ABSTRACT

Discourses are powerful and some are more powerful than others. States and governments are powerful. Through political and policy-making processes, they attempt to inscribe certain practices with particular kinds of meanings and position actors as having particular roles and dispositions, thereby shaping the institutional climate within which people work and live. Institutions, such as churches/mosques and universities, through their practices traditionally authorized certain discourses, thus making them more powerful than others. In exploring the discourses of lifelong learning, there is therefore a need to explore the ways in which certain of them have become more powerful than others and how these are intertwined with wider practices in the social order. This also involves examining the exercises of power within which they are entangled.