Researching global education policy: Diverse approaches to policy movement

Group Submission Type: Book Launch

Description of Session

This session presents the recently published book, Researching global education policy: Diverse approaches to policy movement (Policy Press), edited by D. Brent Edwards Jr., Antoni Verger, Marcia McKenzie, and Keita Takayama. This book contributes to the literature on global education policy by unpacking, theorizing, and problematizing different approaches to understanding policy movement. Many different concepts, including policy transfer, borrowing and lending, travelling, diffusion, and mobility have been deployed to study how and why policy moves across territories, levels, or scales, usually from the global to the local (and vice versa). These concepts represent different theoretical traditions and sometimes conflicting epistemological and ontological orientations that focus on different aspects of what can be considered ‘policy movement.’ In this book, the editors use the term ‘policy movement’ as an umbrella concept under which various theoretical orientations are accommodated.

Although much empirical literature has been produced on policy movement, the underlying theoretical assumptions of authors frequently remain insufficiently discussed. This book is a response to this gap in the literature in that it is based on chapters which take a particular theoretical approach to policy movement and then apply that approach to a particular case in order to demonstrate the kinds of insights that can be generated. Moreover, and importantly, the contributors show the ways in which policy movement paradigms are evolving and, indeed, being combined to form new and hybrid approaches.

The chapters are organized into four sections, each corresponding with a different paradigm. The four different paradigms are: (a) cross-scalar, (b) discursive/normative, (c) topological, and (d) decolonial.

In this session, the book editors will present an overview of the book’s contents and contributions. This will be followed by comments from two experts on global education policy scholarship: Gita Steiner-Khamsi and Noah Sobe.

Sub Unit

• Book launches and Workshops / Book Launch

Organizer

• D. Brent Edwards, University of Hawaii

Chair

• D. Brent Edwards, University of Hawaii

Book Launch Presenters

• D. Brent Edwards, University of Hawaii

• Marcia McKenzie, University of Melbourne

Non Presenter

• Antoni Verger, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Discussants

• Gita Steiner-Khamsi, Columbia University Teachers College & NORRAG

• Noah W Sobe, UNESCO