Inclusion and mastery: variations on the theme of subjection

Abstract

This article undertakes a discursive analysis of the concepts of ‘inclusion’ and ‘mastery’ using memory stories generated in a collective biography workshop. The five authors analysed their memories from childhood and adolescence on two separate and competing concepts that currently inform educational practice: inclusion and mastery. These stories of mastery/non‐mastery and inclusion/exclusion often exceeded or transgressed dominant normative discourses concerning the competent performance of autonomous selves. Drawing on the work of several theorists, they authors explored these transgressions. In so doing, their analysis extends Butler’s theorising of the human subject as constituted through processes of exclusion and differentiation.

Keywords:

• inclusion
• collective memory
• mastery
• discourse
• subjectivity
• autonomy

Acknowledgement

We thank the NZ Royal Society for its ISAT Linkages Fund grant to the VUW Research Cluster on Discursive Frameworks for supporting Bronwyn Davies’ visit to New Zealand.

Notes

1. The terms themselves have a longer history stretching back to the Enlightenment, and, some would argue, to the Renaissance.

2. See Kristeva (1980) on transubstantiation and the suggestion that such wishes are ‘a key fantasy of our reproductive [even if socially constructed heteronormative] desires’ (291).