I recently met with my supervisor about my ongoing doctoral studies. I am going to reflect on that meeting here.
One of the challenges that I have faced in my research work thus far has been deciding what kind of lens I am going to view my work through. Of course, as in everything else in academia, it is not simply a matter of selecting one frame and sticking with it – at any one point, there are many different ways of looking at my work. However, the frame that I do select will have important repercussions on the way that I interpret the data. For example, let’s consider the issue of power. One of the key principles of my research is the idea of ’empowerment of young people’. In its most basic sense, empowerment is linked to power – that is, young people having the power to make meaningful changes in their own lives, a sense of managing themselves and their environment
However, the understanding that one has of power naturally affects how one might explore the empowerment of young people. For example, if one adopts the critical theory school approach to power, in which power resides in the dominant social groups and state apparatuses (oppressive and coercive power, respectively) and is used to repress the other social groups, then one must adopt a strategy of resistance or revolution in order to empower young people.
However, if one takes a Foucauldian approach to power, in which power exists as it is exercised by various groups, and it’s use can be both liberatory and oppressive, to the same group, at the same time, and the ideas of class structures are viewed as simplistic, then power – and empowering – becomes a much more challenging process. This challenge was described accurately by Brookfield, who suggested that even adult education practices which pride themselves on liberatory pedagogy can often be sites of hidden flows of power, and constestations between groups. Upon what basis, then, is my work based upon?
We also discussed the following points:
- What makes JC different?
- Is it simply a different means to achieve the same end? Perhaps slightly more effective, but no more.
- Disruption of moral certainty? Is this important? Unsure about what they had done before? Is this an awakening of critical consciousness?
- Is it more productive to question what is happening to the moral certainty
- Difference between modernism (moral certainty) and postmodernism
- Where does Foucault fit in with this?
- Facilitating the development of problematising the situation. Is this what I’ve done? Identifying the dominant/ orthodox views?
- Have young people build social capital amongst communities?
- In what ways has the JC project, in its entirety, helped to build social capital?
- What does this social capital look like? How do we know? How do we measure this increased social capital?