Subjects, networks and positions: Thinking educational guidance differently

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which framings drawn from post-structuralism can help to inform the understanding of guidance practices. In particular, it draws upon the later work of Foucault and Actor-Network Theory to question the centrality of the humanistic subject predominant within discourses of contemporary guidance and raise issues of power, identity and artefacts in guidance practices. Through these we suggest that guidance can be reframed as a socio-technical web of spatialised knowledge-building practices within wider actions at a distance in the ordering of the social.