Preliminary Material -- Reviewing the Literature -- Critiquing and “Moving Beyond” Extant Canadian Research -- Conceptualizing and Analyzing -- Academic Freedom, Social Relations, and the Regime of Truth -- Academic Freedom and the Rules of Inclusion and Balance -- The Singularity of Academic Freedom -- The Social Programme of Academic Freedom and the Possibilities for Action within It -- The Canadian Association of University Teachers’ Policy Statement on Academic Freedom -- Resources Used in Chapter 4 -- Referencing -- Indexing.

In this unique study, emerging higher education leader and policy expert Kenneth D. Gariepy takes a Foucauldian genealogical approach to the study of the intellectually “free” subject through the analysis of selected academic freedom statement-events. Assuming academic freedom to be an institutionalized discourse-practice operating in the field of contemporary postsecondary education in Canada, a specific kind of cross-disciplinary, historico-theoretical research is conducted that pays particular attention to the productive nature and effects of power-knowledge. The intent is to disrupt academic freedom as commonsensical “good” and universal “right” in order to instead focus on how it is that the academic subject emerges as free/unfree to think—and therefore free/unfree to be—through particular, effective, and effecting regimes of truth and strategies of objectification and subjectification. In this way, the author suggests how it is that academic freedom operates as a set of systemically agonistic practices that might only realize a different economy of discourse through the contingent nature of the very social power that produces it.

Description based on print version record.