Are there any sociologist mners?

[Molesworth]

And if so can I pick your brains about something please pretty please?

hijack away I don't mind!

Yes I have googled and I have read some interesting journal articles and so on, but none of the ones I have come across quite answer my question. I suppose what I want to know is whether there's something in Bourdieu's framework that is fundamentally incompatible with Foucault's

I don't feel worthy to be on the same page with you OM

Your research topic sounds absolutely fascinating (this subject sets my mind on fire - in a good way)

Can I be nosey and ask what the interdisciplinary course is about?

It's a masters in Development Studies.

Sorry I can't help with your OP. I don't think they are incompatible, are they? Anyway, if I were marking an undergraduate essay that tried to make links of this sort, I'd give it a good mark out of sheer gratitude that you've actually tried to think for yourself, rather than just paraphrasing someone else's ideas!

That's reassuring!

I'm basing the essay on the idea of governmentality (it's about 'place' as a marker of difference and identity). Bourdieu's concepts would be useful too, but I wondered whether it would be some sort of horrible academic faux pas to chuck him into the mix with Foucault. It does seem to me that the idea of habitus is not so very different to Foucault's subject positions. Unless I have misunderstood it. WHY isn't there more time for reading?!!! aaaargh

But why not compare them, or draw on what's insightful from each of them? They don't have to belong to different football teams, do they? It's often worthwhile to start with an intellectual problem, and see how one can address it by drawing on ideas from different people, rather than starting with X's idea and comparing it with Y's (my interdisciplinary bias coming out here).

This is what I have done - drawn on Bourdieu where he seems particularly relevant without making links between him and Foucault at all, and frankly with a 1500 word limit there isn't the space for a great deal of exploration without straying from the point. So this question is more to satisfy my own curiosity than for the purposes of the assignment!

Even better - a student who thinks beyond the essay. Rarer than hen's teeth, IME!

oh we're all like this at the ou

Note on an ambiguity in the analysis: under the rubric ?what is good? two sorts of subjectivities are included: the cognitive beleif in what is good, and the motivational orientation of what is good. Thus, it is not entirely clear whether the bourgeois value in competitiveness is being treated mainly as a value/norm or as a personality/character structure, or both. As I indicated, I think it is useful to distinguish ideological and cultural practices precisely in these terms: subjection/qualification thus involves both the creation of a set of beliefs and dispositions (compare this to Bourdieu?s concept of habitus as a cultural embedded pattern of dispositions). This distinction is espceially important for understanding the kinds of contradictions which make pogressive change possible: the distinction between the character-structure and cognitive-structure aspect of values/norms reveals potential contradictions between the kind of people we are and the kind of people we?d like to be.
This is important, for example, in struggles over sexism/made domination on the left, in which men genuinely believe that it is bad to be competitive/aggressive in discussions, but have difficulty in not acting that way.

This from: www.ssc.wisc.edu/~wright/SOC621/lecture%2023%202005.pdf