ABSTRACT
The chapter illustrates the practical idea of policy prolepsis by demonstrating how policy apparitions use fear in becoming-policy. Techno-rational approaches to policy development and research imply that variations in policy meaning, implementations, and outcomes are attributable to actor’s incorrect interpretations, or imply a certain set of literacy skills in reading or decoding policy have atrophied. Policy prolepses, then, are a category of becoming-policy, produced rhetorically and used politically, that shape policy interpretations and shape educational practices within the spaces of desired, yet incomplete, indeterminate, and ad hoc, policy initiatives and implementations. Policy prolepses demarcate a wide range of emergent policy ontologies and fragmented practices produced through educational actors’ senses of policy and their subsequent interpretations of policy, including their calculations of policy outcomes. Policy prolepses operate through affective tones, or affective sensings, that function without certainty, and indeed, on serendipity. Policy prolepses are coded affectively and rhetorically position subsequent policy interpretations and, eventually, position subjects themselves.
