The subject of policy

I work selectively with poststructuralist theories in order to give an account of the subject of policy as a constitutive relationship between social policy and the embodied human subject. Drawing on theories of subjectivity, narrative and governmentality, I articulate possibilities for analysing narrated accounts of experience as a mode of address to policy and its analysis. I argue that the multiple and often contradictory discourses, narratives, practices and experiences through which the subject of policy is governed, are embodied in ways that exceed the rationalities and ambitions of policy. I propose that an address to the experience of the embodied subject is crucial to an understanding of how policy is lived, and to the limits of the realisation or materialisation of policy ambitions. Finally, I explore possibilities for an approach to policy analysis that takes as its starting point a single narrative of experience. In re-telling the narrative of a nineteen-year-old university student ‘Emily’, I highlight the extent to which her ambitions are simultaneously formed by particular ambitions of Higher Education policy and in tension with them.