How many folds does it take to make a dispositif? The concept of Dispositif in Michel Foucault and Sueli Carneiro

Abstract

This text articulates childhood memories lived on the banks of the São Francisco River with philosophical reflections on conceptual construction in educational research. The image of paper canoes, folded with effort and affection, becomes a central metaphor for thinking of concepts as unstable, marked, and mobile productions. Inspired by authors such as Deleuze, Guattari, Veiga-Neto, Foucault, and Sueli Carneiro, the text questions the pursuit of conceptual stability and proposes a philosophical approach that values the folding and unfolding of ideas within specific historical and political contexts. Drawing on Foucault, the concept of the “dispositif” is unfolded as a heterogeneous arrangement of knowledge, practices, and norms that shape subjectivities and operate power relations. Sueli Carneiro contributes by tearing and reinscribing the dispositif from the ground of raciality, introducing the “raciality dispositif” as an operator of exclusion and maintenance of whiteness as the norm. Thus, the text proposes a philosophy of the fold: learning to tear and remake concepts, as one folds a canoe, like someone navigating through the murky waters of memory and oppression, in search of new directions for existence, subjectivity, and research.