ABSTRACT
The interplay of identification and recognition, and the ways that recognizability is both constrained within the education assemblage and struggled over inside schools is the central concern of this chapter. In the previous chapter I argued that the education assemblage imposes limits on what is knowable and known inside schools and demonstrated how these limits might be resisted and shifted as well as inadvertently reinscribed by educators taking up a politics of knowledge in a range of ways. In this chapter I engage with the subjects of schooling – the ways in which students and teachers are constituted as recognizable and legitimate subjects inside the education assemblage. As I have argued in the preceding chapters, the identifications and recognitions that are intrinsic to processes of subjectivation are made available both by the educational discourses that frame schooling and by those wider discourses that permeate the school, circulate inside it and are deployed and foreclosed through the practices of institutions, teachers and students. This understanding allows us to explore the multiplicity, contingency and malleability of students’ and teachers’ identifications and recognitions and show how struggles over subjectivities are a part of the politics of education. In engaging with the issue of student and teacher ‘identity’ in this way and by asserting the politics intrinsic to these I am engaging with those debates about identity politics that I explored in Chapter 2 and the theorizations of subjectivation and performative politics that I posited as a part of an anti-identity politics.
