I believe it is time to revisit a topic I considered in a Research Hub entry on 30 April 2019 about WPR and normativity. The topic remains of interest to many people. Most recently, Rönnblom and Edwards (2025) raise the question of normativity in WPR in their overview of developments in the WPR approach. I start my reflections on this question by stating briefly the argument as put by Rönnblom and Edwards (2025). I use direct quotes to ensure that the terms of the discussion are clear. I proceed to refer back to the 2019 entry to make a case for a specific understanding of normativity in relation to WPR. To put it briefly, I see WPR as a deeply normative enterprise. Disagreements on this stance tend to reflect competing understandings of normativity. I hope to clarify the basis of these disagreements in an attempt to move the discussion forward. I will also be defending the compatibility of poststructuralism and normativity, as elaborated in this post. 

Normativity in Rönnblom and Edwards

Rönnblom and Edwards (2025: 2) identify what they describe as a disagreement “within the post-structuralist field” about “value stances”:

“On one end of the post-structural spectrum of ideas, power is regarded as operating through politically located sets of value understandings and political alternatives, such as feminism and decoloniality (themselves each involving different versions within a shared core). At the other end of the spectrum are post-structuralist analyses that, while they acknowledge power and politics, largely eschew normative responses and specific ideas about alternative political solutions. The WPR approach is located toward this latter end of the field.” 

Later in the article, the authors restate their proposition that WPR is characterised by “the refusal of any normative or political position”. They draw a contrast with 

“post-structural analysis such as discourse theory with a post-Marxist legacy (Laclau and Mouffe) or interpretative analysis that also takes the intentions of subjects into account in the analysis, as well as includes suggestions for political change (c.f. Frank Fischer), or relational approaches concerned with power dynamics and class interests (e.g. Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992).”

In contrast, they conclude that “the WPR approach does not include any normative suggestions for political change and avoids assumptions of intentionality”. They describe this position as “in some tension with the intellectual, political, and personal normative concerns of feminism”. 

It seems to me that the distancing of WPR from normative concerns in this argument involves several different claims. 

These include: (i) a distancing from “value stances”; (ii) a distancing from “specific ideas about alternative political solutions”; and (iii) a distancing from “assumptions of intentionality”. 

As a modification of these claims, I will put the case that WPR reflects “value stances” and, going further, that the refusal of “specific ideas about alternative political solutions” and distancing from “assumptions of intentionality” actually reflect value commitments and hence indicate a deep-seated normativity. The argument here is that political commitments and political strategies – e.g., whether, or not, it is deemed appropriate and/or wise to endorse specific reform options – are normative in character. 

Meanings of normativity

Clearly, in these discussions, we are dealing with competing understandings of normativity. The debate about “normativity” in political theory relates to whether, or not, researchers are entangled in value commitments and/or whether, or not, they prescribe, on the basis of these commitments, what ought to be done. I suggest that there are two separate points here – first, the extent to which researchers’ views and positions reflect “values”; and second, the extent to which they are prepared to impose these values on others. Along these lines Kelly (2012: 2; emphasis added) distinguishes between what he describes as an “inflationary” understanding of normativity as broad value commitments, and a “much stricter definition of the ‘normative’ … which takes it as merely a by-word for prescription, which is to say for ‘oughts’”.

Accepting this distinction, WPR presumes some “broad value commitments” but it refuses to make those commitments prescriptive. Instead of promoting specific reforms, it advances strategies for interrogating reform proposals, looking to identify their assumptions, their genealogy and their effects (WPR questions; Chapter 1 Bacchi 2026). The argument is that such interrogation is required to prevent or modify reforms/policies that can do damage (“harm”) to specific groups. 

In Poststructural Policy Analysis (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 25), Sue Goodwin and I directly confront the question of whether, or not, it is possible to support an egalitarian politics while refusing to advocate specific reforms (i.e. to refuse to be prescriptive). There we argue that, not only are the two perspectives compatible, they are actually necessary to each other. This is because reform programs often buy into problematic premises that need highlighting and questioning. We offer the examples of “social inclusion”, “literacy” and “wellbeing” from Chapter 6 in the book.

 With Foucault (2001: 1431), therefore, the objective is a practice of continuous critique, engaging in “a work of problematisation and of perpetual reproblematisation”. In this Research Hub entry, I suggest that such a stance is itself normative – that it reflects a decision to take nothing at face value and to test interventions in relation to their effects (subjectification, objectification, discursive, lived; WPR Question 5 Bacchi 2026, p. 24). 

I am not suggesting that the issues at stake here can or should be reduced to semantics – that it’s just a matter of different definitions of “normativity”. Rather, I pursue the implications of Tanesini’s (1994: 207) argument that concepts (e.g. “normativity”) have no fixed meaning but “are proposals about how we ought to proceed from here”. It follows that the varied uses of the term “normativity” reflect specific political visions. The critical task, therefore, involves examining how “normativity” as a concept functions in diagnosing future directions. Following this argument, I make the case that normativity as “broad value commitments” allows us to consider the widest possible range of political and theoretical positions within its ambit while prescribing specific reform options carries the danger of imposing interventions with deleterious consequences for specific groups. 

So, what are the “broad value commitments” associated with WPR? I would suggest that there is a commitment to improve the lives of specific groups commonly marginalised and oppressed. I could call this a “social justice” agenda. My hesitation here relates to the many debates about what “justice” means and entails. In earlier Research Hub contributions (30 August 2024, 29 Sept. 2024), I deal with this ambiguity through, first, examining WPR through a social justice lens, and second, through examining “social justice” through a WPR lens. This “double” research strategy, associated with post-structuralism, is discussed later. 

Where is the evidence that WPR supports a social “justice” agenda? Here I provide a few extracts from my recent book, What’s the Problem Represented to be? A new thinking paradigm (Routledge 2026). Chapter 3 (p. 51) emphasises how a WPR form of analysis provides policy workers and researchers with a means to “resist practices deemed to have deleterious consequences for specific people and groups of people” (the examples include people with disabilities, gender and the Sámi in Nordic countries). Chapter 8 highlights the role of a “genealogical sensibility” in WPR analyses. Genealogy is described as a “mindset” that “asks researchers to bring a critical eye to present injustices and inequities”. Chapter 19 (p. 229) states clearly that the point and purpose of identifying governmental rationalities, as in governmentality analyses (Chapter 7), is “to interrogate critically their premises and possible deleterious effects”.

I believe that there is no confusion in the research community about the point and purpose of a WPR form of analysis. I have been maintaining a Select Reference list of WPR applications (Welcome to the WPR Network! | Karlstad University (kau.se) for almost a decade. It is long and growing, with close to 1000 articles, chapters and theses explicitly adopting “what’s the problem represented to be?” as their starting research question. In absolutely every article, chapter or thesis, the expressed commitment is to, for example, “equality”, “diversity”, “inclusion”, reducing stereotyping, attacking oppression, reducing marginalisation, improving “rights”, improving the treatment of LGBTIQ subjects, Indigenous peoples, the Roma, those with disabilities, migrant groups, etc., etc. In each instance there is expressed concern with oppressive norms and normalisation. Clearly there are normative concerns at stake in the uptake of WPR as analytic strategy. In this spirit, the 2026 book (p. xii), acknowledges “the usefulness of the approach in supporting social justice commitments”. 

Rönnblom and Edwards (2025, p. 4) express concern about tensions between the WPR approach and “the intellectual, political, and personal normative concerns of feminism”. They acknowledge the important role of reflexivity but are unhappy that “WPR does not include any normative suggestions for political change and avoids assumptions of intentionality”. Again, here, I suggest it is not a matter of WPR lacking normative commitments (to feminism) but disagreements about political agendas. Specifically, in WPR emphasis is placed on recognition of contesting “versions” of feminism. The suggestion is that reforms that presume a singular feminist ethic (e.g. The Feminist Ethic of Care, Bacchi 2026: 123) can have deleterious political consequences for certain groups of women. 

As in the discussion above, I consider such political disagreements to be normative. Questioning the existence of a singular feminist ethic is a form of normative engagement, concerning what feminism (or “feminisms”) means. So too with disagreements about whether, or not, political analysis should target the intentions of political subjects. Decisions about analytical targets are, in my view, normative since they constitute proposals about how we ought to proceed from here (see Tanesini 1994, above). 

Poststructuralism and normativity

The question arises: can someone with declared poststructural sympathies (me and WPR) defend certain “values”? Isn’t there a basic contradiction? Don’t references to “values” imply truth statements inconsistent with a poststructural troubling of truth claims? I suggest: not necessarily!

There are long-standing debates about Foucault’s value commitments. Habermas coined the term “cryptonormativist” to describe Foucault, suggesting that he was a kind of secret or “closet” normativist, “publicly rejecting normative commitments while tacitly relying on them for criticism” (in Kolodny 1996: 67). Nancy Fraser (1989) also believed that Foucault’s unwillingness to declare his political ideals undermined his political analysis.

Kolodny (1996) provides a way forward in these discussions. Based on Foucault’s political commitments, he (64-65) argues that “Foucault’s work was self-consciously critical, and criticism is inescapably normative”. One does not need to dig too deeply to discern the political perspective adopted by Foucault. His desire to “transform the penal system” (and psychiatric institutions) was directly connected to his concern about the marginalisation of prisoners (and patients). As Catucci (2018: 329 ff) elaborates, in Foucault’s view, “in modern times prison has been the main technology by which our societies manage marginality”. Indeed, “all the social oppositions described by Foucault in his work – normal/abnormal, healthy/pathological, mad/reasonable – were built on the contrast between inclusion and exclusion” (Catucci 2018: 330). His defence of “subjugated knowledges” (Bacchi 2026, Chapter 9), includes the knowledge of the psychiatric patient, the ill person, the nurse and the delinquent. 

Kolodny (1996: 65; emphasis in original) argues that the “later Foucault resisted not the demand for norms, therefore, but rather the demand of a normative theory”. As Cynthia Coe (2011) explains, Foucault “refuses the polarity of nihilism and normative foundationalism”:

“If we are searching for normative foundations, what Foucault is up to will look like nihilism. But the purpose of his genealogical work is to illuminate the contingency of our intellectual quests in order to open up new practices of resistance to particularly modern forms of oppression.” 

Accepting Kolodny’s argument (above) that criticism is inescapably normative, WPR seeks likewise to explore the space between nihilism and normative foundationalism. In this view, “cryptonormativism” is “not a gratuitous evasion of normative theory, but an agonism with its uncertainties and imperfections” (Kolodny 1996: 78-79). 

In other words, in the argument I develop here, it becomes possible to endorse certain “values” (e.g. justice, equality, etc.) so long as space is retained to examine them critically (e.g. “justice”, “equality”, etc [notice the insertion of quotation marks in this application]). This position is described as a “doubling research strategy”. Lather (2001) introduces the notion of a “doubled research practice” to deal with what she calls “stuck places”: “a way of thinking through of some of the complexities, ambiguities and contradictions involved in the process of doing qualitative research that is concerned with recognizing difference and with pursuing social justice” (Gunaratnam 2003: 3).

A “doubled research strategy” involves working with and against analytic categories at the same time. Gunaratnam (2003) illustrates the usefulness of this strategy in relation to racial categories. While recognising “race” as a constructed category, she points out that dissolving the category of “race” makes it difficult to claim the experience of racism. At the same time, poststructuralist critiques of essentialist notions of “race” can “be used in empirical research to generate more complex insights into the production of social location and experience”. It is therefore possible, and politically useful, to work with and against racial categories.  

In Mainstreaming Politics (2010), Joan Eveline and I describe this double move as embracing the simultaneous fixing and unfixing of meanings. In that book, for example, at times we adopt the convention of putting “women” and “men” in quotation marks to trouble the categories; at other times we use women and men, without quotation marks, as having an assumed meaning. This shifting of position reflects the complex political circumstances within which we navigate. 

For political reasons it is sometimes necessary to question the category “women” but at other times it is necessary to adopt the category. There is no confusion here. Rather, there is a determination to shape one’s strategy to particular political objectives, with the decisions about when to fix and when to unfix meanings dependent upon reflexive judgment about the political exigencies of the particular situation. The fixed meanings we necessarily impart on some occasions must be regarded as temporary and subject to continuous critical scrutiny in order to elaborate new, more inclusive meanings. The question is not whether to fix meaning – since for a range of reasons fixing must occur – but when to fix meaning and who to involve in the “fixing” exercise. 

To capture this double move in relation to “justice” or “social justice” I suggest approaching the topic through two perspectives: first, reflecting on WPR through a social justice lens; second, questioning “social justice” through a WPR lens. The reference to social justice in the first position has no quotation marks, signalling a desire to fix meaning. The use of quotation marks in the second position signals a willingness to unfix meaning. As a strategic intervention, these two proposals work together to elaborate new, more inclusive meanings. 

With this strategy I feel comfortable declaring my “broad value commitments”, recognising that they are not truth statements, but targets for critical analysis. It is this route that WPR travels in its normative positioning. This “self”-problematising stance produces reluctance to become prescriptive about change agendas, along with preparedness to practise, and indeed embrace, scepticism about the “truths” that are produced (Bacchi 2026, Chapter 6).

Conclusion

My hope in this entry is to encourage ongoing discussion of these important politico-theoretical issues. I find it useful to identify the three separate topics that are under consideration in these discussions: (1) positions on “values”; (2) positions on political reform strategies; (3) positions on the place of intentionality in political analysis. It is also useful to clarify (at least) two meanings of normativity: (1) as broad “values”; and (2) as willingness to endorse specific reforms. 

I make the case that WPR is normative in the sense of endorsing “broad value commitments” but that it resists translating these into specific reforms. A supplementary argument is that it is possible to characterise political positions (e.g. the refusal to advance specific reforms) as themselves normative in character. Finally, I argue that sustaining a critical approach to declared “values” makes it possible to produce a “normative” poststructuralism. We can defend egalitarian precepts so long as they remain open to interrogation, highlighting the importance of “self”-problematisation (“reflexivity”; see Chapter 6 in Bacchi 2026 on the need to sort through some of the complexities surrounding this issue).

References

Bacchi, C. and Eveline, J. 2010. Mainstreaming Politics: Gendering practices and feminist theory. Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press. 

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

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

Catucci, S. 2018. The Prison Beyond its Theory: Between Michel Foucault’s Militancy and Thought. In E. Fransson, F. Giofrè and B. Johnsen (eds) Prison Architecture and Humans. Olso: Cappelen Damm Akademisk.

Coe, C. D. 2011 Review of: D. Taylor (Ed.) Michel Foucault: Key Concepts. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews: An Electronic Journal. Available at: https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/michel-foucault-key-concepts/ (viewed on 21 January 2019).

Foucault, M. (2001) [1984]. À propos de la généalogie de l’éthique: Un aperçu du travail en cours (rewritten version). In D. Defert, & F. Ewald (Eds.), Michel Foucault: Dits et Écrits, tome II. Paris: Gallimard.

Fraser, N. 1989. Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions. In N. Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. pp. 17-34.

Gunaratnam, Y. 2003. Researching Race and Ethnicity: Methods, Knowledge and Power. London: Sage.

Kelly, M. 2018. For Foucault: Against Normative Political Theory. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Kolodny, N. 1996. The ethics of cryponormativism: A defense of Foucault’s evasions. Philosophy and Social Criticism  22(5): 63-84.

Lather, P. 2001. Postbook: Working the Ruins of Feminist Ethnography. Signs, 27(1): 199-227.

Rönnblom, M. & Edwards, R. (04 Sep 2025): A critical explanation of uses of Carol Bacchi’s WPR approach, Critical Policy Studies, DOI: 10.1080/19460171.2025.2555388 Tanesini, A 1994, ‘Whose language?’, in K Lennon & M Whitford (eds), Knowing the difference: feminist perspectives in epistemology, Routledge, New York, pp. 203– 216, DOI: 10.4324/9780203216125

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.

In my recent book (Routledge 2026) I describe the WPR approach as a “new thinking paradigm”. For those new to these posts, WPR is the acronym for What’s the Problem Represented to be?, initially developed as a mode of critical policy analysis (Bacchi 2009). The argument in the new book is that WPR has important uses beyond policy analysis because, in effect, it offers a way of thinking differently, captured in the term “WPR thinking”. 

“Differently from what?” you may ask. Put simply, it mounts a challenge to the problem-solving paradigm that historically and currently dominates the intellectual and policy landscape. While there have been many critics of problem-solving, WPR offers an alternative. It challenges the presumption that problems simply exist waiting to be solved and argues instead that proposals for change (“proposed solutions”) constitute “problems” as particular sorts of problem. 

This argument should be familiar to those on the WPR list ( Welcome to the WPR Network! | Karlstad University (kau.se) and to those who have used the approach in their research. The new book shows how this analytic strategy provides openings for critical thinking in areas uncharted in earlier writing. In effect then it expands the reach of WPR thinking. New target areas include: items (such as maps or buildings), theoretical assumptions (to produce innovative literature and scoping reviews), images, media reports, and many others. 

The new book also makes a claim that a range of key terms in social and political analysis – e.g. “crises”, “issues”, “difficulties”, “matters of concern”, and others – operate as placeholders in much the same way that “problems” do. Hence, as with “problems”, they need to be displaced. The new book pursues a critique of all such reactive modes of explanation and analysis. Today’s entry offers an example to illustrate how WPR operates as a useful analytic strategy in diverse sites. 

Using WPR thinking

I was prompted to produce this entry by the following article: 

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 

The article does not mention “What’s the Problem Represented to be?” in the text. And it does not apply the WPR questions (see Table at the end of Chapter 1 in Bacchi 2026). Yet, I have added it to the growing list of WPR applications that explicitly apply WPR ( Welcome to the WPR Network! | Karlstad University (kau.se)

Why have I done this? The authors use this quote as an epigraph: 

“What one proposes to do about something reveals what one thinks is problematic (needs to change)” (Bacchi, 2012, p. 21). 

The quote is taken from a chapter I wrote in 2012 introducing a WPR mode of analysis. In my new book (Bacchi 2026) I describe this argument as the key premise in WPR. It makes the point that WPR challenges the presumption that problems simply exist waiting to be solved and argues instead that proposals for change (“proposed solutions”) constitute “problems” as particular sorts of problem (see opening paragraph above). By placing this quote as an epigraph, the authors signal that they intend to deploy “WPR thinking” (though they don’t name it as such). What shape does this take? How does WPR thinking prove useful in their account? 

The Costello et al. article offers seven proposals for how to approach the topic of AI in Education (AIED). The authors refer to these proposals as “framings”.  In summary, these framings include: methodological pluralism; metaphors; ethnographic studies; imagining futures through fiction; humanistic groundings of AI design and development; third space professionals in research; and open education. The goal in adopting these “framings” is to open up for consideration a variety of ways of problematising AI in Education. 

Costello et al. (2025) describe their project as developing a “carrier bag” of “problem areas, approaches and framings” (p.1). The declared objective is to resist “‘hero narratives’ of technologies as weapons of domination”. Instead, the authors defend the usefulness of “small bags used in the practice of foraging”. There is a clear link here to a poststructuralist discomfort with grand narratives and close attention to site-specific conditions. 

Applying the thinking in the quote from my 2012 chapter set out in the epigraph, the seven proposals (see above) offer different ways to problematise AI. In the Conclusion, the authors explain that their intent is to produce research that “widens the conversation on AI so we see it through different lenses and frames”. In particular, the objective is to offer modes of analysis that assist researchers “to connect research on AI to the overarching aims of education itself”. We are told that disagreements among the seven contributing authors are to be expected. Indeed, “dissensus and diversity” are considered to be “useful”. 

This form of engagement resonates with WPR thinking and its commitment to continuous problematisation. However, importantly, the authors do not subject the seven proposed “solutions” (their seven identified “framings” or problematisations) to the WPR questions, as would be expected in a WPR analysis. I proceed to comment on the seven proposals, how they are elaborated and where such questioning would have been useful. To begin, I wish to emphasise the novelty of the methodology adopted in the article. 

Collective and collaborative research

The Costello et al. (2025) article offers an innovative collaborative approach to the selected topic (how AI is problematised). Each of the seven “framings” is produced by a different author, generating research that is “necessarily idiosyncratic, situated in our research and teaching practices”. The article describes their “method” in some detail:

writing was conducted in a sprint over the summer of 2025 using a shared Google doc. The first author led the ideation of an initial list of topics. The group discussed topics, agreed the final set and worked on their sections in the shared document which helped authors avoid overlap and attempt to find continuities. 

Disagreements, we are told, are to be expected (see above) because authors with contrasting backgrounds were involved in the exercise.

The question of how to incorporate collective research in WPR analyses is taken up in a recent publication by Hickman and Muir (2025). How to produce WPR as a “group exercise” is pursued in a subsequent Research Hub entry. 

AI and modes of analysis

Remembering that dissensus is to be expected, what do the seven recommended “framings” achieve in terms of innovative problematisations of AI? And where could “self”-problematisation add to the analysis? 

Methodological Pluralism

This contribution challenges the tendency to describe AI in extremes, as either “a technological utopia” or “a dystopian future of human irrelevance”. In the place of this representation, it offers to illuminate “the plurality and messiness of the ways in which technologies are used in education”. To this end it endorses methodological pluralism, including interpretive approaches, “ranging from ethnography to phenomenology to discourse analysis”. At the same time, it argues that “computational and data science methods can help researchers make sense of vast datasets of user-AI interactions”. 

As already mentioned, the seven frames in the Costello et al. (2025) article are not targeted for a WPR analysis. If such analysis had been included, there would have been room to question the assumptions underpinning methodological pluralism. This form of analysis appears in my new book in its endorsement of “paradigm talk” (Bacchi 2026, Chapters 15, 16, 17 and 18). 

Problematising through Metaphors

This contribution offers a two-pronged form of analysis. First, it suggests the usefulness of critically analysing the metaphors used to describe AI; second, it recommends using AI metaphors creatively. 

The former (examining existing metaphors), it is argued, reveals “how AI is conceptualised and how education is imagined – surfacing assumptions about pedagogy, the learner and the role of teachers”. The contribution offers the example of metaphors that anthropomorphize AI, making it more “personable” and thus “easier to be unsuspectingly peddled”. 

On the latter (promoting creative use of metaphors), the author of this section of the article puts the case that “problems already given may have to be reframed”. Here the author directs attention to the vexed question of plagiarism, “perhaps an issue soon to become a non-problem due to GenAI”. In a clear example of WPR thinking, the author describes how “the ‘solution’ presents itself in the shape of a burgeoning market of AI detection platforms”. This problematisation is described as producing “a ‘Bootleg” industry of fabricated solutions to fabricated problems”. The usefulness of WPR thinking in relation to the topic of GenAI policies in higher education assessment is demonstrated in several recent articles (see Groves and Nagy 2025; Luo 2024; Mochizuki, Bruillard & Bryan 2025). 

Ethnographic Study of AI in Education

This contribution suggests the benefits of producing an ethnography of “technology hype itself”. It asks why “we can look back on previous technology hypes so critically, while at the same time convincing ourselves that this time it is going to be different”. What is needed, in this account, is “deep, extended observation and participation that tells us something about our own tendencies to adopt technologies so uncritically” and “collective autoethnographies” that focus on “localised practices”. 

As with the section on methodological pluralism, the use of ethnography to problematise AI is not subjected to a WPR analysis. My new book (Bacchi 2026) contains a chapter (Chapter 18) that undertakes this task. 

Imaging Futures through Fiction

Education fiction is promoted as a way to prompt reflection on the uses of AI in education, and to allow us “to act in the present by imaging possible futures”. Fiction is described as a “powerful practical strategy for both teaching and learning that can foster critical and technoskeptical thinking in students”. Education fiction becomes a creative tool “with which to discuss complex and often difficult topics around AI’s influence”. 

In the recent IPPA conference in Chiang Mai (2-4 July 2025), Laura Bea, in a special WPR seminar, presented a paper titled, “Can fiction help us to rethink public policy on violence” (Critical Policy Conversations, https://criticalpolicy.co.uk/icpp7/). Related issues are raised in a special Research Hub entry (29 Nov 2022) on “Sociotechnical imaginaries and WPR: Exploring connections” (see also Rahm and Rahm-Skågeby 2023). The task becomes examining the problematisations in this material to see what it can produce as useful political analysis.

Humanistic Grounding in AI Design and Development

This contribution to the Costello et al. (2025) article stresses the need for a humanistic ethics in AI research, which shifts “the focus from the outcomes that AI can achieve to the procedures through which it does”. The declared objective is to create “user-centred solutions that address the diverse needs of learners”. The question according to this author becomes: “Which humanistic principles should be considered when designing and developing AI-powered systems in education?”. 

The entire Costello et al. (2025) article reflects strong humanistic principles. The opening sentence reads: “The words you are reading right now were written by a human being”. The closing sentence to the article states emphatically that “the messiness of the collaborative activities of both teaching and research” are “never entirely determinate practices and always have passionate human beings at their heart”. 

There appears to be no place in the article to query humanist assumptions. WPR thinking would create space to consider how subjects are conceptualised in this account. 

Third space professionals in AI educational research

The author of this section stresses the need to broaden the focus on “teachers” in AI educational research to include “other actors in universities who contribute to learning and teaching”. These actors include “learning designers, academic developers and learning technologists”. These professionals are considered to “add considerable value to how the AI research agenda is conceptualised, designed and enacted”.

Entanglement of Open Education and AI

This contribution emphasises the need to consider the relationship between AI and Open Education as an “entangled pedagogy”. On the one hand, the author argues that the “potential of AI to support digital public goods” ought to be recognised. On the other hand, s/he highlights the challenges AI raises to Open Education in the form of “algorithmic bias, digital divide expansion and over-reliance on proprietary AI models”. 

The example of open licensing (e.g. Creative Commons) is put forward to illustrate the challenges and tensions in this “entangled” relationship. This author makes the case that the whole meaning of “open” in Open Education is put into question because generative AI can generate content “without reference to the aggregated sources used to produce the output”. The author expresses the need for more research “on this evolving notion of openness in the context of education”. In other words, s/he wishes to problematise “openness”, a topic that could be explored using WPR.

Conclusion

The structure of the Costello et al. (2025) article reflects what I call “WPR thinking” in several ways but stops short of applying the WPR questions to its own proposals (see Process 7 in WPR template; Chapter 1 in Bacchi 2026). It offers seven “lenses” through which to consider how AI is conceptualised. On occasion it also uses examples of application (e.g. on plagiarism) that closely follow the WPR mode of inquiry – starting from proposals (AI detection platforms) and working backwards to identify problem representations. 

The focus on competing entry-points to studying AIED with the expressed goal of widening the conversation on AI reflects the WPR intent to explore complexity in social relations. Given the diverse backgrounds of contributors, understandably, the uptake of WPR is uneven. “Self”-problematisation (Process 7) could have provided a means to surface these contrasting perspectives and their effects, an argument pursued in the next entry. 

References

Bacchi, C. 2009. Analysing Policy: What’s the Problem Represented to be?Frenchs Forest, NSW: Pearson Education.

Bacchi, C. 2012. Introducing the ‘What’s the Problem Represented to be?’ approach. Engaging with Carol Bacchi: Strategic interventions and exchanges, 21-24. in Eds Blestsas, A., & Beasley, C. Engaging with Carol Bacchi. Strategic interventions and exchanges. University of Adelaide Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/UPO9780987171856.003 

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

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 

Groves, A. and Nagy, V. 2025. Crime or Failure of Integrity: What is the Problem of Contract Cheating Represented to be in Australia? Higher Education Policy,https://doi.org/10.1057/s41307-025-00402-6

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 

Luo, J 2024, “A critical review of GenAI policies in higher education assessment: a call to reconsider the ‘originality of students’ work “, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, DOI: 10.1080/02602938.2024.2309963 

Mochizuki, Y., Bruillard, E. & Bryan, A. (21 May 2025): The ethics of AI or techno-solutionism? UNESCO’s policy guidance on AI in education, British Journal of Sociology of Education, DOI: 10.1080/01425692.2025.2502808 

Rahm, L. and Rahm-Skågeby, J. 2023. Imaginaries and problematisations: A heuristic lens in the age of artificial intelligence in education.  British Journal of Educational Technology, pp. 1-13. DOI: 10.1111/bjet.13319

This entry offers an expansion of a presentation I delivered to the International Public Policy Conference (IPPC) on 3 July 2025. 

It starts from the premise that “everything has a history” and that, when you historicise something, you de-inevitablise it or de-essentialise it. Hence, the focus becomes the evolution of WPR and the sense that it is a work-in-progress rather than a formula. To tell this story I describe (i) some initial influences; (ii) important shifts in theoretical perspective; (iii) new developments; and (iv) future work. 

• Initial influences

Theoretical premises come from somewhere. Where did the thinking behind WPR arise?

I trace the development of WPR thinking to my work on affirmative action in the mid-1990s. The Politics of Affirmative Action: “Women”, Equality and Category Politics (Bacchi 1996) presents a comparative analysis of approaches to affirmative action in six countries reputed to be leading the way in equality policies for women – the United States, Canada, Australia, Sweden, the Netherlands and Norway. I came to see that how affirmative action was conceptualised depended on historically specific circumstances and that these conceptualisations had important political effects. For example, constituting affirmative action as “beneficence” for the “needy” – as “special treatment” or “preferential treatment” – rendered invisible those in positions of privilege. You can see here the nascent emphasis in WPR on “problem representations” and their effects. 

A radio program on the work of psychologists Don Bannister and Fay Fransella (1977: 57) helped me to think through the propositions that became WPR. They noted: “The way we look at things determines what we do about measuring or changing those things ….”.  I can remember thinking that the flip side of this argument raised useful questions – that is, that what we propose to do about something indicates what we think needs to change (i.e. what is deemed to be problematic). This proposition marks the emergence of WPR as an analytic strategy. 

At this time I was engaged in reading numerous feminist theorists, including Sandra Harding, Genevieve Lloyd, Nancy Hartsock, Iris Marion Young and many others, for a course I was preparing on the history of feminist thought. I noticed that collectively they were asking a particular sort of question to do with ontological and epistemological presuppositions. I am thinking here of Harding (1992) on “strong objectivity” and Lloyd (1979) on the “Man of Reason”. 

This reading led me to start asking related questions of feminists’ theories, leading to the publication of Women, Policy and Politics: The Construction of Policy Problems (Bacchi 1999). This book introduces an approach called “What’s the Problem?” based on five questions. It examines competing feminist positions on a range of policy issues commonly associated with women’s “equality”, including domestic violence, abortion, education and pay equity. 

• Shifts in theoretical perspective

Significant shifts in perspective took place between the 1999 book and Analysing Policy: What’s the Problem Represented to be? in 2009 (Pearson Education). The new book reflected my growing engagement with the work of Foucault and governmentality scholars, such as Mitchell Dean (1999). A new question 3 was added to the WPR questions encouraging a genealogical perspective. Such a perspective highlights the focus in WPR on context and contingency. In addition, “What’s the Problem?” becomes “What’s the Problem Represented to be?”. This change reflects my growing commitment that politically it is important to displace the word problem in the sense of a fixed or essential state of being. 

The next shift in theoretical perspective is reflected in work I produced in the 2010s (Bacchi 2012) and in the book co-authored with Susan Goodwin in 2016 entitled Poststructural Policy Analysis: A Guide to Practice (Palgrave Macmillan), now available as a second edition. The shift is gradual and can be traced by examining the texts closely. Put starkly, there is a move away from social constructionism and towards performative theory. 

Women, Policy and Politics (1999) is solidly grounded in social construction theory. At the time I was reading researchers such as Murray Edelman (1988) and Joseph Gusfield (1989). I emphasised the importance of Berger and Luckman’s (1967) work on The Social Construction of Reality. These perspectives were reflected in the targeting of competing interpretations of “problems”. Increasingly, due to the influence of Foucault, governmentality and “performativity” scholars, including John Law (2004) and Annemarie Mol (2002), I moved (gradually) away from a focus on competing interpretations of “problems” to how problem representations form part of governing practices. This development means that, instead of considering how “problems” are seen (or perceived or understood), the analysis turns to how problem representations produce (or create or constitute) “problems” as particular sorts of problem, with important effects. 

This position is reflected in the argument, put forward in Analysing Policy, that we are governed through problematisations (Bacchi 2009: xxi). It is consistent with the focus in performative accounts on the “realities” created through practices. 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 of “reality”; it is the way in which a particular policy “problem” is constituted as the real.

Take, for example, a policy introducing training programs for women as a means to increase women’s representation in high status and high paying jobs. Note: if training programs is the policy, the problem is represented to be women’s lack of training. Here I want to emphasise what this means: I’m not saying that identifying women as needing training is simply an interpretation of “the problem” of underrepresentation. I’m saying that identifying women as needing training translates into the “reality” of how governing takes place. “Lack of training” becomes the “problem”, with a range of effects (discursive, subjectification, objectification, lived). This problem representation can affect how lives are lived. As John Law (2004, p. 56) describes, enactments do not “just present something that has already been made, but also have powerful productive consequences. They (help to) make realities in-here and out-there”.

My engagement with governmentality thinking led to a widening scope of application for WPR. Governmentality broadens the view of governing practices from conventional political institutions to the many groups of professionals and experts and other agencies involved in governing practices (understood as involved in the conduct of conduct). Therefore ‘policies’ are no longer simply the ‘tools’ of governments; they include all the interactions among those diverse governing agencies and practices. 

This challenge to the boundaries around a restricted view of ‘policy studies’ opens the door to applying WPR to a wide range of phenomena, such as ceremonies (as spoken and acted text), organizational culture (as symbols), buildings, and mechanisms of government (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 18). This expansion of the field of application helps to explain the wide proliferation of uses of WPR across disciplines and geographical spaces.

• New developments

I have written a new book (Routledge 2026) entitled: What’s the problem represented to be? A new thinking paradigm (Introduction and Chapters 1 and 2 Open Access). It makes the case that problem-solving as the dominant thinking framework has serious limitations. WPR is offered as a new way of thinking about social relations. Further, the new book encourages us to question a wide range of terms commonly postulated as drivers of social change, including, alongside ‘problems’, ‘issues’, ‘difficulties’, ‘crises’, and ‘matters of concern’. WPR describes these views of social change as reactive. It suggests, in each instance, starting from proposals and working backwards to identify problem representations (“crisis representations”, etc.). 

Treating WPR as a new thinking paradigm expands possible applications of the approach. For example, the book elaborates how to apply WPR to theoretical positions. Treating theories as proposals about how to proceed (as per WPR thinking) draws attention to how theories are problematisations. Approaching theories as problematisations – organising the material by how an issue is problematised – produces theoretically innovative literature reviews and scoping reviews. Some researchers are already exploring the rich potential of adapting WPR to this usage. See for example: 

• Johansson and Larsson (2022) use WPR to produce a critical review of the research literature on identity in university physics.
• Zimmerman (2024) employs a “problematizing review” to dissect binaries, concepts and categories underlying assumptions in the literature on whistleblowing.
• Power, J. et al. (2025). Beyond dental dams: a critical review of recent research on lesbian, bisexual and queer women’s sexual health, Social Science & Medicine, Volume 380, Article 118249. This review aimed to understand how LBQ + women’s sexual health is framed in current research and the impact of this framing on recommendations for future research and practice. 

As a second novel application, treating WPR as a new thinking paradigm also makes it possible to apply the approach to concepts. In a forthcoming chapter Anne Wilson and I (Bacchi and Wilson, 2026) illustrate how to accomplish this form of analysis by applying WPR to the concept “underlying health conditions”. Through applying WPR to this concept, we denaturalize the term, consider the conditions of its emergence, and draw attention to the political implications of its functioning.

• Future work

There is always more work to be done. 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. Here are a few examples: 

On presuppositions (Question 2) – see: 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 (See the contrast between relational vs reductionist epistemology).

            On silencing practices (Question 4) – see: Anna Siverskog & Linn J Sandberg (05 Mar 2025): Gender Identity, Sexuality, and LGBTI Perspectives in Swedish Dementia Care Policies, Journal of Gerontological Social Work, DOI: 10.1080/01634372.2025.2472971 (There is a general silence on gender identity, sexuality, and LGBTI perspectives in policy).

On subjectification (Question 5) – Östling, Maja. 2025. Deemed as “Distant”: Categorizing Unemployment in Sweden’s Evolving Welfare Landscape. Social Sciences 14: 129. https://doi.org/10.3390/ socsci14030129 (Offers a useful analytic framework to explore the construction of subject positions).

On self-problematization (Step 7) – Fischer et al. (above) suggest bringing WPR-related questions to team discussions. Involving members from different disciplines opens up thinking beyond one’s original parameters. Thus, WPR is put forward as a group exercise, an innovation I find to be particularly exciting (considered in a forthcoming Research Hub entry). 

More work is also needed on the possibility of blending WPR with other theoretical approaches. Several entries in my Research Hub (https://carolbacchi.com ) detail the distinctions between WPR and Critical Frame Analysis, and between WPR and Thematic Analysis (30 Dec. 2024; 29 Jan. 2025). My new book (Bacchi 2026) includes a chapter comparing WPR and Critical Discourse Analysis. At times researchers who blend approaches adopt the constructionist framework in my 1999 book. I argue it is important to take the step from competing “views” (or constructions) of the “problem” to how the “problem” is produced as a particular form of problem (see discussion above).

The possibility of using WPR with large bodies of material deserves consideration. I argue that coding may be used to arrange problem representations. To use coding in this way I suggest that the WPR questions need to be applied first. Here is an example where researchers successfully pursue this approach: 

Amalie Martinus Hauge & Didde Boisen Andersen (11 Mar 2025): Who cares about the dying? – Unpacking integration of palliative care and oncology in the Danish context, Health Sociology Review. 

The place of interviews in WPR analyses deserves attention due to the frequency with which they are used to provide “evidence”, alongside “lived experience”, for the category of “lived effects” (Question 5 in WPR). With Jennifer Bonham I have developed a sister strategy to WPR, called Poststructural Interview Analysis (PIA). The focus in this approach on what is “sayable” makes it congruent with poststructuralist premises. The second edition of Poststructural Policy Analysis(2025; with Sue Goodwin) contains a new chapter (with Jennifer Bonham) illustrating how PIA can be applied. New applications of PIA would be most useful. 

Finally (for now), more work is needed in relation to the political efficacy of poststructural interventions such as WPR. This issue has become pressing due to the shift towards authoritarian regimes in several places. I signalled my interest in this topic in the preceding entries on “authoritarian governmentality” (28 Sept 2025) and “self”-problematisation (29 October 2025). We need to ask if poststructural analysis remains a useful analytic tool in current political situations. For example, what are the consequences of querying the effectiveness of inclusion and diversity programs when these are targeted for elimination in the United States? There is much work to do. 

Conclusion

I hope that tracing some of the changes in WPR encourages the need to approach it with a critical eye. Everything has a history and the history of WPR is still being written. I hope you find occasion to contribute to this project. 

References

Bacchi, C. 1996. The Politics of Affirmative Action: “Women”, Equality and Category Politics, London: Sage.

Bacchi, C. 1999. Women, Policy and Politics: the construction of policy problems. London: Sage.

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 Engaging with Carol Bacchi. Strategic interventions and exchanges, edited by Angelique Bletsas and Chris Beasley. Adeleide: University of Adeleide Press. pp. 141–156. 

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

Bacchi, C. and Bonham, J. 2025. Poststructural Interview Analysis: Politicizing “personhood”. In C. Bacchi and S. Goodwin Poststructural Policy Analysis: A Guide to Practice (Chapter 8). NY: Palgrave Macmillan. 

Bacchi, C. and Goodwin, S. 2025. Poststructural Policy Analysis: A Guide to Practice. First edition 2016. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 

Bacchi, C. and Wilson, A. 2026. What’s the “problem” of “underlying health conditions” represented to be? Applying WPR to concepts. In M. Rönnblom and R. Edwards (eds) Innovations in Critical Policy Analysis: What’s the Problem Represented to be?, Policy Press. 

Bannister, D. and Fransella, F. (1977 [1971]) Inquiring Man: The Theory of Personal Constructs. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Berger, P. L. and Luckman, T. 1967. The Social Construction of Reality. NY: Doubleday/Anchor Books. 

Dean, M. (1999). Governmentality: Power and rule in modern society. London: Sage 

Edelman, M. 1988. Constructing the Political Spectacle. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

Gusfield, J. 1989. Constructing the Ownership of Social Problems: Fun and Profit in the Welfare State. Social Problems 36(5): 431-441.

Harding, S. 1992. “Rethinking standpoint epistemology: What is ‘strong objectivity’?” The Centennial Review, 36(3): 437-470.

Johansson, A & Larsson, J 2022, ‘Identity perspectives in research on university physics education: what is the problem represented to be?’, in HT Holmegaard & L Archer (eds), Science identities: theory, method and research, Springer, Cham, Switzerland, pp. 163–184, DOI:10.1007/978-3-031-17642-5_8.

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

Lloyd, G. 1979. The Man of Reason, Metaphilosophy, 10(1): 18-37/

Mol, A. (2002). The body multiple: Ontology in medical practice. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Power, J. et al. 2025. Beyond dental dams: a critical review of recent research on lesbian, bisexual and queer women’s sexual health, Social Science & Medicine, Volume 380, Article 118249.

Rose, N., & Miller, P. (1992). Political power beyond the state: Problematics of government. The British Journal of Sociology, 43 (2), 173–205. 

Shapiro, M.J. 1988. The Politics of Representation: Writing Practices in Biography, Photography and Policy Analysis. Madison: Wisconsin University Press. 

Zimmerman, P 2025. ‘Staging Debates in Whistleblowing Research: A Problematizing Literature Review’, Journal of Business Ethics, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-025-05990-2 

Dear researchers, let me take this opportunity to share with you details of my new book entitled: What’s the Problem Represented to be? A new thinking paradigm(Routledge 2025). The Introduction and the first two chapters are Open Access. I hope you find the expansion of WPR thinking in this volume interesting and relevant. 

https://www.routledge.com/Whats-the-Problem-Represented-to-Be-A-New-Thinking-Paradigm/Bacchi/p/book/9781032678368

Sincerely, Carol

And now to our topic:

It would seem to be a truism that the political climate has changed since the election of Donald Trump. This change can be seen specifically in the concerted attack on diversity and inclusion programs in the United States. As a critical researcher, I have found myself asking about the relevance of the research perspective I support and use – specifically poststructural research premises – in times like these. In the previous entry (28 September 2025) I consider recent contributions that indicate the relevance of examining current political developments through reflections on “authoritarian governmentality”. In this entry I want to consider the interface between poststructuralist research approaches and political exigency – to what extent is research shaped and compromised due to current political developments? 

I wish to emphasise that this question about the shaping of research priorities is not new – it is certainly not a creation of Trumpian politics. I have broached this topic in several earlier Research Hub entries. I begin this contribution by summarising some of the earlier arguments and linking them to current developments. Our focus is the possibility of and restrictions on unfettered research in authoritarian times. 

Constraints on research

In a Research Hub entry on 31 January 2021, entitled “Critical interventions: What’s a researcher to do?”, I ask: “how ‘free’ are researchers to determine the subject matter of their research?”

I identity three interconnected forms of constraint: 

(i) constraints that involve “navigating research with the powerful” (Aydorova 2020). The example I use here draws on Aydorova’s difficulty in accessing material on education policy in the Russian Federation due to “fiction-making, fakery, and duplicitous performances, sometimes involving researchers themselves.” 

(ii) constraints imposed due to control over funding. Skilbrei (2020), for example, notes the pressure placed on researchers to be deemed “relevant” in order to attract funding, in her work on migration policy in Norway. She asks: “relevant to whom?” 

(iii) “constraints” due to subjectification processes that influence researchers’ approaches to their selected topics. As just one example, I offer Tania Li’s (2014) argument that researchers, of necessity, play a role in “rendering technical” their projects and proposals. She (2014) describes the compromised role of anthropologists who “have to translate our dense, situated knowledge of people, places, and processes into a technical matrix of a manageable, fundable kind.” 

I describe these three forms of constraint as interconnected because, clearly, those in positions of influence (in conventional governmental institutions, but also in academia and other large organisations) can be involved in limiting access to research material and to funding, and in promoting research practices that help to shape researcher subjectivities. I give the example of “evidence-based research and policy”.

The popular (and hence influential) protocol of evidence-based research and policy invites researchers to compete for funding in studies of pre-set problems. Problems, therefore, become taken-for-granted foci for analysis, and researchers become invested in both the thinking behind problem-solving and in the methods associated with such thinking (e.g. empirical studies of alternative interventions along the lines of scientific problem solving; see Research Hub entry 6 August 2018). I use problems here without quotation marks to indicate the common usage of the term to signal “things-that-exist”.

Our academic training in conventional qualitative and quantitative “methods” and positivist premises encourages the almost automatic triggering of this perspective. As just one example, in relation to the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), Waldow (2009: 481) notes: “The enormous resonance of the PISA debate has led to a massive expansion of empirical educational research of the PISA-type in Germany”. And with this research, Radhika Gorur (2016) argues, it is becoming increasingly difficult not to “see like PISA”. 

While being attentive to these “indirect” influences on research protocols, it is becoming increasingly crucial to consider how researchers are to deal with authoritarian interventions. What’s a researcher to do? 

Ways forward: reframing and reflexivity

A recent article by Østebø et al. (2025) tackles head on the issue of how researchers are affected by authoritarian regimes. They ask: “How do Northern Global Health scholars navigate authoritarian political contexts in their research in other countries?”

Their study is based on interviews with health workers in a country that they named Patria, due to a directive not to use the country’s commonly recognised name. The authors highlight the many ways in which researchers manoeuvred around sensitive topics and terms so as not to offend those with authority. 

“To gain and maintain access, and to protect themselves and their local collaborators in a politically sensitive and authoritarian context, the researchers employed practices of ‘framing’. Such strategies included avoiding terms, scholarly references, and questions that were politically loaded; strategically conforming to the assumed apolitical language and methodologies of health research, and negotiating with and leaning on their local counterparts in processes of research dissemination and writing. (Østebø et al. 2025; Abstract).” 

I describe the work of Østebø et al. (2025) as prescient. While we can assume that Patria refers to a country that is commonly described as “developing”, today Patriacould be the United States. Some of the parallels are frightening. In Patria, “anything perceived as challenging the regime’s dominant narrative or political order can be deemed politically sensitive”. The authors report that “some of the researchers we interviewed knew about or had colleagues who either had lost their research visa or research approval”. A few even had colleagues who had been deported “because they openly addressed politically sensitive issues”. Laws were passed in Patria “that prohibited researchers from engaging in work related to politics, good governance, and human rights”. The authors conclude: for researchers who work in authoritarian contexts, “such scenarios are well known” (see Glasius et al. 2018).

So, how did the Patrian researchers proceed? “They would leave out human rights language and use a more apolitical and less sensitive vocabulary” (Østebø et al. 2025: 7):

“While some of these framing practices were motivated by an interest in influencing and changing policy, they were also closely linked to, and spurred by, a desire to gain and maintain access to the field, protect themselves and their Patrian collaborators, and avoid political complications getting in the way of their research (p. 12).” 

These researchers argued that, although they “adapt their wording and behavior to remain within the red lines” (Glasius et al. 2018), they are nevertheless able to produce meaningful and “excellent and informed scholarship” (Loyle 2016).

Østebø et al. (2025: 10) are concerned that the enthusiasm for “framing” research in terms acceptable to those in authority undermines the usefulness of such research: “we caution against an uncritical adoption of these practices in healthcare research” and call upon researchers to “examine the compromises we make”. Their caution rests on a poststructuralist premise that “research is an active component in the shaping of different realities and therefore is, at its core, a political practice” (Bacchi 2012: 142). Compromise, they would argue, comes at a cost. To support this critical focus, they introduce the notion of “political reflexivity”. 

Østebø et al. (2025: 3) define “political reflexivity” as “the critical scrutiny of the taken-for-granted presuppositions and norms that guide our research, and of their relationships to the political environments and power dynamics in specific research locations as well as in academic research more broadly”. They stress that political reflexivity also demands transparency – “a willingness to examine and discuss our own political and philosophical leanings as potential biases” (p. 10). Their target therefore is health research generally rather than just the compromises compelled by authoritarian rule: “A turn to political reflexivity in health research can unravel some of the tacit assumptions, biases, norms and practices that are integral to the health care sciences and which students and researchers must critically think about” P. 1).

I have drafted several Research Hub entries on the topic of reflexivity (21 Oct. 2018; 5 Nov. 2018), and there is much debate about its usefulness. Referring back to Skilbrei’s (2020) work on migration policy in Norway, she notes the pressure placed on researchers to be “relevant” in terms defined by government funders:

“What is researched about migration at any given time, and thus what is known about migrants, is political in the sense that the research is directly or indirectly influenced by the priorities of politicians, bureaucrats, and NGOs. (Skilbrei 2020: 3)”

In response, Skilbrie calls upon researchers to develop “reflexivity … as they take part in producing the realities they seek to describe”:

“By investigating the relationship between research and the context of knowledge, I seek to perform what Loïc Wacquant (2011) calls ‘epistemic reflection’. (Skilbrei 2020: 3)”

Isabelle Stengers issues a more generalized plea not to allow one’s research to be captured by a “State agenda” or by the narrow kind of “relevance” she associates with the “Knowledge Economy” (Muecke 2018). In her view the call for researcher “reflexivity” is limited in its usefulness: “it can easily mean paying attention to defects and biases to be avoided, and for instance to the way our own discrimination patterns and habits negatively affect the knowledge we produce” (Stengers 2008: 46). According to Stengers (2008: 41-42) there is a need to go further, to “make ‘us’ hesitate about our own conditions of thought”.

To this end I have developed the concept of “self”-problematisation as a research practice. “Self”-problematization is not an attitude; it is a practice of the self, an exercise in which one subjects one’s own recommendations and proposals to a WPR analysis (see Bacchi 2018: 10). “Self”-problematization is a key component in a WPR analysis – now identified as Process 7 (Bacchi 2025: 24) in order hopefully to ensure that it is included by researchers who adopt or adapt WPR. I need to ask, of course, whether “self”-problematisation is possible or even “relevant” in authoritarian contexts. With Østebø et al. (2025), I would argue that such a practice is a necessary part of current discussions about political futures.

Conclusion

Does poststructuralism then remain “relevant” today? 

Poststructural interventions draw attention to the place of the subject in research protocols and to how researchers and research are always political. Interventions such as WPR aim to ensure that the terms of the conversation move beyond simple attempts to manipulate one’s analysis to disguise a research agenda, should that agenda be deemed likely to offend decision-makers. As Østebø et al (2025: 10) conclude, such interventions contribute to the much-needed development of “political literacy”: “an ability to critically discuss, recognize and examine how history, political culture and practices of power impact population health and health systems, and interact with our research.” I look forward to additional contributions concerning this vitally important topic.

References

Aydarova, E. 2020. Joker’s pursuit of truth: critical policy analysis in the age of spectacle and post-truth politics. Critical Studies in Education, DOI: 10.1080/17508487.2020.1831566

Bacchi C. 2012. Strategic interventions and ontological politics: research as political practice. In Engaging with Carol Bacchi. Strategic interventions and exchanges, edited by Angelique Bletsas and Chris Beasley. Adeleide: University of Adeleide Press. pp. 141–156. 

Bacchi, C. 2018. Drug Problematizations and Politics: Deploying a Poststructural Analytic Strategy. Contemporary Drug Problems, 45(1): 3-14.

Bacchi, C. 2025. What’s the Problem Represented to be? A new thinking paradigm. NY: Routledge.

Glasius M, De Lange M, Bartman J, Dalmasso E, Lv A, Del Sordi A, Michaelsen M, Ruijgrok K. 2018. Research, ethics and risk in the authoritarian field. Cham: Springer Nature. 

Gorur, R. (2016). Seeing Like PISA: A Cautionary Tale about the Performativity of Inter- national Assessments. European Educational Research Journal, 15, 598-616. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474904116658299 

Li, T. 2014. Anthropological Engagements with Development », Anthropologie & dévelopment [Online], https://journals.openedition.org/anthropodev/495

Loyle CE. Overcoming research obstacles in hybrid regimes: lessons from Rwanda. Soc Sci Q. 2016;97(4):923–35. https://doi.org/10.1111/ssqu. 12346. 

Muecke, S. 2018. Why “slow science” can improve the way we do and interpret research. The Conversation, 29 January 2018. Available at: https://theconversation.com/how-slow-science-can-improve-the-way-we-do-and-interpret-research-90168

Østebø, M. T., Maes, K., Gibb, G. and Henderson, R. 2025. Navigating authoritarian politics: towards reflexive framing in healthcare research, Globalization and Health (2025) 21:20, https://doi.org/10.1186/s12992-025-01115-6 

Skilbrei, M. 2020. Taking on the categories, terms and worldviews of the powerful: the pitfalls of trying to be relevant, Identities, DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2020.1805884

Stengers, I. 2008. Experimenting with Refrains: Subjectivity and the Challenge of Escaping Modern Dualism. Subjectivity, 22: 38-59.

Wacquant, L. 2011. From “Public Criminology” to the Reflexive Sociology of Criminological Production and Consumption: A Review of Public Criminology? Ian Loader and Richard Sparks. British Journal of Criminology,51 (2): 438–448. doi:10.1093/bjc/azr002.

Waldow, F. (2009). What PISA Did and Did Not Do: Germany after the “PISA-Shock”. European Educational Research Journal, 8, 476-483. https://doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2009.8.3.476