30. Exploring Regimes of Discipline:
Ethnographic and Analytical Inquiries
Convenor:
Noel Dyck, Simon
Fraser University
Discussant:
Vered Amit,
Concordia
University
The
pursuit of discipline has become a commonplace feature of contemporary
life. But no longer does it
primarily refer to and revolve around forms of externalized control and
punishment characteristic of traditional institutional settings such as
military units, prisons, religious groups or schoolrooms. Stylized and varying notions and
practices of discipline are today encountered in relatively autonomous and
individuated fields of professional life, not to mention throughout the realms
of leisure and self-therapy.
Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a field of social engagement within
which invocations of the need for and benefits of discipline might not occur.
Discipline
comprises not only a technical means for exercising power over self and/or
others but also an essential symbolic medium for defining and articulating
preferred social practices, objectives and ways of being. Often highly localized and specialized
in terms of its discursive constitution, there is an implicit claim that to
seek discipline is to assert agency.
Obversely, the implementation and management of diverse regimes of
discipline are propounded on the basis of their presumed capacities to produce
moral, physical or mental improvement.
This workshop invites
ethnographic analyses of particular regimes of discipline, be they directed
towards selves or others. In addition to identifying and contextualizing the
organized practices and premises of disciplinary regimes, we will ask how far
the rationales and rhetoric of social control can be reconciled with goals of
self-actualization.
Spare the Game,
Spoil the Child? Discipline and Individuality in Children’s Sports
Noel
Dyck, Simon Fraser University
Helle Bundgaard and Eva
Gulløv
University of
Copenhagen, Danish University of Education
Creatively
Sculpting the Self Through the Discipline of Martial Arts Training
Tamara Kohn,
University of Durham
Disciplining the
Body, Purging the Soul. Technologies of Self in a Polish Catholic Youth
Movement
Esther
Peperkamp, Amsterdam School for Social Science Research
Towards a
Historical Anthropology of Quaker Discipline
Peter Collins,
University of Durham
The Legacy of
Vieskeri – Agency and Discipline in Amateur Trotting Racing in Finland
Susanne
Ådahl, University of Helsinki
Herta
Nöbauer, University of Vienna
Governance as a
regime of discipline
Sue Wright,
Danish University of Education