Performative Approaches to Education Reforms

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.