Session Information
SES G 04, Paper Session
Paper Session
Contribution
Our choices of approaches, theories and methodologies affect our understandings of policy making and our ability to engage with the worlds we study. Theories can be thought of as providing ‘modes of ordering’ (Law, 1994) disposing us towards reaching certain understandings, asking certain questions, observing certain events, and reaching certain conclusions rather than others. Ontological assumptions affect whether or not entities are seen as discrete and discernible, and therefore measurable; whether cause and effect can be clearly established; and whether events can be predicted. Epistemological ideas about the possibility of objective knowledge determine the confidence with which researchers might evaluate data.
Several theories and models of policy making and critique have emerged over time. These may be broadly classified as rational-realist approaches, which focus on effectiveness and efficiency and position the critic as scientist, and discursive-interpretivist approaches that position the critic as deconstructionist. At this time, a conjuncture of circumstances – a focus on ‘outcome’ measures, the climate of accountability, advances in statistical science – are producing understandings that promote a separation between science and politics in education policy. Policy makers are seeking to use scientific rather than political or ideological motivations to identify and solve education policy issues. Emphasising the use of ‘evidence’, in particular statistical evidence based on large-scale testing and other surveys, education policy makers are relying upon numerical accounts that appear value-free and prejudice-free.
Critics are speaking back to these rational-realist approaches to policy making either in its own terms (by questioning the validity of the data, for instance, or the legitimacy of the conclusions and policy solutions and actions) or through deconstruction, particularly using the notion of governmentality, to show how policy makers constrain discourses and determine what is thinkable through regimes of discursive and other forms of control. Both these types of critique have their uses and limitations. The former is limited by its acceptance of science as apolitical and neutral. Whilst the deconstructionists are sensitive to the constructed nature and the limits of policy knowledge, the ‘governmentality’ approach appears to fault the very act of governance, offering no viable alternatives for how we might ‘do’ education policy better. As Trevor Gale puts it, ‘it is no longer sufficient for education researchers to simply expose the power/knowledge relations of policy... we also need to engage with policy in its making; to develop a theory of and active politics for policy engagement.’ (Gale, 2006)
Can ‘policy as assemblage’ offer a productive way for such an engagement? And importantly, can it help the critic to move from critiquing from the sidelines to actively interfering in policy making? Using the notion of policy as assemblage (DeLanda, 2006; Deleuze & Guattari, 1988; Latour, 2005), I explore how policy-makers’ understandings of the education world emerge as an assemblage of material, symbolic and conceptual resources. I then examine how such an understanding might make it possible for the critic to intervene, to counter narratives of singularity, to work with difference and to make policy problems more manageable and respond to them better.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Berg, M., & Mol, A. (1998). Differences in medicine. : unraveling practices, techniques, and bodies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. DeLanda, M. (2006). A New Philosophy of Society - Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London: Continuum. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). A thousand plateaus : capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Athlone Press. Gale, T. (2006). Towards a theory and practice of policy engagement: higher education research policy in the making. Australian Educational Researcher, 33(2), 1-14. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Law, J. (1994). Organising Modernity. Oxford, UK & Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell. Law, J. (2007). Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics, version of 25th April 2007. from http://www.heterogeneities.net/publications/Law-ANTandMaterialSemiotics.pdf Mol, A. (2002). The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham: Duke University Press.
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