Abstract
In this chapter I explore the constitution of intelligible and unintelligible subjects via discourses around student aspirations. Firstly I provide an analysis of a political focus on aspirations from a Butlerian point of view. Secondly, employing the example of an aspirations programme in a secondary school in England, I reveal moments where unintelligible subjects are constituted. In this analysis, female students, mainly Muslims, are intelligible to their (mostly white, non-Muslim) teachers only through a raced lens as passive and subservient to their families, and thus the opposite of the neoliberal ideal of agentic and individualistic. Students’ displays of collective agency and decision-making serve only to confirm their unintelligibility as successful neoliberal subjects because agency is defined as individual in neoliberal discourses.
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Chadderton, C. (2018). Aspirations and Intelligible Subjects. In: Judith Butler, Race and Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73365-4_6
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