Following globalising and globalised education policy: relations of movement and mobility

1. Following globalising and globalised education policy: relations of movement and mobility Dr Kalervo N. Gulson University of New South Wales k.gulson@unsw.edu.au

2. School choice and equity: Policy advocacy organisations and culturally focused schools • ‘policy mobility’, as a way of thinking about how investigate education policy • how school choice and equity are linked to advocacy organisations and culturally focused schools in Sydney, Vancouver and Chicago.

3. New policy landscapes:relations/ territories • Relational aspects – that is, how policy ideas are connected through global and local actors and advocacy organisations • The territorial aspects – that is, policies and ideas as manifest in particular places as culturally focused schools along with the racialised politics of difference that are part of this territorialization

4. Policy mobilities • What situations, ‘transit points’ and ‘sites of persuasion’ do education policies travel through? • How do education policies and ideas transform as they travel? • How do mobile policies impact the character and politics of place? (McCann & Ward, 2012)

5. Overview of paper • what is understood by ideas of scale and policy in a mobility approach • problematising movement and mobility • posit some possible methodological implications

6. (Relational) Scale • ‘policy transfer’ remains wedded to the nation state, and to hierarchical scales (Cochrane & Ward, 2012). • Conversely posited is ‘a notion of scales as assembled relationally by particular interested actors, as unbounded and dynamic, but no less real or powerful’ (McCann & Ward, 2013: 7)

7. Policy fantasies and incoherence • the fantasy of evidence-based policy making where one (successful) idea is merely re-potted somewhere else (Cochrane & Ward, 2012). •  take policy to be, not coherent, but an inchoate and contested set of enacted practices and processes (Webb & Gulson, 2012) • Policy ‘relational and territorial’ (Cochrane & Ward, 2012). • How policy knowledge comes to and where this occurs

8. Movement and ‘Nomads’ • “[A] thoroughly Orientalist discourse investing the non-Western, and in this case, nonsedentary population with desire and romance. So, in addition to the critique that nomadic metaphysics is overly abstract and universalizing in its allocation of meaning to mobility, its advocates often overlook the colonial power relations the produced such images in the first place.” • Cresswell, 2006: 54

9. Geographies of mobility • Mobility as social produced motion concerning meaning and power, that involves a wide range of practices and sites • Mobility: interrelations of representation and materiality • Measurable • Represented • Practiced and embodied

10. Methodological issues • ‘associative ontology’ and ‘metaphysics of presence’ – joining the dots (Smith & Doel, 2010; Jacobs, 2012) • the need to be attendant to the trade-off between ethnographic depth and the role of what is overwhelmingly the male geographer, and the focus on mobility that privileges connections and reach over local engagement.

11. References • Ball, S. J., & Junemann, C. (2012). Networks, new governance and education. Bristol: The Policy Press. • Cochrane, A., & Ward, K. (2012). Guest editorial - Researching the geographies of policy mobility: Confronting the methodological challenges. Environment and Planning A, 44(5-12). • Cresswell, T. (2006). On the move: Mobility in the modern western world. New York: Routledge. • Dikeç, M. (2007). Space, governmentality, and the geographies of French urban policy. European Urban and Regional Studies, 14, 277-289. • Gulson, K. N. (2011). Education policy, space and the city: markets and the (in)visibility of race. New York: Routledge. • Jacobs, J. M. (2012). Urban geographies I: Still thinking cities relationally. Progress in Human Geography, 36(3), 412-422. • McCann, E., & Ward, K. (2013). A multi-disciplinary approach to policy transfer research: Geographies, assemblages, mobilities and mutations. Policy Studies, 34(1), 2-18. Rizvi, F., & Lingard, B. (2010). Globalizing educational policy. London: Routledge.