ABSTRACT
Michel Foucault (1927-1984), the celebrated French intellectual, never had any children of his own. Nor has he usually been identified as a theorist or researcher of children and childhood, since these topics were apparently never much in his horizon of concern. Even so, this absence has not denied him a place in the emerging interdisciplinary field sometimes characterized as social studies of children and childhood. James et al.’s influential Theorising Childhood (1998, esp. ch. 3) contains numerous references to Foucault, while more recent texts such as Prout’s The Future of Childhood (2004), Jenks’s Childhood (2005; see also Jones, 2006) and Wyness’s Childhood and Society (2006) all display a loosely Foucauldian concern for constructions of knowledge – the varying and contested ‘regimes of truth’ – framing how children become inserted into contextually shifting ‘social spaces of childhood’ striated by socio-structural and political-economic lines of power (and see also McNamee, 2000). In a more restricted register, insights from Foucault’s best-known monograph, Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1976), have featured in research on children, schools and education, with papers such as those by Cannella (1999) and Covaleskie (1993) setting an agenda some years ago that, in effect, dragged Foucault into the classroom. Mac Naughton’s text Doing Foucault in Early Childhood Studies (2005) fuses the broader epistemological borrowings from Foucault evident in the likes of James et al. (1998) with claims about researching the micro-level dynamics of early-educational practice, at home as well as in school, while a study by Germeten (2000) is just one among many using Foucault to interrogate how time and space – both physical and ‘pedagogical space’ – are mobilized in the disciplining of school children. For all that, my sense is that these borrowings from Foucault remain relatively limited, relying heavily on relatively few passages from only a few of his writings, namely Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1976) and, to a lesser extent, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (Foucault, 1979a).
