Archaeological, Alethurgical, and Dispositif Analysis: Discourse Studies on Higher Education in Poland from a Post-Foucauldian Perspective

Abstract

At the present stage of the reception of Foucault’s ideas, various theoretical and methodological trends coexist, within which the concepts of Michel Foucault are used fruitfully in empirical research. One of them is discourse studies understood as an inter- and transdisciplinary research area. This article distinguishes and describes three post-Foucauldian strategies of discourse analysis, the combined use of which in one research project is a proposal to integrate concepts scattered in Foucault’s various works. The strategies distinguished (archaeological, alethurgical, and dispositif) are characterized by the different analytical categories, understanding of discourse, and its relations with knowledge and power. The article presents selected results of the complementary use of concepts such as knowledge formation, alethurgy, confession, or the dispositif in the empirical research on the reform of higher education in Poland.