Kerry Harman

Birkbeck College, University of London, Applied Linguistics and Communication, Faculty Member

Followers

Following

Co-authors

Public Views

My main research interests are concerned with the politics of learning at work. My work explores the interrelationships between workplace practices, knowledges, power and subjectivity. I use the notions of embodiment and performativity to help me in these explorations. I am interested in developing ways of representing learning at work that enable different dimensions of workplace experience to become visible. I am also critical of the discourse of Mastery which prevails in much of the workplace learning literature.

My research strands include:

- An exploration of the material effects of workplace practices in specific sites. What objects and subjects are produced in and through everyday practices at work?

- An interest in representations of workplace learning and approaches that enable everyday learning to be re-presented as other than mastery. What is able to count as learning at work and who are able to be counted as workplace learners? Can resistance to organisational/workplace norms be understood as learning at work?

- Learning translations and the ways learning (as an object) is translated as it moves between the institutional domains of work and higher education.

less

George K. # Zarifis

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Andreas Umland

National University of "Kyiv-Mohyla Academy"

Ruben López-Cano

Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya

David Seamon

Kansas State University

Leesa Wheelahan

University of Toronto

Monica Marquina

CONICET

Armando Marques-Guedes

UNL - New University of Lisbon

Andreas Fejes

Linköping University

Noe Cornago

University of the Basque Country, Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea

Marcin Miłkowski

Polish Academy of Sciences

InterestsView All (7)

Uploads

Papers by Kerry Harman

Making the Global Studio sustainable: project update

Over the past three years the School of Design at Northumbria University has been experimenting w... more

Special issue on lived experience, learning, community activism and social change

Studies in the Education of Adults

Introduction: Opposites, Intersections, Turns and Other Imaginative Possibilities

Bloomsbury Academic eBooks, 2022

Practising a Feminist Aesthetic Imaginary: Creating Moments of Equality When Researching Sensory Ways of Knowing Homecare

Feminism, Adult Education and Creative Possibility, 2022

Enacting Equality

Power and Possibility, 2019

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NC 4.0 License. 10. ENACT... more This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NC 4.0 License. 10. ENACTING EQUALITY Rethinking Emancipation and Adult Education with Jacques Rancière The organization of much adult education, whether it be vocational, further, community, higher or civic education, is often underpinned by liberal-humanist ideals associated with the Enlightenment. In this tradition, education is understood as the means for providing a way out of darkness and ignorance and this is closely linked with the notion that education emancipates. In other words, education, whether it takes place in universities, community groups, or workplaces is understood as contributing to the ongoing march of social progress and it does this through producing more knowledgeable individuals and societies. To this end, critical theory emancipation as it draws attention to power and its relation to oppression. However, the emancipatory ideals of education have increasingly come under attack, along with the hope that critical theory will contribute to progressive social change (e.g., Bingham & Biesta, 2010; Cooper, 2014; Kompridis, 2006; Latour, 2004). Increasing diversity and complexity in society has resulted in a less unified understanding around what constitutes progressive social change and transformation (Alhadeff-Jones, 2017), and the notion of a universal truth seems much less certain. At a time when there is a growing skepticism towards experts and elites, as seen in the current exploitation of 'post-truth' politics by the populist right (Friedman, many countries (Dorling, 2015; Winkler, 2017); and the issue of global warming rolling on in a seemingly unrestrained way (Cox, 2018; Nuccitelli, 2018) do we, as Wildemeersch (2014, p. 823) asks, need to "redefine what critical theories and practices are about?" And if so, what other approaches might be possible for those the end goal of education contributes to 'stultification' rather than emancipation. re, with much of this literature examining the alternative conception of emancipation he provides and exploring the implications for education (e.g.

Download

Community-based learning and social movements: Popular education in a populist age

Studies in the Education of Adults, 2020

Download

Self-construction and social transformation: Lifelong, lifewide and life-deep learning

Studies in the Education of Adults, 2018

Download

Democracy, emancipation and widening participation in the UK: Changing the ‘distribution of the sensible’

Studies in the Education of Adults, 2017

The broad concern of this paper is how the relationship between education, democracy and emancipa... more The broad concern of this paper is how the relationship between education, democracy and emancipation might be conceived. This theme is explored through examining the contribution of a Rancierian conception of emancipation and democracy to rethinking widening participation in higher education. Following Ranciere, it is argued that taking equality as a starting point in higher education, rather than as a goal to be achieved through education, disrupts a prevailing logic of education as necessarily providing a pathway to emancipation. From this view the pedagogic practices of explication and mastery, which Ranciere argues work to separate academic reason and practical reason, need no longer be understood as the only way to be academic. It is proposed that this 'redistribution of the sensible' enables higher education to be conceived in ways other than available in ongoing educational debates and enables a move beyond an assimilation-recognition binary. Instead, widening participation can be understood as a space for opening up to experience, transformation and change for both academics and students. From this view, democracy is enacted in the here and now, rather than a goal for the future, and practice can be understood as a site for change.

Download

Assembled selves: the complexities of power at work

In this paper I discuss the ways I’m using identity as a lens for exploring the complexities of p... more In this paper I discuss the ways I’m using identity as a lens for exploring the complexities of power in workplaces. I draw on the work of theorists such as Deetz (1992; 1994), du Gay (1996a; 1996b) and Miller and Rose (1993; 1995) who all use Foucauldian concepts to explore identity and power. I describe how I have been using Rose’s notion of ‘assembled selves’ (1996) to explore worker identities in a large public sector organisation in Australia. This analysis draws attention to the historical and cultural contingency of ‘the subject’ and the politics of identity. In the first section of the paper I theorise identity using concepts from Foucault. Foucault draws attention to the complexities of the relationships between power, knowledge and ‘the subject’ (Dean, 1994; Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982; Foucault, 1981, 1982, 1988; Ransom, 1997). Disrupting taken for granted understandings of ‘the individual’ as a fixed, cohesive, essential self, Foucault explores the ways subjects are produced (Foucault, 1981, 1982, 1988). Drawing on the work of Foucault, Rose points out: ‘capacities for action emerge out of the specific regimes and technologies that machinate humans in diverse ways’ (1996, p. 186). This view contrasts with much of the neo-human relations literature and critical management literature which both tend to understand human beings as possessing core or essential characteristics. Modern power operates through the construction of new capacities and Foucault says that we need to pay attention to the ways capacities are produced in order to gain a better understanding of the complexities of power (1982). This begins to draw attention to the politics of identity. Taking up the notion that our capacity to act is an effect rather than a cause, I explore the identities being produced in a contemporary Australian workplace. In this next section of the paper I draw on my involvement in a three year, Australian Research Council (ARC) funded project which examined everyday learning at work. I have been working with Rose’s notion of assembled selves (1996) as a way of theorising learning at work. My interest is in the ‘who’ we learn ‘to be’ at work. Rose suggests that through being assembled with particular devices, techniques, people, and objects that ‘selves’ are produced (1996; 2000). In this part of the paper I explore the assemblages that contribute to producing a ‘senior manager’ in this workplace. This analysis emphasises the everyday practices of the workplace and the capacities produced by these practices. It draws attention to the myriad of everyday activities and experiences where people are ‘addressed, represented, and acted upon as if they were selves of a particular type’ (Rose, 1996, p. 169). I suggest that the senior managers are both regulators and regulated. There are multiple networks of power in operation and the managers are not outside of these networks. While there are many examples of top-down power in this workplace, I contend that by focusing on this view we ignore the complexities of power at work. This analysis draws attention to the operation of other forms of power including disciplinary power and pastoral power in the workplace. I conclude the paper by discussing the potential that the lens of identity provides for analysing the complexities of power at work. Identity provides a lens for disrupting the prevailing view of power found in much of the organisational literature. In both the mainstream managerial literature and more critical approaches power is understood as coercive and repressive, as an illegitimate control, as ‘power over’. This approach is anchored in a tradition based on a sovereign understanding of power (Foucault, 1981). However, a focus on identity enables a conceptualisation of power that recognises the multiplicities of power. Here power is understood as both constraining and enabling (Ransom, 1997).

Constructing the professional doctorate: ‘what counts’ for academic advisers

Various commentators have written on the conditions contributing to an increasing interest in pro... more Various commentators have written on the conditions contributing to an increasing interest in professional doctorates, both in the UK and Australia, with many attributing this, at least in part, to the emergence of the knowledge economy and shifts from Mode 1 to Mode 2 knowledge production (Lester, 2004; Scott, Brown, Lunt, & Thorne, 2004; Usher, 2002). The emphasis in recent government policy in the UK on university-industry collaborations, both in research and teaching and learning (BIS, 2009; CBI, 2008), as well as an emerging literature on the co-production of knowledge for action (Antonacopoulou, 2009) suggest that professional doctorates will continue to be of interest as a way of organising doctoral education in the UK. However, as Usher (2002) has pointed out, the intertwining of governments, universities and workplaces in innovation processes is not always unproblematic. Research is currently being undertaken at a UK HE institution exploring the question of ‘what counts as learning, and for whom, in a professional doctorate’? This question links with a broader interest in the politics of work based learning and an exploration of power relations in the production, distribution and consumption of practice-based knowledges. We contend that the professional doctorate provides a rich research site for examining intersections between workplace discourses and discourses of Higher Education. The conceptual framework underpinning the study is Foucauldian poststructuralist theory, which draws attention to relationships between language, power, social institutions and subjectivity (Weedon, 1987). We are exploring alignments and contestations around what counts as knowledge and how it might be produced for different players in the field of Work Based Learning (WBL) including professional doctorate candidates, WBL academics and examiners of professional doctorates. The overall study includes the collection and analysis of various texts including: electronic copies of research projects undertaken as a major component of a Professional Doctorate Award; the Module Handbook provided to candidates which provides a guide to candidates completing the research component of their award; interviews with Module tutors and advisers working on the Professional Doctorate programme; and examiners reports of the doctoral level research. The focus of this paper is on ‘what counts’ for WBL academics. Interviews exploring: what makes a ‘good’ professional doctorate? have been undertaken with advisers working on a Professional Doctorate programme in a UK university. The interviews were conducted with the aim of establishing a model of ‘best practice’ for the induction of new advisers working on WBL programmes. However, rather than reading the interview texts in order to develop normative themes as to how the DProf ‘should’ be, the interviews have been analysed with a focus on language, identity/ies, academic practices and values. We are interested in how the DProf is constituted by academic advisers and the implications in terms of how it might be assessed. We found that in many of the interviews that WBL academics slipped into a binary ordering where the professional doctorate was constructed in opposition to the PhD. For example, advisers spoke of development versus research, practice versus theory, relevance versus rigour; with the former often privileged over the latter. There was also a great emphasis on the importance of self development. We suggest that the binary separation of practice and theory evident in the interview texts may not be helpful as it overlooks the complex processes whereby practice and theory are intertwined. The analysis points to tensions and contradictions in the interview texts. We suggest that the ‘in between’ spaces of WBL, where the discourses of workplaces intersect with discourses of HE, provides a site for examining the ongoing renegotiation of academic identity/ies. It is in this sense that academics can be understood as workplace learners too. For example, at times the WBL academics drew on more traditional discourses associated with the academy, such as the value of academic literacy, while at other times organisational discourses seemed to be privileged. The paper provides a more nuanced account of struggles around ‘what gets to count as learning’ in professional doctorates that foregrounds the tensions experienced by WBL academics rather than trying to smooth them over. For example, professional doctorates (as they are organised at this particular university) provide a challenge to the authority of academia and subject-based disciplines as WBL awards seek to recognise knowledges produced in workplaces and workplaces as sites of learning. However, in the process of certifying such knowledge WBL academics are also inserting their own norms, standards and values into this space. In drawing attention to values and what counts for WBL advisers the analysis contributes to ongoing discussions and…

Everyday learning at work: communities of practice in TAFE

Full bibliographic details must be given when referring to, or quoting from full items including ... more Full bibliographic details must be given when referring to, or quoting from full items including the author's name, the title of the work, publication details where relevant (place, publisher, date), pagination, and for theses or dissertations the awarding institution, the degree type awarded, and the date of the award.

Download

Becoming an assessor and learning about assessment: how and what do HE staff learn?

An analytic approach for examining the precarious spaces of professional doctorates

The domain of work and the domain of HE are no longer as distinct as they once might have seemed ... more The domain of work and the domain of HE are no longer as distinct as they once might have seemed and professional doctorates can be understood as one manifestation of the contemporary intersection between HE and workplaces. While an unproblematic alignment between the institution of work and higher education institutions is often assumed in government policy documents, which call for the formation of HE-industry partnerships and the co-production of knowledge, we suggest this overlooks the power-inflected nature of knowledge production and what gets to count as knowledge in both these locations. This paper proposes a poststructuralist analytic framework for examining power-knowledge formations using professional doctorates as a research site and outlines preliminary research in this area. A poststucturalist perspective, which draws attention to relationships between language, power, social institutions and subjectivity (Weedon, 1987), enables the exploration of multiple and mobile force relations in play in HE-workplace intersections. This opens up a number of potentially rich areas for ongoing research in professional doctorates. It enables an analysis of the embodiment and ongoing activation of discourses by individual actors through their identifications and articulated standpoints, thereby illuminating the complex mechanisms whereby the social becomes interiorised and understood as coming from within. For instance Kemmis (2005) refers to practitioners as the carriers of discourse. This is an important conceptual move as it enables both academics and professional doctorate candidates to be understood as ‘practitioners’. This is a view that is often not available in the often taken for granted theory/practice split that has prevailed since Enlightenment times. We are interested in exploring the interrelationships between theory and practice both in the domain of work and the domain of HE. So how might this be done? An analysis of discourses in circulation in both these domains and the embodiment and activation of discourse by individual actors enables alignments between work and educational institutions to be examined but also negotiations, compromises and disjuncture in what counts as knowledge. This approach enables a view of professional doctorates as precarious spaces in which their ethos and purpose undergo constant articulation and location by individual actors but always in relation to wider structural and policy contexts. The above ideas underpin an exploration of professional doctorates currently being undertaken by researchers from the Institute of Work Based Learning at Middlesex University. The overall study will include the collection and analysis of various texts including: electronic copies of research projects undertaken as a major component of a Professional Doctorate Award; the Module Handbook provided to candidates which provides a guide to candidates completing the research component of their award; interviews with Module tutors and advisers working on the Professional Doctorate programme; and examiners reports of the doctoral level research. The present focus is on academic advisers and their discursive construction of the professional doctorate. Interviews exploring: what makes a ‘good’ professional doctorate? have been undertaken with advisers working on the Professional Doctorate programme. The interviews were conducted with the aim of establishing a model of ‘best practice’ for the induction of new advisers working on the DProf programme. However, rather than reading the interview texts in order to develop normative themes as to how the DProf ‘should’ be, the interviews have been analysed with a focus on language, identity/ies, academic practices and values. We are interested in how the DProf is constituted by academic advisers and the implications in terms of how it might be assessed. While a more detailed analysis of the texts is yet to be undertaken, a preliminary analysis points to tensions and contradictions in the interview texts and the ongoing identity work performed by academic advisers as they attempt to negotiate the domain of work and the domain of HE. The ‘in between’ spaces of professional doctorates may potentially be an uncomfortable space for academics. For example, academic advisors may no longer be aligned with more traditional notions of knowledge production in circulation in the academy. Arguably a privileging of knowledges other than those produced in the academy works to disrupt existing knowledge hierarchies and the power associated with the academy. Nor might academic advisers be ‘at home’ in workplaces as academics are situated in the academy and as such are required to operate within its rules, regulations and institutional practices. We are interested in exploring the notion of professional doctorates as precarious spaces where a constant agonistic negation takes place between the academy and the workplace. The emergent and precarious nature of…

Opening up critical spaces in an employer engagement discourse

An Employer Engagement discourse is in widespread circulation in current government policy and re... more An Employer Engagement discourse is in widespread circulation in current government policy and recent government reports in the UK (e.g. Higher Ambitions: the future of universities in a knowledge economy, 2009; Stepping higher: Workforce development through employer-higher education partnership, 2008; Wedgwood, 2006). This discourse espouses the necessity of Higher Education institutions engaging with employers, both in research and teaching and learning provision, in order to produce a more productive workforce and a more productive nation. A number of government strategies have been implemented in order to encourage alignments between employers and HE institutions. One such strategy is the Strategic Development Funds (SDF) initiative currently being offered by HEFCE where funding is available to investigate various models of employer engagement including work based learning provision, accreditation of prior experiential learning and accreditation of employer’s in-house training courses. Not surprisingly, Strategic Development Funds have been actively taken up by universities offering work based learning programmes as they provide recognition of the workplace as an important site of learning and alternative models for organising the design, delivery and assessment of HE programmes. While many WBL programmes can be connected with a discourse of widening participation and social equity, an Employer Engagement discourse places emphasis on workforce development and organisational and national productivity. As an Employer Engagement discourse becomes increasingly widespread in HE in the UK the question explored in this paper is ‘how might spaces be opened up for being critical in this discourse’? In the first part of the paper I examine the widespread circulation of an Employer Engagement discourse in current government policy and reports. I argue that this discourse suggests an unproblematic alignment between employers, employees and academics. I then explore some of the tensions that the circulation of this discourse presents to academics working in the current teaching and learning context. In this section I draw on data obtained as a participant observer in an HE institution in the UK offering WBL programmes as well as data obtained from participating in a large research council funded project in Australia examining the significance of everyday learning at work. I contend that what counts as learning at work and the way workplace learning is counted (or assessed) is not necessarily the same for employers, employees and academics. Furthermore, these three stakeholders cannot be understood as cohesive and unified groups. Thus, work based learning provides an important research site for examining the contemporary intersections between the institution of work and the institution of learning and the alignments and contestations around the design, delivery and assessment of work based learning. It cannot be assumed that the interests of these three stakeholders are necessarily always in alignment and indeed it may be the recognition of differences both between and within these groups that contribute to productive intersections and the production of new knowledge.

The contribution of a Foucauldian approach to theorising everyday learning at work

Negotiating the text: learning at work

Analysing assessment practice in higher education: how useful is the summative/formative divide as a tool?

Download

An exploration of teleworker-manager relationships

Constructing 'the workplace learner'subject

... Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982; Gane & Johnson, 1993; Gordon, 1991; Mills, 1997; Patton, 199... more

Everyday learning in a public sector workplace: The embodiment of managerial discourses

Management Learning, 2012

This article uses a Foucauldian conceptualization of processes of subjectification to examine the... more This article uses a Foucauldian conceptualization of processes of subjectification to examine the everyday learning of a manager in and through their talk about work. A Foucauldian poststructuralist approach draws attention to the discursive mechanisms whereby people are turned into and turn themselves into subjects. This process is theorized by Foucault as the interplay of technologies of power with technologies of the self (Rose, 1996, 1999a). This perspective provides an account of subjectivity as integrally interrelated with power and knowledge, thereby challenging a prevailing view in much of the organizational learning and workplace learning literature of subjectivity as autonomous and essential. A Foucauldian perspective enables power to be introduced into accounts of everyday learning at work but in a way that avoids reproducing a top-down and monolithic view of power. Importantly, it provides the analytic space for re-presenting workplace learners as active in the ongoing n...

Making the Global Studio sustainable: project update

Over the past three years the School of Design at Northumbria University has been experimenting w... more

Special issue on lived experience, learning, community activism and social change

Studies in the Education of Adults

Introduction: Opposites, Intersections, Turns and Other Imaginative Possibilities

Bloomsbury Academic eBooks, 2022

Practising a Feminist Aesthetic Imaginary: Creating Moments of Equality When Researching Sensory Ways of Knowing Homecare

Feminism, Adult Education and Creative Possibility, 2022

Enacting Equality

Power and Possibility, 2019

Download

Community-based learning and social movements: Popular education in a populist age