SELF BEYOND SELF/LOST IN PRACTICE Surveillance, appearance and posthuman possibilities ...

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SELF BEYOND SELF/LOST IN PRACTICE

Surveillance, appearance and posthuman possibilities for critical selfhood in
children’s services in England

Submitted by Ruth Hubbard to the University of Exeter
as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Education(EdD), August 2014.

This thesis is available for library use on the understanding that
it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published
without proper acknowledgement.

I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has
been identified and that no material has previously been submitted and
approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University.

Signature

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Abstract

The selfhood of social professionals in children’s services is under-researched, and where the
primary focus is on practice ‘outcomes’. Informed by a critical social policy frame this thesis focuses
on the selfhood of social professionals in children’s services to ask how it might, or might not, be
possible to think, and do, self differently. I bring into play a critical posthumanist (non-sovereign)
becoming self alongside, and in relation to, the other ‘allowed’ or ‘prescribed’ selves of neo-
liberalism, professional practice and (critical) social policy itself. Utilising theoretical resources, in
particular from Arendt, Deleuze and Guattari, and Foucault, I characterise this as thinking with both
‘surveillance’ and ‘appearance’, and self as an explicitly political project. In a post-structural frame I
pursue a post-methodological rhizomatic and cartographic methodology that aims to open up
proliferations in thinking and knowledge rather than foreclose it to one clear answer, and where I
also draw on a small number of interviews with experienced professionals and managers in
children’s services. A rhizomatic figure of thought involves irreducible and multiple relations that
are imbricated on the surface; it is a flattened picture where theory, data, researcher, participants
and analysis are not separate, where all connections are part of an overall picture, and in movement.
I argue that social professionals occupy a deeply striated landscape for being/knowing/practising, a
particular ontological grid that tethers their selfhood to the pre-existing, and to intensifications in a
neo-liberal project. Here, ‘rearranging the chairs’ becomes more of the same, where the sovereign
humanist subject is “a normative frame and an institutionalised practice” (Braidotti, 2013, p.30). In
thinking otherwise, beyond traditional critical theory, a posthuman lens draws attention to the ways
in which we might be/live both inside and outside of the already existing and where we become with
others, human and non-human in shifting assemblages. However, the self prescribed and prefigured
in dominant discourses constitute the historical preconditions from which experiments in self, and
other possibilities may emerge. Practices of de-familiarisation, a radical, non-linear relationality, and
a hermeneutics of situation are suggested as strategies for thinking forward, for appearance, and a
self beyond self.

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Acknowledgements
Firstly, a heartfelt thank you to my supervisors, Deborah Osberg and Nadine Schaefer, and
not only for their patience. The theoretical and international reach of Deborah’s work, and
her straightforward belief, encouraged me to be ambitious. Nadine always questioned me
critically and insistently and I felt secure in, and grateful for, her careful attention to my
work. At heart though, in these times of very strange things happening in higher education,
I was simply relieved and grateful to have had an educational relationship with my
supervisors (that even allowed for some occasional ‘messiness’), I really valued this.

I also want to thank my colleagues – Sue Lea, Christine Smith, Lisa Spencer-Woodley, Jo
Trelfa, Mel Feek, and Nicky Davies. I have so very much valued their support and
encouragement, ideas, and friendship over a long period of time, and I will really miss them
in my new job in Manchester. In addition, sixteen years with students (who are mostly
social professionals), and stakeholders, at the University of St Mark and St John has been
pretty profound - a thank you feels insipid for so many things given that are now part of me.

On a personal level, the person most (always) on my mind in the latter stages and in writing-
up has been Jess. I don’t know the many and nuanced ways she may have infused this text,
but we bring all sorts of our selves to what we do and I know she is in here, it would be
foolish to pretend otherwise. In a very big way, Jess, and my other (just as special)
daughter Alice, and also Kate, have been unstinting and unsparing in their resolve about me
and this thesis – and to discuss Hannah Arendt and Gilles Deleuze (amongst many other
things) with endless interest, patience and good humour. I’m deeply grateful to them - they
have always been what has sustained me.

Finally, I want to thank Lindsey for always reminding me of the and….and….and….I’m not
sure anything much was viable without this, and I think we may both know how hard-
fought/won even a tenuous and fleeting grasp of this can be.

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C o n t e n t s I n B r I e f

Abstract 2
Acknowledgements 3
Contents in Full 5
List of Figures and Tables 8

Chapter 1: Introduction 9
Presenting and mapping the territory

Chapter 2: Methodology and Becoming-Researcher 29
Research strategy and methods

Chapter 3: Self and Social Policy 57
The limits to selfhood in critical social policy analysis

Chapter 4: Victoria Climbié and Children’s Services 81
The social professional after Climbié and the development of children’s services

Chapter 5: Selfhood and Surveillance 102
Constituting selfhood in surveillance, and its intensifications in neo-liberalism

Chapter 6: Posthumanist Reclamations: Being/Knowing/Practising 129
Rethinking self beyond the humanist, in appearance

Chapter 7: Conclusions 146
Significance of the research and its possibilities

Bibliography 153

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C o n t e n t s I n F u l l

Abstract 2
Acknowledgements 3
Contents in Brief 4
List of Tables and Figures 8

Chapter 1: Introduction 9
Presenting and mapping the territory
1.1 Selfhood and social professionals in children’s services 9
1.2 Resources 15
1.2.1 The dominance of humanism 16
1.2.2 Posthumanism and monism 18
1.2.3 Performativity and bringing things into relation 20
1.2.4 Posthumanist differing 21
1.2.5 Posthumanism and perspectivism 22
1.2.6 Power, surveillance and appearance 23
1.3 Conclusion and research objectives 25

Chapter 2: Methodology and Becoming-Researcher 29
Research strategy and methods
2.1 Introduction 29
2.2 Ontological and epistemological considerations 30
2.3 Research devices 38
2.3.1 Rhizomes and assemblage 38
2.3.2 Mapping and Cutting 39
2.3.2 An experiment in effecting affective relations 44
2.3.3 Interviews 47
2.3.4 The methodology as production 52
2.4 Progressions 55
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Chapter 3: Self and Social Policy 57

The limits to selfhood in critical social policy analysis

3.1 Introduction 57
3.2 Social Policy Towards ‘the Postmodern’ 60
3.3 Categorical, Ontological and Relational Social Identities 67
3.4 Reading Social Policy’s Desires 73

Chapter 4: Victoria Climbié and Children’s Services 81
The social professional after Climbié and the development of children’s services
4.1 Introduction 81
4.2 The Victoria Climbié Inquiry 83
4.3 Integrating Services 88
4.4 Tools, for Research, Evidence and Monitoring 95
4.5 Workforce Reform 100

Chapter 5: Selfhood and Surveillance 102
Constituting selfhood in surveillance, and its intensifications in neo-liberalism
5.1 Introduction 102
5.2 Constituting Self in Children’s Services 105
5.3 Towards Austerity 114
5.4 Surveillance: Intensifications in Neo-Liberalism 119
5.5 Lost in Practice? 125

Chapter 6: Posthumanist Reclamations: Being/Knowing/Practising 129
Rethinking self beyond the humanist, in appearance
6.1 Introduction 129
6.2 Thinking/Being Otherwise 132
6.2.1 De-familiarisation 132
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6.2.2 Non-linear relationality 140
6.2.3 A hermeneutics of situation 143

Chapter 7: Conclusions 146
Significance of the research and its possibilities
7.1 Conclusion and Summary of the Thesis 146

Bibliography 153

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L i s t o f F i g u r e s a n d T a b l e s

F I g u r e s

Figure 1: The Children’s Workforce (DCSF, 2008) 90

Figure 2: The ‘onion’ diagram (DfES, 2004) 90

T a b l e s

Table 1: Postpositivist New Paradigm Inquiry
(Lather and St Pierre, 2013) 32

Table 2: Interview participant descriptors 47

Table 3: Three analytically distinct elements of social identity 71
(Hunter, 2002)

Table 4: Constituting self in surveillance in children’s services: static
and becoming selves 111

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C h a p t e r 1

INTRODUCTION
Presenting and mapping the territory

Dominant strategies do not occupy an empty landscape. They have to overcome
resistances, refusals and blockages. For many reasons, the public realm....is part of
the ‘grit’ that prevents the imagined neo-liberal world system functioning smoothly….
The contested fortunes of the public realm are testimony to the limitations of neo-
liberalism’s plan to rule the world.
(Clarke 2004, p.44-45)

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing
the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies
on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk around well wadded with
stupidity. (Eliot, 1973, p.226)

1.1 SELFHOOD AND SOCIAL PROFESSIONALS IN CHILDREN’S SERVICES

Social professionals operate in the spaces between policy goals and practice
outcomes. The task of securing the professional to the ‘dominant strategies’ of any
given order becomes, then, part of its project, as alluded to by John Clarke in relation
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to neo-liberalism1. The battle for the “teacher’s soul” and the “terrors of
performativity” (Ball, 2003) indicate that the “ground of such struggles is often highly
personal” (p.216), and penetrating. That selfhood is multiply and repeatedly
constituted in, or saturated by, material and discursive relations2 is a broad position
explained and advanced from a whole variety of theoretical positions, though with
varying degrees of attention to, or the problematisation of, questions of dominance
and subjection (and the possibilities for something other – ‘agency’ perhaps).
Kitzinger’s simple statement “Identity….is what you can say you are according to
what they say you can be” (1989, p.82) does direct attention to the operation of
power pointing out that we can only name ourselves within, or in relation to,
discourses and practices that are permitted us (see also Scott 1992). One paradox of
neo-liberalism and its modes of governance is that it claims such a bounty for
‘freedom’ – “the magic of the marketplace” (Cohen and Arato 1994, p.22) - yet offers
such a poverty discourse and narrow axis for self. Ball declares “we are none of the
things we now do, think or desire” (2012, p.33).

Informed by a critical social policy frame this thesis focuses on the selfhood of a
range of social professionals in the children’s workforce – the diverse array of
professionals and practitioners in the public, private and third sectors in, broadly,
social work, health, youth work and education - to ask how it might, or might not, be
possible to think, and do, self differently. This declares selfhood as a central concern
for practice but in this (re)claiming I seek to disrupt and to rework an understanding,
to move beyond (or through, or with) the requirements of self in neo-liberalism, and

1 By ‘neo-liberalism’ I mean both a political (commodifying) project and ideological commitments (discursively
and materially produced) that promote free market economic (individualism) as the fundamental driver of
economic and social progress, and a concomitant residual welfare state.
2 The phrase ‘material and discursive relations’ refers to the idea that both discursive and material practices
may be important; it signals the inclusion here of a variety of theoretical positions that might focus on the
material, rather than, for example, a classically poststructuralist emphasis on discursive productions in
language. Of course, the discursive can also include the material and my general usage of ‘discourse’ is
intended to include both, unless otherwise specified; I do not intend to produce a binary. However, the
materiality of lived practices can sometimes be left out of the equation as has been noted by various material
feminist theorists and captured in Barad’s (2003, p.801) assertion that “Language has been granted too much
power”, and by others such as actor-network-theorists (for example, see Fenwick 2010; Fenwick and Edwards
2010). Discourse refers to specific social conditions that are historically situated and “Discourse is not what is
said; it is that which constrains and enables what can be said. Discursive practices define what counts as
meaningful statements” (Barad, 2003, p.819).
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