Disruptive events: elite education and the discursive production of violence

Abstract

This paper considers the discursive production of violence in the context of educational markets. Drawing on a larger study of sexually violent incidents that occurred in an elite private boys' school in Sydney, Australia, in 2000, the paper examines disciplinary traditions and communicative practices surrounding these events. Insights from Michel Foucault and Michel de Certeau inform the analysis of market‐inflected features of school cultures, and their reconfiguration in violent acts by educational consumers. The paper aims to bring the intersection of school cultures and policy contexts into the matrix of factors considered in relation to school violence, and argues that institutional and social discourses that normalise and reproduce hierarchies of status and worth are complicit in the symbolic and material production of violence.

Keywords:

• Certeau
• consumption
• Foucault
• private schooling
• school violence
• sexual violence

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a Macquarie University Research Award for Areas and Centres of Excellence, which the author gratefully acknowledges. The dissertation received the Macquarie University Vice Chancellor's Award for Academic Excellence, and the nationally awarded Australian Association of Research in Education Doctoral Thesis Award 2005. The author would also like to acknowledge with thanks Dr Wendy Sutherland‐Smith and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Notes

1. The three‐year doctoral study conducted between 2001 and 2004 concerns the role of consumption and representation in the discursive production of the sexually violent events. The larger study employed a discourse analytic approach to analyse school history, promotional materials, and discipline policies, correspondence between the school and parents, media reports, and interview data, demonstrating how institutions such as schools, church and media are complicit in the discursive production of school violence.

2. Within Australia, the term ‘private schooling’ refers to fee‐paying, non‐government run schooling. Entry to elite private schools such as the one considered in this study is often highly competitive, and while fees vary from school to school, they are generally costly. Newspapers reported that the fees to attend the school at the centre of this study were as high as $25,000 AUD/annum.

3. This research was approved and conducted under the guidelines set out by the Macquarie University Ethics Committee. Documents cited here were legally obtained as documents in the public domain. Identifying information, including names of individuals and institutions, has been omitted or anonymised to protect the identity of participants in the study. Correspondence referred to here includes open letters circulated by the school to parents, and a letter that had been sent to the school by the mother of a boarding student who was later charged in relation to the sexually violent incidents described above. A more detailed analysis of the mother's letter and of the school's response to it is contained in the larger study.

4. A copy of the school's response to the parent letter is also analysed in the larger study. It is worth noting here that the school's letter of response contains no refutation of/corrections to any claims made by the parent letter with regard to practices in the boarding house.