Educational policy as a research object: the ethnographic possibilities, challenges and limits of studying power

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

The publication of Chris Shore and Susan Wright’s Anthropology of Policy: Critical Perspectives on Governance and Power in 1997 marked the ascendance of ‘policy’ as a new subfield of anthropology. Drawing on Foucault, Shore and Wright analyzed policy as an “art of government” and a central regulating principle of ‘modern’ societies; and, in the process, they signaled the limits of empiricist, economist and realist approaches to explaining and evaluating policies. The anthropology of policy approach has sought to unravel the disciplinary modes of power exercised by the (largely pastoral/welfare) state through its policy efforts to “make live,” with ethnographers studying up (Nader 1972), across scales and levels – horizontal, vertical and transversal (Vavrus & Barlett 2017) – and through (Reinhold 1994) to reveal the organizing and outworking of statist power as policy. In parallel, new and trenchant analyses of the state in the 21st century and beyond have emerged – of policies that “make live” and “let die”; that carve out ever larger spaces of exception (Ong 2006), abandonment (Povinelli 2011), penalization (Wacquant 2009) or fossil-making (Haraway 2014). What can an anthropology of (educational) policy say to and say of such contemporary statist modes of policy-making?
This panel presents cutting-edge policy ethnographies in the field of education, drawn from diverse regional contexts. Sited in Malawi, South Africa, Uganda, India, Germany and the US, they explore the possibilities, challenges, and limits that ethnographic methodologies offer for understanding power, populations, and socio-institutional change through the anthropological study of policy as practice (Sutton & Levinson 2001). Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, each panelist reflects on the following questions:
- What policy spaces, institutions, directions, horizons, objects, participant groups and populations, etc. did the research project focus on?
- In what ways were the spaces, institutions, directions, horizons, objects, participant groups and populations researched a departure from the design of the project or from the expected trajectory (up/down/across, etc.) of policy ethnographies?
- What did such departures reveal about who does education policy, and how, and to what ends? What does each ethnography reveal about how state (and institutional) power is organized in the form of policy and employed in relation to citizen-subjects and other populations?
- What do these ethnographies, taken together, reveal about the scholarly study of educational policy, of education and power, and of theorizing education and the state?
Thus, Rachel Silver, in the broader context of studying national educational policies and transnational efforts towards securing the schooling of pregnant girls in Malawi, reflects on the possibilities and limits of the policy-meeting as an object of ethnographic study. In an educational research context of limited finances and time, ‘meeting ethnography,’ she demonstrates, offers a potent means for the study of how power and authority in international development and education are (re)produced as well as strategically subverted. What does meeting ethnography reveal (but also obscure) about target populations as well as researchers, and their relations with those at the (policy meeting) table? Upenyu Majee’s research on higher education in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) also illuminates how policy spaces and narratives are not only socially constructed, but socially constitutive: they demarcate who belongs in (higher) education, at what scales of policy, and for what institutional, statist and (inter-)nationalist ends. Drawing on his institutional ethnography at one of South Africa’s formerly white, top-ranked public universities, his work demonstrates how visual and conceptual policy-maps – in making visible the figure of the ‘regional student’ – offer a compelling deconstruction of internationalization policies in higher education and their social/political uses. Kirk Anderson also considers higher education policy – specifically, the policy and practice of diversity in US universities – to reflect not only on institutional ways of doing diversity (vis-à-vis being diverse), but also on the ways in educational policy studies knowledges are produced and constructed in particular, regionally-bounded ways. What methodological possibilities emerge when higher education policies in the US are theorized in terms not restricted to ‘domestic’ knowledges, but drawn from political economic approaches to international development/education?
Susanne Ress, drawing on her experiences in a gamut of policy-making performances and spaces (‘domestic’ as well as ‘international’) in the educational policy realm, considers ‘ethnographic sensibility’ as a means of bridging across the researcher-practitioner’s embodied, affective, everyday experiences in/of policy-making processes and the more or less bureaucratic, constructivist and poststructural approaches to policy as the practice of power. Drawing on specific “episodes” from her work in Germany and Brazil, she explores ethnographic sensibility as a way of feeling/recognizing policy-as-power.
On the other hand, Nancy Rydberg reflects on the overwhelming helplessness that researcher and participants may experience in educational spaces and policy contexts suffused by recent violence. In her ethnography of sexual and reproductive health (SRH) education policy in Uganda, she confronts the questionable ethics of educational policy as a research object in a post-conflict society where “make/let die” violence rather than “make live” policy has constituted the government of populations. Miriam Thangaraj, in her ethnography of right-to-education policies in India, records how the apparently progressive spaces carved out by policy – school classrooms, for instance, where working children are “rescued and rehabilitated” – are, in the context of precarious labor markets, also a means of labeling, producing and “letting die” particular populations as ‘surplus.’ Nancy Kendall, in her collaborative, multi-sited ethnography, considers ‘precarity’ as an embodied and encompassing condition, to understand how/why the educational outcomes for low-income students in higher education spaces in the US continue to fall behind their more privileged peers. How may an ethnographic understanding of precarity – as a constant, accumulative awareness of the contingency of one’s present and future well-being – as a way of being in the world offer a new way to approach educational inequality?
Across the panelists, we consider the ethnographic study of policy (new ethnographic approaches and emphases to/in policy) as well as reflect on our ethnographic investigations to explore what our approaches say of the changing policy-scape and its implications for state power and various populations. Our work speaks to policy-makers and practitioners, as well as scholars and students interested in policy or qualitative studies, more generally.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• Lesley Bartlett, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Individual Presentations

• Reflections on meeting ethnography as method in studying "through" international development - Rachel Silver, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Instrumental yet invisible: regional students and university transformation in South Africa - Upenyu Silas Majee, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• The “will to improve” campus climate: a developmentalist and ethnographic perspective on diversity in higher education - Kirk R Anderson, Dickinson College, PA

• Ethnographic sensibility and professional skill in policy making - Susanne Ress, University of Bamberg

• Reflections on conducting ethnographic research in post-conflict schools - Nancy M Rydberg, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Right to education policies and/as the spatial production of surplus populations - Miriam Thangaraj, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Precarity past, present, and future: US higher education policy and practice under conditions of advanced inequality - Nancy Kendall, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Discussant

• Ameena Ghaffar-Kucher, University of Pennsylvania