Ontological Coaching in the Affirmative Action Policy in Higher Education: The Making of Inclusion through a Vital Politics of the Self

• In Event: Evidence-based decision making in education
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Self and other, here and there: challenging notions of space, culture, and belonging

Proposal

Through a qualitative research based on interviews with policymakers and practitioners, and document analysis of images, videos, syllabus, books, manuals and policy rationales, I explored the arrival, pedagogical practices and rationality of ontological coaching within the affirmative action policy in the Chilean higher education. I put to work poststructural notions such as governmentality, technologies of the self, and pastoral power, alongside concepts, drawing on Ranciere’s work (2009), able to describe a post-political configuration of inclusion and equity policies in higher education.

Within global discursive and affective practices of knowledges constituting affirmative action policy, there is an unfolding of a will to knowledge keen to advocacy work defending and promoting these programmes as necessary and progressive politics of justice and equity in higher education, while not problematising the specific and located technologies and knowledges through which these policies unfold (e.g. Jenkins and Moses, 2014; Castillo and Cabezas, 2010; Román, 2013). I challenge this discourse of truth by drawing on the case of the deployment of ontological coaching within the broader discourse of inclusion performing the affirmative action policy in the Chilean higher education. I contextualise, ontological coaching as part of a more global tendency featured by the unfolding of psycho-political and affective technologies and knowledges of the self in the field of education, such as “character education” psychologies of success, positive psychologies, and mindfulness, among others. Nonetheless, I emphasise the importance to problematise these technologies in specific cultural and economic localities recognising the they can be loosely and differently assembled by different and competing governmentalities and local arrangements at play (Youdell, Harwood and Lindley, 2018, pp. 221–222).

I contend, drawing on the work of Ranciere (2009) and Moulian (2002), that ontological coaching emerges within a “post-political” configuration of inclusion oriented to police the agreement and legitimation of exclusion and inequality in higher education. In this discursive configuration, ontological coaching operates as an affective governmentality technology oriented to teach working-class students, deemed talented and exceptional for higher education spaces, how to conduct themselves as proper higher education subjects through the management and articulation of emotions, body and language, so as to remake a new truth of themselves. Ontological coaching, as part of the affirmative action policy technologies of inclusion, has become one of the dominant modes of “activation” of the working-class students to manage themselves as successful, meritocratic and desired subjects of higher education. Ontological coaching is a technology made out of the encounter between philosophy, sciences and the business world. The arrival of the ontological coaching at the affirmative action policy, means a recontextualisation of its corporate functions to nurture business leadership and entrepreneurialism towards the education and equity field. In this escenario, ontological coaching operates as a pastoral technology aiming to know and reshape the interiorities of the working-class subjects, deemed vulnerable and yet with hidden potential to be materialised and realised (Yang, 2015), in order to vitalise their "emotions" and "attitudes" so they can successfully overcome and navigate the demanding challenges and inequalities in higher education.

Ontological coaching works as an “infrapower” that makes possible to place as equity measures and outcomes, affective dimensions of individuals, regardless the material and political outcomes, such as well-being, aspirations, self-steem or motivation. In this fashion, ontological coaching is part of a tactical mode of addressing class inequalities in higher education without reanimating class as a political category but decoding it as barrier for flourishing and realising entrepreneurial potential as the main mode of overcoming inequalities. By placing subjects with capacities and potential to rise themselves over structures of inequalities, it positions itself as a legitimate "justice enhancing mechanism"(Boltanski and Chiapelo, 2005, p. 163), thus, working towards the legitimation of ordo-liberal or affective neoliberal governmentalities.

I conclude that this policy is a manifestation of a “new neoliberal spirit of capitalism” (Boltanski and Chiapelo, 2005) where “critiques and struggles against neoliberalism” and “affective neoliberal governmentalities” meet, producing a normative notion of inclusion able to legitimate the neoliberal university and leaving unchallenged and reinvigorated assumptions regarding higher education as the space of reproduction of governing elites, the inevitability and desirability of inequalities, and the erasing of social class grammars from the epistemic repertoire of politics and research. I close with some rumination regarding the possibilities of enacting “epistemic disobedience” (Mignolo, 2009) in research practices as a way to revitalise militant critical research in education.

Author

• Daniel Leyton, Universidad Alberto Hurtado