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:

1. Is WPR a “method” of “discourse analysis”? What differences appear if WPR is approached as an analytic strategy? 
2. Is it possible to combine WPR with the FEC (Feminist Ethic of Care)? Or should WPR be applied to the FEC? [next entry]
3. 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 21^st 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

This entry is inspired by a segment on the ABC’s Radio National Program, entitled “God Forbid” (9 April 2023). The panel was asked to consider how one’s writing affected one’s life. On this particularly reflective morning I found myself considering if the amount of time and effort I put into developing and “refining” WPR was justified. How did the work affect my life? How does it affect the lives of other researchers? How does it or can it affect the lives of “research subjects”?

Thinking about this topic put me in mind of Annemarie Mol’s work on research methods as “interferences”. According to Mol (2002: 155, emphasis in original), “[M]ethods are not a way of opening a window on the world, but a way of interfering with it. They act, they mediate between an object and its representations”. The argument captured in these evocative words is that research practices create realities, that, as researchers, we are unavoidably involved in “ontological politics” (Mol 1999; Research Hub entry 20 Dec. 2017). 

If WPR, as a research “method”, creates realities, it surely is involved in changing lives. But what does it mean to say that one’s research creates (or performs or enacts) realities? What kind of claim is being made here? Moreover, what kind of a responsibility does this proposition impose on researchers? Fraser (2020) has written about the possibility of delivering “ontologically-oriented research”. She provides guidelines for how this research can be done. Dennis (2019) raises the concern that “if we take enacting or inventing the social to its end point, are we in danger of overstating the creative potential of our methods?”

“By highlighting the role of method in making reality, are we at risk of once again granting too much responsibility and power to researchers and their intentions, practices, and technologies (as raised in debates over the crisis of representation; Clifford & Marcus, 1986) and not enough to the world as it makes itself known (Barad, 2007; Savransky, 2018; Stengers, 1997)?”

Performing realities

These questions are central to contemporary theoretical debates about what is commonly described as a “performative” theoretical perspective. In previous Research Hub entries (29 Sept. 2022; 26 Oct. 2022) I show how the performative argument links to claims about producing realities. I distinguish between two meanings of performativity: first, to refer to the effects of a subject’s “utterances”; second, to refer to the effects of a broad range of practices, including research practices.

The first meaning, which refers to the effects of a subject’s “utterances”, is linked to Austin (1962; discussed further below). In this tradition Jackson (2004: 2; emphasis in original) claims “that linguistic acts don’t simply reflect a world but that speech actually has the power to make a world”. In the second, broader meaning, “performativity” is connected to “every kind of act, that, when being committed, changes the existing order to a certain degree” (Breljak & Kersting 2017: 435). To prefigure the argument, I suggest that WPR is best approached through this second, broader, meaning, marking a significant distance from linguistics and “utterances”.

The mention of “acts” in these two meanings indicates that the target of analysis, in both cases, is practices (see Research Hub entries 30 Nov. 2019; 31 Dec. 2019). Connections can be drawn with aspects of Deleuzian assemblage theory. As with a performative perspective, assemblages, or rather assemblings, draw attention to ongoing processes “in which there can be no single stable reality but only specific realities made and unmade in practice” (Farrugia 2016: 39; emphasis added). In such practice accounts, “performativity” can be seen to counter a certain sort of positivism and essentialism. It invokes “the diverse materials involved in the putting together of various categories, objects, and persons” (du Gay 2010: 171). Reality becomes a product or effect of (repeated) acts (Breljak & Kersting 2017: 435). 

Questioning performativity

The speculative pragmatist Martin Savransky (2018: 226) expresses qualms about the meaning and legitimacy of these claims. He declares there is “much that I find unconvincing – and on occasion misleading” about the performative perspective. He examines the arguments of some of the leading theorists associated with this theoretical stance (Osborne and Rose 1999; Law and Urry 2004; Callon 1986) and finds their explanations wanting: 

“Indeed, it is often unclear what is meant by the process whereby reality is said to be ‘produced’, ‘enacted’, ‘constructed’, ‘brought into being’, and so on by the social sciences”. (Savransky 2016: 129) 

Going further, Savransky (2018: 228) is scathing in his suggestion that the claim that research methods produce realities displays “hubris”. 

Savransky’s concerns need to be taken seriously. It is not enough simply to claim that methods produce realities without clarifying what is intended in this claim. My understanding is that theorists aligned with a “performative” analytic are primarily concerned with alerting researchers to the possible negative consequences of some of their “interferences” (research methods). In other words, I have always associated this perspective with a self-critical and cautionary stance rather than with a “boastful” claim about making realities. In a 2012 chapter on the politics of research practices, I concluded: 

“The whole point of a turn to ontological politics, as presented in this chapter, is to insist that researchers examine the realities they create and to assess the political fallout accompanying those realities.” (Bacchi 2012: 152; emphasis added)

Still, Savransky is correct that the claim that research practices produce realities has been interpreted to mean that research practices can and should produce (certain kinds of) realities. In that same chapter in 2012 I turned to Deleuze and Guattari (1988: xii) to herald the possibility of marshalling concepts to challenge established practices. Pointedly, Deleuze and Guattari (1988: xii) compare a concept to a brick: it can be used to build a wall, or it can be thrown through a window. The latter signalled an ability by researchers to disrupt established practices.

In addition, above, I mentioned the work of Suzanne Fraser on the possibility of designing “ontologically-oriented research”. Fraser (2020) describes her innovative research projects in these terms: 

“As I will argue, the projects and their outcomes were fundamentally inspired by the insight that research not only explores and describes realities, it actively constitutes the realities it explores, playing a direct role in reconstituting realities through its conduct, outcomes and communications.” (Fraser 2020: Abstract) 

Fraser is sensitive to the power issues raised by Dennis above, emphasizing the need to “design and conduct research in response to this inescapable power to constitute objects and shape outcomes” (Fraser 2020: 3; emphasis in original). Acknowledging the “risky” dimensions of taking up such research, she makes the case that it is possible to “intentionally” set out “to leverage these insights about research to produce novel objects, materials and discourses to enact better outcomes” (Fraser 2020: 3; emphasis in original). In my reading, this stance would mean that any research approach, including WPR, could aim at creating reality “differently” and hence at changing lives (Fraser discusses the elements that make up ontopolitically-oriented research in her Conclusion). The reference to “better outcomes” signals the necessarily normative dimension of this argument (see Research Hub 30 April 2019). 

Performing Austin: the dangers of metaphors and analogies 

According to Savransky (2018: 226), the performative turn has been animated by “a particular interpretation of John Austin’s theory of the illocutionary force of performative utterances”. He notes that Austin first developed the term “performatives”. Austin’s particular usage is reflected in the first meaning of performativity identified at the outset of this entry, to refer to the effects of a “subject’s” utterances. The proposition most commonly associated with Austin is that language is not purely descriptive of “reality”; rather, language does things (with links to “speech act” theory; Searle 1979). To quote Austin (1962: 12), “the issuing of an utterance is the performing of an action”. For example, when I say, “I promise to finish my work”, I am doing something – I am making a promise. Savransky argues that Austin’s description of perlocutionary effects, the alteration of on-going situations, better captures what the “performative” scholars are describing: 

“In contrast to illocutionary effects, the notion of a perlocutionary effect requires that we conceive of the relationship between an invention and a milieu as something other than a unilateral creation of the latter by the former.” (Savransky 2016: 131)

I have previously described the “performative” perspective as analogous to Austin’s illocutionary effects ( KEYNOTE ADDRESS – CAROL BACCHI – 18 August 2022). Öjehag-Pettersson (2020; 627; emphasis added) similarly, references Austin and treats “speech acts” as a simile in his analysis of the role played by numerical devices in governing sub-national regions in Sweden: 

“recognizing the performative capacity of numbers is a way of pointing to the fact that numerical devices, like ‘speech acts’ (Austin, 1976), do something to the context in which they are articulated. They are not exact representations of reality, nor neutral ways of classifying and grouping social phenomena. Rather, they are a part of the iterative practices that brings objects and subjects into being in what we call ‘the real’ (Butler, 1993).” 

I now believe that drawing analogies with “speech acts” and “illocutionary effects” and even “perlocutionary effects” ends up confusing the socio-political analysis intended by “performative” scholars with linguistic theory. WPR is not associated with language theory. The claim that proposals in policies produce “problems” as particular sorts of problems has nothing to do with illocutionary effects. The example I offer of how training programs for women produce the “problem” as women’s lack of training has nothing to do with “speech acts”. Rather, the claim that the proposal produces women’s lack of training as real, forming part of an analytic strategy targeting governing mechanisms. It is a political, not a linguistic, intervention. 

It may be appropriate therefore to stop referring to “performatives” in relation to WPR. Law and Mol abandon the language of performativity because of the way in which, in Austin, the focus is on conventional subject-actors as the originators of practices. Mol suggests using the terms enacted and enactment instead of performed and performance because enactment suggests that “activities take place but leaves the actors vague” (Mol 2002: 33; see also Law 2004: 159). Another option that works well is “constitutive”. Poststructural Policy Analysis(Bacchi and Goodwin 2016) builds its analysis around the term “constitutive”. Policies are described as constitutive of “problems”, “subjects”, “objects” and “places”. The term “constitutive” signifies that things are brought into being – or, in other words, that realities are created. But does this change in terminology bring us any closer to clarifying just what this claim entails? 

What realities are created? 

As mentioned above, I agree with Savransky that the claim that research methods produce realities needs greater specification. 

What does it mean to say that one’s research creates (or performs or enacts) realities? What political visions and assessments are these statements and key terms intended to convey? WPR traces how policies and other practices embrace or incorporate a specific approach and meaning that translate into and play a part in shaping people’s lives. It shows how these practices give substance and credibility to certain “objects” and “subjects”. It puts in question “real” “places” by highlighting their emergence in practices (see Walters 2009 on the creation of “Europe”). By tracing these effects, it allows the “real” to be thought differently and can impact directly on people’s lives.

Consider this example. Kiepec et al. (2023) piloted a photo elicitation methodology to examine the perspectives of health providers and “participants who use substances” on substance use. They report that health providers were influenced by a “medicalization” view that identifies “aspects of lives experienced as constituting a ‘problem’ treatable, primarily though medical interventions”. To counter this view, the authors integrated “non-problem-focused theoretical perspectives (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016), considering contextual factors that extend beyond individual, often pathologized factors”. The authors conclude that their findings “may contribute to nuanced understandings to destigmatise and mitigate Othering” (Kiepec et al. 2023; Abstract).

This example illustrates how questioning problem representations (e.g., “medicalization”) can lead to alternative problematizations. It also shows the importance of focussing on how “problems” are conceptualized in research approaches. Kiepec et al. (2023) are able to produce more nuanced understandings because they adopted a critical relationship to the conventional problem status attributed to drug use. Challenging “problems” and how they are represented opens space for creating the world otherwise. 

In contrast, critics of the performative position tend to work with a version of problems as entities. I specify “a version” because it is important to recognize the nuance of the argument. As part of his critique of the “performative” position (see above), Savransky (2018: 227) questions “methods of inquiry” that presume to “enact” the social, to “frame” or “make” problems, “as if problems were yet another product of our omnipotent performativities”. Displaying a pragmatist ethic and a “pluralistic realism” (Savransky 2021), he (2020, p. 6) endorses the need for an “ongoing, risky experimentation with the proposition that problems might have a certain amount of being of their own”. This need for problems in pragmatism curtails the opportunities to challenge problem representations that can harm specific individuals and groups. 

A few additional examples of how practices produce “objects” illustrate the constitutive position – that things come to be through practices. Nielsen and Bonham (2015: 234) describe the plethora of relations which operated, in the early-to-mid-twentieth century, to “forge ‘traffic’ as an object for thought out of a multitude of street activities”. Referring to the production of the “object” of “addiction”, Keane et al. (2011: 876) explain that “all diagnostic instruments and practices construct their objects rather than describe a pre-existing ‘reality’”. In a constitutive analysis, the focus shifts from ostensibly stable entities to the multitudes of factors involved in their emergence. 

What is accomplished by challenging the simple existence of “things” and drawing attention to the plural and diverse practices involved in their emergence and co-constitution? If you do this, says Shapiro (1992: 12), you can “lessen the grip of their present facticity” and imagine the world otherwise. For example, questioning the fixity of “nation-states” provides a step towards problematizing sovereignty in world politics (Rowse 2009: 45).

Going further, since the plurality of factors at work produces multiple realities, we are impelled to ask why some realities become “the real” and how they come to appear so natural (Rose 2000: 58). Instead of taking the “real” for granted as how things must be, the analytic task becomes exposing the means of its creation, making it possible to question its authority and influence. 

None of this analysis involves illocutionary or perlocutionary effects. The claim that research practices produce realities relies, not on linguistic theory, but on political vision. Knowledge is no longer treated primarily as referential, as a set of statements about reality, but as a practice that interferes with other practices to create realities. 

Conclusion

Is the argument that WPR can change lives a display of hubris (Savransky 2018: 228)? Is there a need to ensure that we don’t overstate “the creative potential of our methods” (Dennis 2019)? Ought we to cultivate “humbler sensibilities with regards to the question of what a ‘method’ may be capable of” (Savransky 2018: 226)? Or, is more to be gained through examining “methods” in terms of the lives they make possible? I tend towards the latter position.To this end researchers have a responsibility to examine critically the premises, or taken-for-granted knowledges, that underpin their analyses. For this reason, the WPR approach includes an undertaking for policy workers/analysts and researchers to engage in “self”-problematization, seeking out possible forms of domination in their ownproposals and problematizations (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 40). Whether this position is described as “humble” or not is a moot point. 

I would welcome hearing from you on this topic. Perhaps you could share your views about whether you believe your WPR research opens up the possibility to change lives “for the better” (see above), or if you think this question is misguided in some way. 

REFERENCES

Austin, J. L. 1962. How to do things with words. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 

Bacchi, C. 2012. Strategic interventions and ontological politics: Research as political practice. In A.Bletsas and C. Beasley, C. (Eds), Engaging with Carol Bacchi: Strategic interventions and exchanges. Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press. pp. 141-156.

Bacchi, C. and Goodwin, S. 2016. Poststructural Policy Analysis: A Guide to Practice. NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of “sex”. New York: Routledge.

Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, England: Duke University Press. 

Breljak, A. & Kersting, F. 2017. Performativity: moving economics further?, Journal of Economic Methodology, 24:4, 434-440, DOI: 10.1080/1350178X.2017.1369652

Callon, M. 1986. Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay’, in J. Law, ed., Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 196–223.

Clifford, J., & Marcus, G. E. (Eds.) 1986. Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. 1988. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Athlone Press.

Dennis, F. 2019. Making Problems: The Inventive Potential of the Arts for Alcohol and Other Drug Research. Contemporary Drug Problems, 46(2): 127-138. doi: 10.1177/0091450919845146

du Gay, P. 2010. Performativities: Butler, Callon and the Moment of Theory. Journal of Cultural Economy, 3(2): 171-179.

Farrugia, A. 2016. Assembling realities, assembling capacities: Young people and drug consumption in Australian drug education (PhD thesis). Curtin University, Bentley, WA.

Fraser, S. 2020. Doing ontopolitically-oriented research: Synthesising concepts from the ontological turn for alcohol and other drug research and other social sciences’, International Journal of Drug Policy, 82, 102610, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2019.102610

Jackson, S. 2004. Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Keane, H., Moore, D., and Fraser, S. 2011. Addiction and dependence: Making realities in the DSM. Addiction, 106, 875–877.

Kiepek, N., Ausman, C., Murphy, A. and Brothers, T. 2023. Socially Situated Experiences of Substance Use: A Photo Elicitation Pilot Study. Sage Open, July – September, 1-17. DOI: 10.1177/21582440231200360 

Law, J. 2004. After Method: Mess in social science research, London and New York: Routledge. 

Law, J., and Urry, J. 2004. Enacting the Social.  Economy & Society, 33: 390–410.

Mol, A. 1999. Ontological politics: A word and some questions. In J. Law, & J. Hassard (Eds.), Actor network theory and after. Oxford: Blackwell. 

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