Women, Education and the Self

Maria Tamboukou links Foucauldian ideas to feminism and education. Its central argument is that the Foucauldian notion of “technologies of the self” needs to be gendered and contextualized. This argument is pursued through a genealogical analysis of autobiographical texts of women educators in the UK at the turn of the 19th century. This is a new theoretical approach, since Foucault’s work has proved to be of great interest to feminist scholars but as yet, his theories have only intermittently been used in educational feminist work.

Author Biography

MARIA TAMBOUKOU is Senior Lectuer in Psychosocial Studies and Co-Director of the Centre for Narrative Research in the Social Sciences, University of East London, UK. She received her PhD from King’s College, University of London, UK. Her publications and research interests are in the sociology of gender and education, gender and space and the exploration of foucauldian and deleuzian analytics and the use of auto/biographical narratives in research. She is co-editor with Stephen J. Ball of Dangerous Encounters: Genealogy and Ethnography.