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UBC Theses and Dissertations

Otherworlds : teachers' experiences of power vis à vis accountability policies in South Carolina Adkins Cartee, Mary Rebecca

Abstract

This study focuses on a single school district as a site of concept-building in relation to teachers’ subjective experiences of power vis à vis a neoliberal policy regime. The assemblage of teachers’ subjectivities takes place in the context of the Southeastern United States, in a policy environment highly influenced by neoliberal ideology. The study focuses on the South Carolina School Report Card Policy (part of No Child Left Behind) as an instantiation of neoliberal education policy and draws on a Foucauldian and Deleuzian framework for understanding how power produces teachers’ subjectivities with and through policy. The researcher orients this work as a fieldwork in philosophy in order to think about power with teachers in the situated contexts of their lives in a unique school district; this study therefore generalizes to theory rather than to people or location. The research concludes that power a/effected teachers’ subjectivities through disciplinary technologies and the creation and maintenance of affective channels, having bodily and material impacts on teachers, and causing them to find ‘the other’ of students’ bodies, which have been raced, classed, and gendered, in themselves.

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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada