ABSTRACT
This chapter is designed to encourage the reader to consider the ways in which Michel Foucault's thought can be applied within educational institutions such as the school, the college and the university. First, it uses examples, case studies and 'critical incidents' to explore and inquire into the way in which such processes might be seen to be at work in a variety of education settings. Second, the chapter will encourage readers to employ Foucault's thinking as a means of inquiring into the social, historical and cultural conditions that might have made these educational practices and ways of thought possible and in so doing to investigate their socialising and disciplinary effects. Along with other post-structural theorists of the twentieth century such as Deleuze, Derrida, Lyotard, Irigaray and others, Foucault is often seen as being responsible for the 'linguistic turn' that has come to characterise a great deal of contemporary philosophical thinking.
