ABSTRACT
It has been argued that any production of knowledge is actually a production of reality with very specific material consequences for the agents involved in that particular reality (Barad 2007; Hekman 2010; Law 2004; Mol 2002). When, for example, the ‘boys’ problem’, that is, boys finding it unmanly and feminising to study, is blamed on over-achieving girls and the female teachers who privilege girls’ learning styles in research (Nyström 2012), this will inevitably produce one of multiple realities that will have material consequences for the agents involved (Hekman 2010). In the context of the extensive scientific reporting in media on young Swedish school girls’ increasing psychological (ill)health, and of the increasing amount of preventive programmes and self-treatments being implemented in schools around Sweden to enhance the individual girl’s self-management of stress and psychological problems, it is only fair to ask how such knowledge production becomes part of a larger and extended apparatus (Barad 2007) of producing school girls’ (multiple) realities and their enactments of ill-or well-being in those realities. The question is, in what ways do reported scientific findings (based on various psychological, psychoanalytical and
*Corresponding author. Email: anna.palmer@buv.su.se
and Education, Vol. 25, No. 6, 671-687, https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2013.829909
i Anna Palmer
outh Studies, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
neuro-cognitive theories) become co-constitutive agents in the production of the phenomenon of school girls’ ill-or well-being together with other performative agents? Such agents are here understood to be entanglements of discourses, places, materialities and embodied practices in or connected to the school environment. All of these involve socio-historical aspects of gender, ethnicity, class, age, etc. in various situated ways. Although this study focusses primarily on the materiality of language (MacLure 2013) as the strongest agent in these intra-active entanglements, our analysis also shows how various other material agents, such as the school building and architecture, which we usually take to be the fixed material backdrop of human agency, are themselves strong co-constitutive agents of school-related ill-or wellbeing.
