In the Keynote address ( KEYNOTE ADDRESS – CAROL BACCHI – 18 August 2022 for last year’s International Symposium on WPR I mentioned that WPR was being used as part of the assessment of Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality (CA, sometimes CAGE). I spoke encouragingly about the possibility of identifying developments in this initiative for new experiments in deliberative democracy. In this entry I outline the findings of the researchers on this topic and raise some questions about the uses of WPR. The intent is to provoke discussion, not to critique the impressive research that has been produced.
In the first section below I summarize the major publications to emerge from this initiative. This summary will allow me to identify key topics, as listed here, that I then pursue:
- Is WPR a “method” of “discourse analysis”? What differences appear if WPR is approached as an analytic strategy?
- Is it possible to combine WPR with the FEC (Feminist Ethic of Care)? Or should WPR be applied to the FEC? [next entry]
- Is it useful to apply WPR to “citizens’ assemblies” and other forms of “mini-publics” (Courant 2021) as novel modes of deliberative governance? [subsequent entry]
My goal is to show how it can be fruitful to approach WPR as a way of thinking differently, keeping it to the fore on the full range of topics one is undertaking. I am not saying that WPR is the only valuable mode of critical analysis. Rather, I hope to indicate how it disturbs specific arguments that require interrogation and adds a layer to the analyses produced.
Publications on Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality
The following references introduce readers to the topic of Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly and to related topics – most prominently the topics of care and care ethics. They deserve close reading.
Loughnane, C. and Edwards, C. 2022a. Reimagining
care discourses through a feminist ethics of care: analysing Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality, International Journal of Care and Caring, (16 pp). https:// doi.org/10.1332/239788221X16686175446798.
Loughnane, C., Kelleher, C. and Edwards, C. 2023. Care full deliberation? Care work and Ireland’s citizens’ assembly on gender equality, Critical Social Policy, April.
Loughnane, C. and Edwards, C. 2022b. Reimagining care discourses through a feminist ethics of care: analysing Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality. International Journal of Care and Caring, 7(4): 675 – 690.
The following Report for CareVisions extended the analytic framework to include both the Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality (2020–2021), and the Houses of Oireachtas Special Committee on COVID-19 Response (2020). The latter involved a cross- parliamentary committee established to examine the government’s response to COVID-19:
Edwards, C., Daly, F., Kelleher, C., Loughnane, C. and O’Riordan, J. 2023. Re-Envisioning a Care-Centred Society in Ireland beyond COVID-19. Institute for Social Science in the 21st Century, University College Cork, Cork.
See also: Daly, F. and Edwards, C. 2022. Tracing State Accountability for COVID-19: Representing Care within Ireland’s Response to the Pandemic. Social Policy and Society,
doi:10.1017/S1474746422000665
Loughnane and Edwards (2022a) lay out clearly their analytic agenda:
“Our analytical framework seeks to integrate Carol Bacchi’s (2009) notion of problematisation with an FEC [Feminist Ethics of Care] lens to interrogate and potentially expand how societies represent and act on care.”
To undertake this task, they “draw on a discourse analysis of documents from the CA (Citizens’ Assembly) to explore how care itself was represented and understood”.
The authors describe their “methodology” as follows:
“The first author read and watched all the documents and videos a number of times to become immersed in the module material. Following this, text directly related to the problematisation of care was extracted from across the sample and organised by the relevant WPR question. An analysis guide was developed outlining the WPR questions and the elements of the FEC lens that might emerge or, alternatively, be absent in relation to each. Following the authors’ joint refinement of the analysis guide, the first author undertook open coding and documented emerging themes as she moved between the data, the WPR methodology and the FEC lens. Both authors individually reviewed this analysis before coming together to discuss interpretations and agree key themes (outlined in the following)”. (Loughnane and Edwards 2022a; emphasis added)
I have provided the detail here to show the way in which the project started from extracting text related to the problematisation of care and then organized the material by the WPR questions. In the recent blog on WPR and RTA (Reflexive Thematic Analysis) I suggest exactly this approach (Research Hub entry 28 Dec. 2023). The question I broach in the next entry is whether it is possible to apply a FEC lens to the materials identified. That is, is it possible to combine WPR with the FEC (Feminist Ethic of Care) as the authors propose to do. Or rather, should WPR be applied to the FEC?
The authors identify two problematisations:
“Care as a ‘problem’ of gender inequality” and
“The care market ‘problem’”.
While the first problematisation was to be expected in a Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality, the authors provide a nuanced and careful analysis of the ways in which arguments could be seen to undermine particular visions of gender equality. They highlight for example how much attention was directed to men’s need to be encouraged into caring activities: “much more was made of the need to support men into care”. They also highlighted how “the care module [the Assembly was organised by modules] quickly attached to the possibility for salaries, facilities and career ladders to encourage care gender parity”.
This form of thinking shows links to the second problematisation, “The care market ‘problem’”. In this problematisation, care “was broadly constructed as serviceswithin a care market” (emphasis in original). In addition, care provision was examined “through the lens of remunerated and unremunerated work”.
Importantly, this discourse analysis of key problematisations was combined with the FEC lens. There is a large literature on feminist care ethics (see below). Loughnane and Edwards (2022a) adopt a popular convention of examining care through three outlooks: care as value, care as relation and care as practice:
“Care as value attends to the values displayed in undertaking, receiving and thinking about care (Held, 2006). The relationality of care recognises human interdependence within care relations, the fluidity of carer/ care receiver positions and connections between those relations ‘closest in’ to wider socio-political contexts (Barnes, 2012; Tronto, 2013). Approaching care as practice illustrates the labour involved in caring and the differences of care in intimate, institutional and commodified context.”
WPR and discourse analysis
The authors cited are certainly in good company in describing WPR as a mode of discourse analysis. “Discourses” form a significant part of my 2009 book (Bacchi 2009). And many authors like to combine WPR with CDA (Critical Discourse Analysis; Fairclough 2013).
At the same time, I have endeavoured to clarify a distinction between “discourse analysis” and “analysis of discourses” (Bacchi 2005). The point here is to emphasise that WPR is not a form of language analysis. Rather, it draws attention to the place of knowledges (discourses) in governing practices.
Seeing WPR as discourse analysis leads to the conclusion that we are dealing with competing forms of interpretation of a “problem”. The argument becomes that different people, groups and texts offer a particular view of a “problem”.
By contrast, since at least 2009 WPR has been associated with the way in which “problems” are produced/created/enacted as particular sorts of problem. We are not dealing with modes of interpretation, then, but with competing modes of governing. The language of “representation” in “What’s the Problem Represented to be?” can be seen to cause some of this confusion. However, as Shapiro (1988: xi) says, “representations do not imitate reality but are the practices through which things take on meaning and value …”. They form part of an “active, technical process” of governing (Rose and Miller 1992: 185). A problem representation therefore is not some image or interpretation of “reality”; it is the way in which a particular policy “problem” is constituted as the real (Bacchi 2012: 151).
To gain access to this production of “problems” WPR starts from proposals or proposed solutions. It then works backwards to see how the “problem” is implicit within a proposal. This form of analysis is what is intended in describing WPR as an analytic strategy.
To apply this strategy a researcher seeks out recommendations and aims. More broadly, it is possible to read many statements as having within them an implied proposal for change. Think for example of a claim that there is a need to enhance social cohesion. Such a claim constitutes “lack of social cohesion” as “the problem”.
The analysis offered by Loughnane and Edwards (2022a) is replete with recommendations that could provide starting points for WPR. For example, they list the “wide-ranging recommendations” that were an outcome of the care module:
better pay and conditions for paid carers; improvements to welfare payments and pensions for unpaid carers; augmented respite provision; movement towards a publicly funded childcare model; additional paid leave for parents; improvements in person-centred supports and resources for older and disabled people to live independently and to participate in their care decisions; a statutory right and enhanced access to home care; and an ending of the division of disability services for those aged under and over 18 years
Each of these recommendations provides a fertile entry-point for examining the deep-seated assumptions, the genealogy and the effects called for in a WPR analysis.
For example, “additional paid leave for parents” relies on assumptions about parental responsibilities and the need for the market to “accommodate” those responsibilities. Each proposal offers a treasure-trove of problem representations. Adopting WPR as an analytic lens creates the opportunity to rethink commonly endorsed proposals for change such as these.
One topic area where WPR might have thrown up some novel questioning is around the topic of “men’s equality”, an issue that clearly concerned Loughnane and Edwards (see above). The authors identified the “individualised solutions the citizens debated”:
“showing role models of both genders in various jobs with the focus on care type jobs’; a school programme ‘focusing specifically on normalizing the provision of care’; and ‘gender quotas to enable shared care’ in teaching, nursing and childcare” (Citizens)
Asking the WPR questions of each of these proposals would assist in teasing out the underlying assumptions in these proposals. For example, asking what the “problem” is represented to be in a proposal for more men role models would provide interesting insights into the assumed place of men in social arrangements and into the theoretical assumptions underpinning role model arguments.
I should note that on many occasions Loughnane and Edwards appear to start their analysis from proposals. Moreover, their nuanced assessment of the issues under scrutiny would often line up closely with the kind of insights a WPR analysis would generate. So, why do I think WPR assists in this kind of project? It seems to me that the systematic application of the WPR mode of thinking – analysing proposals and working backwards, with subsequent application of the other WPR questions – provides a way of thinking that keeps us alert to the governing mechanisms that shape our lives and worlds.
The authors in these articles offer a different tool for this task– the Feminist Ethic of Care. In the next entry I take some time to explain my concerns about adopting FEC as a “standard or yardstick” for assessing policy documents (Sevenhuijsen 2004: 16). I also suggest that deliberative forums, such as citizens’ assemblies, offer excellent targets for a WPR analysis, pursued in the last entry in this series (late April).
.
References
Bacchi, C. 2005. Discourse, Discourse Everywhere: Subject “Agency” in Feminist Discourse Methodology’. NORA: Nordic Journal of Women’s Studies, 13(3): 198-209. Reproduced in C. Hughes (Ed.) (2012). Researching Gender. Sage Fundamentals of Applied Research Series.
Bacchi, C. 2009. Analysing Policy: What’s the Problem Represented to be?Frenchs Forest: Pearson Education.
Bacchi, C. 2012. Strategic interventions and ontological politics: Research as political practice. In A. Bletsas and C. Beasley (Eds.), Engaging with Carol Bacchi: Strategic Interventions and Exchanges. Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press, pp. 141-56.
Barnes, M. 2012. Care in Everyday Life – An Ethic of Care in Practice, Bristol: Policy Press.
Courant D 2021. Citizens’ assemblies for referendums and constitutional reforms: Is there an “Irish model” for deliberative democracy? Frontiers in Political Science2: 591983.
Fairclough, N. 2013. Critical discourse analysis and critical policy studies. Critical Policy Studies, 7, 177–197.
Held, V. 2006. The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rose, N., & Miller, P. 1992. Political power beyond the state: Problematics of government. The British Journal of Sociology, 43 (2), 173–205.
Sevenhuijsen, S. 2004. TRACE: A Method for Normative Policy Analysis from the Ethic of Care. In S. Sevenhuijsen and A. Svab (eds) The Heart of the Matter: The Contribution of the Ethic of Care to Social Policy in Some New EU Member States.Ljubjana: Peace Institute, Institute for Contemporary Social and Political Studies.
Shapiro, M.J. 1988. The Politics of Representation: Writing Practices in Biography, Photography and Policy Analysis. Madison: Wisconsin University Press. Tronto, J. 2013. Caring Democracy – Markets, Equality, and Justice, New York: New York University Press
Carol Bacchi 