Showing papers in "Critical Studies in Education in 2007"

Knowing one's place: space, theory, education

Abstract: In the latter parts of the twentieth century social theory took a spatial turn, one that education has yet to undertake, at least in any concerted way. Nonetheless, this paper aims to demonstrate that there could be, and perhaps is, a more decided turn towards unraveling spatial questions underpinning educational processes and practices. In this paper, we briefly set out the key ‘trajectories’ of space in social theory. We also examine what happens when spatial theories ‘escape’ traditional disciplinary confines and ask, in a rudimentary way: to what extent education is education any longer when spatial dimensions are added to its fields of concern? This paper concludes by ‘mapping’ various spatial foci in critical educational studies.

Converging us softly: how intergovernmental organizations promote neoliberal educational policy

Abstract: In recent years, international organizations (IOs) and, more specifically, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) have played an important role in educational policy‐making at the national level. These organizations encourage world change and promote particular ideologies through a set of complex actions and policy recommendations that exploit growing world interconnectedness. This paper discusses some of the ways in which IGOs are affecting educational policy‐making at the national level and the ways in which national Governments are engaging with IGOs in order to develop their educational policies. The paper separates the manner in which IGOs influence national educational policy in a movement towards global ‘soft’ convergence by creating four distinct constructs through which we can better understand how IGOs such as the World Bank, the OECD, and even UNESCO are able to perpetuate a neoliberal agenda through global educational policy influence.

The emergent structure of feeling: what does it mean for critical educational studies and research?

Abstract: Critical research in education is not what it used to be. It must now engage with a differently structured and globalized world with different social and material conditions for its peoples. This paper sets out to name the contemporary structure of feeling in which education researchers now work, particularly in terms of what now is to be the object of their educational theorizing and research and what are to be the intellectual resources brought to bear on such activity. The intention is to open up debate, recognizing that there are no easy answers and yet acknowledging the need for answers to be attempted. It is, therefore, an invitation premised on an optimism of the will to complement legitimate pessimism of the intellect. It concludes that a critical engagement with these matters demands a modernist/postmodernist, reconstructive/deconstructive reflexivity in the mobilizing of a new sociological imagination applied across the broad spectrum which is educational research.

Foucault, biopolitics and the birth of neoliberalism

Abstract: In his governmentality studies in the late 1970s Foucault held a course at the College de France on the major forms of neoliberalism, examining the three theoretical schools of German ordoliberalism, the Austrian school characterized by Hayek, and American neoliberalism in the form of the Chicago school. Among Foucault's great insights in his work on governmentality was the critical link he observed in liberalism between the governance of the self and government of the state—understood as the exercise of political sovereignty over a territory and its population. Liberal modes of governing are distinguished by the ways in which they utilize the capacities of free acting subjects and, consequently, modes of government differ according to the value and definition accorded the concept of freedom. This paper first briefly discusses Foucault's approach to governmentality, before detailing and analysing Foucault's account of German ordoliberalism, as a source for the ‘social market economy’, and the EU's ‘social...

Going critical: the problem of problematizing knowledge in education studies

Abstract: This paper raises the issue of what it is to be ‘critical’ in education studies and in social theory more generally. It argues that this idea has for a long time been associated with forms of social constructionism and sociological reductionism. These understand the idea that knowledge is social in terms of reducing it to the experiences and interests of the groups whose perspective knowledge is held to represent. In this way knowledge is conflated with knowing. This approach has the consistent problem of collapsing into a relativism that denies of possibility of objectivity in knowledge or an epistemologically independent basis for knowledge claims. This paper offers an alternative view based in critical realism that attempts to provide non‐relativist, though fallible, grounds for knowledge claims that restore a sense of autonomy to fields of knowledge production by understanding the sociality of knowledge in terms of emergent materialism. In this manner, the argument provides an alternative to both soci...

Neoliberal technologies of subject formation: a case study of the Duke of Edinburgh's Award scheme

Abstract: The hegemony of neoliberalism as an economic and Governmental rationality on a global scale is well documented How it has come to be that way, and how its relevance is upheld is a complex theoretical and historical–empirical question This article contributes to the discussion by examining the ways in which neoliberal discourse enters into the production of subjectivity and comes to operate at the level of desire While subject formation takes place in multiple and contradictory ways, and within and across a multiplicity of social sites, the article focuses on the popular Duke of Edinburgh's Award scheme as a technology of neoliberal subjectification The article analyses how neoliberal discourse manifests itself in the Award's promotional material and programme and, drawing on qualitative semi‐structured interviews, how the Award scheme is taken up by students in a prestigious Australian private girls' school

Education, neoliberalism and the consumer citizen: after the golden age of egalitarian reform

Abstract: In this paper I attempt to explore the implications for education policy arising from aspects of Third Way political thought and its troubled relation to neoliberalism. In particular, the implications for equality arising from Third Way reforms to secondary education are considered. The limits of contestation that mark out the centre ground of UK politics have become increasingly consolidated around neoliberal ideas and principles. I briefly outline a ‘golden age’ of egalitarian reform and its displacement by the emergence of neoliberalism. Neoliberal restructuring is implicated in the emergence of the market state, the establishment of the relation of the individual to the state as one of consumer citizen, the growth of individualism, and a likely increase in competition to fend off downward social mobility. The paper concludes that the future compass for reforms aimed at reducing educational inequality now looks increasingly restricted and narrowed.

All the lonely people: the struggle for private meaning and public purpose in education

Abstract: This paper argues that the ‘new world order’ achieved at the end of the cold war is in crisis, not generated from the threat of ‘war’ between Christian and Islamic worlds but from within western societies, specifically from the growing commercialisation and ‘privatisation’ of social and community life which has uncoupled the systems and activities of society from the collective and individual purposes of people who comprise that society. Drawing on interview data (life and work histories) from three cohorts (1950s-1960s, 1970s-1980s, 1990s to present) of US and Canadian teachers, the paper identifies evidence of this crisis in the fields of culture, education and public service (e.g. in the turning away from public and towards private pursuits as the motivation for one's ‘life's work’ or ‘passion’). It also looks to these fields in the search for answers to what motivates people and sponsors their meaning-making, specifically whether privatisation should be our only route to human meaning. The paper concl...

"Neoliberal Spatial Technologies": On the Practices of Educational Policy Change.

Abstract: This paper explores the spatial dimensions of neoliberalism, in relation to educational policy change in the inner‐city of Sydney, Australia. It offers a response to Peck and Tickell's challenge that studies of neoliberalism are often undertaken as discrete macro‐ or micro‐analyses without attention to the links between, and across, these scales. The paper posits the notion of ‘neoliberal spatial technologies’, a bricolage of neoliberalism, governmentality and relational space, to contribute to cross‐scalar understandings of neoliberalism in relation to inner‐city educational policy change. An adumbrated analysis is presented of the practices surrounding the outcome of educational policy change in inner‐Sydney. The paper concludes that these practices, drawing on discourses of neoliberalism and relational space, constitute particular students as possible neoliberal educational subjects.

Knowledge and policy: research and knowledge transfer1

Abstract: Knowledge transfer (KT) is the emergent ‘third sector’ of higher education activity—alongside research and teaching. Its commercialization origins are evidenced in its concerns to extract maximum value from research, and in the policy push to make research‐based knowledge trapped in disciplinary silos more responsive to the growing information and knowledge needs of various users. In addition KT maps closely against knowledge economy assumptions as effective KT is believed to provide competitive system advantage. Indeed the promotion and organisation of KT may be a key policy development in aligning higher education more closely with the knowledge economy. KT thus raises a great many issues for researchers in the social sciences: this paper considers some of these issues, drawing on recent research on the implementation of KT in universities in Scotland.

Decentred education: suggestions for framing a socio‐spatial research agenda

Abstract: This paper explores the trend towards a decentred social organization of learning that has become evident over the last 30–40 years. This is illustrated by the shifting imagery of education, from the red brick school to dispersed learning networks, or ‘learning bubbles’, that constitute new learning spaces. In the context of our large funded research project that aims to assess new learning spaces, we problematize this decentring of education and consider theoretical social and spatial resources that help us to understand this shift in the social organization of learning. We draw these insights together as suggestions for framing a socio‐spatial research agenda and the key themes that help us to interrogate decentring and the emergence of new learning spaces, how these trends are manifest in educational practices, and the implications for affective learning, learners and their life chances.

Durkheim and Vygotsky's theories of knowledge and their implications for a critical educational theory

Abstract: This paper is part of the ongoing work of the author and others in developing a social realist theory of knowledge for educational studies. It contrasts Durkheim and Vygotsky's theories and why both are important for educational theory. It begins by emphasizing the similarities between them; that knowledge has to be understood in terms of its historical development in human societies and that the acquisition of knowledge is the primary goal of formal education. In contrasting the ideas of the two writers the paper develops the distinction between ‘structure’ for Durkheim and ‘activity’ for Vygotsky and explores some of the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. It then examines how the ideas of the two writers have been developed by their leading followers in sociology and psychology‐ giving particular consideration to the work of Basil Bernstein and Yrjo Engestrom. It concludes with some broader issues concerning theories of knowledge in educational studies.

Disentangling Chile's authoritarian neoliberalism and its effects: the downfall of public higher education and its implications for equitable access

Abstract: In recent decades, neoliberal reforms have spread across Latin America. Despite different accounts showing the adverse social impact of these reforms, what seems lacking are historical analyses of why and how neoliberal policies occurred in this region. For instance, there are only rare accounts of how dictatorships in the 1970s prepared the terrain for neoliberal reforms. A key instance of this regional process is presented in the dictatorship that ruled Chile from 1973–1990. Theoretically based on political ideas of human dignity and individual freedom, the pragmatics of Chilean neoliberalism were very repressive. This paper will address this tension and the impact of market‐driven policies on the public arena, particularly in higher education.

Governing by Network in Europe: Associations, Educational Research and Social Partnership.

Abstract: The coincident arrival of a European policy space in education and a European Educational Research Association [EERA], and their subsequent relation, will be the subject of this paper. EERA is a hybrid organization—it supports scientific networking, it is a social partner in EU policy, it is a first level social space for networking, and increasingly it is faced with acting in policy forums. It is scientific, public and professional but most of all, like most associations, especially those working across borders, it is unstable and voluntaristic. Establishing itself in a new policy landscape, a European Policy space rapidly emerging in higher education and research around it, and burdened with the pasts of its members—and its diversity of traditions and languages—is difficult enough. Yet it has to be examined against new theories of governance and the role of networks, which place associations in Europe in a very interesting role. The paper tends to the conclusion that either EERA or the theory fails to m...

‘Rolling back, rolling out’: exceptionalism and neoliberalism of the Spanish state

Abstract: In recent literature, there has been extensive work revolving around the process of neoliberalism, its implications for the unfolding of state spaces, and its dramatic impact on processes of policy production. Some of this literature offers a periodized trajectory of neoliberalization, by first discussing the consolidation of the Keynesian welfare state (KWS) in the 1950s and 1960s, its subsequent erosion in the 1970s and 1980s, and the restructuring and dramatic rescaling of the state in the 1990s. Utilizing examples of Spanish educational policy in the post‐Franco era, this paper explores some of the complex ways in which neoliberal pressures are impacting states situated outside these KWS templates.

The curriculum of the future. Ahead of its time

Abstract: Inevitably, questions will be posed about the justification for reviewing a book that was published in 1998. We might reflect that the contemporary relevance of a text is arguably more important than recency of publication. More specifically, I suggest that consideration should be given to the currency of the issues, concepts and the educational, economic and political contexts being addressed in the text, as well as those that have informed its development. Taking the latter point first, The curriculum of the future. From the ‘new sociology of education’ to a critical theory of learning necessarily takes us back to the 1970s, a time when Michael Young was in the midst of growth in the field of sociology of education. Those who have shared the challenges and rewards that come from engagement with Basil Bernstein’s work and who also possess a passion for curriculum, will reflect at how fortunate Young was to learn first hand from Bernstein that ‘there could (and should) be a sociology of curriculum’ (p. vii). Some 30 years on, The curriculum of the future serves as a worthy reminder of that, and of the extent to which since the 1970s, work emanating from the Institute of Education in London has continued to set directions for development of the field.