![]()
1
Introduction
ELIZABETH J. ALLAN, SUSAN V. IVERSON, AND REBECCA ROPERS-HUILMAN
Higher education, like any complex educational or social system, encounters problems that need solutions. Policy is one vehicle through which colleges, universities, and systems of higher education work to sustain and improve as they strive to enact their missions, goals, and objectives. Policy researchers and analysts are frequently called upon for expertise in assessing the effectiveness of extant policy and making recommendations for improvement. Yet, despite the implementation and refinements of policy, some problems – such as those associated with access, equity, and diversity – continue to plague postsecondary/individual campuses and higher education systems. Moreover, the very language through which policy (and power relations within systems) is created continues to be both value-laden and contentious.
Catalyzed by a growing awareness of feminist poststructural perspectives and their potential to enhance understandings of policy and professional practice in postsecondary education, this volume responds to the need for a text that illustrates how these perspectives can help researchers and practitioners think differently about policy issues and policy analysis in the context of higher education. The research highlighted in subsequent chapters examines a range of topics of interest to scholars and professionals in higher education, including: purposes of higher education, administrative leadership, athletics, diversity policy, student agency, social class, the history of women in postsecondary institutions, and quality and science in the globalized university.
The majority of the chapters examine policy-related issues in the context of U.S. higher education; importantly however, the analytic approaches employed are transferable to policy investigations in varied contexts. As well, two of the chapters bring a more global perspective to this volume by detailing research related to student engagement in New Zealand (Chapter 9) and transnational implications of discourses carried by educational policy reports of the World Bank (Chapter 11). In addition to the scope of policy-related issues and contexts examined, the chapters also range widely in their focus on different aspects of sociopolitical identity, including: sexual identity, socio-economic status, geographic home, gender, race, and status within university organizational hierarchies.
This text joins together the work of scholars who draw upon theories of feminist poststructuralism (FPS) to examine policy issues within the context of postsecondary education. While the chapters included in this volume shine a spotlight on different issues related to higher education, they share two themes: (1) they all investigate issues relevant to policy, and (2) they draw upon FPS perspectives to analyze and understand the issues in new ways with a focus on struggles for social justice. Our use of the plural terms, theories and perspectives, is intended to emphasize the fluidity of FPS and to highlight that such approaches do not conform to a singular methodological protocol. FPS approaches provide a lens through which to analyze what has come to be taken-for-granted as “normal” everyday practice. When applied to research and policy analysis, FPS approaches foreground assumptions embedded in the naming of problems and examine the discourses that may produce unintended consequences of policy solutions.
To set the stage for the ensuing chapters, we offer a few definitions of key concepts associated with FPS. First, what is theory? Theory has various meanings depending upon context and methodology. As noted by Creswell (2009), quantitative researchers, generally, test theories as an explanation for answers to their questions, whereas typically for qualitative researchers, theory provides a “lens that shapes what is looked at and the questions asked” (p. 49). For our purposes, we draw upon the latter understanding of theory. This “orienting lens” (Creswell, p. 62) serves as an explanatory framework through which to analyze and understand a given phenomenon. For instance, drawing upon feminist perspectives as a theoretical lens may illuminate policy issues with particular effects for women in specific contexts (Allan, 2003) or knowledge about oppressive situations for women (Olesen, 2000). We ascribe to Ozga’s (2000) view that “there is no such thing as theory in itself, divorced from a standpoint in time and space. When any theory so represents itself, it is important to lay bare its concealed perspective” (p. 45).
This project – guided by the notion that inquiry leads to change – is informed by feminist theory, which is defined by a commitment to eliminating subordination and oppressive conditions in social institutions (e.g., education) and a liberatory belief in a more just and equitable society (Ladson-Billings, 2000; Lather, 1991; Tierney, 1992). The term feminism is often treated as a unitary category, yet there are actually many feminisms, each informed by different theoretical underpinnings (Tong, 1998). All, however, share the concern with gender relations and women’s emancipation (Tisdell, 1998). While feminist perspectives foreground the examination and inclusion of women’s experiences and contributions, we ascribe to versions of feminism that draw upon the concept of intersectionality. Such perspectives acknowledge ways in which women’s experiences are not monolithic and highlight how gender is shaped by sociopolitical identity forces like race, social class, physical ability, sexuality, and cultural context to name a few. Inspired by a range of feminist perspectives (e.g., Collins, 2000; Ladson-Billings, 2000; Lather, 1991; Olesen, 2000; Wing, 2003), this project joins feminism with poststructuralism to retain, yet also problematize, a critical approach to policy studies that helps raise important questions about the control and production of knowledge, and the ways policy can be used to empower individuals to act within unique sociopolitical contexts to challenge dominant ideology (Ball, 1994; Marshall, 1999).
An FPS lens is important because it can help policy analysts and scholars studying policy-related issues trace the discursive shaping of policy problems and identify how the embedded assumptions may contribute to consequences of policy solutions that may not have been explicitly intended. Specifically, as Susan Iverson’s analysis of diversity plans in Chapter 10 poignantly illustrates, policy solutions can employ discursive images that are meant to be liberatory and yet are restrictive to those the policy is meant to serve. The identification of policy shortcomings, limitations, or inherent contradictions is not new (see Berman & McLaughlin, 1974). Darling-Hammond and McLaughlin (1995), in their examination of policies that support professional development, call for critical examination of practice and rethinking of policymaking so that policies do not support rigid systems. Yet, absent in their calls for change is an interrogation of the taken-for-granted assumptions that make a policy problem a problem. The use of FPS as an analytic lens affords new ways of thinking and seeing that work to dismantle the “givenness” of policy issues and goals and a means of examining ways in which the taken-for-granted policy discourses may reinforce the problems they seek to alleviate.
A primary objective of this book is to provide readers with a useful overview of feminist poststructural perspectives as well as a range of examples demonstrating how FPS offers helpful lenses for analyzing policy and policy development processes in the context of higher education. In this sense, the book is part of several ongoing conversations about higher education policy, feminist, and poststructural research approaches, and the ways in which governing policies are developed, enacted, and interpreted. Perhaps most importantly, the book focuses on the role of policy in shaping both discourse and, within discourse, lived experience. To this end, Reconstructing policy in higher education has several purposes. Specifically, through policy analysis, theoretical discussion, and the presentation of original empirical research, the book:
1. Describes key tenets characterizing FPS and how this theoretical framework can support the analysis of policy and policy development processes.
2. Promotes understandings of how policy serves to both transmit and produce realities affecting higher education.
3. Highlights how hidden assumptions embedded in policy may serve to undermine intended goals of policy-makers.
4. Showcases feminist poststructural perspectives and methods applied to a range of policy issues in higher education.
5. Informs more effective development of policy and change strategies advanced by groups committed to promoting more equitable experiences for historically disadvantaged groups in postsecondary education.
Important Concepts
As will be made clear in Chapter 2 of this volume, FPS draws from and relies on concepts and approaches that emerge from multiple sources and across disciplinary domains. In the following section, we provide a brief overview of key concepts and approaches to set the stage for engaging with subsequent chapters.
Policy
The term “policy” can be understood differently depending on the disciplinary context. According to Fowler (2009), distinctions and disagreements about the ways in which policy is defined emerge from philosophical differences about the nature and roles of society, power, and government. As an academic field of study, public policy emerged in the 1960s as a subfield of the discipline of political science (Cochran & Malone, 1999). In general, public policy refers to the dynamic and value-laden process through which a political system handles a public problem and the policy process is a sequence of events
For some, the study of policy is limited to the realm of government and is concerned primarily with the development and implementation of laws or statutes, associated rules and regulations, court decisions, and their implementation via elected and appointed officials and those working within government agencies and bodies (Conway et al., 2004; Fowler, 2009). For others, policy is more broadly defined to also include the dynamic and value-laden process through which political systems operate to solve problems at t...
