SELECTED THESES ON THE CIRCUMPOLAR ARCTIC

Rather than accept contemporary patterns of individuality as natural and universal, sociologists need to problematise such patterns, and deconstruct the processes through which specific forms of individuality emerge. Particular forms of human individuality and subjectivity are historically constructed, as human beings experience and engage in social practices and relations. In societies such as ours, individuation is central to the constitution of human subjects. I conceptualize individuation as a process through which human beings become objectively knowable to others through distinctive biographies and personal characteristics, and subjectively known to themselves through habituated patterns of consciousness and practice. In this dissertation, I analyze adult education in the Kitikmeot region of the Northwest Territories as an organized field of intervention which individuated human subjects, and objectified their putative learning needs. My analysis has three main stages. First, I document the political-economic changes through which individuating educational practices became possible in the Kitikmeot. The disorganisation of aboriginal subsistence practices, and the construction of permanent settlements, wage economies, and plural administrative fields of intervention were the key political-economic changes. Second, I narrate the evolution of official discourses, administrative structures, and local programs through which adult education was actually constructed as a significant field of social relations. The construction of adult education was achieved through the emergence of 'cultural deprivation' and 'deficit learner' regimes of truth about the relationship between Inuit, adult education, and modernity, along with the emergence of specific administrative agencies responsible for organising and supervising adult education programs in Kitikmeot communities. Third, I analyze how adult educators' practices in the 1980s individuated adult basic education participants, and objectified those participants' learning needs. The cumulative weight of adult educators' administrative, evaluative, and pedagogical practices objectified students and learning needs, and inculcated a subjective sense of inadequate individuality among participating students.