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Affective Governmentality pp 19–38Cite as

Pastoral Power and Governmental Subjectivities: An Analysis of a Teacher Recruitment Advertisement

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Part of the book series: Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education ((CSTE,volume 9))

Abstract

Advertisements commissioned by official ministries make ideal sites for investigating how media discourses are informed by state ideologies. Teacher recruitment advertisements, in particular, may be seen mobilising an ideologically charged vision of teacher professionalism that is at once reductive and productive. This chapter critiques the ideological discourses underlying the narrative representation of professional teacher identity in a Singapore teacher recruitment video advertisement entitled Mrs. Chong which features a caring teacher going out of her way to help an economically disadvantaged student and concludes with the romantic suggestion that the path to success stems from personal inspiration and determination. This chapter illustrates how neoliberal governmentality attempts to place the notion of care under an affective technology. Where the hardships of teaching are as its own rewards, the governmental representations suggest idiosyncratic caring engaging in a privatised form of social work that fails to question larger socio-political forces. The establishing of a critical space for the role of caring and emotions within education is also explored.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The Kuleshov effect originated from Lev Kuleshov’s experiment of editing in which three different scenes consisting of a plate of soup, a girl in a coffin, and a woman on a divan were paired with the expressionless face of an actor. While the same shot of the actor was used, the audiences perceived different expressions of hunger, sadness and desire, respectively.

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  1. National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Andrew Joseph Pereira

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  1. Andrew Joseph Pereira
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Pereira, A.J. (2019). Pastoral Power and Governmental Subjectivities: An Analysis of a Teacher Recruitment Advertisement. In: Affective Governmentality. Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education, vol 9. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7807-2_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7807-2_2

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