with what effect. Through these three chapters the research questions were explored and addressed.