Dr. Patrick Ryan

READINGS: Patrick Ryan, "Discursive Tensions on the Landscape of Modern Childhood," Educare Vetenskapliga Skrifter (2011: 2): 11-37.

The 'Landscape of Modern Childhood' explained at Althouse faculty of education, 2013.  watch the video or listen to the audio.

Exercises: Write out and bring 2 questions on the readings.

Lecture Resources:

Text-Discourse Dynamic

The Landscape of Modern Childhood (LMC) Diagram

Sample Transcript (2013)

Wordsworth, Ode, lines 59-77 (1807).

Milestones, Mothercraft (1923).

Gesell's Dome (est. 1911, photo 1947)

Las Meninas (1656) Diego Velazquez

Discursive Formation
Discourse
Paradigm
Theory

Text
Instantiation
Language-Logic-Practice

The Landscape of Modern Childhood
 --Socialization Theory & the Conditioned Child
 --Romantic Developmentalism & the Authentic Child
 --Sci. Developmentalism & the Developing Child
 --Social Actor Theory & the Political Child

Governmentality
recursion
recursive text and discourse

Confession/Conversion Techniques
Population Management

READINGS:
Patrick J. Ryan, "What to Make of Child-Saving Discourse?" Childhood: History & Critique S1, Ep1 (Nov. 12, 2014).

View Greta Thunberg performs 'authentic' and 'political' figures of childhood at 2019 UN Climate Change Summit

Ellen K. Feder, "Power/Knowledge," in Michel Foucault: Key Concepts edited by Dianna Taylor (Acumen Publ. Ltd, 2011): 55-68.

EXERCISES:  What discourses of childhood do you think Thunberg draws upon in her address? 

Write out and bring 2 questions on the readings.

LECTURE RESOURCES:

Hobo's Lullaby Arlo Gutherie

Governmentality Diagram

Foucault's Theses on Power

Progressive Teleologies: Ideology Critique and Authentic Actors Alternatives

Child-Saving Discourse
Self-Consuming Artifacts
Generative Tension

Ideology Critique
Base Truth
Superstructure and False Consciousness
Participant Action Research

Analytics of Power
Power/Knowledge
Foucault's Theses on Power

 

READINGS:
Lena Sjoberg, "Confession of an individual education plan," in Foucault and a politics of confession in education edited by Andreas Fejes and Katherine Nicoll (London: Routledge, 2015): 62-75.

Tina Besley, Counseling Youth, front matter (v-xxiii) and Chapter 1, “An introduction to Foucauldian analysis.”

EXERCISES:  List the types of self-reflection techniques you have experienced in educational institutions.  What is the significance of making a student's own learning part of the curricular content?

Write out and bring 2 questions on the readings.

LECTURE RESOURCES:

Sunday School Floor Plan (1830s)

Sunday School Discipline (1830s)

Library of Congress Panoptical Reading Room

Panopticon Design

discursive practices
gaze
dispositifBinary Opposition
 Generative Tension
Dialectic
Reflexivity
Recursion
The Self-Examining Subject

Discipline
Time, Space, Bodies
 Self-Reflexive Subject
 

READING:


 

EXERCISES:

 

Paper 1 Due - Oct. 18 (40%) :  Drawing upon the readings and lectures to date write a 4 page paper doing the following:

Pick any disciplinary or confessional technique commonly experienced by children, and (1) explain how it helps produce a cycle of self-examination and self-presentation and (2) its significance for power-knowledge relations between the generations.

READING:
Tina Besley, Chapters 2-3

EXERCISES: Bring a question about each of Besley's chapters.

What does the phrase "the medicalization of childhood" mean to you?

LECTURE RESOURCES:

Bureau of Juvenile Research (1913)

 Medical Review of Reviews (1915)

Bradley, "Paediatrist in the Community" (1915)

Eugenic Lights (1928) 

 Disciplinary Techniques
Hierarchical Observation
 Normalizing Judgment
The Examination

Contemporary Examples of Discipline

Eugenics
Scientific Racism
HH Goddard
'the Moron'
MMFM
Sterilization

Profile Drawings
Eugenic Family Histories
Mental Age
IQ

Normalization
Graphic Visualization
Radical Simplification

Paul Farmer
John Snow
Epidemology
Bio Power
DOTS

READING:
Edward J. Comstock, “The End of Drugging Children: Toward the Genealogy of the ADHD Subject,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences vol. 47, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 44-69.

EXERCISES: Bring two questions about Comstock. Have you had clinical experiences which you think shaped your sense of your self, and ones which you think had little disciplinary force. What differentiated them?

*Obviously you may choose not to disclose information about yourself which you are uncomfortable speaking with us about. 


LECTURE RESOURCES:

Patrick J. Ryan, "Producing Self-Regulating Subjects," Childhood: History & Critique S1, Ep5 (Jan. 19, 2015).

Anti-Psychiatry Short Video

Excerpts from "Take Your Pills"

READING: 
Tina Besley, Counseling Youth, “Sociologizing Youth,” and “The Moral Constitution of Youth” Chapter 4 and 5.

EXERCISES: Bring two questions about Besley.  Besley reviews mental hygiene films as a technology of youth moral education (or indoctrination) in the M20C. Can you name the moral discourses of your schooling in the E21C?  What structures of language, logic, and practice in moral education did you encounter?

LECTURE RESOURCES: 

P. Ryan, "'Young Rebels Flee Psychology':  individual intelligence, race, and foster children in Cleveland, Ohio between the world wars,"  Paedagogica Historica vol. 47, no. 6 (October 2011): 767-783.

READING:
Patrick J. Ryan "The 'government of heroic women': childhood, discipline, and the discourse of poverty -  'Kontrolle durch heroische Frauen': Kindheit, Disziplin und der Armustsdiskurs," in Bildungsgeschichte – International Journal for the Historiography of Education vol. 7, no. 2 (2017): 173-190.

WATCH: BBC - Our World "Norway: Parents Against the State."

EXERCISES: Write-out two questions about "The government of heroic women."  Answer these questions as you watch the film and read: 

1) What do Borge Tomter (representing Barnevernet) and Einar Salvesen (writer of expert letter) agree and disagree about? 

2) Name two or three discursive practices – highlighted in Ryan – that arose in social work during the early 20C.  Which of these practices are conditions of possibility for the stories pictured in the BBC short documentary to be told?

3) Return to question 1 and Salvesen's critique of Barnevernet's investigative practices.  Was Salvesen arguing for a withdrawal or intensification of disciplinary techniques in the Foucauldian sense?

LECTURE RESOURCES:

TBA

READING:
Anna Anderson, "Is 'giving voice' an incitement to confess?" in Foucault and a politics of confession in education edited by Andreas Fejes and Katherine Nicoll (London: Routledge, 2015): 133-145. 

EXERCISES: Bring two questions about the readings to share in discussion.


LECTURE RESOURCES:


 

Ian Hutchby
Contrasting Models of Power
Pastoral Practices

Turn Construction Units (TCU)
Transition Relevant Places (TRP)
Adjacency Pairs
Bricolage
Assymetrical Interactions
Affordance
Frame

Therapeutic Objects
Counseling Tropes
Perspective-Display Sequence (PDS)

Active Listening
Question-Answer Formulation (QAF)
Tropes
Narratives
Newsmakers
Formulations
Institutionalized Incitement to speak

READING:
Tina Besley, Counseling Youth, Chapter 6-7.


EXERCISES: Bring questions about Besley

 

Paper 2 Due - Dec. 8 (60%) :  Write a 6-page paper drawing upon the assigned readings in the course, lectures, and add 2 scholarly articles of your own choosing to respond to one of the following prompts.

Option A: Identify a specific example of the biopolitical management of populations through the medicalization of childhood. Use the intellectual tools within governmentality studies to analyze its political significance for power relations and the production of subjects.

Option B: In what ways do Foucauldian Analytics (or governmentality studies) challenge or complicate (encouarge you to rethink) the common pursuit of childhood studies to uncover or free the 'voice' of the child?