Policy assemblages and human devices: a reflection on ‘Assembling Policy’

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 As part of my current Australian Research Council project, titled ‘National schooling reform and the reshaping of Australian federalism’ [DE160100197], I am working to develop an approach that combines ‘assemblage’ with insights from ‘complexity theory’ as a foundation for understanding national policy shifts. Some of my initial work on how assemblage can be used to theorise national reform is featured in Savage and Lewis (2017).

2 Deleuze and Guattari use the terms territorialisation, deterritorialisation, and reterritorialisation to describe how a variety of assemblages (e.g. from political spaces through to ecosystems) come together (territorialisation) or come undone (deterritorialisation), or to describe cases where existing or disrupted assemblages are reassembled (reterritorialisation) (1987).

3 For an interesting discussion of assemblage and its ontological, theoretical, and conceptual uses, see Acuto and Curtis (2014), particularly chapters one and two.

4 It is useful to note that in an earlier article, Ureta (2014) proposed a framework for studying policy assemblages that comprised just ‘three configurations’ instead of four: (1) Problematisation; (2) Infrastructuration; and (3) Regime.