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Bronwyn Davies – Legitimation: Neoliberal Imperatives and Post-structural Challenges

Le.git.i.mate (first definition): conforming to established standards of usage, behaviour, etc; based on correct or acceptable principles of reasoning; reasonable, sensible or valid; authorized, sanctioned by, or in accordance with law (Collins English Dictionary).

In this definition, legitimacy is concerned with conformity to practices that have, one way or another, acquired a status comparable to the law. In the broad field of social and educational research, legitimacy has been colonized, perhaps predictably, by those working in “empirical” research, a field characterized by adherence to the rules of scientific method, and by a belief in causal, evidence-based reasoning that is, more often than not, backed by statistical estimates of probability and generalizability. In scientific discourse, empirical means: “derived from or relating to experiment and observation rather than theory” (Collins English Dictionary). It is this conception of data as holding meaning independent of theory that best characterizes the empirical endeavor. In such research, truth claims rest on method, rather than the interpretive work involved in formulating and asking questions, generating data or the work that is done in representing and articulating the new forms of understanding that are emergent in the research. Indeed interpretation is to be abhorred as it introduces an “illegitimate” bias into otherwise pure data and mathematical calculations. This proprietorial claim on legitimacy by the empiricists poses an interesting dilemma for postempiricist researchers: do they abandon the terms as meaningless for their own purposes, or recolonise it through postempirical deconstructive work on it, or neither or both of these?
Dr. Bronwyn Davies is well known for her work on gender, classroom research and her writing on poststructuralist theory. More recently she has been working on a critique of neoliberalism as it impacts on subjectivities at work and on the relations between pedogogy and place. Her books include: Life in the Classroom and Playground; Frogs and Snails and Feminist Tales; Preschool Children and Gender; Shards of Glass; Children Reading and Writing Beyond Gendered Identities; Poststructuralist Theory and Classroom Practice; Power/Knowledge/Desire: Changing School Organization and Management Practices; Gender in Japanese Preschools (with Hiroyuki Kasama); A Body of Writing; (In)scribing Body/landscape Relations; and Doing Collective Biography (with Susanne Gannon). She is currently working on a new book called Pedagogical Encounters.

Event organizer is the Institute of Early Childhood Education & Research (IECER), with the Centre for Cross-Faculty Inquiry in Education (CCFI), the Centre for the Study of the Internationalization of Curriculum Studies (CSICS), the Department of Language and Literacy Education (LLED), and the Department of English as co-sponsors.