A Fair (Af)fair? On Subjectivation and Differentiation in Educational Capitalism

Abstract

In our time the school is organized with the market as a model and schools are operating on the basis of a marketized rationality, yet within normative frameworks of inclusion and “a school for all”. Then it becomes increasingly important to understand how markets and inclusion have been seen as relevant categories in education and what subjects and relations of power these categories assume and produce. Thus, this is the general purpose of the thesis, investigated in two studies of ethnographic art, in which analyzes are emphasizing relations of power, knowledge and subjects. Study one focused how subjects were constructed in relation to achievement, competition and perceptions of inclusion in a high school, while study two examines interpellations and affirmations in three upper secondary school-fairs. The results suggest that subjects in my studies identify with existing educational partition to functions, places and positions in education and society. Discourses of identity, differentiation and equality partake in giving the market almost metaphysical qualities beyond historicity and geography. The notion of ”Investmentality” was introduced to think about how unequal, hierarchical orders were staging educational values and knowledge, but also “stakes” and “needs,” to be calculated in economic terms as investments for students, schools or regions and nations. I suggest this simultaneous governing of subjects and school system can be recognized as a partition of the sensible in contemporary Swedish educational capitalism.