Search results

The United Nations (UN) actively incorporated new media as a tool for consultation and agenda setting during the Millennium Development Goal (MDG)–Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) transition. As global actors shifted their attention to the sustainable development goals, the UN and its partners scaled up their digital engagement with civil society, multinational agencies, and country-level stakeholders to inform the post-2015 agenda. This chapter explored how the UN integrated Twitter into the post-2015 consultation and how the UN Women and the United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative used Twitter to construct and diffuse girls’ education policy discourse during the MDG–SDG transition.

Building on the proposition that Bernstein's ideas are due for a revival in higher education research, the call for studies in which theory is put to use and for policy studies to engage in textual analysis, this chapter argues for the affordances of the theoretical underpinnings of Bernstein's pedagogic device and critical discourse studies in investigating connections between policy and practice. Drawing on the sociology of pedagogy and applied linguistics, this chapter aims to explore the theoretical complementarities of the chosen approaches for exploring how policy ideas move through time and space. A focus on the notion of recontextualisation enables an understanding of how influences beyond the discipline itself, including policy discourses, can shape learning, teaching and assessment practices. The illustrating case examines policy on learning and teaching and how these ideas are recontextualised from national policy through to institutional policy and individual practices. The critical or questioning angle of both approaches in seeing ideas, including policy, as never value-free but as situated within their sociopolitical context can shed light on how policy ideas make their way into universities and in whose interests.

This chapter explores the colocation of ethnographic and discourse approaches in gender-focused research in comparative and international education. Drawing from the authors’ scholarship in the fields of girls’ education, women’s empowerment, and international education policy and development, this chapter highlights opportunities to interrogate culture in qualitative data through ethnographic and discourse approaches. The chapter concludes with reflection and future directions for these authors and for the field.

Canada is a country with ten provinces and three territories, each of which boasts its own set of unique characteristics. Education is constitutionally defined as a provincial responsibility. Although several federal government departments have some responsibilities in the area of education, there is no federal department of education. Thus, it is difficult to examine educational policy at a national level.

In this chapter, the interest is directed towards how transnational policy messages (supra-level) can be tracked down through analyses of curriculum policy discourses at the national (macro-level) and municipal level (meso-level) in the Swedish school system. Drawing on discursive institutionalism, and organizational and institutional theory, we analyse central policy messages in the introduction of the national Swedish standards-based curriculum reform for compulsory school from 2011, focusing on discourses of communication between local authorities (meso-level) and schools (micro-level) within their area of responsibility for curriculum making. Two main features emerge. The local curriculum reform agenda is significantly shaped by the argument that explicit standards together with systematic governance through evaluation and accountability will increase students' performance. The second feature underlines strong accountability as a prerequisite for equity and equivalence and the importance of the local school authority for the organization of schooling, structural support and interventions for curriculum making in schools. Equity and equivalence are a challenge for the local authorities. They have problems to support curriculum making which tends to create considerable variations in how the curriculum reform is enacted in the different schools of the municipality.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a clear and replicable methodology for conducting a policy archaeology. This paper articulates the steps in policy archaeology and the process is applied to a study of Discourses of disability in special education policy in Ontario, 1965-1978.

The metaphor of field archaeology guided the process of locating relevant texts through backward and lateral mapping and locating and interpreting artefacts. The artefacts were discursive representations of complex policy problem of disability in stakeholder texts. The Discourses were compared chronologically, within and across stakeholder texts. An explanatory narrative relates the Discourses to the socio-historical context.

There were significant contradictions in the discursive construction of disability. The texts of the Council for Exceptional Children presumed agreement that disability was an intrinsic, permanent deficit within the student with disabilities. In contrast, the other stakeholders stated that disability was the result of socially and educationally constructed barriers.

This paper makes no claim of universal truth. The interpretations and conclusions reached are influenced by the researcher’s knowledge and experience. Other scholars may reach other conclusions.

Scholars have a clear and replicable methodology for conducting a policy archaeology. This methodology is currently the most “true” to the metaphor of archaeology and uses Discourse analysis, interpretation and the creation of a narrative situated in a socio-historical context.

The study shows that the Discourses of disability in special education policy in special education policy in Ontario place children with disabilities at a serious educational disadvantage.

The “welfare reform” narrative of successive Conservative-led UK Government emphasises public spending reductions, individual responsibility and strengthening of benefit conditionality. The purpose of this paper is to cast light on how this narrative is challenged and disrupted by the Scottish Government through their articulation of a social democratic welfare state imaginary.

The study draws together a decentred governance perspective that emphasises ideational tradition for understanding (re)construction of governance (Bevir, 2013, p. 27) with critical discourse analysis to examine how welfare interpretations/representations are carried into the policy and public arena. The Scottish Government documents are deconstructed to interrogate the ideas and form of their emergent discourse and its relation to the independence referendum and welfare governance reform.

Responding to changing socio-economic contexts and welfare governance, the Scottish Government has developed a discourse of modernisation rooted in British and Scandinavian social democratic traditions. Fusing (civic) nationalism with social wage and social investment concepts, they conjure up imaginaries of a prosperous, solidaristic, egalitarian welfare state as a feasible future reality, recuperating “welfare” as a collective endeavour and positioning a maldistribution of power/resources between groups and constituent countries of the UK as the “problem”.

The paper is of value to those interested in how changes to centralised-hierarchical welfare governance can open new spaces for actors at different levels of government to articulate counter-hegemonic discourses and practices. Its originality lies in the analysis of how the Scottish Government has reworked social democratic traditions to weave together a welfare imaginary that directly contests the problem-solution narrative of successive Conservative-led UK Governments.

The purpose of this paper is to present a composite framework for critical policy analysis drawing from discourse analysis and post-structuralist analysis. Drawing on an interpretive paradigm (Yanow, 2014), this paper provides a thick description (Geertz, 1973) of the processes involved in the application of these tools in a critical policy analysis project, focusing on disability policy within the Irish context. Methodologically, this is a resourceful cross-fertilization of analytical tools to interrogate policy, highlighting its potential within critical disability policy analysis and beyond.

Merging a critical discourse analysis framework and a policy problematization approach, the combination of tools presented here, along with their associated processes, is referred to as the critical discourse problematization framework.

Potentially, the framework can also be employed across a number of cognate social policy fields including education, welfare and social justice.

The value of this paper lies in its potential to be used within analytical practice in the field of critical (disability) policy work by offering an evaluation of the analytical tools and theoretical framework deployed and modeled across an entire research process.

The framework has the potential and has been used successfully as a tool for disability activism to influence policy development.

The analytical framework presented here is a methodically innovative approach to the study of policy analysis, marrying two distinct analytical tools to form a composite framework for the study of policy text.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the patient comes to be seen as a solution to governance problems.

The paper studies health policy discourse in Denmark from 1970 to 2000. Based on an analysis of national policy documents, the paper traces how the patient is redefined as part of governance problems.

The paper suggests that “the new patient” coincides with changes in healthcare governance and is not just a clinical concern. The persona of the patient has been mobilized in dissimilar ways in addressing specific policy problems, resulting in both a duty-based idea of a socio-economically responsible patient and a rights-based idea of a demanding health-service consumer.

The study is limited to policy documents that address healthcare governance in one country. It does not describe the broader evolution of patient ideas or the practical impact of political discourses.

Practitioners should expect to encounter conflicting views of patient responsibilities, interests and involvement. Such conflicts are not only related to a lack of conceptual clarity but are indicative of how the new, active and responsible patient has become a key clinical concern and a central element of health policy governance.

The paper contributes to the understanding of “the new patient” in discussions on patient-centred healthcare and empowerment by emphasizing the definition of the patient in a political context. The latter has often been ignored in existing research.

This chapter addresses the political history of aircraft noise annoyance and its relationship to sustainability.

Using extensive case studies and secondary sources, the chapter shows how a particular approach to noise annoyance that emerged already accepted large-scale annoyance. The focus is directed towards the black boxing of political decisions with scientific knowledge.

This contribution demonstrates that noise annoyance policy has shaped citizens’ perceptions of aircraft sound and has intensified the associated annoyance. Finally, the discussion considers the significance of the participation of citizens and the political implications of these findings. Currently, participation is predominantly confined within a growth paradigm and reproduces tensions in ecological modernization policies. Participation and protest can inadvertently engage these tensions and question the participatory practices themselves. A moratorium on ‘growth’ might create the necessary space for fundamentally rethinking aviation and sustainability.