Session Information
23 SES 02 B, Approaching Education Policy (Part 2)
Paper Session
Contribution
This paper is a part of a larger study, which drawing on Foucault's mode of analysis, explored educational policy-making in post-communist Ukraine. The study approached education policy process from four the prespectives: those of outcomes – policy what(s), rationalities – policy why(s), actors – policy who(s) and power – policy how(s). This paper focuses on the question of power or policy how(s). The key quesiton it seeks to address is how the actors positioned in the field of policy conceptualise and view balance of power of educational reformation. As a point of departure for analysis, I use Foucault's conceptualisation of governemt and the link between rationality and action. Thus, to use Foucauldian language, policy-making procedures are understood as technologies – the assemblage of actors, institutional practices, instruments, models of intervention – which enable authorities to act upon the ‘conduct of conduct’ (Rose & Miller, 2008, p. 16). To view policy-making procedures as technologies, is to trace the ways through which policy rationalities – policy why(s) – have become operable, instrumental, realisable and doable. In other words, to understand policy process is to uncover the nexus between know (rationale) and how (technology) of government. Exploration of policy how(s) assists in tracing the links and disjunctions between rationality and action, thought and intervention. By addressing the question of power in the field of policy, this paper provides insights into complex sets of conditions and powers vested in policy actors, and the ways these conditions influence the actors’ ability to translate rationalities into actions (cf. Rose & Miller, 2008).The paper outlines three views of power: globalist, traditional and pluralist; and two power technologies: post-communsit and (neo)libaral - as they are understood and conceptualised by the key policy actors dominant in the field of educaitonal policy-making in post-communist Ukraine.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Dean, M. (1999). Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. London: SAGE. Dunleavy, P., & O'Leary, B. (1987). Theories of the State: The Politics of Liberal Democracy. Basingstoke: Macmillan Education. Fimyar, O. (2010). The (Un)Importance of Public Opinion in Educational Policy-Making in Post-Communist Ukraine: Education Policy ‘Elites’ on the Role of Civil Society in Policy Formation. In S. Fischer & H. Pleines (Eds.), Civil Society in Central and Eastern Europe: Successes and Failures of Europeanisation in Politics and Society, Changing Europe Book Series (Vol. 7, pp. 157-173). Stuttgart: Ibidem Publishers. Retrieved from http://www.changing-europe.org/download/Summer_School_2009/Fimyar.pdf Jessop, B. (2002). The Future of the Capitalist State. Cambridge: Polity Press. Jørgensen, M. (2002). Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method. London: Sage Publications. Peters, M. A. (2001). Education, Enterprise Culture and the Entrepreneurial Self: A Foucauldian Perspective. Journal of Educational Enquiry, 2(2), 58-71. Pilkington, H. (1994). Russia's Youth and Its Culture: A Nation's Constructors and Constructed. London: Routledge. Popkewitz, T., & Brennan, M. (2002). Foucault's Challenge: Discourse, Knowledge, and Power in Education. New York and London: Teachers College Press. Riabchuk, M. (2007). Ambivalance or Ambiguity?: Why Ukraine is Trapped between East and West. In S. Velychenko (Ed.), Ukraine, the EU and Russia: History, Culture and International Relations, Studies in central and eastern Europe (pp. 70-89). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rose, N., & Miller, P. (2008). Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life. Polity Press.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.