with a little help from Foucault

I have spent the morning at work going through our area's Quality Assurance Manual in preparation for Thursday when I meet with the QA officer to make sure what we do in running our program is reflected in the processes in the Manual. At the moment it very much isn't and with a potentially disruptive restructure in the offing we are trying to get things tied down. As well as the delightfully dry language of the manual I have also had the opportunity to go into the institution's policies to check a few things. I managed to resist reading through the "Policy on Policies" (that is not a joke) but did actually find some useful things in the Assessment of Coursework Policy that we can transfer. It seems the key with policy is to be as broad as possible while allowing for every specific eventuality. I don't know, I'm not a policy maker but I'm sure one could write a fascinating critical discursive analysis of contemporary policy and management documents with a little help from Foucault. I shall resist that temptation.

I am also wondering if the fact I now have a headache could in any way at all be related to the morning's reading material.

I am now engaged in a much more interesting task - tidying out my filing cabinet of 8 years accumulated readings and journal articles and compiling them into some sort of final library. Alas, I find myself using the dreaded endnote...but only for compiling an alphabetical list of titles. I am also enjoying preparing a pile of readings for the shredder, of many of the obscure, irrelevant and intensely theoretical readings that were of no use at all, but were continually supplied to me in an insistent manner by my original supervisor.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing.