Two - Policy Mobilities and Assemblage Theory: Key Concepts

Summary

In this chapter, we delineate the key theoretical resources – namely, policy mobilities (PM) and assemblage theory (AT) – that inform our conjoined PMAT approach and our efforts to better understand policy movement in a time of unprecedented connectivity and complexity. Within such a globalized milieu, we characterize comparative and international education (CIE) as, in part, a concern for the emerging modes, spaces and relations of education policy making and governance, and the influence these exert upon localized ‘moments of encounter’ (Amin and Thrift, 2002) with policy. By working creatively across PM and AT, our aim is to destabilize the taken-for-granted and universalizing concepts that frequent policy research in CIE and instead foreground the contingent nature of policy as always becoming; that is, as emerging in unpredictable ways.

As such, this chapter details our own understandings of and engagements with PM and AT. Perhaps most importantly, we seek to move beyond PM and AT (and their related concepts) as being mere ‘words’. Specifically, we want our thinking with PMAT to move beyond neologisms or linguistic devices that allude to something in a general sense but which elude concrete meanings or research applications, or that fail to engage with the more substantive features of these concepts and approaches. For instance, we seek to distinguish this work – and the development of our conjoined PMAT approach – from ‘assemblage’ standing as a vague shorthand for something that is complex or relationally defined. Our purpose here is not to suggest that an ‘assemblage’ cannot be useful when describing or denoting something that is complex, or to police some form of orthodoxy around the (in)appropriate uses of assemblage. Arguably, people (including us) will deploy these terms because they feel there is something gained by using them, even if their interpretation differs (more or less) from the concepts’ original purpose. That being said, our purpose is to emphasize what more or what else can come from moving beyond more superficial understandings and uses of PM and AT, and instead consider their respective lineages and the broader intellectual tradition in which they were developed: the fields in which they originated, the questions they sought to answer and, importantly, the questions they might be profitably directed towards in CIE research.