Opening Doors To Disruption: A Poststructural Deconstruction Of Community College Discourse

The purpose of this study is to disrupt damage-centered assumptions about community colleges by problematizing how power-knowledge relations work within the discursive practices of dominant community college discourse. As a post qualitative study, I plugged in Michel Foucault’s (1970, 1977, 1980, 1982) poststructural theories of power-knowledge, subjectivity, and discursive practices with community college discourse. A thinking with theory (Jackson & Mazzei, 2017) approach to inquiry allowed me to plug in Foucault’s theories, my analytical questions, and multiple texts such as television commentary, advertisements, job descriptions, and organizational publications. These analytical moves created assemblages of encounters and experiences that exposed the power-knowledge relations at work within the discursive practices of community college discourse and made visible how certain community college subjectivities (student, leader, and institution) have become normalized.