Seminar by Professor Tara Fenwick (University of Stirling) 'Professional responsibility and professionalism: a sociomaterial examination'

Issues of professional responsibility and professionalism are invoked frequently by concerned policy makers and a nervous public alike. In education, critical circles have grappled with the familiar disturbing representations and prescriptions that continue to circulate in the name of improving quality and responsibility. Alongside these perspectives, various approaches that we might call ‘sociomaterial’ have been attracting interest in educational research, working upwards from the difficult, messy and highly complex material dynamics of everyday practice – the ‘matter’ of the matter.  I am interested in what insights these sociomaterial approaches might bring to questions of responsibility. How can we understand professional responsibility, if it is a ‘mattered’ and relational enactment? What practices of professional responsibility are suggested through such an approach? In this presentation I will examine changing social and material enactments of professional responsibility within the general undermining of professional work, knowledge and authority. I suggest particular governing regimes that appear to be wreaking important changes in the expectations and moral imperatives constituting professional responsibility.  Then, I turn to everyday practices of responsibility that professionals can and do employ. These are strategies that may knit practitioners, professional educators and communities into more affirmative possibilities – hopefully avoiding both the naïve idealism and inflated prescription that often seep into existing discourses of professionalism and professional responsibility.