Between astonishment and dust: archives in educational research

Abstract

This article proposes a reflection on the notion of archives in the work of Michel Foucault, highlighting two complementary movements in its conceptual formulation. On the one hand, archives appear as a monument, the result of an archaeological gesture that destabilizes the linearity of history and interrogates regimes of knowledge through the conditions of emergence of discourse. In this sense, discontinuity, rarity, and the materiality of what is said are foregrounded as elements that challenge totalizing narratives and promote attentive listening to the forces that traverse and sustain knowledge. On the other hand, the poetic dimension of archives is emphasized, understood as an investigative operation driven by astonishment, curiosity, and openness to chance, an effect of the dust of time and of what is found in the interstices of documents. This perspective suggests attentive listening to deviations, traces, and to what escapes, resists, and insists on remaining. Finally, the idea of “prying,” as evoked by Foucault, is outlined as a possible methodological gesture for research in education, especially in the face of the recurrence of ready-made questions and answers and the urgency of interrogating the ways in which knowledge is produced, legitimized, and circulated. This is perhaps less a conclusion than a wager still in the making: to be struck by the dust of archives and their traces of lives, marks of time, and spaces of suspension, as a way of opening breaches in the hurried logic of the present.