Chidozie Alozie

My PhD research pursued a Foucauldian-inspired post-structuralist policy discourse analysis, investigating structural educational reform policy from the United States and Australia to discern a relationship between their policies of reform and the coincidence of racial segregation within schooling. Engaging policy as both discourse and an Althusserian ideological apparatus, I combined Carol Bacchi’s WPR Framework (Bacchi 2007, 2009; Bacchi and Goodwin, 2016) and theories of collective Affect (Ahmed, 2004; Anderson, 2014; Wetherell, 2015; McKenzie, 2017) to analyse 27 policy initiatives and documents between 1982 and 2015. A vital result of this analysis was the identification of shared ideological underpinnings, or conceptual and explanatory logics, within reforms across the different contexts, and also the development of a model of affective policy circulation to address why and how policy manifests in particular ways.

By problematising policy in this fashion, I believe that my research attunes the critical gaze of policy analysis towards the reformative aspects and agendas of educational policy, and especially its political and subjectification effects. Notably, it rejects the neoliberalism-as-hegemony narrative, recognizing not only the tacit‑and necessary‑assent of educational actors but also asserting the agency of these selfsame actors to reclaim the discursive field- to ‘take back the wheel’ of education and its reform.