I am a doctoral student in Curriculuma nd Instruction. I am interested in the manner in which cultural, political, and historical factors shape experience and constitute subjectivity and the interworkings of the power-knowledge-subject triad. I am planning to develop a dissertation that critically analyzes the emergence of educational psychology over the course of the 20th century. I will examine how ed psych has operated as a normalizing technology. I will also explore how psychology's status as a "hard" science has influenced the historical construction of the present form of schooling. Would anyone be able to suggest influential departments and/or particular scholars in the history and theory of psychology that I might discuss these issues with? Thanks

-- matt curtis (easyridermdc@yahoo.com), July 23, 2002

Answers

Well it sounds like you're already using a lot of the terminology pioneered by Michel Foucault, so you should definitely read him if you haven't already. Madness & Civilization, Birth of the Clinic, Discipline & Punish, Power/Knowledge, and perhaps the first volume of the History of Sexuality would be of particular interest to you. Some of this sort of analysis has been applied to psychology by Nikolas Rose in the UK and, somewhat less stridently, by Ian Hacking here in Canada. Good secondary sources on Foucault include Dreyfus & Rabinow's book __Michel Foucault_, and Gary Gutting's _Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Scientific Reason_ and the _Cambridge Companion to Foucault_. You might also check out David C. Hoy's _Foucault: A Critical Reader_. Finally, you might find it a little easier to avoid some of the common pitfalls of doing Foucauldian analysis by having a look at a paper I wrote called "Digging archaeology: Sources of Foucault's historiography." You can find it on-line at: http://www.yorku.ca/christo/papers/digarch3.htm.

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), July 23, 2002.