Education in neoliberal governmentality: transgression as a method in teaching-research

Abstract

This article aims to discuss, drawing on Foucauldian studies, the possibilities of teaching-research from a transgressive perspective within the current context of neoliberal governmentality in education. To this end, it develops a theoretical problematization based on Foucault’s writings and their reinterpretations, engaging with the concept of governmentality and its discursive force in the present time. Subsequently, it distinguishes the governmental critique proposed by liberalism from the discursive dissemination subjected to neoliberal rationality. Understanding neoliberalism as a governmental rationality that generalizes competition and entrepreneurial logic to all spheres of social life, the article analyzes its implications in the field of Education. Acknowledging the complexity of knowledge–power–subject relations, the text discusses interactions, resistances, and hybridizations within neoliberal governmentality from a transgressive teaching-research perspective. The article conceives the educational process not as a field of cause-and-effect certainties determined by macropolitics, but as a space of contact among different discursive forces that interact with the curriculum. Finally, it highlights transgression as a method for subverting teaching, focusing on counter-conducts as pathways to new possibilities of being, saying, and doing within didactic experimentation.