The work of Michel Foucault has become a major resource for educational researchers seeking to understand how education makes us what we are. In this book, a group of contributors explore how Foucault’s work is used in a variety of ways to explore the ‘hows’ and ‘whos’ of education policy – its technologies and its subjectivities, its oppressions and its freedoms. The book takes full advantage of the opportunities for creativity that Foucault’s ideas and methods offer to researchers in deploying genealogy, discourse, and subjectivation as analytic devices. The collection as a whole works to makes us aware that we are freer than we think! This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Education Policy.
1. Participation as governmentality? The effect of disciplinary technologies at the interface of service users and providers, families and the state Jane McKay and Dean Garratt
2. Thriving amid the performative demands of the contemporary audit culture: a matter of school context Amanda Keddie
3. Discourses of merit. The hot potato of teacher evaluation in Italy Giovanna Barzanò and Emiliano Grimaldi
4. A genealogy of the ‘future’: antipodean trajectories and travels of the ‘21st century learner’ Carolyn Williams, Susanne Gannon and Wayne Sawyer
5. The policy dispositif: historical formation and method Patrick L.J. Bailey
6. Opening discourses of citizenship education: a theorization with Foucault Katherine Nicoll, Andreas Fejes, Maria Olson, Magnus Dahlstedt and Gert Biesta
7. Changing policy levers under the neoliberal state: realising coalition policy on education and social mobility Richard Riddell
Biography
Stephen J. Ball is the Karl Mannheim Professor of Sociology of Education at the Institute of Education, University College London, UK. He was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2006; and is also Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. He is the co-founder and Managing Editor of the Journal of Education Policy. His main areas of interest are in sociologically informed education policy analysis and the relationships between education, education policy, and social class. He has published over 140 journal articles and written 20 books, including How Schools do Policy (with Meg Maguire and Annette Braun, Routledge, 2012), Global Education Inc. (Routledge, 2012), Networks, New Governance and Education (with Carolina Junemann, Policy Press, 2012), and Foucault, Power and Education (Routledge, 2013).
