The work of Michel Foucault has become a major resource for educational researchers seeking to understand how education makes us what we are. In this book, a group of contributors explore how Foucault's work is used in a variety of ways to explore the "hows" and "whos" of education policy - its technologies and its subjectivities, its oppressions and its freedoms. The book takes full advantage of the opportunities for creativity that Foucault's ideas and methods offer to researchers in deploying genealogy, discourse, and subjectivation as analytic devices. The collection as a whole works to makes us aware that we are freer than we think! This book was originally published as a special issue of the 'Journal of Education Policy'.
1. Participation as governmentality? The effect of disciplinary technologies at the interface of service users and providers, families and the state Jane McKay and Dean Garratt 2. Thriving amid the performative demands of the contemporary audit culture: a matter of school context Amanda Keddie 3. Discourses of merit. The hot potato of teacher evaluation in Italy Giovanna Barzano and Emiliano Grimaldi 4. A genealogy of the `future': antipodean trajectories and travels of the `21st century learner' Carolyn Williams, Susanne Gannon and Wayne Sawyer 5. The policy dispositif: historical formation and method Patrick L.J. Bailey 6. Opening discourses of citizenship education: a theorization with Foucault Katherine Nicoll, Andreas Fejes, Maria Olson, Magnus Dahlstedt and Gert Biesta 7. Changing policy levers under the neoliberal state: realising coalition policy on education and social mobility Richard Riddell