ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we will specifically direct attention at how adult education (as education in general) becomes a site for the normalisation of students, aiming at adapting individuals into what is deemed desirable in terms of how a citizen should be and act. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of heterotopia of deviation, we analyse interviews with students and teaches in MAE, asking the following questions: what kinds of student subjectivities emerge through the way teachers speak about students, how students speak about themselves and their studies and through current policy texts on adult education? Our analysis illustrates how MAE teachers as well as students pick up and mobilise policy discourses of adult education and position students enrolled as subjects of deviance in need of modification. Students are either positioned as failures in terms of lacking proper education because of a failure to finish upper secondary school or because of failure in the labour market. Through such statements, adult education stands out as a heterotopia of deviance, a place of citizen formation where citizens are moulded and corrected into becoming what is considered desirable. The question, however, is how such heterotopia, a place in time and space offering students to reshape themselves in line with their desires and dreams, at the end provides possibilities to emerge as a new and improved subjectivity, one who gain employment and can support her or himself.
