From Confinement to Attachment: Michel Foucault on the Rise of the School

This article develops a Foucauldian account of the rise of the modern school, on the basis of a thorough examination of all references to education in Foucault's work. It analyses the seventeenth-century origins of mass schooling and traces its development up to the nineteenth century. It identifies several overlapping stages in this multifaceted and largely contingent development, particularly a fundamental shift from a negative to a positive conception of the school. This Foucauldian understanding of the rise of schooling as a disciplinary technology suggests that an initial focus on the exclusion or confinement of disorderly groups was gradually superseded by a focus on the inclusion or “attachment” of diverse individuals and on the development of their potential. It concludes by cautioning against over-simplistic applications of Foucault's work to the field of education.     

Implementing Spatial Data Analysis Software Tools in R

This article reports on work in progress on the implementation of functions for spatial statistical analysis, in particular of lattice/area data in the R language environment. The underlying spatial weights matrix classes, as well as methods for deriving them from data from commonly used geographical information systems are presented, handled using other contributed R packages. Since the initial release of some functions in 2001, and the release of the spdep package in 2002, experience has been gained in the use of various functions. The topics covered are the ingestion of positional data, exploratory data analysis of positional, attribute, and neighborhood data, and hypothesis testing of autocorrelation for univariate data. It also provides information about community building in using R for analyzing spatial data.     

Interview with Stephen J. Pyne

Born in California in 1949, reared and educated in Arizona, Pyne earned his bachelor's degree in English at Stanford University and his master's and doctoral degrees in American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Pyne has written about fire on earth as none did before him. He has fought fires on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, collected a unique library on how different cultures have used and misused fire in the past, and consulted on fire management for many agencies throughout the world. He has published seven books, three monographs, fourteen reports, and over fifty articles and essays. A MacArthur Fellow from 1988 to 1993, Pyne is a professor of American Studies at Arizona State University West. He and his wife, Sonja Sandberg, were married in 1977 and have two daughters. They live in Glendale, Arizona, where this interview was conducted in September 1994 by Roger Adelson.