Following policy: networks, network ethnography and education policy mobilities Following policy: networks, network ethnography and education policy mobilities (original) (raw)
Related papers
Policy mobilities and methodology: a proposition for inventive methods in education policy studies
The argument of this paper is that new methodologies associated with the emerging field of ‘policy mobilities’ can be applied, and are in fact required, to examine and research the networked and relational, or ‘topological’, nature of globalised education policy, which cuts across the new spaces of policymaking and new modes of global educational governance. In this paper, we examine the methodological issues pertaining to the study of the movement of policy. Informed by contemporary methodological thinking around social network analysis and the ethnographic notion of ‘following the policy’, we discuss the limitations of these approaches to adequately address presence in policy network analysis, and the problem of representing speed and intensity of policy mobility, even while these attempt to solve the problem of relationality and territoriality. We conclude that the methodologies of policy mobility are inexorably intertwined with the (constantly) changing phenomena under examination, and hence require what Lury and Wakeford describe as ‘inventive methods’.
ECNU Review of Education, 2023
The flows and frictions of policy networks We are all scholars of policy to some extent. Such a definitive statement is not without merit-after all, we all experience and interact with policy across education, from the "eddies and flows" (Cochrane & Ward, 2012) of its movements to the "fixities and moorings" (Sheller & Urry, 2006) of its frictions. Regardless of whether we explicitly refer to ourselves as "policy researchers," the various dimensions of education and schooling upon which we choose to putatively focusincluding pedagogy, curriculum, assessment, and student wellbeing-are continuously being (re)shaped and (re)constituted by the various material and discursive elements of policy, in both predictable and unpredictable ways. Unsurprisingly, policy remains a central preoccupation of education research, leading to a continued focus on developing, adopting, and adapting different theoretical, methodological, and analytical approaches to better understand the changing empirical contexts we face. These changes include not only the changing policies themselves but also the changing processes, actors, spaces, and relations by which such policies are developed, disseminated, contested, and enacted. It is fair to say that in this contemporary moment, all manner of
This article aims to explore processes of policy implementation with respect to an ongoing empirical study in three very different sites: Denmark, Nepal, and China. Rather than treat these investigations in the traditional manner of separate and contained national case studies, I attempt to create a "policyscape" around processes of what Roger Dale has called hyperliberalism in education, and I do so by working across different levels of the education systems within these three countries. My argument is that nationstate and system studies of education must be informed by understandings of the nature of globalization and especially the new imaginative regimes that it makes possible. Educational phenomena in one country case must thus be understood in ongoing relation to other such cases. In this sense, I am attempting to operationalize as a research program a new approach to comparison, one that has been alluded to in the literature but only conceptually (e.g., Cowen 2000; Marginson and Mollis 2001; Welch 2001).
From Government to Governance: 'Teach for India' and new networks of reform in school education
Contemporary Education Dialogue (Sage journals), 2018
The 'Teach for India' programme, an important offshoot of the 'Teach for All'/ 'Teach for America' global network, began as a Public Private Partnership (PPP) in 2009 in poorly functioning municipal schools in urban Pune and Mumbai. Like its prominent American counterpart, the programme has similar ideas of reform where it recruits college graduates and young professionals to serve as teachers in under resourced government schools and low-cost private schools as part of a two-year fellowship. Over the past seven years, the organisation has expanded its reach to five other cities in the country – Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai and Ahmedabad – and is emerging as a focal point among a growing network of urban not-for-profit organisations seeking to infuse new logics of reform within municipal school administrative bodies. This paper seeks to situate the emergence of the programme in the Indian context and map its links to local, national and global actors and organisations using Social Network Analysis (SNA). Through the use of SNA, the paper seeks to highlight the growing network of non-state institutions in metro cities – most notably Mumbai and Delhi - that are playing a key role in school reform focusing on school management, school leadership, advocacy and teacher training.
Following policy: networks, network ethnography and education policy mobilities
Journal of Education Policy
Mobile policies. .. are not simply travelling across a landscape-they are remaking this landscape, and they are contributing to the interpenetration of distant policymaking sites. (Peck and Theodore, 2010 p. 170) … the new strategic cosmopolitan serves as a nodal agent in the expanding networks of the global economy (Mitchell 2003).
Local in Education Policy Discourse in India
Voices of Teachers and Teacher Educators, 2021
This article looks at how local, as a concept, relates to education in the framework of National Education Policy (NEP) 2020. To examine this, the paper is divided into five sections. It focusses on the urge for 'local' as an aesthetic. It provides a historical overview of the idea of local in the context of and in relation to education from colonial to contemporary times with attention to various policies, reports and 'innovative' programmes. It highlights how contemporary debates have been influenced by global players and ideologies. The paper explains how local as a leitmotif operates in NEP 2020 and offers suggestions to give space to it in policy implementation.
Based on the 'case' of educational reform in India this paper explores the emergence of both new trans-national spaces of policy and new intra-national spaces of policy and how they are related together, and how policies move across and between these spaces and the relationships that enable and facilitate such movement. The paper is an attempt to think outside and beyond the framework of the nation state to make sense of what is going on inside the nation state. In particular, it takes seriously the need to rethink the frame within and scale at which the new policy actors, discourses, connections, agendas, resources and solutions of governance are addressed -and the need to move beyond what Beck calls 'methodological nationalism'. In other words, the paper argues that thinking about the spaces of policy means extending the limits of our geographical imagination. It also means attempting to grasp the joining up of these spaces in and through relationships the need to rethink the frame within and scale at which the new policy actors, discourses, conceptions, connections, agendas, resources and solutions of governance are addressed. In other words, thinking about the spaces of policy means extending the limits of our geographical imagination. It also means attempting to grasp the joining up and re-working of these spaces in and through relationships.
Laboring to Relate: Neoliberalism, Embodied Policy, and Network Dynamics
Peabody Journal of Education, 2017
Bourdieu (1986) observes that the existence of a network of connections is not given, rather it is "the product of endless effort" required "in order to produce and reproduce lasting, useful relationships that can secure material or symbolic profits" (p. 90). This paper builds on previous research (Ball, 2012, Ball & Junemann, 2012) to explore some aspects of the embodiment of policy. I draw on Larner and Laurie's (2010) work on technocratic expertise and how, as she puts it, "privatisation ideas and practices are transferred in embodied forms," and in particular her argument "that this has significant implications for how privatisation is globalized" (p. 218). Concomitantly, I respond to McFarlane's (2009) assertion that we need to pay much greater attention to the labor of policy work (Gale, 2003). From these starting points, the paper focuses on the "multiple actors, multiple geographies and multiple translations involved in the processes of policy transfer" (Larner & Laurie, 2010, p. 225) and, more generally, how these actors play a part in the neoliberalization of education or, to paraphrase Rankin (2003), in "anchoring neoliberalism" (p. 709). I begin and end with discussions of research concepts, research method, and their interrelation: that is, policy networks, policy ethnography, and policy mobility. The central section is mainly devoted to a presentation of various data to adumbrate one part of a global education policy network with a focus on India (and the Indian Education Reform Movement [IERM]) and on one network participant.