Performative Approaches to Education Reforms: Exploring Intended and Unintended Effects of Reforms Morphing as they Move

The purpose of this book is to investigate with conceptualization how reforms change educational organizations and subjectivities, and how educational organizations change reforms. The book gives an account of the power of conceptual endeavors, with close readings of empirical material.

The book elaborates this through empirical investigations of the intertwinement of different educational reforms, of policies, standards, and everyday educational lives across the globe. As well as telling stories of reforms and how they transform and are transformed by the educational organizations and subjects they engage, the book highlights how a careful enactment of methodologies and critiques might enable a tracing of not only intended but also unintended effects of reforms. In this way, the book explores performative approaches to education reform and thus attempts to nuance the idea of causality and linearity in the implementation of education reforms.

Engaging with performative approaches, this book scrutinizes how reforms are involved with the creation and shaping of the world and thus offers insight into what happens when reforms are borrowed, translated, and taken up in a range of ways. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education.

Dorthe Staunæs is Professor in Social Psychology at the Danish School of Education at Aarhus University, Denmark, with a specific focus on subjectivities, diversity and educational leadership/policy. Her qualitative methodologies have contributed significantly to the field of intersectionality and subjectification. Her current work on affirmative critique and data-subjectivities as effects of governance is situated at the intersection of affect studies, queer feminism, black feminism, and new materialism. ORCID: 0000-0002-6554-6632

Katja Brøgger is an Associate Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark. She is the research program director of Policy Futures. Her research on higher education policy and governance explores the relations between transnational reform processes and national policymaking and takes inspiration in ‘new materialism’. She is a member of The European Consortium of Political Research, the EU COST Action on New Materialism, the Research Committee at the Danish School of Education, and the Study Board for Education Science. ORCID: 0000-0002-5582-4889

John Benedicto Krejsler is a Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark. His research on new conditions for (pre-)school and teacher education in a transnational perspective brings together education policy, new conditions for producing ‘truths’, and social technologies. He is the President of the Nordic Educational Research Association and was a council member of the European Educational Research Association (2009–2018). He was a Visiting Professor at Kristianstad University, Sweden (2009–2010), and at UCLA, USA (2015–2016). ORCID: 0000-0002-6471-2723