Education policy is premised on its instrumentalist approach. This instrumentalism is based on narrow assumptions concerning people (the subject), decision-making (power), problem-solving (science and methodology), and knowledge (epistemology). Policy, Geophilosophy, and Education reconceptualises the object, and hence, the objectives, of education policy. Specifically, the book illustrates how education policy positions and constitutes objects and subjects through emergent policy arrangements that simultaneously influence how policy is sensed, embodied, and enacted. The book examines the disciplinary and multi-disciplinary approaches to education policy analysis over the last sixty years, and reveals how policy analysis constitutes the ontologies and epistemologies of policy. In order to reconceptualise policy, Policy, Geophilosophy, and Education uses ideas of spatiality, affect and problematization from the disciplines of geography and philosophy. The book problematizes case-vignettes to illustrate the complex and often paradoxical relations between neo-liberal education policy equity, and educational inequalities produced in the representational registers of race and ethnicity.

The empirical focus of this book is on the twenty year struggle by parents and members of the Black community in Toronto to introduce an Africentric Alternative School (AAS) with Black-focused curricula. It brings together a seemingly disparate series of events that emerged from equity and multicultural narratives about the establishment of the school – violence, anti-racism and race-based statistics, policy entrepreneurs, and the re-birth of alternative schools in Toronto - to illustrate how these events ostensibly functioned through neoliberal choice mechanisms and practices. Gulson and Webb show how school choice can represent and manifest the hopes and fears, contestations and settlements of contemporary racial biopolitics of education in multicultural cities.

The field of education policy research is a dense, crowded space owing to its complicated relationship to different intellectual histories and the influence of various ontologies or 'turns'. To aid comprehension and clarity, this book describes the history, contribution and application of over 90 keywords in the field of education policy research. It is designed as a reference, learning and teaching tool to assist students, educators and researchers with: - complex learning and teaching; - wider and background reading and knowledge building; - critical scholarship and research; - interdisciplinary thinking and writing; and - theory development and application.

This book aims to posit theory as a central component to the study of education and education policy. Providing clear, introductory entries into contemporary critical theories and their take up in education policy studies, the book offers a generative invitation to further reading, thought and exploration. Instead of prescribing how theory should be used, the contributors elaborate on a set of possibilities for researching and critiquing education policy. Education Policy and Contemporary Theory explores examples of how theoretical approaches generate a variety of questions for policy analysis, demonstrating the importance of theory as a necessary and inevitable resource for exploring and contesting various policy realms and dominant discourses. Each chapter provides a short overview of key aspects of a particular theory or perspective, followed by suggestions of methodological implications and recommended readings to extend the outlined ideas. Organized around two parts, the first section focuses on theorists while the second section looks at specific theories and concepts, with the intention that each part makes explicit the connection between theory and methodology in relation to education policy research. Each contribution is carefully written by established and emerging scholars in the field to introduce new scholars to theoretical concepts and policy questions, and to inspire, extend or challenge established policy researchers who may be considering working in new areas.

In the past decade, post-structural policy analysis in education has evolved, primarily focusing on disrupting dominant narratives about education policy research, development and implementation, and the aims and outcomes of the policy-research nexus. This book originates from an ‘Education Policy Analysis for a Complex World’ workshop held in conjunction with the University of British Columbia and sponsored by a Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Connection Grant. The workshop focused on one over-arching question: To what extent can post-structural theories offer innovative policy analyses, and contribute to new forms of policy development and implementation? The chapters in this collection provide responses from the participants of the workshop, and serve as illustrations of the broad range of scholarship that may be identified as post-structural policy analysis. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Studies in Education.

This book is an edited collection introducing the Education Policy and Social Inequality series, and presents chapters from authors on the editorial board. It investigates relations between educational policy and social inequality, not simply in terms of policy solutions for inequalities but also how education policy frames, creates and at times exacerbates social inequalities. It adopts a critical stance, encompassing innovative and interdisciplinary theoretical and conceptual studies – drawing on e.g. sociology, cultural studies, social and cultural geography, and history – as well as original empirical work that examines a range of educational contexts, including early years education, vocational and further education, informal education, K-12 schooling and higher education. The book argues that critique and policy studies can have a transformative function, positing new dimensions for understanding the role of education policy in connection with recurrent social problems and seeking the amelioration of social inequality in ways that challenge the possibility of equity in the liberal democratic state, as well as in other forms of governance and government.

The ‘mobile turn’ in human geography, sociology and cultural studies has resulted in a hitherto unparalleled focus on the critical role that mobility plays in conserving and regenerating society and culture. In this instance, ‘mobility’ refers not just to the physical movement of goods and peoples, ideas and symbols; it can also be analytically applied to the technologies used to facilitate their movement. One such technology is education, which has yet to fall the under the purview of the mobility lens – something that this collection endeavours to redress. Its contributing authors, drawn from Canada, Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom, explore salient issues relating to education and mobility. These include studies of the career implications for academics of moving across borders; the impact of university study on prison populations; policy mobility and the charter school movement; affect theory and policy development in Canada; educational advertising on Sydney trains and stations; and the employment mobile approaches to track policy development and implementation. One notable feature of the mobility turn is the willingness of its adoptees to explore innovative research methods. Variously demonstrating the efficacy and cogency of autoethnography, affect theory, textual ethnography and human geography for a mobility-empowered education analytics, this collection is no exception. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Studies in Education.