Martin Forsey

A l’initiative de Agnès van Zanten, l’OSC a le plaisir de recevoir Martin Forsey, Associate Professor in Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Western Australia, jeudi 10 juin de 10h à 12h à la MSH, salle 445bis.

Martin Forsey fera une conférence sur :

Shaping the Will of Autonomous entities ? School choice and the Creation of Neoliberal Subjects

The hows and whys of neo-liberal subjectivity are the main questions pursued here. By focusing on how the “consumers” of educational services have used and adapted to the regimes of choice that have opened up to them in the past two decades or so, we can get a sense of how the subjectivity of these social actors impacts upon the policies that help shape their behaviour, and vice versa. Based on interviews conducted amongst parents, students and teachers in Perth, the capital of Western Australia, the paper pursues an understanding of neoliberalism as a practice in the Bourdieuean sense of the word, as a means of capturing the ‘structured agency’ – the dynamic interaction between cultural beliefs, structural imperatives and individual agency – that is part of our every living moment.

Martin Forsey is an Associate Professor in Anthropology & Sociology at The University of Western Australia. He teaches courses in Australian Studies, Business Anthropology and has been conducting research on schools and schooling for more than a decade. His monograph, Challenging the System? A Dramatic Tale of Neoliberal Reform in an Australian School was published in 2007, and a co-edited volume, titled The Globalisation of School Choice was published in 2008. Dr Forsey has written about ethnographic research methods and is currently enjoying a short fellowship at the University of Edinburgh where he is thinking about conceptualisations of agency in social science literature.