‘Neoliberal spatial technologies’: on the practices of educational policy change

Abstract

This paper explores the spatial dimensions of neoliberalism, in relation to educational policy change in the inner‐city of Sydney, Australia. It offers a response to Peck and Tickell's challenge that studies of neoliberalism are often undertaken as discrete macro‐ or micro‐analyses without attention to the links between, and across, these scales. The paper posits the notion of ‘neoliberal spatial technologies’, a bricolage of neoliberalism, governmentality and relational space, to contribute to cross‐scalar understandings of neoliberalism in relation to inner‐city educational policy change. An adumbrated analysis is presented of the practices surrounding the outcome of educational policy change in inner‐Sydney. The paper concludes that these practices, drawing on discourses of neoliberalism and relational space, constitute particular students as possible neoliberal educational subjects.

Keywords:

• Education
• Governmentality
• Neoliberal
• Policy
• Space

Notes

1. All place and organization names are real, all school and participant names are pseudonyms.

2. A version of this paper was presented at the American Educational Research Association in San Francisco, April 2006, and the Place, space, young people and processes of social transformation: interdisciplinary imaginings seminar, Monash University, 21 July 2006. I would like to thank Michael Peters, Anoop Nayak, Mary Lou Rasmussen, Eva Bendix Petersen and Colin Symes for their feedback on earlier versions of this paper.

3. This idea owes much to Youdell's (2006) construction of possible and impossible educational subjects.

4. In this paper I place race within quote marks to indicate race is a problematic category in regards to claims of social constructivism and essentialism (Nayak, 2006).

5. While place is not utilized as an analytical construct in this paper, I take the position that place and space are in a mutually constitutive relationship, that is place that does not need to supplant space, or vice versa, it can be place and space (see Agnew, 2005).

6. Here, whilst I recognize that Aboriginal peoples are made up of diverse language groups with connected land affinities, I use Aboriginal as a marker for those that are constituted as Aboriginal by the state schooling system.

7. These moves away from the comprehensive ideal are also evident in the UK (Phillips, 2003).