Coming to matter in practice: enacting education policy

Abstract

This article is offered as a counterpoint and complement to the symposium on policy enactment in a previous issue of 'Discourse' by Stephen Ball, Meg Maguire and colleagues. Although their focus was largely on the discursive, and policy actors and policy subjects, this article is concerned with researching the emergent materiality of policy and draws on an Australian Vocational Education and Training policy study. It focuses on one particular object (a mini-warehouse) and one policy (Productivity Places Program) and develops an approach to researching a topology of policy enactment along three intersecting axes. In this topology, the material is given an ontological status, which is 'in-here' as opposed to 'else-where'; where reality is emergent in practice. The research focus therefore is on policy processes and the assumption is that these processes are not benign as the world continues to be (re)articulated unequally; the point of policy research being to investigate the ways in which policy processes contribute to or work against this inequality.