Foucault, technologies of the self and national identity

This paper is a part of a doctoral thesis which explores national identity construction by school children in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). Lower secondary school level (6-8 grades, 11-14 years) is the site where research takes place. The study is designed to examine the relationship between school children’s construction of national identity and their educational experience. An investigative critical case study in a secondary school in the TRNC is undertaken to explore such a relationship with a particular aim at revealing what sense of self this age-group of school children in Northern Cyprus have, how they place themselves in the immediate community and broader social and geo-political space and what factors contribute to the process of the construction of their national identification. The focus of the paper is on theoretical framing for inquiry, which is based on Foucault's program of investigation of how human beings are made subjects. The reading of Foucault which determines the focus of inquiry in this study conceptualizes Foucault’s historic-critical analyses of the constitution of the subject in terms of interrelated domains of structure and agency: human beings are shaped by anonymous structures, networks of knowledge, as well as institutional and other social structures, and human beings have capacity to modify existing constraints and their own behavior. I use Foucault's theorizing on the constitution of the subject, and particularly Foucault’s concept of technologies, to study how the process of national identity construction is revealed through the interplay of ‘technologies of domination’ (structural environment of the school children) and ‘technologies of the self’ (children’s individual behaviour in the context of schooling).