ABSTRACT
The work by Comber described above shows the way in which particular categories of students are constituted through discourses and the interaction of those and other discourses to prescribe and constrain students’ educational futures. That is, it shows how people are constituted as particular kinds of subjects through discourse, and how populations are categorized and controlled or governed. There are a number of other works that examine the role of education in this intersection of subjectivity and governmentality that provide useful models for the application of critical discourse analysis in comparative education. Interested readers may wish to read the works by Tait (1993) on the construction of the categories of ‘child’ and ‘adolescent,’ Jones (1990) on the ‘good teacher,’ McCallum (1993) on the ‘problem child,’ Troyna and Vincent (1995) on ‘social justice,’ Tyler (1993) and Baker (1998) on ‘childhood,’ Fendler (1998) on the ‘educated subject,’ and Wagener (1998) on ‘the body.’ In order to illustrate this kind of work, I review Tait’s (1995) work on the processes and effects of the construction of the category of ‘at-risk youth.’
