Browsing by Subject "hallinta"

In my research, I examine special education as a discursive practice in the Foucauldian sense, in which ideas about disturbance are almost exclusively produced as individual characteristics. The discursive perspective also challenges the position of scientific knowledge and concretizes the power and control contained within it. My study is situated in special education context where the education system has assumed a significant role in constructing the normal individual. Therefore, the examination of disturbance is closely related to questions of exceptionalism. In my research, I investigate how disturbance is conceptualized in Helsinki university course materials. Additionally, I reflect on the positioning that materials offer to individuals, mainly in expert positions, who consume them. My data consists of two course books used in special education training, which I approach and deconstruct discursively. In my research, discourses appear as information systems that, instead of merely describing, act as significant building blocks in our thinking and actions. Thus, course materials are kind of a window into the ways in which disturbance and specialness are structured within the education system and more broadly in society. The results of my research show that disturbance is primarily presented as individual deficiencies, which reinforces my preconception that disturbances are personal faults or defect. Consequently, various skills and self-management strategies are offered as solutions to disturbance, which enable one to overcome it. The results also challenged individualistic views. The disorder was presented as a product of Western culture, where certain behavioral patterns are intentionally excluded from appropriate and correct behavior. The course material also placed the adult i.e. the teacher, in a position where they are seen as an actor outside the disorder, who is able to know and report how, when, and why the disorder develops.

In this thesis, I look at the subjectification of students of higher education in writings about students' mental health and wellbeing. My research is situated in feminist poststructuralist studies and aims to shift the focus of the discussion on students' mental health from the individual towards a more societal perspective. Informed by post-methodological theories of inquiry, my approach to both data and writing can be characterised as drifting. The data of the research consists of the "Stories" section of the website of Nyyti ry, a non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting student mental health and wellbeing. The section contains stories that students have written of their everyday life. This data is enhanced by autoethnographic elements since also I am a university student to whom matters of mental health and wellbeing come close to home. Neoliberal higher education and the psy-complex serve as the context of my research. Together, they shape the circumstances and provide the discourses that students draw from in order to grasp the possibilities and limits of their lives. I ask how the ideal student subject is constituted in the stories, how the psy-discourse functions together with neoliberalism, and how the students make use of the psy-discourse. I have read the data discursively with the concepts of power and subject, inspired by a Foucauldian power analytical approach and studies on governmentality. In the research, I have used the concepts of subjectification and subjectivity to inquire upon how the students make sense of the problems and solutions related to studying and how they make themselves comprehensible within and with the help of the psy-discourse. I looked at self-help as a form of neoliberal and psychological governance that guides subjects to work on themselves. In the stories of the students, I read the (re)production and questioning of the active and entrepreneurial employee citizen. The students did not accept the neoliberal ideal as a given. Some recognised the role of the society as the producer of these pressures and questioned performance-centric ideals. The ideal subject was challenged with tools provided by the psy-discourse and in this way the discourse was made to serve the needs and ends of the students themselves. However, the solutions mostly remained on an individual level. I conclude my thesis by asking how we could (re)build the study environment into one that would provide means for people with varying dis/abilities and needs to get by and even flourish. I suggest that this requires the critical questioning of our ideals as well as a reorganisation of societal and institutional circumstances.

My aim in this study is to outline what kind of circumstances urban policy as a new form of societal governance provides for political agency of citizens. I am looking at the nature of this governance and the way it works between citizens and the city organization in projects seeking to promote the involvement and influence of citizens. I am especially interested in how these goals are promoted on behalf of the city organization, how citizens are addressed, what kind of agency seems to be called for, and what kind of tensions may arise during this process. I formulated my research material from project documents produced in the Pilot Experiment for Local Democracy in the city of Helsinki. Some of my own observation notes from various events connected to the pilot experiment were also added to the material. I approached some of my research material in relation to the strategic program of the city of Helsinki to delineate the most common strategies of the city concerning citizen participation. I analyzed my material by applying a Foucault-oriented discursive approach and theoretications of new governance and political agency. In light of my analysis, I conclude that seeking to promote citizens' possibilities for local participation and to influence the city organization simultaneously ends up defining and limiting the terms and preconditions for such actions in many ways. It seems that project work as a form of governance is significant considering how the contents and goals of citizen participation and citizens' agency itself is to be formed. According to my analysis, projectified governance works firstly by feigning invisibility, i.e. guiding the attention from actual ambitions and goals to the form of actions to "the right way" of governing those actions. Secondly, it works by sharing more and more power and responsibility among different agents, simultaneously limiting the possibilities of this agency. This kind of governmentality can be seen to set its sights on being efficiently internalized through the ideal of active citizenship and consensual collaboration between the city organization and citizens into so-called participatory local democracy and citizen agency. On the other hand it may also enable new possibilities for describing the genuine political agency of the citizens in urban policy. In order for these possibilities to open up, I consider it crucial to bring forth continuous critical conversation and to question what it is that is actually being pursued by projects seeking to promote citizen participation, what it is that is actually done, and what kind of consequences these questions have from the perspective of political agency.

According to the analysis of governmentality, power in contemporary societies is not exercised through control and force as much as through softer and more persuasive techniques of governance. In governmentality, the attempt is to affect individuals' inner worlds – their wills, attitudes, and self-perceptions – in order to achieve certain political ends. The curriculum is analysed from the viewpoint of governing subjectivity. It is perceived to produce ideal subjectivity, ie. to conduct individuals to pursue a certain ideal of a good human being. The aim of this thesis is to analyse, what kind of ideal subjectivity does the curriculum produce and what kind of techniques of the self are promoted as means of attaining this ideal. This thesis draws from Michel Foucault's theorizations about subjectivity and subjectivation. Subjectivity is not seen as essentially existing, but as something that is constructed and shaped in practices that are entwined with knowledge and power. The curriculum represents the official discourse of the school and thus produces authoritative knowledge about what is good subjectivity and how it may be pursued. The curriculum is a normative document which affects all teaching in the school. Thus, it is important to analyse what kind of ideals the curriculum produces. Previous studies have analysed subjectivation within for example the discourses of lifelong learning and entrepreneurship education. However, the Finnish curriculum has not, as far as is known, been analysed from the Foucauldian viewpoint of subjectivation. The general parts of the Finnish national core curriculum for basic education served as data for the analysis. More specifically, the chapters that were analysed were those about the values and general goals for basic education (chapters 2 and 3). The analysis was executed through careful reading, utilizing methods of rhetoric discourse analysis. The ideal subjectivity was found to be constructed through the truth-discourse of the curriculum. The ideal subjectivity was composed most importantly of mastering various techniques of the self, bearing responsibility and internalizing the ideal of total learning. Future working life, ecological sustainability and culture and values formed the central areas in which subjects are expected to govern themselves in certain ways.

In this MA dissertation I’m going to examine the discursive formation of social exclusion from the specific aspect of social governance. Social exclusion has been a main concern in welfare policy in Finland and Europe in recent decades. The social construction of exclusion is reconstructed in daily practices in politics, media and everyday speech. Despite the numerous areas of discussion there is a great consensus in public opinion regarding who the socially excluded are and why it is especially important to form resistance to their exclusion. Discourses regarding the uncontrollability of social exclusion have managed to divert the focus away from exclusion, which hides the modes social exclusion is operating in as an instrument of social governance. The aim of this dissertation is to critically examine the discursive formation of social exclusion, and to show how the concept is connected to social governance. For research methodology I have used genealogy and critical reading of governance, as well as the idea of discursive formation of truth systems. This dissertation mainly uses analysis based on literature, but also utilises the extracts of policy documents to support its arguments. In this research I have separated the governance of social exclusion into four sections. I review each theme in their own chapters, where I discuss how the theme is formed and how it became a part of the discursive formation of social exclusion. The first theme discusses how social exclusion is a way of moral and normative governance, while the second area explores the dimension of financial-rational governance. The third section considers social exclusion as a reflection of changing citizenship, as well as ideologically degrading the welfare state. The fourth theme discusses management of mental states as a form of exclusion governance, and where interventionist projects have a primary role. Critical examination of social exclusion is important as discursive formation and knowledge systems are used in many ways to legitimize displacing practices and unequal policies. By critically examining the certainty of social exclusion we can become aware of how positions of the socially excluded are formed through variated discourses legitimizing truth systems. The conclusion of my paper suggests that political discussion needs new openings and contemporary perspectives to question the prevailing way of rationalization.

In my master's thesis, I examine entrepreneurship education in the context of neoliberal governmentality. I approach this phenomenon with analytics of power and governmentality developed by Foucault. My goal is to look at what kind of discursive reality is constructed in the entrepreneurship education guides for teachers, what kind of subjectivity is produced in them for students, and how governmentality appears in these, produced subjectivity. Since entrepreneurship education is seen in many studies as part of neoliberal change in education policy, I think it is appropriate to approach the topic through theory of neoliberal government as well. I selected five entrepreneurship education guides for teachers as my research material, one produced by Suomen Yrittäjät, three produced by the YES Network and one produced by the Ministry of Education and Culture. In terms of the nature and topics of my research, I chose critical discourse analysis as my research method, where it felt like a natural choice when I studied the power in discourses and governmentality that they produce. In my research material I searched discourses that were in a hegemonic position and that occur as natural truths. When I had found them, I focused my research in what kind of dominance were inside discourses and what kind of subject positions they constructed for students. I found three dominant discourses, individual, responsibility, and entrepreneurial discourses. The discourses constructed a reality in which students had to be individual and responsible, however, in such a way that individuality and responsibility appeared only as a certain kind of trait that served working life. Entrepreneurship turned out to be a requirement for the whole individual to be certain, both in terms of personality and action. The discourses built an entrepreneurial subjectivity in which students had to be rational, flexible, and moral, allowing them to automatically act correctly toward the market. The reality built by the discourses made these demands appear to the students as their best, in which case they want to implement them, that is, to control themselves. The subjectivity constructed in the entrepreneurship education guides appeared strongly to the neoliberal ideal individual, so entrepreneurship education could be seen as neoliberal governmentality.