The Politics of Incompetence

Incompetence is not an objective state lacking competence nor a kind of deficiency that needs to be filled. Rather, it is a constructed state that is productive, working in tandem with its opposite, competence. Perception of incompetence/competence is what Michel Foucault (1977) calls a technology of normalization that pushes individuals to aspire to follow a shared norm, while hierarchically differentiating individuals according to their proximity to the aspired norm. The notion of incompetence is thus productive in that it turns individuals into specific kinds of subjects (Foucault 1977). The Politics of Incompetence: Learning Language, Relations of Power, and Daily Resistance further investigates other productive processes around the perception of incompetence specifically through its intersections with various ideologiesacademic achievement, teacher-student hierarchy, native speaker ideology, normative unit thinking, and privilege of vulnerabilityas such intersections generate new knowledge, new reflection on ones assumptions and privilege, new space for marginalized language, and more. This volume opens up a new area of studyproductive cultural politics of incompetenceby focusing on language learning in diverse contexts: Japanese-as-a-Second-Language classrooms in US colleges, Italian language tourism in Italy, and indigenous Mori language revitalization at an Aotearoa/New Zealand school.