| Concepts in Discourse Analysis | |
| Discursive formation | Patterns of regularity between objects, types of statements, concepts,
or thematic choices. For example, “where one can find a regularity (an order, correlations, positions and functionings, transformations)”Foucault, 1972, p. 38). |
|---|---|
| Discursive strategies | Discourses work to normalize certain subjectivities and exclude others. Strategies of normalization and exclusion may be recognized as comparing, ranking, hierarchizing and dividing (Foucault, 1995). |
| Discursive effects | This is where power/knowledge come together. The effects of discourse are concerned with who gains power through discourses and the implications of this for the reproduction of unequal relations of power. Attending to the power effects of discourse in this study involves asking who benefits from mothering discourses in literacy advice, who or what is left out or marginalized in literacy advice? What are the possible implications of this? |
| Analytic lenses | |
| Feminist post-structural theories of mothering |
Mothering is seen as a socially constructed practice, shaped by the dominant patriarchal system of social organization. But women do not experience this system in the same way, there is no “universal” or “essential” subject that is Mother. This tension is captured, and can be productively analysed by distinguishing between the institution of motherhood, and the experience of mothering (Rich, 1976; Arnup, 1996; O’Reilly, 2003). |
| Mothering and literacy as socially situated practices | This links mothering and literacy as two related social practices. Mothers (as well a fathers, caregivers, and children) may be seen to mediate institutionalized ideals of “what counts” as good mothering, and “ideal’ literacy from their local cultural and material contexts, including the “habitus” that shapes everyday mothering and literacy practices. |