Power, or rather the exercise of power through specialized disciplinary knowledges produced by modern institutions, remains poorly understood and dangerously obscure. Power individualizes and totalizes, sequesters us in myriad institutions such as schools and universities, habituates us to prevailing modes of economic production, and, through its specialized knowledges and disciplinary techniques, disassembles agentive individuals and reassembles docile bodies as compliant, governable populations. Power thus functions at the level of the body, both the individual and the social, and while always an important phenomenon of study, power, conceptualized as the embodiment of practices historically produced through disciplinary techniques, assumes even greater significance in the context of the existential crises created and manipulated through neoliberal globalization, resurgent authoritarianism, and militarism. Governmentality, or governmental rationalization, the emergence of which Foucault (2007) traces in Europe to the sixteenth century, accompanied the development of the modern nation-state, perhaps humankind’s most destructive sequestering institution, whose interests lie in developing and administering their resources, wealth, security, territory, and populations. Nation-states, formed through diffuse, overlapping, biopolitical institutional orders—psychiatric, legal, religious, economic, gender, sexual, racial, educational, medical, carceral—simultaneously administer life and eliminate threats to the social body (Foucault, 2003).

The effectuation of disciplinary power occurs in a broad field that Foucault (2015) characterized as a state of civil war between disciplinary institutions and those engaged in revolts of conduct against them. Power, to paraphrase Bernadette Baker (2001), is in perpetual motion, non-monolithic, constituted by and constitutive of multifarious overlapping institutions, and, perhaps most important, always contestable. Foucault’s historical inquiry into the emergence of the psychiatric and medical orders, the prison, and the production of sexuality and gender forces us to look skeptically at the simplistic assumption, perpetuated in most social institutions, including schools, that scientific and technical rationalization inevitably leads to progress or has yielded a world any more just, humane, or “civilized” than at any point in the past. As Carlson (2002) suggests, the myth of the inevitability of progress, whether technical or social progress, toward a more democratic and just society “has been substantially deflated”:

For one thing, progress never adequately delivered on what it promised. The good society, like President Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” had to be deferred indefinitely because other matters proved more pressing. The myth of progress also got mixed up with some very undemocratic politics in the twentieth century. In the name of progress, education and other public institutions have been brought under much greater top-down bureaucratic control, using corporate managerial models. (p. 195)

Foucault’s analysis of power certainly casts doubt on the commonsense myth of perpetual progress through social rationalization attributed to institutions of modernity. Overt ritualized public displays of power such as the public execution of the condemned, for example, have been largely reconstituted in the West as the “insidious, quotidian, habitual form of the norm” (Foucault, 2015, p. 240). The historic shift from power as force to disciplinary power-knowledges effected as “subtle tactics of the sanction” (Foucault, 2015, p. 6) has rendered power increasingly invisible. Disciplinary tactics have, in many instances, removed the effectuation of power from public view and relocated it behind institutional walls: the prison, the psychiatric hospital, and the school. As a result, significant political questions have also been removed from the field of political discourse and recast in the “ostensibly detached language of science, reason, normality, and common sense,” which conceals how institutions exercise power (Shore & Wright, 1999, p. 560). Perhaps most insidious, disciplinary tactics habituate individuals to embody institutional attitudes and practices, which become increasingly taken for granted, even sacrosanct, to the extent that many may have lost the capacity to question them.

In this book, I engage in curriculum inquiry to form a more complex understanding of social issues theorized in the historic production of technologies of disciplinary power effected as knowledges on bodies. I seek to contribute to the development of new synoptic texts in curriculum studies through which teachers can provoke and co-create historicized complicated conversations in their classrooms, open spaces in which they and their students reconstruct their understanding of themselves, and cultivate an ethic of self and social care through which they contribute to cultural, intellectual, and democratic life—projects of crucial importance to all humankind.