This collection focuses on transformations in the governance of education, paying attention to the trans-nationalisation of educational policies and the emergence of new actors in education. It focuses on the knowledge and instruments of government that shape education systems at different scales of governance. The book is a contribution to this…

This article investigates the increasing prominence of intercultural and global skills assessment in study abroad administration and pedagogy, and how it influences the practice of international education and the roles it plays in the administrative spaces of U.S. higher education. Drawing on a series of interviews with administrators, faculty…

This article examines forms of subjectivation propagated through the processes and practices of ethics review in UK Higher Education Institutions. Codified notions of research ethics are particularly prevalent in the university context along with stringent institutional regulation of the procedures surrounding ethics review of research proposals.…

There is a rational assumption built into some research projects that policy contexts are influenced by the quality of the evidence. This is, at best, only somewhat true some of the time. Through policy ethnographies, two education researchers working in the context of sustainability discuss their experiences with evidence-based policy. Central to…

In the aftermath of the Indian government's decision to change the status of Jammu and Kashmir on 5 August 2019, activism for the right to self-determination in Kashmir came under tremendous pressure. An intense crackdown in Kashmir, including a complete communication blackout and internet blockade, meant the only Kashmiri and dissenting voices…

Action learning has evolved over a period of time when managerialism and performativity, which are aspects of neoliberalism, have become stronger and this explains, in part, the emergence of Critical Action Learning (CAL). Performativity, in particular, has increasingly become internalised by people at work. CAL seems to be limited to power…

Choosing which additional language to include in national curricula and when to begin teaching it are important educational policy decisions. The current study aims to provide a contextually embedded picture of such policymaking process in the Iranian context. More specifically, the study is intended to explain the agency mechanism of different…

This article intends to empirically document the ambiguity, even ambivalence, of governance practices , through the study of a public policy in Portugal, the Programme InovAction, that stimulates intervention projects in 'local state of emergency' territories. In this way, we search to contribute to the debate around the reform of the State and…

Bourdieu's concept of field offers an alternative explanation for the inevitable gap between policy initiative and implementation. While the existing literature mostly concentrated on the dichotomy of macro- and micro-politics in enacting education policies, the missing attention to meso-level, local governments as policy interpreters and…

In 1989, New Zealand started to follow an international trend of reforming education policy according to the neoliberal principles of competition, choice and self-managing schools. Since then, the increasing availability of digital data in schools has corresponded with the development of student achievement measurement tools and benchmarking of…

Inequality in adult learning and education (ALE) participation has been reported by previous comparative studies. In doing so, however, most of efforts have been made to understand such patterns of inequality in ALE participation at the micro-level using a conceptual approach based on human capital theory. While the micro-level approach offers an…

The small school movement originated in the democratic ideology of Deborah Meier, who sought to create schools that gave students, parents, teachers, and all stakeholders in the communities they served a voice in education. In New York City, Meier's vision was implemented haphazardly by a group of business and political elites able to pour…

This paper describes how a locally developed school ranking system affected student enrolment patterns in British Columbia over time. In developing an annual school "report card" that was published in newspapers and online, the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute created a marketplace for school choice by devising an accountability scheme…

Using a critical postmodern framework, this article analyzes the relationship of the decision-making processes of anarchism and neoliberalism to that of deep democracy. Anarchist processes are found to share common core principals with deep democracy; but neoliberal processes are found to be antithetical to deep democracy. To increase the joy in…

In this article, Lois Weis and Michelle Fine introduce critical bifocality as a way to render visible the relations between groups to structures of power, to social policies, to history, and to large sociopolitical formations. In this collaboration, the authors draw upon ethnographic examples highlighting the macro-level structural dynamics…