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Interrupting the Psy-Disciplines in Education pp 203–220Cite as

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‘How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?’ Troubling the Psy-gaze in the Qualitative Analysis and Representation of Educational Subjects’

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Abstract

My Ph.D. thesis aims to trouble hegemonic understandings of academic ‘underachievement’ by considering the complexity of the discourses that constitute primary school students’ academic subjectivities. It was apparent from a conversation with my thesis supervisors about the initial draft of an analysis chapter of an interview with one of my research participants, ‘Maria’, that despite my articulation of the poststructuralist underpinnings of the thesis, I had unreflexively defaulted to psychologising discourses in the analysis. This included engaging in the production of Maria’s biography as a singularly situated real story about her, through ‘triangulating’ her own, her teacher’s and her mother’s stories about her. Moreover, my own positionality in terms of how I engaged with Maria, the power relations between myself and her, and my motivation for conducting the interview, remained invisible and unchallenged. In this paper, I wrestle with the question of how we can know our research participants, and map the journey of ‘representing’ ‘Maria’ and the pitfalls that were encountered along the way.

‘The master, who at first appears to be “external” to the slave, reemerges as the slaves own’s conscience’ (Butler 1997, p. 3).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Newcastle, Newcastle, Australia

    Matthew Wilson-Wheeler

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  1. Matthew Wilson-Wheeler
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of People and Technology, Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark

    Eva Bendix Petersen

  2. Institute of Advanced Social Research and SPARG, University of Tampere, Tampere, Australia

    Zsuzsa Millei

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Wilson-Wheeler, M. (2016). ‘How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?’ Troubling the Psy-gaze in the Qualitative Analysis and Representation of Educational Subjects’. In: Bendix Petersen, E., Millei, Z. (eds) Interrupting the Psy-Disciplines in Education. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51305-2_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51305-2_12

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-137-51304-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-51305-2

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