ABSTRACT
For the moment at least, I am interested here in examining how cooperative models of school governance, be they trust, academy or free school, mobilize the trope of ‘voice’ as a signifier of democratic subjectivity. As will become clear throughout the following chapters, the notion of ‘having a voice’ is understood, within a co-operative school context, as an effect of (re)structuring particular relations of power and reversing dominant hierarchies. In this chapter, I examine the governance structures of a co-operative ‘free school’ as one of many contexts from within which discourses of ‘democratic participation’ are (re)articulated at the intersections of ‘co-operation’ and the traditional institution of ‘the school’. For, as Michel Foucault (1989, p. 55) points out, in order to examine the formation of enunciative modalities which shape ‘what can be said, by whom, where and when?’, one must first discover the rules that link particular statements to discourses and consider ‘the place from which they come’. Carla Willig (2008) further underscores the merits of adopting an analytic framework inspired by Foucault’s ideas in that:
a Foucauldian version of discourse analysis also pays attention to the relationship between discourses and institutions . . . discourses are not conceptualized simply as ways of speaking or writing.
