Since the earliest marks on cave walls and stones to the digital images that permeate contemporary society, visual representations have long been central to the ways in which individuals and societies construct meaning and organize knowledge. Today, images have become central to the production and communication of knowledge; not only in books, newspapers, and magazines, but also in the official documents produced by state institutions and governmental agencies. Increasingly, educational institutions and government agencies employ visual tools through educational platforms and social media to communicate with the public. This shift, from a “world as told” to a “world as shown” (Kress, 2003), carries far-reaching political, social, cultural, and epistemological implications, not least in the field of education. 

Yet, the visual image – whether painted, photographed, or derived from statistical data – is not a neutral mirror of the world. Rather, it is a technology of representation, constructed, selected, and displayed with specific purposes in mind. These images are imbued with the norms, values, and rules of depiction that are socially, culturally, and historically situated (Jenks, 1995; Mirzoeff, 2016; Nóvoa, 2000). In this sense, they serve as mechanisms of seeing, knowing, and organizing the world that continuously (re-)shape what is visible, knowable, and governable.

Questions of what we see, how we see, and how we are educated to see (cf. Anderson & Dietrich, 2012; Foster, 1988)are directly related to questions of power and the politics of knowledge. What is revealed and what is obscured? Who decides what and who is worth depicting? What norms and rules underpin the production and the use of visual representations and what hierarchies and differences do they, in turn, naturalize? How do visuals affect the ways in which education policies are formulated, disseminated, perceived, and enacted? In essence, these questions call for a critical analysis of how the visual is co-constitutive of the making of education.

The last decades have been marked by a significant expansion of theoretical and methodological approaches in the study of education policy. However, as a consequence of the pronounced linguistic turn, the analytical focus has been on the verbal dimension. Although there has recently been an increased interest in understanding the role of numbers in shaping educational policy (e.g., Ball, 2015; Lindblad et al., 2018), visual images have not received much attention so far. This seems surprising given the central role that the visual and regimes of visuality play in contemporary societies. Today’s proliferation of visual images and surveillance techniques is not simply the result of technological progress but must be understood as an integral element of the apparatuses of power and knowledge, that fundamentally reconfigures the relationships between visibility, truth, and governance (cf. Foucault, 1991). They enhance the state’s capacity to register and monitor spaces, times, bodies and behaviors, while simultaneously producing new forms of legitimacy and new objects of governance. In other words, politics is not merely communicated through images and visual technologies; it is composed of them.

Against this background it seems crucial to understand the entanglement of the visual, visualities, and politics and to explore the technologies, institutions, and practices that make education visible and, thus, governable. As a first step toward this goal, this article presents a review of the existing literature that explores different types of visual imagery and/or employs visual methods to explore issues related to education policy and governance.

This study is part of a broader project that examines the entanglements of visual culture and education. The initial sample of nearly 500 research papers spans the history, sociology, policy, and everyday materialities of education, reflecting the diversity of research fields in which the visual operates as an object of inquiry and a constitutive element of scientific reasoning. From this data set, for the purposes of this paper, I wanted to select papers dealing more specifically with education policy, politics and governance. However, at this stage I encountered a dilemma. On the one hand, to study governance and politics is to engage with the production of gazes and visibilities – those ordered ways of seeing and being seen that inscribe the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion (Edenborg, 2017). From this vantage point, all studies of educational policy are implicitly studies of the visual, concerned with the regulation of what can be seen, known, and acted upon. On the other hand, research on visual culture in or of education cannot evade the issues of values and politics. In this sense, every study within the initial dataset could be read as relevant to the aim and scope of this paper. To avoid over-interpretation, I limited the dataset to papers that are published in journals devoted to education policy and governance (e.g., Journal of Education Policy) or that explicitly mention politics, policy, or governance in their title, abstract, or keywords. This strategy yielded 23 research articles and 1 book chapter, published between 2005 and 2024 which I carefully read and coded with focus on: (1) the theoretical and methodological approaches used, (2) the types of visuals (such as photographs, films, drawings, or diagrams) examined, (3) the aspects of educational governance explored through these visuals, and (4) the contributions each study made to the field. Inevitably, this selection is also a way of ordering the ‘archive’ (Foucault, 1972) that makes some knowledge visible over others by privileging explicit ways of reasoning about the visual and the governance of education.

The small number of selected publications speaks for itself: while visuals have come to the fore in education history and childhood studies, they remain unexplored in educational policy and governance. The visuals analyzed in the selected papers include data visualizations, such as graphs and statistical charts; dashboards and digital platforms that mediate learning and institutional processes; covers and illustrations accompanying policy documents; documentary films that narrate policy impacts; and media imagery that conveys cultural representations of education. Among the most influential theoretical and methodological approaches are those derived from Science and Technology Studies (STS), followed by visual or multimodal discourse analysis and historical and genealogical analysis. In response to the increased interest in understanding the role of numbers and the practices of datafication in educational governance, researchers are increasingly focusing on charts, graphs, and diagrams in educational governance, highlighting how they reconfigure individuals, nations, and institutions through visualized imaginaries of progress. These studies reveal how data visualizations forecast education’s future by extending past trends, embedding policy decisions within aestheticized narratives of rationalized progress and certainty (Madsen, 2024; Mikhaylova & Pettersson, 2024). Several studies explore how visuals, while ostensibly neutral, may function as technologies of exclusion (Berkovich & Benoliel, 2019; Estera & Shahjahan, 2019). By examining how political ideals, such as those of inclusion, are reflected in visual imagery, these studies reveal how visual and textual representations entangle with histories of racial, gendered, and cultural oppression, while promoting diversity and excellence. Taken together, these studies, though few in number, show how the entanglement of the visual and the political constitutes a particular regime of educational governance – one in which the visible and visibilities become a site of contestation, where power operates through the management of representations, and where the subject is permanently inscribed in the field of gazes.

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