Thinking Tools

Abstract

In 1984, I moved to Paris to begin my undergraduate education at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po). Sciences Po offered a series of seminars ostensibly to help foreigners (including me at that time) pass the entrance exam. What I remember from these is a chain smoking ‘M. Thomas’ doing his utmost to convey the message that Sciences Po was an elite institution, that entering it was like entering a ‘gulag’ and that only the best would ‘survive’ (his expressions). I also recall finding M. Thomas and his universe rather bizarre. A few years later, this was no longer true. I looked at French education in a new way just as Iver Neumann (in this book) looked at women differently after working with fur-coats. But more significantly, I had become intensely aware of the (often inarticulate) hierarchies and power relations of practices.