By Cameron Miranda-Radbord

Walk to Simcoe Hall, arrive at 9:10am – late, because administration doesn’t function on UofT time. Listen to financial update. Ask questions. Fight a losing battle against schoolwork that could have been done last night. 

I approached my ethnography of Accessibility Services from what I consider a unique standpoint – both “below” the mid-level administrators running the program in the hierarchy of formal university power in that I am a student, and “above” them in that I am also one of a few students to sit as members of the University’s Governing Council. I put “above” and “below” in quotes because of course there is more nuance than this – I am a student researcher who wields whatever power the platform this class provides to critically assess and document Student Life, and as a Governor I often feel as though, despite my best efforts, I am a token student rather than any actual authority. 

At the beginning of the class, we read Professor Li’s “Foucault Foments Fieldwork at the University” – the course was designed to make, as she wrote, “the familiar university world strange”. (Li 227) For me, thinking about power and subjectivity in the University had always been parallel to the Foucault I invariably encounter in my Sexual Diversity Studies classes – whereas the French scholar existed in a nebulous world of scholarly theory, power at UofT was plainly present in the black-and-white policies I would review or enforce as a student representative on Governing Council, or the University Tribunal, or whatever other bodies a bizarre and possibly masochistic interest in governance compelled me to join.  To me, the University was a site of what Foucault would label sovereign power – draconian academic discipline policies under which students would see their ability to study revoked for years, or dining hall regulations that, if administration were to be believed, would bankrupt the school if even slightly loosened. Frankly, I looked toward documenting the effects of University policy through an ethnography with some trepidation. In many cases, subjectivity did seem to be imposed unilaterally by administration, “the man”, on students – a straight line could be drawn from university policy to suffering on the part of my peers. 

Yet after reading “Foucault Foments…” I felt more optimistic about my ability to draw interesting conclusions about power as it related to Student Life. My own positionality emphasized the presence of nuance: I was hard pressed to categorize both my relationship to Student Life as a student researcher and a student government firmly into any of Foucault’s forms of power. So, while it was difficult to ignore the sovereign and disciplinary power that exists in the spaces I inhabit as a student, I was inspired to make my familiar world a little stranger and pay attention to the biopolitical power that exists much more subtly than “the man” at Simcoe Hall.

Works Cited

Li, Tania Murray. 2023. “Foucault Foments Fieldwork at the University.” In Philosophy on Fieldwork: Case Studies in Anthropological Analysis, edited by Nils Bubandt and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer, 214-30. Abingdon: Routledge.