ABSTRACT
In this concluding chapter, we will discuss the outcomes of the book and tie the main threads of the arguments and analyses together. All of the chapters are informed by the notion that schools can be transformative political spaces. Despite neoliberal normativity in education, the book shows that within dominant neoliberal educational governance, where neoliberal normativity makes politics and political subjectivity superfluous and where achievement tests and audit culture delimit educational practises (Harvey and Ringrose, Foss Lindblad and Lindblad, and Reimers in this book), there is still room for the emergence of political subjectivity. The education assemblage encompasses contradictory norms and practises that plug into each other in multiple and not totally foreseeable ways. Besides the neoliberal emphasis on measurable knowledge, the education assemblage includes citizenship studies, human rights and critical thinking. Consequently, the chapters make way for a critical discussion about the multiple emergences of global and local materialisations of educational norms as well as about how political subjectivities are made (im)possible. By drawing on the arguments from the chapters, we want to contribute to a theoretical discussion of neoliberal norms in education, pointing to the messiness and the situatedness of their materialisations, and to the unpredictability of what can and will emerge within and alongside educational practises.
