Saltmarsh, Sue (2012) ‘I’m just not that kind of person’: choice, agency and economic subjectivities in multicultural educational contexts. In: Precarious international multicultural education: hegemony, dissent and rising alternatives. Transgressions: Cultural Studies and Education (84). Sense Publishers, Rotterdam, Netherlands, pp. 117-131. ISBN 978-94-6091-893-3
Abstract
[Conclusion]:
This chapter considers the significance of economic discourse as a technique of governmentality through which families from a variety of cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds are positioned as self-regulating, self-actualizing citizen/consumers (Rose, 1999a, 1999b). Its analysis of excerpts from ethnographic case studies demonstrates the subjective implications of consumer culture and economic discourse in the lives of women living in Australian outer metropolitan suburbs and rural towns. While these women’s cultural backgrounds and socioeconomic circumstances varied, the texts and talk of their everyday consumer experiences reveal the extent to which economic discourse is implicated in shaping their experiences of social worth, personal agency and imagined futures. Positioned within dominant discourses of economic participation via a program designed to facilitate the development of financial literacies, the women in the study draw in turn on gendered and racialised discourses of consumption, achievement, responsibility and transformation in their negotiation of economic subjectivities.
For culturally and socioeconomically diverse schools and communities, I argue, this evidence demonstrates how giving an account of oneself (Butler, 2005) in economic terms is fraught with tensions and contradictions that reflect the
gendered and racialised inequalities of contemporary economic discourse.
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