doctoral research project
Processes of subjectivation in advisory services and settings around continuing education (working title)
My doctoral research, drawing on theories of subjectivation, analyses audio recordings of conversations within advisory settings around continuing education as processes of positioning.
In the context of the workplace, professional development and lifelong learning, advisory services on continuing education have the purpose of effecting change in clients’ relationships with their work by helping them make decisions coherent and contiguous with their lives to date. The relationships involved here are specific ones between the subject, the world of work, and that of education, co-generated in the situated dialogue between client and advisor, in the act of their speaking in and about positions towards, and in this context relationships with, their selves. The process of analysis seeks to identify the subject positions to which clients and advisors refer, which they explore and enter into negotiations around in their interaction; put differently, it attempts to pinpoint how specific advisory settings and encounters around continuing education become the site of processes of subjectivation.
The thesis will analyse the character of the self-relationships thus observable as discursive events in process and subjects of negotiational interaction via an identification of subject positions and positionings. The empirical reconstruction thus enabled draws on the analysis of positionings within narrative analysis of ‘small stories’.