The genealogy and the research in education: absurd children as blind zones in the social forces diagram or in the power/knowledge devices

Abstract

The essay addresses how genealogical research can contribute to make visible, in the educational processes, blind zones in any diagram of social forces or dispositives of knowledge and power in which children can exert resistance. We use literature to exemplify the strength of children’s inventiveness. We discuss some dimensions of genealogical research: the examination of subjectivation processes; the analysis of the consistency plan and the chance of struggle; the discontinuous sense of history and the weight of tradition; researcher’s sensation of strangeness and attention; the facing of the effects of truth and its dismantling, aiming to escape, not power itself, but particular strategies of the relations of knowledge and power.