We employ a policy assemblage, mobilities, and mutations framework to analyze the geographies that constitute and reflect educational policy circulation at the regional or supranational level in trans-regional regimes and/or quasi-federal polities such as the European Union (EU) and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM). Recognizing that policies are…

This article reports on a critical policy analysis of discourses related to school exclusions. The management of problematic student behaviour is one of the intractable problems facing education systems today. Despite being ineffective, school suspensions and exclusions are commonly used in many countries as a discipline strategy to manage student…

New Public Management (NPM)-inspired higher education (HE) governance has become increasingly topical in recent years. However, while existing research provides an overall understanding of relevant changes, it does not offer a complete analysis of complex governance and falls prey to deterministic and relatively narrow ideological impositions.…

The economic dislocations and political antagonisms brought about by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic are once again fueling speculation that we are collectively witnessing the terminal crisis of the neoliberal order. It will be argued here that this crisis rhetoric is grounded in a fundamental misconception of neoliberalism that fails to capture its…

In recent times, education policy and reform discourses have become increasingly politicised by neo-liberalism, with critical policy methodologies struggling to catch up. Critical policy sociologists have noted that critical commentaries rarely succeed in changing or impacting dominant education policy pathways. This article presents a framework…

Higher education professional associations (HEPAs) are well-established agents of knowledge production and have been influential in shaping higher education policies and practices. In the context of US international higher education, HEPAs have contributed to the rise of 'internationalization' as a discursive practice. Proposing an analytical…

In late 2020 the Government of Alberta's Ministry of Advanced Education sent a guidance document to Alberta post-secondary institutions to lay out how work-integrated learning was to be conducted. This document also informed the institutions that work-integrated learning should be included in all future program proposals. The guidelines were sent…

In this article, we introduce the special issue focused on diverse perspectives to discourse analysis for education policy. This article lays the foundation for the special issue by introducing the notion of a third generation of policy research--a strand of policy research we argue is produced at the intersection of education policy and discourse…

Many host-countries have liberalised migration policies to facilitate the transition of international students to the local labour market as they are seen as economic agents who increase global competitiveness and integrate easily. However, how migration and educational policies at the regional and national levels emerge, are negotiated and become…

Offered through a split-text, this article mounts/destabilises the argument that policy research that cites authors usually associated with post-structural thought and which is published in a mainstream education policy journal is overwhelmingly realist in its ontologising practices. It reminds the reader why that is problematic and calls for a…

In the last two decades, Spain's general music education curriculum has moved beyond the exaltation of so-called Western art music to also include some instances of non-Western musical traditions. This process of diversification is often articulated as entirely positive. The present paper interrogates such discourses, following a post-structural,…

This article traces the evolution of the French policy PISA debate from 2001 to 2014 by analysing the results of two original qualitative researches. Theoretically, this debate is the outcome of specific policy configurations, which predetermine its scope, content and effectiveness. These configurations are themselves described through their…

This manuscript describes an approach to critical qualitative data analysis that combines (1) Carspecken's critical qualitative methodological framework with (2) the conceptual resources of critical discourse analysis (CDA), as framed by Fairclough and colleagues. Carspecken's methodological theory illuminates the connection between sociopolitical…

In this paper, we demonstrate how history informs how policy meanings are constructed and the rhetorical strategies used to convince others to accept these meanings. We have two goals: (a) to show how a group of non-governmental actors, People for Education, became part of Ontario, Canada's policy discursive network; and (b) to demonstrate the…

The curriculum is a governance technology of knowledge production and is also itself governed by complex dynamics within European education policy space. This article focuses on how the curriculum is governed by comparative knowledge; in particular, it identifies how this facet of governance has manifested itself within the policy space of…