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Introduction

All sectors of education today are called upon to do more and reach further into the social fabric of our post-modern lives than ever before. As social institutions reflective and productive of the contemporary zeitgeist, the contradictions and complexities of educational projects grow ever greater with each new crisis that education is called upon to help confront. From gun violence to climate change to hunger to terrorism to social mobility to civic responsibility to economic literacy, and on and on, educational institutions (pre-K, K-12 school systems, colleges and universities) are emplaced within, yet expected to act upon, the most compelling social imperatives of our time. Research about how to organize, govern, and lead the educational endeavors commanded by such challenging times—educational policy research—must review and perhaps reconfigure its fundamental assumptions about knowledge, being, purpose, and reality in order to accommodate the complexity of imperatives expected of education today.

In this chapter, we present the tradition of policy discourse analysis (PDA) as a method for critical policy studies in education. After reviewing key tenets, core principles, and a few exemplars of PDA, we suggest a post-humanist and post-qualitative addendum to the method, emplacing it within the Anthropocene—the current geological epoch which is marked by humankind’s imprint on the Earth, and its attendant social implications. By post-humanist, we suggest incorporating non-anthropocentric ontologies that recognize the significance of non-human actants on the production of becoming-subjects (i.e., things and people). Decentering the human means recognizing the broader forces that co-constitute our realities, such as the power of things (Bennett 2009). By post-qualitative, we suggest that the post-humanist commitments directed from the Anthropocene are best operationalized in the emerging methodological tradition of post-qualitative research, which re-works, re-thinks, and un-does much of the taken-for-granted concepts in the traditional interpretive paradigms of qualitative inquiry (Lather and St. Pierre 2013). We pay closer attention to these conceptual territories later in the chapter.

We briefly illustrate our addendum using emergent analysis from Gildersleeve’s broader project on the materialization of discourses of opportunity for Latino (im)migrants in higher education policy (Gildersleeve 2013; Gildersleeve 2017; Gildersleeve et al. 2015; Gildersleeve and Hernández 2012). We conclude by relating PDA for the Anthropocene to the methodological turn in policy research recognized as the third generation of policy research. In an essentialized understanding, third-generation policy research focuses on the “understanding of policy as demonstrated in educational discourses” (Lester et al. 2015, p. 1). Centering discourse as an organizing analytic, third-generation policy research explicitly engages in analyses of power to examine how policy mediates social opportunities (Fairclough 2013). In its attention to discourse, third-generation policy research also recognizes the partial, fractured, and produced qualities of policy truths (Kuntz et al. 2011). Third-generation policy research is more interested in how policy processes and outcomes come about as reflections and productions of society, rather than normative outcomes and measurements of policy practice (Lester et al. 2016). Our main objective in this chapter is to build upon the discursive commitments of third-generation policy research by insisting—and illustrating—how discourse and materiality are entangled in the production of realities. Thus, we claim it is incumbent on third-generation policy researchers to wrestle with the consequences of the Anthropocene as we seek to connect policy processes and outcomes to the production of societies.

Policy Discourse Analysis

Discourse, in a traditional sense, refers to the construct of language, both written and spoken, and its attendant social implications (Allan et al. 2010). PDA, however, employs post-structuralist notions of discourse. Foucault conceptualized discourses as historically and socially bound frameworks in which power and knowledge intersect to order what we conceive of as reality (2003). Mediated and reinforced through social institutions, discourse comprises not just language, but the rules, standards, and beliefs by which a society conducts itself (Ball 1994, 2015). We experience the knowledges produced through discourse as natural, static, and thus take them for granted. Understanding policy as discourse assumes that policy produces particular truths (albeit dynamic and unstable) and possible knowledges (albeit tentative and historically bound).

Policy as discourse both reflects and produces our understanding of the world around us and the ways that we behave within it (Ball 1994). Researchers typically treat policy and the truths and knowledges it produces as stable, unified, and self-evident. In approaching policy as discourse, the researcher seeks to understand “how a human being is envisaged in our present and the social practices that constitute this human being” (Ball 2015, p. 3). Attending to policy’s discursive effects allows us to question the assumptions upon which policy is based, the realities it produces, and the ways in which it may further entrench rather than alleviate the problems it seeks to solve.

PDA has been used as a method for educational policy analysis for almost 30 years, though it is rooted in theories advanced by the post-structuralists including Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau, and Chantal Mouffe, though in this chapter, we have chosen to focus specifically on theories advanced by Foucault. Fairclough (1992) began to develop critical discourse analysis (CDA), a three-dimensional framework for linguistic analysis that approaches text first as simple text, then as discursive practice, then as social practice during this same timeframe. Ball’s (1994) work, What Is Policy? Texts, Trajectories, and Toolboxes, explicitly introduces the idea of treating policy as discourse as opposed to text, thus opening the door to applying post-structural tenets to policy analysis. Over the past two decades, feminist scholars have advanced feminist post-structural approaches to PDA that continue to shape the method (Allan 2010).

Pragmatically, PDA treats policy texts as sites of discursive production ripe for analysis. However, in order to do so, the text must be emplaced within a broader context—and context is mutable, dynamic, and always subjectively dependent and historical. That is to say, the context within which a policy text can be emplaced is tied to particular historicity—itself dynamic and subjective.

For example, in their study of Latina/o immigrant educational opportunity, Gildersleeve et al. (2015) analyzed policy texts associated with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) executive action crafted by Janet Napolitano as US Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. DACA allows undocumented immigrants who entered the United States as juveniles and meet certain criteria a renewable two-year deferment of deportation. DACA does not infer legal status nor does it provide a path to citizenship. In order to draw out the discursive effects of DACA on Latina/o immigrant educational opportunity, Gildersleeve et al. emplaced this text within the broader context of Napolitano’s leadership of the University of California (UC), of which she became President following her tenure as Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Gildersleeve et al. emplaced DACA within context provided by official speeches that Napolitano gave as UC President, as well as an on-air interview broadcast on public radio. This strategic contextualization by Gildersleeve et al. afforded their analyses to trace the discursive production of Latina/o immigrants in California higher education against the broader research literature about Latina/o educational opportunity. One implication from the intersection of immigration policy and post-secondary education leadership that Gildersleeve et al. derived was the production of Latina/o college students as a particularized caste of human capital, promoted chiefly in service to an American economy that by design benefits dominant subject positions (i.e., wealthy white men), while subjugating Latina/o educational achievement to the welfare of the marketplace.

Approaching policy as discourse requires that we abandon modernist notions of power. Foucault (1978) asserts that power cannot be divorced from knowledge, that they are bound together and expressed through discourse. A traditional understanding of power could be likened most closely to what Foucault (2008) describes as sovereign power. Here, power is located in an individual (or institution) and wielded over others. It binds and represses. Policy as discourse, on the other hand, operates through biopower. Where sovereign power is concerned with the individual body, Foucault (2003) conceives of biopower as a generative force that is wielded at the level of the population. Foucault introduces the term biopolitics to describe the framework through which biopower is expressed. Foucault instructs us:

[Biopolitics’] purpose is not to modify any given phenomenon as such, or to modify a given individual insofar as he is an individual, but, essentially, to intervene at the level at which these general phenomena are determined, to intervene at the level of their generality. (p. 246)

Policy as discourse, as a biopolitical technology, expresses biopower in the ways it produces realities. Biopower and sovereign power are by no means mutually exclusive here—in fact, biopolitics requires that the individual self-surveils and monitors his/her own behaviors. Policy as discourse produces what we come to know and act within as reality.

Foucault (in Allan et al. 2010) describes the interaction of discourse and power/knowledge as the site in which “conditions of possibility” (p. 14) are produced, the framework within which we repeatedly construct ourselves and our world. Policy as discourse then, beyond creating reality, creates identities. Understanding the effects of policy requires us to deconstruct the subject positions that policy produces. Subjectivity—the space(s) wherein the self is made known—is a constant site of struggle, crafted and shaped by the conflicting subject positions made available from various discursive fields (Foucault 1978). Identity, in contrast to humanist thought, is neither static nor essential. Rather, produced by and through the interplay of discourse(s), identities are made plausible as tentative, contested, and conflicted subject positions. Identity, as constructed by policy, can be understood as a biopolitical technology for population control and an expression of biopower (Lemke 2011). Identity as an analytic technology must reconcile its populist notions of empowerment and its capitalist realities of inclusion/exclusion. These are the kind of concerns at stake and illuminated by using discursive analyses to interrogate policy in education.

PDA, in its challenge to static humanist notions of truth and knowledge, necessarily defies a singular definition. Allan (2010) conceptualizes PDA as a hybrid methodology building out significantly from feminism and post-structuralism, while employing methods associated with interpretive and critical theory. In contrast to other methodologies, PDA begins by questioning the assumptions underlying policy, the discursive framework in which policy is constructed (Allan et al. 2010). Specifically, PDA attends to how problems are identified, how identity constructs inform those problems and their possible solutions, and how policy as discourse both reflects and produces reality and subjectivity. PDA allows the researcher to pull from multiple traditions of critical inquiry to interrogate policy as discourse (and discourses by and through which policy is produced), as well as the subject identities it creates and informs (Allan 2010). In exposing and analyzing discourse(s), PDA shifts the starting point of policy analysis from a place of accepting the problems policy proposes to address to investigating the discursive production of the problem itself and the subject position(s) of those whom policy targets.

For example, in her interrogation of US Department of Education discourse regarding the role of higher education in economic advancement, Suspitsyna (2012) employs Fairclough’s (2006) textually oriented discourse analysis (TODA) method to discursively analyze federal education policy. TODA involves the analysis of how power is expressed through spoken and written text. Suspitsyna engages in three levels of analysis: (1) analyzing the textual means through which realities are constructed; (2) investigating genre, audience, and authors as discursive practice; and (3) exploring the speeches’ rhetoric as discursive social practice within the broader neoliberal regime. Through her analysis, Suspitsyna demonstrates how higher education’s public purpose, through federal rhetoric, is co-opted by and subjugated to its role within the neoliberal regime as an engine for economic growth.

As Foucault (1978) writes, “discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart” (p. 101). In broadening the frame for policy analysis to interrogate policy discourse, PDA offers an important tool for exposing the systemic roots of perceived problems and, thus, a space in which to challenge systems and advocate for change.

However, PDA can be criticized for resting on critique as the sole outcome of analysis. Further, by treating policy texts as sites of discursive production, PDA runs a risk of ignoring the materiality of policy effects. By its definition of discourse, PDA relies on representational and interpretive ontologies, in which language reifies the real (Fairclough 2013). Education researchers working in the broad areas of post-humanism and post-qualitative inquiry point out that representation is a secondary intervention that creates static structures out of dynamic movements and difference (Massumi 2002; MacLure 2013). Scholars often point to the analyses of philosopher Gilles Deleuze, particularly his work, The Logic of Sense (2004), through which he argued that such a representational tool as language contributes to the dogma of thought, building categories of right and wrong (or good sense and common sense), stemming from an elusive and illusive rational and autonomous individual. In order to address these concerns, we offer a post-humanist addendum to the PDA tradition. We begin by emplacing education policy within the Anthropocene—a geologic period marked by humankind with significant social implications for all of its institutions. We then pivot to incorporate the recent theorizations on the materiality of language from Maggie MacLure (2013) in order to put forth a tentative (and nervous) operationalization of our post-human/post-qualitative addendum to PDA.

The Anthropocene

We live, work, and know the world as complicit producers of the Anthropocene. In a scientific sense, the Anthropocene is our current geologic period—one in which humans are the primary agents of affect and effect on the planet—we have as much power over geologic change as anything else, if not more so, and our imprint on the Earth can be recognized in the Earth’s very constitution (Zalasiewics et al. 2011). Such science forces us to grapple with the social consequences of human agency not as separate from nature, but constituent and simultaneously constituting of nature. Put more simply, we invent nature, with every decision we make socially and politically regarding how we choose to understand it. In social science, the Anthropocene provides “an ethical injunction to think critically about human and nonhuman agency in the universe” (Zylinksa 2014, p. 62). Applied to PDA in education, the Anthropocene begs attention paid to the non-human agents/actants produced through policy as discourse and the consequences thereof. For example, in examining a policy on school choice, the material conditions of schools matter, particularly as the buildings, artifacts, and supplies afforded across the choices produced through such policy might act upon different children radically differently.

The Anthropocene, as geologic time, marks an epoch in which humans are the dominant form of life on the planet, but also the dominant force affecting life of the planet. Humans are no longer subordinate to our environment. Rather, we are able to manipulate, mitigate, and create our environment in ways to serve various needs, desires, or interests. Humans shape and re-create the Earth. We do this metaphorically, through signs and symbols that help make sense of large-scale phenomena like migration and small-scale challenges like settlement development. Through science, technology, and work, humans have learned, over time, that we can also shape and re-create the Earth literally. We can change the direction of river-flows. We create dams, and we dry up estuaries. We build skyscrapers on what once was marshland. We experiment with new forms of Earth in controlled laboratory “biospheres.” We create earthquakes as we withdraw vital fluids from below the Earth’s surface (e.g., hydraulic fracturing). Humans generate hurricane force winds as we raise the temperature of the planet through carbon-based consumption and production.

With dominance comes responsibility. Humans, by taking charge of nature—from indexing of the planet’s species to changing its tectonic patterns—also have taken responsibility for the environment. If the environment needs manipulating for our desires or for other species’ needs, we seek to understand its relation to self, surroundings, and other beings. We cause and protect other species from extinction.

Not only do we effect change of the environment, we are affected by the environment. Humans, as the dominant form and force of life, are uniquely situated as relationally conscious to what happens around us. As philosopher, Sverre Raffnsoe (2016) shares, “This requisite responsibility has become encompassing to the extent that even singular, hard-to-predict events far beyond human control, such as earthquakes or hurricanes, have entered into the equation” (p. xii). Humans have assumed responsibility for knowing nature, totally, in order to continue our course of manipulating, generating, mitigating, and, ultimately, controlling nature.

Such environmental-social positioning on the planet necessarily raises ontological questions as humans, while not subservient, remain dependent and, in our role as responsible actant, are positioned precariously, in relation to nature—nature that we create. Human actions affect life—not just human life but planetary life. Humans are dependent on how others can respond to the nature we invent—both the nature that is and the nature that may become. Again, Raffnsoe (2016) is instructive:

They [humans] must be able to answer to, and also to answer for, how they relate to the surroundings in which they find themselves, and which are not merely a result of human creation, while at the same time they must address the reality that they themselves have a decisive effect on the places they inhabit and on how these places effect themselves and others. (p. xiii)

Through our politics of work, our development of science, and our innovations of technology, humans have positioned ourselves, ontologically, into a new way of being on the planet. Unanticipated, yet not wholly unexpected, humans—and the social institutions we have created—must wrestle with the new challenges that such positioning demands of us. We must wrestle, through our institutions and the knowledge systems (or discourses) we use and invent to produce them, with what it means to be human in the age of the Anthropocene.

Another defining characteristic of the Anthropocene’s social consequences is the saturation of knowledge through mutual mediation. While humans co-create and re-create our surroundings so extensively that we emerge in geologic history as a life condition for the planet (Raffnsoe 2016), our surroundings boomerang around and back onto our existence, “setting out incontestable conditions for human beings that they have neither explicitly caused nor can easily comprehend” (p. 14). As much as we, as a species, become a condition for planetary life, nature continues to lay down conditions for the human species. This can be seen in climate studies, wherein climate has become understood as interaction between human and nature to such permeating thresholds that it is problematic to regard them separately for analysis. Such mutually defining status of becoming illustrate the great paradox of the Anthropocene concept and its consequences for the ontological foundations of social research. Drawing again from Raffnsoe (2016):

While humanity on its part encompasses and embraces the planet and its life forms, the planet with its life forms and its destiny also encompasses and embraces humanity. And if humanity on its part has swelled to colossal size in relation to its surroundings, its surroundings likewise appear colossal on their part in relation to human affairs. (p. 15)

As giant as the human might seem, it is not the center of the universe. The human condition is mediated mutually, despite, and in some ways constituting of, its efforts to control, manipulate, and build its landscape to meet its interests. Such subordination in the philosophical foundations of policy discourse and the political discourse that enables policy is a radical shift from the humanist tradition in which an explicit and overwhelming Anthropocentrism emerges. As such, the Anthropocene concept, and the science of the Anthropocene epoch, each obliterates the long-standing assumptions of objectivist, truth-discovering, politics-making efforts of traditional policy analysis. Rather, to make sense of the political acts that social policy engenders, and/or to build meaning from the uses and generation of policy as a tool for politics and educational practice, third-generation policy research must confront an ontological turn in the foundations of social inquiry and attend to its consequences for method. Such consequences are detailed in the next section.

A Post-humanist and Post-qualitative Addendum

As a strange, yet imminent twist of planes, taking the Anthropocene seriously points toward a need for a non-anthropocentric onto-epistemological orientation. Centering a humanness (i.e., a known/knowable human subject) in analysis, critique, and action does not make sense in a context wherein science itself forces us to reconcile the agency of machines and other things. PDA requires that we uncover and take seriously the discourses in and through which policy is created as well as its own discursive effects. In a world in which humankind operates not solely as a resident species, but as a geologic force, an inventor of nature and of self, rejecting anthropocentrism or decentering humanness opens opportunities to think creatively/freshly about what dominant discourses hold up as real as well as what they obstruct, leave out, or obscure. Hence, post-humanists theorize new ontologies of “becoming-animal,” “becoming-earth,” and “becoming-machine” (Bennett 2010; Braidotti 2013; Esposito 2015). The move toward becoming, rather than being, is significant. In the post-human condition, things (including people) protrude into reality as partial and dynamic, never quite what we (or they) aspire to be, yet always en route toward a becoming. Further, the clear categories or delineations of things (e.g., humans, animals, earth, machines) become obfuscated, as hybridity takes center stage in the constantly shifting ecosystems of realities. We address these concepts in more detail toward the end of this section.

This is an optimistic synthesis of the Anthropocene. For here lies great promise: post-humanist and non-anthropocentric ontological productions might indeed afford new tools for excavating the discursive configurations made available from our new material actants, reflected and produced via policy discourses and the discourse of policy, where the former are produced through policy texts (in context), and the latter is the knowledge regime that makes policy possible—policy as dispositif in Foucauldian terms, perhaps (Foucault 2008).

Pertinent to our contribution to PDA (for the Anthropocene) and the third generation of policy research, it is important to note that the questions around the human raised by post-humanists also raise questions about the relationship between/betwixt the discursive and the material. The term mangle has been used by theorists to describe the mutual implication of the discursive and the material in how we can come to know the world (Heckman 2010; Pickering 1995). It is similar to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994) notion of assemblage, which emphasizes the unfolding emergence of what humanists termed reality. But it is not as simple as an intertwining of language and matter; language-as-discourse and matter-as-actants intra-sect and become entangled (Barad 2007) in non-hierarchical organization. Below, we review ways that three of these mangled ontological becomings have been theorized in the post-humanist literature, emplaced within the Anthropocene.

Becoming-Animal

The traditional humanist subject—white, Eurocentric, healthy, heterosexual, and male—is predicated on the othering and domination of all else. Animals occupy multiple complex positions in relation to the humanist subject—even as they are employed to signify humanist values and cultural norms, their bodies quite literally sustain us as food, as labor, and through companionship. Braidotti (2013) suggests that this interrelation, traditionally grounds for exploitation and othering, breaks down within a post-human paradigm.

Becoming-animal, as an ontology, situates subjectivity in the context of the human as and in relation to animal and vice versa. In the context of the Anthropocene, the humanist understanding of the bond between humans and animals is necessarily negative as it rests in what Braidotti (2013) characterizes as “shared ties of vulnerability” (p. 69) rooted in the destructive impacts of human life on Earth. Post-humanism focuses instead on the human-animal continuum, calling into question our experience of the animal as separate, both subjugated and exploited in the interest of human advancement. At the same time, it rejects the anthropomorphization of the animal as a holdover of humanism that both discounts the animal and reinforces the human/animal distinction. Becoming-animal opens a space in which we can move beyond the binaries to instead investigate the ways in which we—human and animal—intersect, inform, and co-create identities. Within this space, the humanist subject topples from a position of domination. In its place, Zoe, life-force that transcends and imbues human/animal, emerges as post-human subject, opening new opportunities to interrogate constructs of otherness.

Becoming-Machine

The post-human subject cannot be understood or conceptualized outside of our technologically mediated reality. Humanist binaries simply do not work in regard to the human/machine relationship. Zoe, that vital, interrelational life-force animates, too, our myriad technological connections, reimagining human bodies as part of a complex, interdependent living fabric. Braidotti (2013) posits becoming-machine as an integrated web of new social ecologies that encompass the organic and inorganic. Perhaps in becoming-machine, more than other iterations of post-human subjectivity, it is easiest to recognize the primacy of transversality, the intersectional and interrelational overlaps that weave together the human and non-human, as a dynamic animating force or Zoe.

Becoming-Earth

The Anthropocene, so-called given the rise of humanity as a geologic force, has witnessed (and continues to witness) human-caused environmental crisis and destruction, most obviously embodied as climate change. Within this context, the human imagination has grown to encompass both our own macro-agency as a species and the possibility of our self-generated mass extinction. The Anthropocene also creates the conditions for new forms of subjectivity that are geo-centered. Braidotti (2013) writes, “We [critical theorists] need to visualize the subject as a transversal entity encompassing the human, our genetic neighbours the animals and the earth as a whole, and to do so within an understandable language” (p. 82). This is no small task. In our present condition, we might simultaneously experience humanity as both a geologic force and endangered species. At the same time, this collapsing of experience threatens to assign equal culpability across humanity, an unwarranted conclusion. Becoming-earth requires that we intentionally disidentify from humanist values, constructs of hierarchy, and dualism (e.g. male/female), to instead reposition and instead adopt monism as our frame for inquiry. Braidotti (2013) defines monism as “the open-ended, interrelational, multi-sexed, an trans-species flows of becoming through interaction with multiple others” (p. 89). Within this frame, Braidotti suggests that if we position Zoe as subject, we have an opportunity to move beyond compensatory humanism, a space in which we attend to planetary concerns by anthropomorphizing both the Earth and all its inhabitants, living or no, to create new ways of being, imagine new futures, and co-conceptualize our agency within them.

In each of these ontological becomings, we see clear implications for a post-human and materialist approach to PDA. In positing humanness in the frames of becoming-animal, becoming-earth, and becoming-machine, Braidotti (2013) challenges us to re-think the limitations around how PDA conceives of identity and discourse. PDA, and discourse theory more broadly, is rooted in a fundamental binary configuration, what Braidotti calls the given (nature) and the constructed (culture) (p. 2). PDA focuses specifically on how policy as discourse constructs identities/subject positions. To accomplish this, PDA approaches identity as contextual and relational and decidedly anthropocentric. PDA asserts that identity is historically bound, tied to specific social norms, and so on, but it is limited, in that it interprets subject positions in relation to a human “other” (mother, daughter, sister, etc.) that speaks to individuation. In other words, though we seek to uncover the processes through which identities are created, we experience/represent identity as a product that is singular, bounded, human, and, as a result, incomplete. In theorizing ontologies of becoming and situating Zoe as subject, Braidotti (2013) offers new perspectives and, thus, new tools for PDA to employ in its approach to policy as discourse. Should we adopt ontologies of becoming in PDA, we no longer seek to understand how policy constructs the human being, but rather its generative underpinnings. In other words, a post-human PDA for the Anthropocene refocuses on policy’s life-force, the intersections of power that produce not only what is, but what could be. Our point here is not that PDA must adopt ontologies of becoming-animal, becoming-earth, or becoming-machine specifically. We offer these examples to illustrate the possibilities that emerge within post-human subjectivity. We suggest that post-human PDA interrogate becoming itself—not how policy constructs present knowledges, but how it generates new ways of being now and in the future. Within the frame of becoming-animal, to use one of our exemplars, in examining policy on service and emotional support animals, the researcher might explore the generation of new identities that emerge from the space in which the othering of disability status, animal as pet, and animal as technology intersect. To accomplish this, we must look beyond humanist agency to a post-human approach to PDA, employing becomings both as ontological frames and as units for analysis.

Toward Sense and Emplacement

In working toward a post-qualitative inquiry informed by the ontological turn of new materialism and post-humanism, Maggie MacLure (2013) suggests that researchers might consider drawing from sense in order to engage with the materiality of language. MacLure reminds that “language is in and of the body; always issuing from the body; being impeded by the body; affecting other bodies” (p. 663). As such, language intra-sects with matter as it becomes representational. Yet, sense, a “non-representing, unrepresentable, ‘wild element’ in language” (p. 658), might provide an opening for PDA to engage with the mangle of language and matter. Sense is a thinking-feeling of a becoming. It cannot be spoken, nor interpreted, and therefore cannot be represented nor representative. However, sense is made known to us in our engagement with data, with social practice, with texts, and within contexts. Sense might be understood as an event (Deleuze 2004). But—an event that takes flight from any number of lines and might never unfold into a becoming … anything.

Recalling our discussion of PDA, in which we assert that it requires a recognition of text within context. Gildersleeve et al. (2015) emplaced otherwise seemingly disparate political speeches and other texts into a built and subjective context in order to map plausible subjectivation techniques emergent from the immigration policy regime. During analysis, while scouring texts related to immigration and education, politics and political economy, education and opportunity, immigration and democracy, the team, at one point, shared a sense-event when it recognized there was a context that could be built if we recognized the materiality of the policy texts they encumbered. From the existing border fencing to the imaginary border wall to Sather Gate at the UC at Berkeley to the immigration forms that migrants must fill out, a zillion kinds of matter mattered and entangled any potential discursive production that the language of policy alone could muster. Such sense-events kept the discursive productions operating on the surface of experience—right at the thresholds of the manglings of education policy. As such, we were able to imagine and map the plausibility of the Latino caste in education policy and college choice. We followed and led the sense-event by entering the mangle or assemblage that continues unfolding as the immigration policy regime from a moment, a line of flight that we could empirically demonstrate as constitutive of a becoming-subject.

Policy Discourse Analysis in the Anthropocene and Third-Generation Policy Research

Expecting or working toward sense in PDA might afford the opportunity to consider how the language of texts within context intra-act with matter, both the materiality of language (the building blocks of text) and the matter that becomes represented through language. Of course, sense is but one option for reconfiguring how discourse and policy might become engaged in recognition of the Anthropocene and our post-human lines of flight. Our overarching goal in staging this chapter through the tradition of PDA and into the Anthropocene and mangling education policy within the post-human/post-qualitative critique and production of new ways of knowing is not necessarily to say that sense needs to be incorporated into PDA, although we think it probably could be beneficial. Rather, we hope to demonstrate that third-generation policy research has an opportunity, and perhaps an obligation, to playfully experiment with how we bring the ontological imperatives of the Anthropocene to bear on education.

We are not alone, nor the first to make such a suggestion. Jasmine Ulmer (2015) drew from post-humanist philosopher Catherine Malabou’s concept of plasticity (2007, 2010, 2012) and presented it as an approach to policy analysis that could incorporate the becoming nature of the human/non-human entanglement. Ulmer used plastic as an organizing metaphor, analytic, and method for examining technology-centered models of education reforms. She theorized the policy process as plastic—simultaneously shapeable, yet structured, and all the while destructible. Her use of plasticity afforded her the ability to render policy beyond its textual representation, vacillate from outside to inside (and vice versa) of its material manifestation (e.g., outcomes), and provide new directions for policy to consider. According to Ulmer, “plasticity provides a means for understanding how structural elements intra-act within dynamic processes of shaping, reshaping, and unshaping policy” (p. 1101). Her plastic reading of education policy challenges the Anthropocentrism of traditional policy analysis, including the post-structural tradition of PDA described earlier.

Ulmer provides examples of how technology-centered reforms in education materialize from received shape/form—they are presented as (discursive) givens necessary for the digital age of education and workforce development. She then describes how such reforms provide shape/form by materially changing the make-up of instruction (e.g., using tablet technologies in elementary classrooms). Ulmer ultimately draws her plastic reading to demonstrate how technology-centered education reforms might cause disruption (i.e., destruction) by radically re-organizing the teaching and learning exercises of education (e.g., teacher as technologist rather than pedagogue). Ulmer concludes, “this shaping, reshaping, unshaping, and even resistance to shape continuously defines and challenges processes of policy formation” (p. 1103). Her plastic reading, as a (post-humanist and) post-qualitative method for policy analysis, necessarily mangled the discursive and material consequences of education policy.

Summary

Recognizing the entanglement of “the human” with the things that accompany us in our sense of becoming requires that education policy researchers think differently and experiment playfully—yet seriously—with new theoretical and conceptual tools for explaining and designing educational conditions and futures.

Raffnsoe (2016) notes:

Within new post-disciplinary contexts, academic borders, including borders between the human and the non-human, become more like thresholds that dare us to overstep them, and bridges and passageways that dare us to build them, in order to establish a new independent relationship between that which previously seemed divided. Similarly, the differences become more like accounts that dare us to settle them and balance them appropriately, in order to enable new types of knowledge to come to light. (p. 57)

As education increasingly is emplaced within and expected to act upon dynamic social imperatives, researchers need to develop newly powerful tools that recognize the non-hierarchical organization of our onto-epistemological conditions. Emplacing PDA within the Anthropocene, and providing a post-human and post-qualitative addendum to its representational (i.e., textual and interpretive) tradition, is but one attempt at operating at the thresholds of method and methodology. PDA for the Anthropocene must wrestle with the ontological shifts that “the human” can no longer ignore in our own becoming-history as a geologic force. Thus, we hope to have offered one plausible passageway to entangling the discursive and material that previously were divided.

Policy researchers interested in taking seriously the Anthropocene and its consequences for human subjectivity via education policy might begin by identifying the material actants that emerge from or produce the policy contexts and regimes under scrutiny. First-steps methodologically might mean shifting focus from the rhetorical development of policy to the materialization of policy regimes. Research questions might become less deterministic and more fluid, affording a dynamism of difference (ala Derrida), to emerge in the empirical readings of education policy. As we have suggested in this chapter, a shift from meaning to sense and from discretion to entanglement is needed in third-generation policy research. These movements suggest that researchers expand the scope of their inquiry. Researchers could stop trying to establish any semblance of boundary for policy and its consequences. Rather, recognizing that any given policy regime acts upon a territory of activities and therefore can be de-territorialized and re-territorialized as the materialization of policy extends into social life.

We reiterate that our goal is to encourage a playfulness with third-generation policy research. One of the greatest strengths of the Anthropocene as a context for inquiry is its indeterminacy. There are fewer and fewer rules for establishing how something can come to be known. As such, the development of new concepts for new explanations—new sense moments, or plastic readings—might serve as new goals or strategies for third-generation policy researchers.

Key Connections to Policy Research

  1. 1.

    Identify material actants within policy regime.

  2. 2.

    Focus on the materialization of policy regimes, rather than rhetorical development of particular policies.

  3. 3.

    Recognize how policy regimes are emplaced within broader material conditions.