Researching the Policy Mobilities of Sustainability Education

• In Event: Policy Mobilities and Education Policy Research

Abstract

Objectives
The purpose of this presentation is to use the case of ongoing research on sustainability uptake in higher education policy in Canada to discuss considerations of the mobilities and materialities of policy and policy research. Using empirical data to discuss congruencies and tensions between conceptualizations and practices of policy research, the presentation will highlight possible implications for future research.

Perspective or theoretical framework
The research discussed in the presentation draws on several theoretical and methodological research trajectories, including those situated within critical policy research, including literatures of policy mobilities (e.g., McCann & Ward, 2012; Peck & Theodore, 2012); policy enactments (Ball, Braun, & Maguire, 2012; Heimans, 2014), vertical case study and multi-sited ethnographies (e.g., Bartlett & Vavrus, 2014; Marcus, 1995), network ethnography (e.g., Ball & Junemann, 2012), and approaches to place and materiality in research (e.g., Tuck & McKenzie, 2015; Fenwick & Edwards, 2011). It also is situated within the literature on environment and sustainability in education, which has not been the focus of significant critical policy research to date, and yet is an area of growing policy focus and mobility (McKenzie, Bieler, & McNeil, 2015).

Methods and data sources
Data from the site analysis stage of a national study of sustainability in Canadian formal education will be drawn upon in the presentation. Data sources will include interview and focus group data collected from those involved in sustainability policy development and enactment at the post-secondary level, including students, staff, faculty, administrators, and members of the broader community; as well as observational and archival data including maps of campus space, policy documents, evidence of sustainability initiatives on campus, documented history of the land and as Indigenous territory. Data collection methods and questions were developed with an attention to both the movement and mutation of policy and practice (e.g., via networks, technology, measurement data, actors, spaces for dialogue, techniques and counter-techniques); as well as on the territoriality of policy, including in the materialities of local places (e.g., land, local culture and traditions, physical spaces and objects, local policies). The scope of analysis is multi-sited, with attention to the particularities of each research site, as well as what can be learned comparatively across sites and scales. In these ways, the site analyses involves a focus on the flows and stickiness, generativities and gaps of policy and practice within and across sites; through networks, individual and organizational actors, the materialities of place, and other relationships. The analyses will experiment with how to examine and represent these types of policy relationalities via visual and textual forms.

Results and scholarly significance
In bringing together a focus on policy mobilities with a situated study which takes up questions of the materialities of education policy, the presented research aims to contribute to conversations about conceptualizations and practices of policy research. Rather than presenting research results in this forum, the focus will be on the theoretical and methodological challenges and implications of studying and representing the relationalities of policy.

Author

• Marcia McKenzie, University of Saskatchewan