ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we discuss how Foucault can be used to think about education policy, and we draw upon our own work to demonstrate how this might be done. Importantly, Foucault himself was adamant that his analytical approach was not to be used like a recipe. Rather, he encouraged scholars to treat his work as a conceptual toolbox, where different concepts could be picked up, tried out and used when appropriate. Therefore, in the spirit of Foucault’s appeal, this chapter is presented in the form of a toolbox – offering a variety of conceptual tools that may be useful as readers follow different lines of inquiry throughout their education policy analysis pursuits. Throughout this chapter, we weave through illustrative vignettes of how we have put Foucault’s concepts to work in our own policy research, or how one might think about using Foucault within education policy more generally. Drawing across these cases, we show how the concepts have been useful for different purposes, but we also include moments when the research took us in unexpected directions that prompted us to consider complementary theoretical tools.
