Power, Discourse, Ethics / New Research - New Voices (PDF)

In this unique study, emerging higher education
leader and policy expert Kenneth D. Gariepy takes a Foucauldian genealogical
approach to the study of the intellectually "free" subject through the analysis
of selected academic freedom statement-events. Assuming academic freedom to be
an institutionalized discourse-practice operating in the field of contemporary
postsecondary education in Canada, a specific kind of cross-disciplinary,
historico-theoretical research is conducted that pays particular attention to
the productive nature and effects of power-knowledge. The intent is to disrupt
academic freedom as commonsensical "good" and universal "right" in order to
instead focus on how it is that the academic subject emerges as free/unfree to
think - and therefore free/unfree to be - through particular, effective, and
effecting regimes of truth and strategies of objectification and
subjectification. In this way, the author suggests how it is that academic
freedom operates as a set of systemically agonistic practices that might only
realize a different economy of discourse through the contingent nature of the
very social power that produces it.

Dr. Gariepy's use of Foucault's genealogical
analysis provides a wholly different way in which to re-think the construction
and practice of academic freedom in Canada and is thus an important
contribution to the broader discursive field it seeks to analyze. Given
contemporary neoliberal critiques of the university, the issue of academic
freedom and the intellectually free subject is a vital problem that is of
interest to numerous knowledge producing communities - on and off campus.
Equally important in addressing the problem of academic freedom is how the book
also contributes a new description of the genealogical method - something
Foucault did not stipulate - that is original, ambitious, compelling, and
insightful. I commend Dr. Gariepy for returning, to investigate anew, an issue
we think we know." - E. Lisa Panayotidis, PhD, Professor & Chair,
Educational Studies in Curriculum and Learning, Werklund School of Education,
University of Calgary, Editor of History of Intellectual Culture.