ABSTRACT
Employed as a methodological approach, a constructivist spatial imaginary may . . . enhance emerging narratives of educational restructuring. Rather than context . . . or contingency, geography becomes both a stake and strategy in political mobilizations-a tool to initiate, stabilize, and contest policy change. (Thiem 2007: 32)
Ball (1994a) contends ‘the complexity and scope of policy analysis . . . precludes the possibility of successful single-theory explanations. What we need in policy analysis is a toolbox of diverse concepts and theories’ (p. 14, original emphasis). In this chapter I explicate how spatial theories are a useful, even necessary, part of critical policy analyses of inner city education markets. In tandem with Chapter 2, this chapter completes the conceptual terrain on which the forthcoming chapters are based.
