In the previous entry (28 Dec 2025) I mentioned the increasing interest in incorporating collective research in WPR analyses (see for example Hickman and Muir 2025). Here I want to offer some preliminary thoughts on this proposal – why I find it exciting, and the challenges involved in such a project.

Exploring the boundaries of WPR

On several occasions, I have described WPR as a “work in progress”. In my new book (Bacchi 2026) I describe important developments in the approach – e.g. bringing a genealogical sensibility to the analysis; shifting the emphasis from constructionism to “performativity”, broadening the target beyond “problems” to encompass “risks”, “difficulties”, etc. The goal in each case is to encourage clarification and elaboration of the critical potential of WPR. 

In a short history of WPR produced in a recent entry (28 Nov 2025) I mention that more work needs to be done on expanding this potential:

“It has become clear to me that several of the WPR questions would benefit from providing more guidance on how to proceed. More work is needed, therefore, on developing approaches that give effect to the WPR questions. I enthusiastically welcome new contributions that address this task.”

In this entry I explore the place collaborative and collective research may play in expanding the critical potential of WPR. I use the term “collaborative” to refer to work produced by cooperating researchers, and “collective” to describe research based on wider community involvement. The next section highlights contributions where collaborative and collective research proves useful in identifying silencing practices and crafting alternative problematisations (Question 4 in WPR). The subsequent section considers how collective research can feature usefully in understanding “lived effects” and “subjugated knowledges” (Questions 5 and 6). The final section reflects on possible theoretical challenges to the crafting of these arguments. 

Strategic interventions: Question 4

Question 4: What is left unproblematic in this problem representation? What is silenced? Can the ‘problem’ be conceptualised differently?

In past work I identify several analytic strategies to pursue and identify silencing practices in one’s selected topic of interest. I mention the usefulness of reading and reflecting on available critical literatures around the topic area. I also emphasise the kinds of insights that can be generated through comparative analysis – showing for example how a “problem” can look quite different in different contexts. 

The practice of “self”-problematisation is also promoted as a way to draw attention to silencing practices in one’s own work. In my new book (Bacchi 2026; Chapter 6) I highlight the useful analysis produced by Weier and Farrugia (2020). Their article on the rescheduling of low-dose codeine products by Australia’s therapeutic drug regulator to prescription-only sale applies the WPR questions to generate “alternative problematisations”. The authors then apply WPR thinking to these “alternative problematisations” in a practice of “self”-problematisation (see Process 7 in Table of WPR questions, Bacchi 2006, end of Chapter 1; available Open Access). 

Through applying WPR thinking in this way, Weier and Farrugia (2020) identified important critical questions that their initial analysis had failed to address: first, the need to open the notion of chronic pain itself to analysis; second, the need to reconsider the erasure of pleasure from the authors’ analysis; and third, the need to consider which forms of knowledge were privileged in the regulator’s decision, an issue absent in the original study (p. 6). In other words, through “self”-problematisation the authors identified silences in their initial WPR analysis.

Collaborative research and silencing practices

There have been several initiatives that recommend the use of collaborative research to identify and work past silencing practices. In the previous entry (28 Dec 2025) Costello et al. (2025) collect the contrasting perspectives of seven different authors/contributors on the topic of how to problematise AI in Education (AIED). According to the lead author, Costello, such an approach generates research that is “necessarily idiosyncratic, situated in our research and teaching practices”. This methodological intervention is designed to recognise dissensus and to widen the conversation around AIED. 

In an earlier entry (28 April 2025), I refer to the research of Fischer et al. (2024) and their deliberate attempt to enlist researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds to broaden their analysis. Recalling their topic – exploring the deep-seated epistemological and ontological assumptions in academic articles on agroecology (AE) and sustainable intensification (SI) in relation to climate change – they created a space to jointly discuss their reading of contrasting problematisations “in an interdisciplinary group”. Again, the objective here is to create a space where silencing practices may be identified. 

In my new book (Bacchi 2026), I explore Dixit’s (2024) work on “allyship”, which invites scrutiny, from peers, of one’s research and observations. “Self-problematisation went from so-called ‘formalised knowledge’ practices to substantive discussions and engagements within a peer group and a gradual changing of who is a ‘knower’” (Dixit 2023, p. 11).

The Norwegian scholars, Eggebø, Lundberg and Teigen (2022) have written specifically on “silences” in Norway’s climate change policy. Drawing on WPR thinking they identify a “lack of connection between gender equality and climate policy in the Global North”. Eggebø (2020) has also developed a framework called “Collective Qualitative Analysis” which “aims to gather a research group for a collective workshop where they engage in the work of analysis together” (see https://hdl.handle.net/11250/2724396). Prospects for combining this analytic method with WPR thinking are under consideration (personal communication July 2025).

The initiatives just described defend the need to involve groups of scholars in generating research into problematisations. There is willingness to challenge the notion of the solitary scholar producing knowledge. As WPR thinking replaces the “sovereign subject” of Western consciousness with a decentred poststructuralist “subject”, it provides fertile soil for collaborative research projects of this kind. 

Collective research and silencing practices

Collective research can extend beyond the sorts of joint (or collaborative) research projects introduced above. Hickman and Muir (2025) broaden the range of contributors to WPR analyses beyond “experts” and academics. To increase user involvement in their project on cervical screening campaigns, they ran two collaborative analysis workshops, one with a “Lived Experience” group and another with a “Learned Experience” group. While the “Learned Experience” group drew on their academic and professional expertise, the “Lived Experience” group consisted of individuals who had “direct, personal experience of the issues being analyzed”.  

This expansion of the research project to include non-academics is linked to longstanding debates about involving the wider community in policy making. The issue of community consultation and its effectiveness is hotly contested. Some theorists see community consultation as a token exercise and as limited in its democratic potential (see Squires 2005 on “citizen juries”). At the same time, other theorists place a good deal of faith in the democratic promise of community participation. In other work (Osborne, Bacchi and MacKenzie 2010, p. 19), my colleagues and I question the tendency to create a sharp dichotomy “setting democratic practice against bureaucratic expertise”.

My concern in this entry is a more precise question about what exactly wider community participation can contribute to WPR analysis. I’ve chosen to examine this question through considering the potential contribution of community members to recognition of “lived effects” (Question 5) and “subjugated knowledges” (Question 6

Strategic interventions: Questions 5 and 6

Question 5: What effects (discursive, subjectification, objectification, lived) are produced by this representation of the ‘problem’?

Question 6: How and where has this representation of the ‘problem’ been produced, disseminated and defended? How has it been and/or can it be disrupted and replaced? Consider the role of ‘subjugated knowledges’. (Bacchi 2026, end of Chapter 1)

For Question 5, I restrict my comments to the category of “lived effects” because it attracts so much interest and, indeed, so much support. Specifically, among WPR researchers, there is often an expressed wish to involve non-academic participants in accessing “lived effects”. The argument, in brief, is that the wider-than-academic community has something unique to offer to researchers, their “lived experience”. This proposition links closely to discussion of “subjugated knowledges” (Chapter 9 in Bacchi 2026), again with the argument that those with “lived experience” have unique perspectives that are valuable and that tend to be devalued. 

Hickman and Muir (2025, p. 2) explain the rationale behind this contention. They argue that “research using co-production rejects the traditional hierarchical research paradigm that privileges ‘objective’ knowledge-production methods and undervalues experiential knowledges”. They identify “strong convergences between the aims of co-production and Foucault’s concept of subjugated knowledges”. Here they quote Foucault (1980) to the effect that subjugated knowledges are those that “have been explicitly disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naïve knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity”. 

“Lived effects” is a crucially important concept in WPR thinking. It offers an answer to critics who argue that the approach deals only with representations and has little to say about “real life”. The notion of “lived effects” is also vital to the claim that problem representations create realities (Bacchi 2026, Chapter 14). For example, if welfare is constituted to be a handout rather than a right, this problem representation can affect the amount of money distributed to welfare recipients, with real lived effects. 

Given the focus in Foucault and in WPR on the need to challenge what is “in the true” (rather than some abstract notion of “truth”), the category “subjugated knowledges” provides an important strategic intervention. Illustrative of this stance, Rudolf (2017) engages in dialogue with participating South African communities to question deep-seated Western cosmological assumptions in her own work.

I should note that those who wish to use “lived effects” and “subjugated knowledges” commonly turn to interviews as a research method. Interviews are treated as supplying access to “lived experience”. It is here, as I go on to discuss, that our theoretical troubles surface. 

Challenges to collective analysis

There are two issues that require comment and reflection in relation to “lived effects” and “subjugated knowledges”. First, we need to consider how “subjects” are conceptualised in these accounts. Second, we need to engage directly with questions about claims to “truth” and “knowledge”. 

On the question of the “subject” I refer you to Chapter 4 in Bacchi 2026. There I make the case that how the “subject” is conceptualised underpins all subsequent questions and forms of analysis associated with WPR. It is not a topic that can be ignored. 

I describe the “subject” in WPR as provisional and in ongoing formation. You will recognise here a challenge to the Enlightenment subject with a separate interior consciousness. If this is the case, what possible grounds are available for claiming that researchers can access the “truth” about any selected topic? The notion of “lived experience”, and hence of “lived effects”, needs to be discussed with an eye to this question of “subject” formation. Unqualified use of these terms restricts the usefulness of the analysis. 

Relatedly, the term “lived experience” implies that research “subjects” can speak to the “truth” of their experience. The implication is that, through interviews, researchers can access this “true knowledge”. Joan Scott (1991) challenged this view of “experience” as a grounding for truth some years ago but the debates around this topic remain with us. In more recent iterations, Vitellone (2018) challenges conventional social science approaches to drug use and claims to expertise. She seeks “situated knowledge” from the users of syringes. 

“Replacing theoretical questions with drug users experience produced an alternative research practice, which directed our focus away from the reflections and interpretations of the participant observer and critical social theorist, to drug users description of shooting up and the spaces of injecting as data for learning, feeling and thinking with. (Vitellone 2018, p. 64)”.

According to Isabelle Stengers (in Vitelloni), to produce such situated knowledge requires that researchers develop ‘rapport’ with drug users. Importantly, for both Stengers and Vitelloni creating a rapport is always a “local, precarious event”. Moreover, such an intervention needs to be recognised as political and pragmatic, never innocent. With Jennifer Bonham, I have developed a framework called Poststructural Interview Analysis (PIA) that offers a way to draw upon interview transcripts to examine the politics involved in shaping the kind of person it is possible to become (Bacchi and Bonham 2025, p. 142). 

Where do these reflections leave the commitment to draw upon “subjugated knowledges” and “lived effects” in WPR analyses? The suggestion here is that appeals to “lived experience/s” require acknowledgement of the tentative and political nature of those appeals. Following Foucault, there is no suggestion that any particular group has privileged access to “truth” because of their social location. Truth claims are always political claims.

Rather than seeking “truth”, WPR thinking targets the politics involved in “truth” production. “Subjugated knowledges”, therefore, do not represent “truth”. They provide a tactical challenge to the “centralising powers” of “an organised scientific discourse” (Foucault 1980, p. 84). 

Conclusion

I am indeed excited about the possibility of undertaking WPR analyses as a group exercise. I believe that the active working through of the WPR questions among groups of researchers or community members can stimulate useful interactions. It could, for example, raise new questions about silencing practices and “lived effects”. 

The remaining challenge, and it is immense, is to have this form of analysis recognised in mainstream political analysis. Here, I refer not just to collaborative research, which has a certain acceptance, but to research that questions conventional views of “knowledge” and “experience”. A recent article describes such research as “dangerous” (Brown and Proctor 2025) in the sense that, first, it queries widely accepted research protocols and second, relatedly, it threatens the status of vulnerable students. I share the authors’ conviction regarding “the urgency” for the “continued creation and circulation” of such research and the need for “concentrated support by faculty members” (p. 116).

References

Bacchi,C. 2026. What’s the Problem Represented to be? A new thinking paradigm. NY: Routledge. 

Bacchi, C. and Bonham, J. 2025. Chapter 8: Poststructural Interview Analysis: Politicizing “Personhood”, in C. Bacchi and S. Goodwin, Poststructural Policy Analysis: A Guide to Practice, second edition. NY: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 131-145.

Brown, S. and Proctor, K. 2025. Dangerous Dissertations: Alternative Approaches to Dissertation Inquiry. Impacting Education: Journal on Transforming Professional Practice. impactinged.pitt.edu Vol. 10 No. 3 (2025) DOI 10.5195/ie.2025.494 114 Pp 113-122

Costello, E., Ferreira, G., Hrastinski, S., McDonald, J.K., Tlili, A., Veletsianos, G., Marin, V.I., Huijser, H. & Altena, S. (2025). Artificial Intelligence in Education Research and Scholarship: Seven Framings. Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice, 22(3). https://doi.org/10.53761/xs5e3834 

Dixit, A 2023, ‘Caste(d) knowledges: (self)-problematising epistemic impunity and caste-privilege in academia’, Organization, advance online publication, DOI:10.1177/13505084231204102

Eggebø, Helga (2020) Collective qualitative analysis (V. Szepessy, Trans.) Norsk sosiologisk tidssskrift 4(2): 106-122. Doi: 10.18261/issn.2535-2512-2020-02-03, translation available at https://hdl.handle.net/11250/2724396 

Eggebø, H., Lundberg, A. K., and Teigen, M. 2022. Gaps and Silences: Gender and Climate Policies in the Global North. Social Politics, https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/jxac032

Fischer, K. et al. 2024. Progress towards sustainable agriculture hampered by siloed scientific discourses. Nature Sustainability, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-024-01474-9 

Foucault, M 1980, ‘Two lectures’, in C Gordon (ed.), Power/knowledge: selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977 by Michel Foucault, trans. C Gordon et al., Pantheon Books, New York, pp. 78–108.

Hickman, M. E. & Muir, R. (23 Sep 2025): Integrating co-analysis and researcher reflexivity into Bacchi’s ‘what is the problem represented to be?’ framework: A cervical screening case study, Critical Policy Studies, DOI: 10.1080/19460171.2025.2561142 

Osborne, K., Bacchi, C. and Mackenzie, C. 2010. “Gender analysis and community participation: The role of women’s policy units”, in C. Bacchi and J. Eveline (eds) Mainstreaming politics: Gendering practices and feminist theory. Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press. pp. 191-213.

Rudolph, N 2017, ‘Hierarchies of knowledge, incommensurabilities and silences in South African ECD policy: whose knowledge counts?’, Journal of Pedagogy, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 77–98, DOI:10.1515/jped-2017-0004.

Scott, JW 1991, ‘The evidence of experience’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 773–797, DOI:10.1086/448612.

Squires, J. 2005. Is mainstreaming transformative? Theorising mainstreaming in the context of diversity and deliberation”, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society, 12(2): 366-388.

Weier, M & Farrugia, A 2020, ‘“Potential issues of morbidity, toxicity and dependence”: problematizing the up-scheduling of over-the-counter codeine in Australia’, International Journal of Drug Policy, vol. 80, article 102538, DOI:10.1016/j.drugpo.2019.07.033. Vitellone, N 2018, ‘Situating the syringe’, International Journal of Drug Policy, vol. 61, pp. 62–65, DOI:10.1016/j.drugpo.2018.07.005.