The document discusses several theoretical tools for critiquing discourses around quality and social change, including post-structuralist ideas from Michel Foucault on how power operates through discourse to construct social realities. It also discusses standpoint theory and the idea that oppressed groups can develop critical insights by understanding how the world is structured from their situated perspectives. Finally, it discusses Boaventura de Sousa Santos' concept of an "sociology of absences" which examines how certain alternatives are actively produced as non-existent through dominant logics and rationalities.

1. Critical tools for interrogating the Quality Agenda Discourses, Standpoints, Absences, and Hegemonies

2. AIMS Offer some theoretical tools that we can use to critique. Not s directly theorising ‘quality’ per se, but more philosophical, looking at social change, ‘Social Thoery’. Need to work out what this would mean.. Creative work

3. Traces of the past Post-structuralism Michel Foucault Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966) Post-Structuralism what we think of as a social ‘structure’ e.g. poverty, is actively created, through discursive mechanisms, ‘Regimes of truth. Discourses Tracing past legacies – an ‘archaeology’ – to write a history of the present

4. ‘ Productive power’ Power operates not to limit what we do (power over someone), but operates to create certain worlds ( and not other) 'One must remember that power is not an ensemble of mechanisms of negation, refusal, exclusion. But it produces effectively. It is likely that it produces right down to individuals themselves.' Michel Foucault. (2004). 'Je suis un artificier'. In Roger-Pol Droit (ed.), Michel Foucault, entretiens. Paris: Odile Jacob, p. 113. (Interview conducted in 1975. This passage trans. Clare O'Farrell).

5. Standpoint Theory From..Standpoint feminism… Women’s truth.. Therefore experience based Situated knowledge Challenges universal truth…. Rather perspectives, multiple truthes. Knowledge from somewhere and FOR someone Emphasis on oppression, voices etc Essentialism leanings (e.g. only a women, a Maori, can understand/speak. Political)

6. Knowledge is socially situated – knowledge is based on experience, and different situations result in different knowledges. But more than this is at stake. Oppressed groups “can learn to identify their distinctive opportunities to turn an oppressive feature of the group’s conditions into a source of critical insight about how the dominant society thinks and is structured. Thus, standpoint theories map how a social and political disadvantage can be turned into an epistemological, scientific, and political advantage.” Harding, Sandra. 2004. “Introduction: Standpoint Theory as a Site of Political, Philosophic, and Scientific Debate” in The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual & Political Controversies , 2004, New York and London: Routledge, 1-15.

7. “ Oppositional postmodernism” Boaventura De Sousa Santos A Sociology of Absences ‘ consists of an inquiry that aims to explain that what does not exist is in fact actively produced as nonexistent, that is, as a noncredible alternative to what exists.’ (Santos, 2004 The World Social Forum: A Users Manual:14. Available Online at www.ces.uc.pt/bss/documentos/fsm_eng.pdf. ‘ I do not romanticise the local, the South, or the periphery. I do not romanticize, I take sides.’ (Santos, 1998: 138)

9. logics of hegemonic rationality The first derives from the monoculture of knowledge and rigor of knowledge (…) turning modern science and high culture onto the sole criteria of truth and aesthetic quality, respectively. The second logic resides in the monoculture of linear time, the idea that history has a unique and well-known meaning and directions. This meaning and direction have been well formulated in different ways in the last two hundred years, modernization, development and globalization. The third logic is the logic of social classification, based on the monoculture of naturalization of differences. It consists in distributing populations according to categories that naturalize hierarchies. (…) According to this, nonexistence is produced as a form of inferiority. The forth logic of production of non-existence is the logic of the dominant scale: the monoculture of the universal and the global: according this the scale that adopted as the primordial determines the irrelevance of all other possible scales. In western modernity, the dominant scale appears under two different forms: the universal and the global. The fifth logic of non existence is the logic of productivity. It resides in the monoculture of the criteria of capitalist productivity and efficiency, which privileges growth through market forces. (Santos, 2004: 15-17)

10. Constellating the tools Tools can be used together – they are not separately applied to a situation… SO.. We can look at the ways that Discourses have created absences, or use a standpoint to become aware of an absence

11. Global South Women Indigenous People Poor Rural Communities

12. Write an alternative Declaration of Education for xxxxxxx with a focus on your group Preamble Aims

13. Next Week Research an educational Project in your chosen case that study location that claims to offer quality.. Write a critique of this initiative or project.