A conceptualisation of resistance to global educational prescriptions through the lenses of Michel Foucault

This paper proposes an inquiry of Foucault’s approach of subjectivation, extending it to the Southern institutional actors engaged in ‘relations of prescription’ and individual subjects in the educational field. It questions their reactions to the implementation of global educational prescriptions, with a special focus on the resistance practices. The theoretical extension proposed is based on the complementary association of Foucault’s works on ‘resistance’ (1978, 1982, 1984a, 1984b, 1990) with the theoretical models of Hirschman (1970), Bajoit (1988) and Le Bourhis and Lascoumes (2014). It enables the development of a typology of forms of reactions to global educational prescriptions, going from a variety of resistance practices to conformity attitudes.