Session Information
23 SES 02 A, Europeanisation and Education Governance: Comparative Analysis
Paper Session
Contribution
In this paper I will argue that openness forms a governing regime in recent policy-making. ”To open education” has been a recurrent slogan across Europe and in creating a shared European higher education space, the European Higher Education Area, EHEA (EC, 1999). It has been adressed in geographical terms, enabling transnational, European student mobility, social goals of widened participation and lifelong learning and in pedagogy, for example through IT-based learning.
To open education is a highly spatialized strategy, that is, it respond not only to a closure, inflexiblity and shortcoming of higher education but to a reconfiguration in size, scale and mission, and should make us imagine a European and global higher education space. Thus, space and spatialization operate in certain ways, to neutralize place-time restrictions of access and participation and to internationalize or to economize higher education.Open higher education spaces are considered enhancing the democracy and effectiveness of higher education.
The regime of openness I adress here, involves a represenational politics, i.e. as policies name and speak of opening higher education, they also organize, embed or extends higher education. Even if these are fictions, strategies and tactics, we can assume that they dosomething and affect how we imagine European higher education systems, interactions etc. Such policy representations create orderings - also of ”open spaces” - that render others invisible or inconceivable. The analytical focus in this paper is on discursive aspects of space (and place) and how spatializations take part in powerful organizing mechanisms. The empirical material and focus aligns to my thesis in 2010, which only paid minor attention to the European dimension of local national (Swedish) policies. Based on Swedish and European official policies between 1992 and 2005 I will exemplify and discuss how a European space is shaped and ordered. The question is, How is openness and the spatialization of open higher education spaces taking part in governing a European higher education?
Rather than considering governing regimes and government as emanating from a central State or agenda-setting instance as EU, I align to the approach of governmentality studies, based on Foucault’s contribution (1991). It focuses on how governing is formed in a wider sense, taking the form of governing rationalities, in policy-making this often comes in the forms of problems and solutions stated. With the approach, it is possible to look at regimes of government and how different instances, means and reasonings form governmentalities. With the spatial governmentality focus, I contribute to a young research field in education (Gulson & Symes, 2007), but a well-established endevour in geography (e.g. Huxley, 2008).
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Bergviken Rensfeldt, A (2010). Opening Higher education: Discursive Transformatinos of Distance and Higher education government. Gothenburg: Gothenburg Diss. ACTA no 300. European Commission (1999). The European Higher Education area. Joint declaration of the European ministers of education. Bologna. Foucault, M. (1991). Governmentality. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon, & P. Miller (Eds.). The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality (pp. 87-104). Chicago: Chicago University Press. Enders, J. (2004). Higher education, internationalisation and the nation-state: Recent developments and challenges to governance theory. Higher education, 47(3), 361-382 Gulson, K. N. & Symes, S. (2007). Knowing one’s place: Space, theory, education. Critical studies in education, 48(1), 97-110. Huxley, M. (2008). Space and government: Governmentality and geography. Geography compass, 2(5), 1635-1658. Lindblad, S. & Popkewitz. T. S. (Eds.). (2004). Educational restructuring: International perspectives on travelling policies. Greenwich: Information Age. Pongratz, L. (2009). Tantalus torment: Notes on the regimes of lifelong learning. In M. Simons, M. A. Peters, & M. Olssen (Eds.). Re-reading education policies: Studying the policy agenda of the 21st century (pp. 425-438). Rotterdam: Sense Publisher. Rizvi, F. (2006). Imagination and the globalisation of educational policy research. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 4(2), 193-205. Simons, M. (2007). The “renaissance of the university” in the European knowledge society: An exploration of principled and governmental approaches. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 26, 433-447. Popkewitz, T. S. & Rizvi, F. (Eds.). (2009). Globalization and the study of education. Chicago: Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, 108(2). Walters, W. & Haahr, J. H. (2005). Governing Europe: Discourse, governmentality and European integration. London: Routledge.
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