The subject of policy

Abstract

I work selectively with poststructuralist theories in order to give an account of the subject of policy as a constitutive relationship between social policy and the embodied human subject. Drawing on theories of subjectivity, narrative and governmentality, I articulate possibilities for analysing narrated accounts of experience as a mode of address to policy and its analysis. I argue that the multiple and often contradictory discourses, narratives, practices and experiences through which the subject of policy is governed, are embodied in ways that exceed the rationalities and ambitions of policy. I propose that an address to the experience of the embodied subject is crucial to an understanding of how policy is lived, and to the limits of the realisation or materialisation of policy ambitions. Finally, I explore possibilities for an approach to policy analysis that takes as its starting point a single narrative of experience. In re-telling the narrative of a nineteen-year-old university student ‘Emily’, I highlight the extent to which her ambitions are simultaneously formed by particular ambitions of Higher Education policy and in tension with them.

Keywords:

• policy
• subjectivity
• governmentality
• narrative
• experience

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter Bansel

Peter Bansel is a Research Fellow with the Sexualities and Genders Research Network in the School of Social Sciences and Psychology at the University of Western Sydney. His research focus on governmentality, narrative, biography, experience and subjectivity has been applied to empirical research with multiple subjects (children, young people and adults) in multiple sites (schools, universities, community organisations and workplaces). His research and publications have variously focused on: education, schooling and work; knowledge economies and labour markets; gender and sexuality; and biographical narratives of experience, performativity and policy.