It is difficult, if not impossible, to keep up with the pace of change to do with AI. Some months ago, I shared with you my first experiments with ChatGPT (29 Sept 2023). A question arises as to the usefulness of WPR in relation to these developments. In this entry I introduce a recent article that tackles European policy regulating AI and that draws upon WPR to produce a cogent analysis (Pham and Davies 2024). 

I am frequently asked for exemplars of how to work with WPR. The Research Hub provides an ideal venue to pursue this project. Hence, you can expect to find several subsequent entries that will bring to your attention useful WPR applications. The entries will include comments on the kinds of materials that can be used for a WPR analysis and on theoretical issues that require further consideration.

Article: Bao-Chau Pham & Sarah R. Davies (02 Jul 2024): What problems is the AI act solving? Technological solutionism, fundamental rights, and trustworthiness in European AI policy, Critical Policy Studies, DOI: 10.1080/19460171.2024.2373786 

Brief summary: 

The authors critically explore the policy “responses” to AI produced by the European Commission, with a particular focus on the AI Act (the EU’s Proposal for a Regulation: Laying Down Harmonised Rules on AI), first published in April 2021. They find that this policy constitutes the technology as both opportunity and threat, and that these problematisations are made to “cohere” through risk-based categorizations. A particular point of interest is how these problematisations enact an “exceptionalist notion of Europe as a policy actor and coherent political community” (Abstract).

Materials used:

Pham and Davies (2024) offer a clear guide to the sources they draw upon for their analysis. Table I (p. 6) lists the AI policy documents published by the European Commission (EC) and the High-Level Expert Group on AI (HLEG AI) between April 2018 and April 2021. The authors explain that, while the policy “response” is most explicitly spelt out in the AI Act, they consider this wider “corpus”, 

“as the documents are all constitutive of the policy discourse that underpins the AI Act and wider EU AI policy discussion. These additional documents allow us to understand how the proposal and justification for the AI Act became intelligible. (p. 7)”

This use of related texts is often necessary to “build up a fuller picture of a problem representation” (Bacchi 2009, p. 20). 

Applying WPR

The authors display and state clearly that they see their work as extending “prior analysis of what the AI Act is doing (and especially Krarup and Horst 2023; Paul 2023)” (p. 15 Note 1). They consider how the WPR approach extends “the discussion on the performative politics of European AI policy” (p. 15). Their analysis offers readers insights into the usefulness of approaching policy through problematisations. 

The authors produce a clear guide to how to apply WPR. I proceed to summarize some key points:

The WPR approach recommends starting from “proposals” or “proposed solutions” in policy texts and “working backwards” to see how these produce the “problem” as a particular sort of problem. 

Pham and Davies (p. 2) follow this analytic strategy. They note: “Our starting point is the policy solution presented in EU documents, namely the AI Act and the regulatory strategy it proposes, that of risk-based tiers”. The authors provide a useful overview of the literature that examines the place of “risk technologies” in governing practices (p. 3). They also link their analysis to other scholarship that understands “policy as constitutive and as producing the entities that it refers to”. This point, that WPR targets what policies produce as real, is critically important: 

“Policy discussions of AI and related digital technologies are thus not neutral but enact particular visions and imaginations of these technologies and the societies in which they are situated (af Malmborg 2022; Bareis and Katzenbach 2022).(p.4)” 

By “working backwards” from the initial risk-based proposal, Pham and Davies (2024) are able to identify two problematisations: first, that AI is necessary to productivity; and second; that (some) AI is “risky” and poses threats to the “rights” of European citizens. The notion of “risk” allows these two apparently conflicting problematisations to “cohere”. 

Mitchell Dean (1999, p. 177) elaborates the governmentality position that, in effect, “There is no such thing as risk in reality”:

“Risk is a way – or rather, a set of different ways – of ordering reality, or rendering it into a calculable form. It is a way of representing events in a certain form so they might be made governable in particular ways, with particular techniques and for particular goals.”

The task for researchers, therefore, is to draw attention to the practices involved in the production of “risk” thinking and “risk technologies”. The notion of “risk technology” highlights the role of “risk” categories as governing mechanisms. Pham and Davies’ (2024) analysis provides insights into the place of “risk” thinking in governing AI.

To elaborate on the two identified problematisations, the authors “mine” the “related texts” listed in Table 1. They describe their analytical approach as abductive “in that we were sensitized to the seven questions outlined by Bacchi”. They elaborate: 

“We considered Bacchi and Goodwin’s (2016) suggestion that it might be necessary to go through the WPR steps multiple times. In this vein, we read the documents repeatedly and conducted multiple rounds of iterative coding, revisiting the WPR framework and its questions throughout the analytical process.” (p. 7; emphasis added)

Through this practice Pham and Davies (2024) illustrate how it may be possible to develop methods to use WPR in relation to large bodies of material if you apply the theory (WPR) throughout the analytic process (an argument I make in the previous Research Hub entry, 27 Feb 2025).

The authors effectively use quotes from their primary material (see reference to Table 1 above) to support their arguments. For example, they quote this 2020 EU White Paper to firm up the problematisation of AI as necessary for productivity: AI will facilitate “gains that can strengthen the competitiveness of European industry and improve the well- being of citizens (European Commission 2020b, 25)”. I would point out that quotes such as this one could be described as “proposals” in the WPR sense of the term as they promote a particular vision that describes what needs to be done. Hence, they serve as entry-points for identifying and interrogating problematisations/problem representations. 

In elaborating the second problematisation, the need to protect European values from “risky” AI, the same White Paper states: 

“It is more important than ever to promote, strengthen and defend the EU’s values and rules, and in particular the rights that citizens derive from EU law. These efforts undoubtedly also extend to the high-risk AI applications marketed and used in the EU under consideration here. (European Commission 2020b, 18) “

This quote, again, is a clear proposal (in the WPR sense of the term) about what needs to be done. I make this point to illustrate the analytical fruitfulness of approaching primary textual material through the lens of “proposals” and their problematisations (this topic forms the basis of a forthcoming Research Hub entry). In other words, the supplementary policies listed in Table 1 are replete with proposals that could provide the focus for analysis. 

• Pham and Davies (2024) are particularly interested in the effects of the identified problematisations (Question 5 in WPR; Bacchi and Goodwin 2016, p. 16). Among the three sub-categories of interconnected effects introduced in Analysing Policy(Bacchi 2009, p. 15-18) (discursive, subjectification and lived), they zoom in on subjectification effects. Through this topic, they illustrate how it is possible to foreground some parts of a WPR analysis if space constraints impose limits on what can be covered. 

The authors describe subjectification effects as “how certain subject positions (in this case that of “Europe” itself) are constituted through problematizations and their proposed solutions” (p. 11 ff). They stress that “European AI” is imagined to “safeguard ‘core societal values’” and in doing so to “carve out a distinctive trademark”. The notion of a “(more) trustworthy, ethical ‘AI made in Europe’) (European Commission 2018b, 1)” is “repeatedly stated as a desirable goal”. 

• In terms of critique (thinking of Question 4 in WPR and the need to identify “silences”, p. 7) the authors endorse analyses that query the notion of “trustworthy AI”, describing it as ambiguous (Stix 2022) or as a buzzword (Reinhardt 2023), and that draw attention to the limitations of “techno-solutionism” (Katzenbach 2021; Paul 2022). They note two specific issues that emerge from their analysis: “the way in which Europe emerges as an exceptionalist policy actor and the related question of who is included in the AI Act’s efforts to protect ‘citizens’” (p 13). They raise questions concerning “whose values and rights are not being included in EU policy”, whether the “dignity and rights of people on the move” are included, and if the global impact of AI technology features in the policy statements. Finally, they emphasise that the constitution of AI technology as economically productive equates citizenship with participation in markets in ways that reflect “at the very least, an incomplete imagination” (p. 14):

“the policy documents produce a version of European citizenship that is perhaps better aligned with Homo economicus than with other versions of the citizen (Brown 2015).” 

• Pham and Davies (2024) conclude their analysis with a section on “self”-problematisation, examining “the situatedness and limits of our own analysis” (p. 13). It was refreshing to see this topic included as it is so often ignored. Step 7 (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016, p. 20) signals the need to recognise that researchers are inevitably located in cultural and political logics that could well affect their analyses The authors clearly understand the significance of being willing to subject one’s own proposals to the WPR questions. They acknowledge the limits of the corpus they draw upon. The focus on policy documents and on Europe means “ignoring the many other actors and processes that are influential: industry activity, media discussion, national policy in both Europe and across the world, NGOs, and civil society” (p. 14). It follows that their argument about how AI and European identity are realized is necessarily incomplete.  

Theoretical Issues:

The WPR approach asks you to leave behind conventional notions of “problem” and “solution”. There are no “problems” per se. There are only problem representations. In addition, references to “solutions” take on a new meaning. A “solution” is not the resolution of a difficulty; rather, it provides the starting place for identifying problem representations, remembering that proposals (postulated solutions) indicate what is targeted as in need of change and hence what is represented as problematic, i.e., as the “problem”. “Solutions”, therefore, provide the starting points for analysis, not the end points. To keep this argument to the fore, I suggest the need for quotation marks when you use these terms except in cases where it is clear that “problems” and “solutions” are treated as some sort of presumed pre-existing state or entity. This topic is pursued further in forthcoming Research Hub entries. 

Conclusion: 

The usefulness of WPR can best be gauged by examining what researchers achieve through its adoption. I would highly recommend reading Pham and Davies (2023) to see how they craft their argument. For the next several entries, I will bring to your attention insightful and challenging contributions on climate change, menstruation, unemployment and Universal Basic Income. Please let me know which particular topics you would like to see discussed (carol.bacchi@adelaide.edu.au).

For other applications of WPR in relation to AI and related topics, see the following suggestions. Please let me know if I have missed any: 

Kallioinen, E. 2022. The Making of Trustworthy and Competitive Artificial Intelligence: A Critical Analysis of the Problem Representations of AI in the European Commission’s AI Policy. MA thesis, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki.

Lindt, M 2022. The Geopolitics of Artificial Intelligence: A Comparative Policy Analysis of French and Chinese Artificial Intelligence Policy Discourse. MA thesis, Malmö University, Faculty of Culture and Society (KS), Department of Global Political Studies (GPS).

Padden, M. 2023. The transformation of surveillance in the digitalisation discourse of the OECD: A brief genealogy. Internet Policy Review, 12(3). https://doi.org/10.14763/2023.3.1720

Padden, M. and Öjehag-Pettersson, A. 2021. Protected how? Problem representations of risk in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Critical Policy Studies, https://doi.org/10.1080/19460171.2021.1927776

Padden, M. and Öjehag-Pettersson, A. 2024. Digitalisation, democracy and the GDPR: The efforts of DPAs to defend democratic principles despite the limitations of the GDPR. Big Data & Society, 1-13, DOI: 10.1177/20539517241291815 

Puukko, O. 2024. Rethinking digital rights through systemic problems of communication. Revista Latina de Comunicación Social, 82, 01-19. https://www.doi.org/10.4185/RLCS-2024-2044  

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 

Sundberg, L. 2019. If Digitalization is the Solution, What is the Problem? In T. Kaya (Ed.) ECDG 2019 19th European Conference on Digital Government. Academic Conferences and Publishing Ltd. pp. 136-143.

Wong-Toropainen, S. 2024. Problematising User Control in the Context of Digital Identity Wallets and European Digital Identity Framework. In: Prifti, K., Demir, E., Krämer, J., Heine, K., Stamhuis, E. (eds) Digital Governance. Information Technology and Law Series, vol 39. T.M.C. Asser Press, The Hague, pp. 115-136. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6265-639-0_6 

References

af Malmborg, F. 2022. “Narrative Dynamics in European Commission AI Policy—Sensemaking, Agency Construction, and Anchoring.” Review of Policy Research 40 (5): 757–780. advanced online publication. https://doi.org/10.1111/ropr.12529.

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

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

Bareis, J., and C. Katzenbach. 2022. “Talking AI into Being: The Narratives and Imaginaries of National AI Strategies and Their Performative Politics.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 47 (5): 855–881. https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439211030007.

Brown, W. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 

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

European Commission. 2018b. “Coordinated Plan on Artificial Intelligence.” COM (2018) 795 

Final.

European Commission. 2020b. “White Paper: On Artificial Intelligence – a European Approach to 

Excellence and Trust.” COM (2020) 65 Final.

Katzenbach, C. 2021. “’AI Will Fix This’ – the Technical, Discursive, and Political Turn to AI in Governing Communication.” Big Data & Society 8 (2): 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 20539517211046182. 

Krarup, T., and M. Horst. 2023. “European Artificial Intelligence Policy as Digital Single Market Making.” Big Data & Society 10 (1): 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517231153811.

Paul, R. 2022. “Can Critical Policy Studies Outsmart AI? Research Agenda on Artificial Intelligence Technologies and Public Policy.” Critical Policy Studies 16 (4): 497–509. advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/19460171.2022.2123018.

Paul, R. 2023. “European Artificial Intelligence “Trusted Throughout the World”: Risk-Based Regulation and the Fashioning of a Competitive Common AI Market.” Regulation & Governance. https://doi.org/10.1111/rego.12563.

Pham, B-C & Davies, S. R. (02 Jul 2024): What problems is the AI act solving? Technological solutionism, fundamental rights, and trustworthiness in European AI policy, Critical Policy Studies, DOI: 10.1080/19460171.2024.2373786  

Reinhardt, K. 2023. “Trust and Trustworthiness in AI Ethics.” AI and Ethics 3 (3): 735–744. https:// doi.org/10.1007/s43681-022-00200-5. Stix, C. 2022. “Artificial Intelligence by Any Other Name: A Brief History of the Conceptualization of ‘Trustworthy Artificial intelligence.” Discover Artificial Intelligence 2 (1), advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44163-022-00041-5. 

This entry follows through on the preceding one in which I endeavour to clarify distinctions between the theoretical approaches offered in WPR, RTA (Reflexive Thematic Analysis) and CFA (Critical Frame Analysis). To begin I offer a summary of the key points raised in the preceding entry and, at the end, I consider a way to combine approaches that may prove useful. I refer you also to the Research Hub entry on 23 December, 2023, entitled: “Oops, I said ‘themes’: WPR and RTA (Reflexive Thematic Analysis)”. 

The key distinctions among approaches can be tackled through three interconnected discussion points:

First, the kinds of assumptions interrogated;

Second, approaches to knowledge;

Third, approaches to materials used in analysis.

First, the kinds of assumptions interrogated:

Alvesson and Sandberg (2013) usefully identify contrasting “levels of analysis” in academic theorising based on the kinds of assumptions they examine. They mention five kinds of assumption but for our purposes I zoom in on the contrast between “in-house assumptions” and “field assumptions”. 

Put simply, “in-house assumptions” are those accepted by the discipline (e.g. psychology, economics, etc.) within which you find yourself. Alvesson and Sandberg offer the example of “trait theory” in psychology. Someone who wishes to question the traits commonly assigned a leader, for example, still accepts that it is a worthwhile project to examine something called “leadership traits”. Trait theory is taken for granted; it is not questioned. 

By contrast, if a researcher examines “field assumptions” the whole notion of a “trait” would come up for questioning. What does it mean to assign “traits” to people? What assumptions about human psychology underpin the notion of “trait”? These are the sorts of questions that would be raised in Foucauldian-influenced analysis. Hence, such analysis questions “field assumptions”. 

WPR operates at the level of “field assumptions”. Question 2 specifies the need to identify the epistemological and ontological presuppositions underpinning identified problem representations – e.g., the meanings required for something called a “trait” to exist. By contrast, RTA appears to work at the level of “in-house assumptions”.

Consider, for example, how “evidence” is treated. As an in-house assumption, “evidence” informs the use of coding, commonly adopted in RTA studies. The premise is that bits of knowledge can be identified and labelled, and henceforth manipulated for research purposes. 

WPR, on the other hand, challenges the whole idea of “evidence” – therefore it works at a different level of analysis – at the level of questioning deep-seated assumptions or field assumptions such as “evidence”. I hope you can see how disagreements about the level of analysis that is required prove problematic in blending WPR and RTA.

Second, approaches to “knowledge”: 

Closely related to the first discussion point, WPR brings a sceptical approach to “knowledge”. This scepticism becomes clear if we consider the analytic strategy it endorses. As a commencing premise in that strategy, WPR makes the case that: what one proposes to do about something indicates what is identified as needing to change and hence what is deemed to be problematic (“the problem”). The analysis therefore starts from what is proposed (e.g., recommendations, aims, implied goals, etc.) with the argument that it is possible to “work backwards” from proposals to identify what the “problem” is represented to be (problem representations). I use the example of training programs for women to illustrate this argument:  if training programs for women (to increase their representation in positions of influence) is the proposal, the “problem” is represented to be women’s lack of training.

While this point may not appear at first glance to advance the discussion in a useful manner, WPR proceeds to interrogate this proposition. To open identified problem representations to critical scrutiny, we examine the “knowledges” they rely upon (Question 2 in WPR). Note the plural use of “knowledges” instead of common references to “knowledge”. The whole point of the analysis is to question taken-for-granted knowledges commonly accepted as true. 

For example, training programs for women accept and work within assumptions that “training” increases “skills”. These “in-house” assumptions, associated with developmental psychology, provide the grounds for the proposal. Challenging this reliance on psychology as a form of “truth”, in WPR, the assumed “knowledge” of “psychology” becomes something to question as one form of (competing) “knowledges”. 

By contrast RTA offers a psychological theory. Its very premise is the usefulness of psychology as an approach to knowledge. We can see this premise operating, for example, in the work of Byrne (2022) who examines “opinions” and “attitudes”, a fairly conventional psychological approach. For WPR “opinions” and “attitudes” are “field assumptions” that require questioning. 

Closely related to these different approaches, how the “subject” is conceptualised in RTA, as a being with “attitudes” and “opinions”, sits in sharp contrast to the position on “subjectification” in WPR. On the RTA side, we see a version of a sovereign subject with “attitudes”; on the WPR side we work with a provisional subject produced in practices (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016, pp. 30, 40). 

Third, the kinds of material used: 

RTA relies on interviews and focus groups as offering access to “opinions”. As in the point just covered, this research approach presumes subjects as kinds of being who express “views” that reflect an interior consciousness. By contrast, as just noted, WPR adopts a Foucauldian perspective that questions the sovereign subject presumed in RTA. Hence, for WPR researchers, there is a need for a new approach to interviews as research materials. 

In the Appendix to Poststructural Policy Analysis, Jennifer Bonham and I (2016) develop an approach to interviews as research materials that builds on the theoretical premises informing WPR. Called Poststructural Interview Analysis (PIA) it highlights the meanings that need to be in place for certain statements to be possible. As in WPR, the focus is on underlying conceptual logics and taken for granted assumptions in interview texts rather than on a presumption that interviewees can access the “truth” of their experience. 

A possible way forward

Researchers who turn to RTA in their WPR analysis tend to want to find a way to engage large amounts of material. The common focus in WPR studies on a single piece of legislation or report as a starting point for the analysis seems to miss the opportunity to provide a wider picture of relevant texts. I should note that in Analysing Policy (Bacchi 2009: 20) I point out that “It is often, even usually, necessary to examine related texts … to build up a fuller picture of a particular problem representation”. I still find this approach useful (Bacchi 2023) but remain open to other suggestions for bringing WPR to large bodies of material. In this spirit, I introduce the innovative study produced by Stoor et al. (2021) on suicide among the Sami. 

The authors started their analysis from “proposals” in a large number of texts (40) and “work backwards” to identify problem representations – providing a highly effective example of WPR as analytic strategy. Their 40 texts produced 40 different, but related, problem representations. They proceeded to organise the material in a useful way. They introduce five categories to refer to more specific kinds of problem representation. The proposals to “address” suicide cluster around these five themes, “pertaining to shortcomings on individual (5), relational (15), community/cultural (3), societal (14) and health systems levels (3)”. 

The suggestion in this example is that it may be possible to apply the theory first (ask the WPR questions) and subsequently to organise the identified problem representations into “themes” (using a version of RTA). Here we need to remember that themes capture “some level of patterned response or meaning” (Braun and Clarke 2021: 341). Clearly, Stoor et al.’s five categories offer five forms of explanation for suicide among the Sami that emerged in their material: they found representations that problematised individual behaviour, relational situations, community/cultural factors, societal factors and the problematisation of health systems. 

This useful organisation of the material by these five themes is not the only possible organisation. By producing supplementary material, Stoor et al. keep open the possibility that problem representations could be clustered in some other way. Hence, they refuse to impose one true meaning on the material, instead acknowledging the complexity of the situation. This willingness to embrace ambiguity and contingency results in a thought-provoking analysis.

Conclusion

I realize there may be pressures applied to research students and other researchers to produce analyses that can be described as “rigorous” or “systematic”. Large bodies of material, coding and “themes” appear to fit the bill. The goal is commonly described as “producing new knowledge”. The poststructural stance associated with WPR questions “knowledge” as assumed “truth”, referring instead to “knowledges” as plural conceptions of “truth”. I believe it is necessary to reflect on these contrasting perspectives in any attempt to bring together WPR and some other theoretical framework. 

References

Alvesson, M., & Sandberg, J. 2013. Constructing research questions: Doing interesting research. London: Sage.

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

Bacchi, C. 2023. Bringing a ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’ approach to music education: a national plan for music education 2022, Music Education Research, DOI: 10.1080/14613808.2023.2223220 .

Bacchi, C. and Bonham, J. 2016. Appendix: Poststructural Interview Analysis: Politicizing “personhood”, in C. Bacchi and S. Goodwin, Poststructural Policy Analysis: A Guide to Practice. NY: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 113-122.

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

Braun, V. & Clarke, V. 2021. One size fits all? What counts as quality practice in (reflexive) thematic analysis?, Qualitative Research in Psychology, 18:3, 328-352, DOI: 10.1080/14780887.2020.1769238 

Byrne, D. 2022. A worked example of Braun and Clarke’s approach to reflexive thematic analysis. Quality & Quantity, 56: 1391-1412. 

Stoor, J. P. A, Eriksen, H. A. and Silviden, A. C. 2021. Making suicide prevention initiatives targeting Sámi in Nordic countries. BMC Public Health, 21:2035. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-021-12111-x  

This entry is prompted by the increasing attention directed to the possibility of blending, or integrating, WPR with other analytic approaches. The two analytic approaches I consider include Reflexive Thematic Analysis (RTA) and Critical Frame Analysis (CFA). These approaches share a commitment to use large bodies of material and to find ways to organise that material. They also share some common terminologies, including “themes”, “coding” and “evidence”. There is, in these approaches, a tendency to focus on policy actors, though Walsh (2022: 5) points to an interest in “hegemonic discourses” in CFA. 

I have considered these topics elsewhere. Specifically in a Research Hub entry in 2023 called “Oops, I said ‘themes’” (23 December) I focus on the presuppositions underpinning Reflexive Thematic Analysis. In April 2018 I made some preliminary comments on the relationship between WPR and frame theory. In other writing (Bacchi 2009b) I begin to probe some possible links between WPR and CFA. Here I offer reflections on a conference presentation by Walsh (2022) that suggests the usefulness of integrating WPR and CFA (see also Walsh 2024). I refer in passing to other recent articles that propose blending WPR and RTA (Olvik 2024, Dinmore et al. 2024). 

Starting places: problematisations

In the earlier Research Hub entry on Reflexive Thematic Analysis and WPR (23 Dec. 2023), I stress the importance of considering the form of research question brought to one’s research material. Research questions provide starting places for thinking. Both RTA and CFA tend to ask why something happens. Walsh (2022: 28-29), for example, asks, in her selected policy areas, “why the assumption of a clash between culture and women’s rights dominates public debate and the academy”. WPR does not ask “why” questions. It asks “how possible” questions – how was it possible for women’s rights to be conceptualised in a way that sets them in opposition to assumed cultural standards? 

The boundary between “why” and “how possible” questions may seem to be blurred. If you ask how something is possible, could you not say that inadvertently you are explaining why something happened. However, the term “why” evokes a sense of causality that is not present in “how possible” questions. In the latter position, we are looking to examine thinking at a different level of analysis (see below). 

Problematisations provide a vital linchpin in opening up this level of analysis. Problematisation is a tricky term. Elsewhere, I talk about the two most common uses of problematisation (Bacchi 2012). First, there is the use of the term to signal an analytic approach that questions (or problematises) things. This usage has become part of the vernacular. Think, for example, of references to one’s desire to problematise an issue. 

Second, the term is used to refer to how “things” are problematised – these are the forms of problematisation themselves. Think for example of Foucault’s work (1980) on how different eras have problematized “sexuality” and thus made “sexuality” a particular kind of object for thought in different sites, either as a biological imperative or as part of a moral code.  

This second usage of problematisation is much less common in contemporary theory despite its centrality in Foucault’s work. Foucault talks about a desire to get “inside thinking” and he sees problematisations (the forms themselves; note the use of the plural) as a way to do this. We look to identify and examine how things are problematised. WPR applies both meanings of problematisation. It problematises (asks critical questions about) identified problematisations (the forms themselves). The study of the forms of problematisation themselves, the problematisations (plural), entails examining the presuppositions that make these problematisations possible (see “how possible” questions above). 

Walsh (2022: 28) identifies the importance of this task in WPR. She characterises WPR as concerned with “background knowledges”. This concern, as she says, is the characteristic that most clearly distinguishes WPR from CFA: “WPR offers methods for uncovering the power of background knowledges underpinning policy controversies that an upgraded version of CFA lacks”. 

The meaning of “background knowledges”, the term Walsh adopts to describe WPR, needs elaboration. WPR specifies a concern with the underlying ontological and epistemological premises that make what is said and what is done possible. Consider for example the policy of offering training programs to women to increase their access to positions of influence. A particular understanding of the individual (an ontological presupposition) underpins the proposal, one in which human beings are seen as “skill-acquiring” creatures. This understanding depends upon psychological theories of human development (epistemological assumption/presupposition). There is also an assumption that women are deficient, lacking in some ways, e.g., a gendered assumption about women’s lack of abilities in certain areas. Both psychology and gender are forms of social (“background”) knowledge (discourses). Note that in Foucault and in WPR discourses are knowledges rather than forms of language use.

With Foucault, the goal in identifying these underlying forms of knowledge (“background knowledges”) is to open them up for questioning. We ask: are there ways to think about human beings other than as “skill-acquiring” creatures? Do “skills” exist outside human beings waiting to be acquired? What are the epistemological and ontological assumptions upon which such a proposal relies? And what would happen if we challenged these assumptions, if the “problem” were thought about differently? We could do the same thing with “gender”, asking: are there ways to think about human beings other than as men or women with assumed, differentiated “skill” sets, etc. 

Walsh (2022: 19) describes CFA as a complement to the WPR focus on “background knowledges”. She identifies two different analytic processes: “framing and the (re)production of dominant knowledges”. In her account, the “constructivist” CFA position allows access to framing, described as “what is said”, while “constructionist” WPR focuses on “background knowledges”. The key distinction, for Walsh, is that “an upgraded CFA ensures researchers become intimately familiar with what was said, who said it, and what it means” (Walsh 2022: 20). As an example of what CFA offers, Walsh (pp. 15-16) mentions how centrist and radical right Dutch politicians silence Dutch Muslim women. The example of “cultural essentialism” is put forward as a “background knowledge” (what WPR offers) informing her selected policies – e.g., banning the burka in France. 

A difficulty here, I would suggest, is Walsh’s separation between “what is said” and “background knowledges”. In WPR such a separation does not exist. Recall the focus in WPR on “how possible” questions – how is it possible for certain things to be said, or for certain things to be done? To answer these questions, WPR (Question 2) examines the “background knowledges”, using Walsh’s term (see below), that make it possible to say certain things. The suggestion that we can separate “what is said” from the kind of epistemological and ontological analysis offered by WPR would need to be defended. This point links to the common characterisation of RTA and CFA as somehow more objective and rigorous than WPR (pursued later).

Starting places: Proposals

If we accept the distinctive contribution in WPR just described – a focus on how things said and things done become possible – , we need to see how this approach can be “operationalised”. The key analytic premise in WPR is that proposals to institute forms of change reveal what is presented as needing to change and hence what is produced as problematic. It follows that the starting place for analysis is precisely proposals for change. This argument is a nuanced one. For example, an endorsement of the need for greater social cohesion can be read as a proposal in which lack of social cohesion is constituted as a “problem”. The need to identify proposals leads to the frequent use of legislation or reports as starting places for analysis. From these it is possible to extract recommendations (proposals for change) and then to consider how a particular issue/practice is being problematised within them. To initiate a critical approach to these “proposals”, we move to Question 2 in WPR (see Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 20) and ask about the presuppositions that make identified proposals possible (see above on “how possible” questions). 

With Sue Goodwin I have developed this way of thinking to embrace a wide range of practices and “entities” beyond public policies (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016). In an earlier entry (14 January 2018), I describe how it is possible to see buildings as proposals. There I explain that buildings and other artefacts can be seen as proposals in the sense that they commit to particular ways of organizing the world. It follows that it is possible to ask: “If this building [or some part of a building, e.g. a purpose-built room or facility] is a statement about how things ought to be, what is seen as needing to change and hence as ‘the problem’?” Bottrell and Goodwin (2011, p. 4) use the example of modern schools with their “uni-purpose facilities located on enclosed land, fenced and gated” and how they reflect a “hidden curriculum” that problematises the moral and cognitive training of young people. 

Proposals provide a starting place for probing problematisations (problem representations) and the (background) knowledges upon which they rely. Problem representations are treated as implicit within proposals. If a program is put forward to train women, women’s lack of training can be identified as what is problematised (“the problem”). This analytic strategy stands at a distance from CFA and RTA where “themes” and “frames” are identified in forms of text, as elaborated in the next section. 

Levels of analysis

In the description above, the “steps” in WPR thinking hopefully become clearer. We start from what is done or what is said. We probe what is problematised in these practices or “statements” (work backwards to identify the implicit problem representations within them). We interrogate the “background knowledges”/presuppositions that make these problem representations possible. These distinctive research questions provide a unique level of analysis. To suggest blending WPR with RTA and/or CFA means asking if they operate at the same or at different levels of analysis. I suggest the latter.

Alvesson and Sandberg’s (2013: 53-56) work on how to develop interesting research questions assists in distinguishing different “levels” of analysis in varied research approaches. They identify five categories of assumptions underpinning specific theoretical stances: in-house, root metaphor, paradigmatic, ideological and “field assumptions”, associating the last with the work of Foucault. Studies that work at the level of “in-house” assumptions tend to accept the frames of reference adopted in their field. By contrast, Foucauldian-influenced research puts these terms of reference in question, unsurprising given the commitment to probe deep-seated presuppositions in “background knowledges”. As Alvesson and Sandberg note, Foucauldian-influenced theory questions “field assumptions” – that is, the assumptions taken for granted across many fields. 

Such an approach puts in question the commonly adopted categories of analysis in mainstream political and social theory. One example is the category of evidence. WPR brings a sceptical approach to presumptions of accessible “evidence”. Such “evidence” is associated with a positivist paradigm and a correspondence view of knowledge. In contrast with the critical approach to evidence in WPR, evidence tends to be referenced as taken-for-granted “knowledge” in those who support CFA (Walsh 2022: 4) and RTA (Dinmore et al. 2024: abstract and passim), suggesting deep-seated epistemological distinctions between WPR and these approaches. 

The acceptance of evidence in CFA and RTA corresponds with the terms mentioned earlier – “coding” and “themes”. According to Walsh (2024: 4), the “coding template” in CFA makes “evidence” “retrievable”, improving “intertextuality” and “accuracy”. The premise in this approach is that bits of knowledge can be identified and labelled and, henceforth, manipulated for research purposes. It is this perspective that leads to the enthusiasm for and defence of RTA and CFA as more objective than WPR. Olvik (2024: 6) develops such a contrast. She distinguishes between WPR, where she argues that “it is important to acknowledge the potential for researcher subjectivity in interpreting” policy documents, and RTA research practices, which ensure “consistency and reflexivity and mitigates researcher bias”. Contra this view, in a WPR approach to “knowledge”, “researcher subjectivity” is taken to be inevitable across the board (i.e. in WPR and in supposedly more objective RTA). For WPR researchers, however, “subjectivity” operates, not as a handicap, but as a research resource. 

Braun and Clarke (2006), who developed RTA, are more careful in their claims about “objectivity”. They do not position RTA researchers as independent of interpretation. Themes, they explain, do not emerge from thin air (Braun and Clarke 2021: 343). Still, they emphasise that RTA involves “Coding interestingfeatures of the data in a systematic fashion across the entire data set, collating data relevant to each code” (Braun and Clarke 2006: 87; emphasis added). In RTA, “the theory and method need to be applied rigorously” where “rigour lies in devising a systematic method whose assumptions are congruent with the way one conceptualises the subject matter (Reicher and Taylor 2005: 549)” (Braun and Clarke 2006: 96; emphasis added; see also Walsh 2024: 4 on “rigor” in CFA). It could be argued that current enthusiasm for RTA and CFA is in part due to the need to satisfy a research community wedded to “rigour” and “systematic” analysis, positions linked to positivist principles.

Braun and Clarke make a key point in recognising the central importance of checking to see if your research assumptions are “congruent with the way one conceptualises the subject matter”. It is at this level that distinctions among research approaches become clearest. While Braun and Clarke (2006: 77 Abstract) argue that RTA is a useful strategy in disciplines “beyond psychology”, the kinds of questions asked in RTA analyses tend to presume the existence of states of being or states of mind (i.e. premises within psychology). Byrne (2022), for example, focuses on deciphering the “opinions” and “attitudes” of research subjects. 

Key premises in this approach sit uncomfortably with a WPR analytic strategy. The presumption of sovereign subjects with “attitudes” is put in question in a WPR approach to subjectivity (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 49-53). Indeed, WPR treats “psychology” as a governing (background) knowledge and a contingent historical creation that needs “to be interrogated rather than enshrined as ‘truth’” (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 5). On this point Walsh (2022: 22) usefully disclaims “truth” as her standard for assessment, indicating a possible link with WPR’s endorsement of “self”-problematisation. Marshalling empirical material in poststructural accounts becomes possible if truth claims are refused. 

Coming back to “problems”

Clearly, a way needs to be found to clarify distinctions among theoretical approaches. I tend to concentrate on conceptions of “problems”. In Analysing Policy (2009a: 251-252) I produce a “Guide to paradigms in major policy approaches” based on competing conceptions of “problems”. I offer a similar analysis of “paradigms in health policy” in a 2016 article: “Problematizations in Health Policy: Questioning How ‘Problems’ Are Constituted in Policies” (Bacchi 2016). The sub-title signals my intervention target – how “problems” are constituted as particular sorts of problems. 

At the most basic level, a contrast needs to be drawn between positivist endorsements of forms of problems-that-exist and the troubling of “problems” in WPR. Hence, it follows that, to check if different research approaches are congruent, it is necessary to check how “problems” are constituted. 

The contrast between CFA and WPR on this point (how “problems” are conceptualised) is clear in the “sensitizing questions” in Verloo’s (2005) version of Critical Frame Analysis (see Appendix B in Walsh 2022; see also Lombardo et al. 2009). The first questions in the CFA template under the heading “Diagnosis” read: “What is represented as the problem?” and “Why is it seen as a problem?”. 

I wish to highlight the significance of altering the opening question in WPR – “what’s the problem represented to be?” – to read “What is represented as the problem?”, as occurs in CFA’s (Verloo’s) questions. As we saw above, a WPR approach starts from proposals and works backwards to see how the “problem” is represented within them. There is no separation between “problem” and “solution” (or “diagnosis” and “prognosis” as in CFA); they are mutually imbricated. Hence, there is no such “thing” as a problem pure and simple.

The prompt in the CFA sensitizing questions: “What is represented as the problem?” initiates a different mode of analysis, examining how social actors talk about an assumed issue/problem – how they represent something (an issue). It follows that the focus in CFA becomes voice and rhetoric. 

If we examine the other CFA-based templates in Walsh (2022), it becomes clear that problems are presumed (simply) to exist at some level (I drop quotation marks around the term “problem” when it is used in ways that accept problems as existing states of some sort). I offer a few examples. Consider in Appendix D: Template 1 Example, Sensitizing Questions for Collecting the Evidence, S.A.S. v France, 201415 (Walsh 2022, p. 40; emphasis added): “What is the problem(s) identifiedby the speaker? Why is it a problem? Is inequality a problem? If so, what is the inequality?”. 

Consider the contrast between these questions and the many applications of WPR to the question: “What is the problem of ‘gender inequality’ represented to be?” (Bacchi 1999; Bacchi and Eveline 2010). Note, for example, in the selected sensitizing questions, the interest in how speakers identify problems (assumed to exist). By contrast, WPR probes specific proposals in policies and other practices to consider how “gender inequality” is produced as a particular sort of problem in specific contexts (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 64-68).

Is it possible to somehow blend these perspectives? Walsh (2022: 22) constructs two templates: a coding template and an analysis template, and “toggles” between them. She recommends “adding WPR questions to the analysis template but keeping them separate from CFA questions”. The goal here is to assist “scholars to maintain clear distinctions between frames and framing on the one hand and background knowledges (read WPR) on the other hand” (Walsh 2022: 22-23; emphasis added). Avoiding a mechanistic form of analysis, Walsh recommends an iterative process that “includes CFA coding with CFA and WPR analysis in conjunction”. 

While I applaud the innovation and clear thinking in Walsh’s intervention, as mentioned above, it is the very idea of a distinction between frames and “background knowledges” that WPR challenges. “Background knowledges” informframes; it could not be otherwise. Walsh (2022: 10; emphasis added) admits as much; however, there is a lack of specificity of just what “background knowledges” entail. In one place, they become “worldviews”: “I found that in each case every frame was informed by the speaker’s worldview and policy position, and that both informed the speaker’s rhetoric and reasoning”. In another, they become biases: “those unquestioned knowledges are likely to include racialized-sexist biases about Dutch Muslim women as oppressed and lacking political agency and hence who cannot speak for themselves” (also Walsh 2024: 5). 

Knowledges in a WPR analysis go deeper than biases which appear to be no more than opinions. Nor is the interest in “worldviews” that inform speakers’ “rhetoric and reasoning”. Rather, the focus is on the deep-seated presuppositions that make different proposals possible. To identify and question these presuppositions, the analytic process needs to start from the WPR questions. 

Conclusion

The examples in this entry indicate the fertile thinking sparked by considerations of how to develop useful political theory. I encourage such thinking and experimentation. Walsh’s (2022) detailed investigation of the premises underpinning CFA and WPR is useful and insightful, partly because it allows us to draw attention to distinctions among analytic approaches. 

Walsh is attentive to these distinctions. As quoted earlier, she (2022: 28) concludes that “WPR offers methods for uncovering the power of background knowledges underpinning policy controversies that an upgraded version of CFA lacks”. In her view, constructionists (WPR users) would benefit from “applying CFA not least because it ensures they escape the accusation of determinism and can help them to uncover resistant perspectives and resistant stories”. This is doubtless a worthwhile goal. There is certainly a need to develop our theories of resistance. I have hesitations, however, about the suggestion that the best way to do this is to construct a dichotomy (distinction) between what is said and “background knowledges”. 

As I develop above, what is said needs to be examined in terms of what could be said, what it is possible to say – what is “sayable” (Foucault 1991, pp. 59, 63). For elaboration of this point, I refer you to a chapter I wrote with Jennifer Bonham (2016), applying this thinking to interview transcripts. Asking “what is sayable” means rethinking conventional approaches to interviewing as a research method that treats “things said” as providing access to people’s interior thoughts and experience. Rather, in interviews and more broadly, “things said” are analysed in terms of the practices, including the knowledge practices, that give rise to them (Bacchi and Bonham 2016: 116; see next entry). This analytic strategy raises questions about the possibility of identifying “frames” (“what is said”) as a separate analytic category, distinct from “background knowledges”.

I look forward to continuing these conversations and exchanges. All the best for your research and writing in 2025. Hoping to hear from you via the WPR list ( Welcome to the WPR Network! | Karlstad University (kau.se)

References

Alvesson, M., & Sandberg, J. 2013. Constructing research questions: Doing interesting research. London: Sage.

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

Bacchi, C. 2009b. “The issue of intentionality in frame theory: The need for reflexive framing,” in E. Lombardo, P. Meier and M. Verloo (eds) (2009) The Discursive Politics of Gender Equality: Stretching, bending and policymaking. NY: Routledge. pp. 19-35.

Bacchi, C. (2012). Why Study Problematizations? Making politics visible. Open Journal of Political Science, 2(1): 1-8.

Bacchi, C. 2016. Problematizations in Health Policy: Questioning How “Problems” are Constituted in Policies, Sage Open, April-June. DOI: 10.1177/2158244016653986 

Bacchi, C. and Bonham, J. 2016. Appendix: Poststructural Interview Analysis: Politicizing “personhood”, in C. Bacchi and S. Goodwin, Poststructural Policy Analysis: A Guide to Practice. NY: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 113-122.

Bacchi, C. and Eveline, J. 2010. Approaches to gender mainstreaming: What’s the problem represented to be? in C. Bacchi and J. Eveline (eds) Mainstreaming Politics: Gendering practices and feminist theory. Adelaide: University of Adelaidee Press.

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

Bottrell, D., & Goodwin, S. (2011). Contextualising schools and communities. In D. Bottrell, & S. Goodwin (Eds.), Schools, communities and social inclusion. South Yarra: Palgrave Macmillan. 

Braun, V. & Clarke, V. 2006. Using thematic analysis in psychology, Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3:2, 77-101, DOI: 10.1191/1478088706qp063oa 

Braun, V. & Clarke, V. 2021. One size fits all? What counts as quality practice in (reflexive) thematic analysis?, Qualitative Research in Psychology, 18:3, 328-352, DOI: 10.1080/14780887.2020.1769238 

Byrne, D. 2022. A worked example of Braun and Clarke’s approach to reflexive thematic analysis. Quality & Quantity, 56: 1391-1412. 

Dinmore, H., Beer, A., Baker, E. and Bentley, R. 2024. Advancing a healthy housing policy agenda: how do policy makers problematise housing-related health issues? Journal of Social Policy, doi:10.1017/S0047279424000138.

Foucault, M. 1980b. The history of sexuality, Vol. I. An introduction. New York: Vintage Books.

Foucault, M 1991, “Politics and the study of discourse”, in G Burchell, C Gordon and P Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp. 53-72, ISBN: 9780226080451.

Lombardo, E., Meier, P. and Verloo, M. (eds) (2009) The Discursive Politics of Gender Equality: Stretching, bending and policymaking. NY: Routledge.

Olvik, J. 2024. Navigating Complexity: Potentials and Paradoxes Within Governance Strategies for Public and Third Sector Collaboration. Voluntas, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11266-024-00682-3.

Reicher, S. and Taylor, S. 2005: Similarities and differences between traditions. Psychologist 18, 547/49. 

Stoor, J. P. A, Eriksen, H. A. and Silviden, A. C. 2021. Making suicide prevention initiatives targeting Sámi in Nordic countries. BMC Public Health, 21:2035. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-021-12111-x  

Verloo, M. 2005. Studying Gender Equality in Europe. European Studies Newsletter, 24(3/4): 8-10.

Walsh, D 2022. An Integrated Approach for Doing Comparative Discursive Policy Analysis. Prepared for presentation at the American Political Science Association Conference September 14-18, https://preprints.apsanet.org/engage/api-gateway/apsa/assets/orp/resource/item/634b14dc3e8d9944361b3d76/original/an-integrated-approach-for-doing-comparative-discursive-policy-analysis.pdf

Walsh, D. 2024. A complementary approach to Critical Frame Analysis and “what is the Problem represented to be?”, Critical Policy Studies, https://doi.org/10.1080/19460171.2024.2383194

Following my reflections describing my move towards poststructuralism (Research Hub 30 October, 2024) I decided it was worth commenting on my conviction that such a stance is useful politically.

It is interesting to reflect on how poststructuralism (or sometimes postmodernism) becomes the “whipping boy” in so many political debates. In the mainstream it is targeted as responsible for “fake news” due to its refusal of “truths” and ambivalence about “truth claims”. In the heated field of political theory, it is associated with “negativity” and “critique”, neither of which is looked on favourably. Latour (2004) is best known for constructing a dichotomy between “debunking” as a poststructural enterprise and “assembling” as a desired alternative that heralds the bringing together of collective “concerns” in a “Parliament of things” (Latour 1993, pp. 142-145).

“The critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles. The critic is not the one who lifts the rug from under the feet of the naïve believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather.” (Latour 2004: 246)

Those who adopt the label “postcritical” (Felski 2011, 2015, 2016) tend to collapse poststructuralism into “ideology critique” on the “debunking” “side” (Research Hub Entry, 29 Nov. 2021).

I tackle these issues under several headings:

1. Conceptions of “truth”
2. The nature of “critique”
3. The peril of binaries – “debunking” versus “assembling”
4. Political affiliations
5. Political futures

1. Conceptions of “truth”

“Truth” has become inescapable. And this is because the political landscape is littered with “lies”. We can thank the current American demagogue in large part for painting this landscape. In addition, preoccupation with the power of the internet and AI tends to focus on “misinformation” and “disinformation”. The latter implies deliberate manipulation of “facts” and the distortion of “truth”.

But, of course, we all know that “truth” is a chimera, and that “facts” are debatable. Many battles have been fought over “truths” and “facts”. Nor does claiming access to “truth” or “facts” resolve anything. To say that climate change is a fact doesn’t really assist in decision-making about ways forward.

Foucault, and Foucauldian-influenced poststructuralism, offer a separate, and useful, entry-point on these matters. Foucault (1981, p. 61) explains that his concern is not with what is true but with what is “in the true”. We need to ask – how did “fake news” become possible? What meanings need to be in place for “fake news” to be a recognised category? How is “knowledge” conceptualised? Is this a useful conceptualisation? How, in other words, did “fake news” become “truth” (“in the true”)?

Note that, when Foucault directs attention to what is “in the true”, he is not targeting intentional manipulation of “facts” – a position that retains (by default) a view of “facts” as readily established and available to bemanipulated. He is asking, rather, what was necessary for this position on “facts” to be accepted as “true”. Attention is directed to the background knowledges that install “truths”.

This stance is clear in Foucault’s treatment of psychiatry and clinical medicine. He talks about the ways in which “psychiatric discourse” and “clinical discourse” shape the objects they purport to study. He emphasizes the “practices of psychiatry”, “the operation of the sets of relations characteristic of psychiatry as an accredited form of knowledge” (Bacchi and Bonham 2014: 182). Hence, the political target becomes the interconnected practices that give these knowledge formations authority. This example from The Archaeology of Knowledge illustrates this mode of thinking/analysis:

“In these fields of initial differentiation, in the distances, the discontinuities, and the thresholds that appear within it, psychiatric discourse finds a way of limiting its domain, of defining what it is talking about, of giving it [its domain] the status of an object—and therefore of making it manifest, nameable, and describable”. (Foucault 1972, p. 41; emphasis added)

It is through such knowledge practices (“discursive practices”) that “truths” are established (Chaufan et al 2024).

• The nature of “critique”

What form of critique does this approach offer? Is critique passé?

The approach to “truth” just outlined destabilises claims to “truth”. That is, it shows the conditions necessary to establish “truth claims”, illustrating that they are contingent and reliant on “outside” factors. When someone claims access to “truth” or paints someone else’s position as “fake”, new questions arise. What are the grounds for the claims being made? Are these grounds open to contestation?

It is important to distinguish this argument from concerns about “ideology”. We are not talking about concocted ideas meant to lead people astray, a common understanding of ideology. We are talking about the full complex of ontological and epistemological assumptions at work in creating a particular stance. It follows that poststructuralism sits at a remove from “ideology critique”.

In a series of previous Research Hub entries (30 Sept. 2021; 30 Oct. 2021; 29 Nov. 2021) I outline the debates surrounding “ideology critique” and mention how poststructuralism tends to be collapsed into the category “ideology critique” by those who assume what they call a “postcritical position”. It is interesting how, in these discussions, “ideology critique” becomes the sum total of what is meant by “critique”. The increased questioning of “ideology critique” has led to a general condemnation of “critique” in all forms, collapsing the two terms so that all “critique” becomes “ideology critique”. As a result, poststructural critical interventions are typecast in ways that devalue their political possibilities. This misrepresentation causes all sorts of confusion.

It has led for example to the constructed dichotomy between theoretical approaches as either “debunking” or “assembling”. That is, poststructuralism is collapsed into a theoretical category (called “debunking”) that targets misrepresentation (“misinformation”, “fake news”). In this characterisation of poststructuralism, the focus is on uncovering “truth” and challenging the “evil ones” who misrepresent it (the purveyors of “ideology”).

However, as described under the first topic addressed above, poststructuralists do not engage in defending “truths” or seeking “falsehoods” (“ideology”). They question all forms of knowledge through identifying the “conditions of necessity” for their existence. There is not a search for those who manipulate “facts” nor for “vested interests” who protect their wealth and assets. These quests may be worthwhile, but they are not poststructuralist. It follows that applications of WPR that accept the premises of a form of “ideology critique” sit uncomfortably alongside a Foucauldian-influenced analysis such as WPR.

• The peril of binaries

The characterisation of poststructuralism as (simply) “debunking” is subsequently typecast as (purely) negative – challenging what is “hidden”, the lies beneath the “truth”. Due to this characterisation, discussions about critique degenerate into whether one’s approach is (simply) negative critique or whether one can approach sociopolitical analysis in a more “positive” way.

As noted above Latour casts this contrast as “debunking” versus“assembling”. In his seminal 2004 article, entitled “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?”, Latour characterizes deconstruction as purely “negative” in its impact, with a tendency to “totalize” and “demonize” opponents. The postcritical theorist Felski (2011) makes a similar complaint: “Critique is characterised by its ‘againstness’, by its desire to take a hammer, as Latour would say, to the beliefs of others” (see also Felski 2016; Coole 2000 on the negative character of critique). It is this view of critique which lies behind Barad’s (2012, p. 49) dismissal of “critique”: “I am not interested in critique. In my opinion, critique is over-rated, over-emphasized and over utilized”.

Munk and Abrahamsson (2012, p. 54) point to the downsides of characterising political positions in simple dichotomous terms – “assembling” versus “debunking”, “affirming” versus “negating”, “crafting commonality or enacting disparity”. These binary classifications rely on oversimplification of a poststructural position.

WPR certainly does not “demonize” opponents. In fact, Sue Goodwin and I (2016: 14) caution against this tendency in some WPR applications (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 14). In Foucauldian-influenced analyses, such as WPR, there is a shift in focus from the grand theorizing of a force called ideology to the minutiae of routine and mundane practices. To adopt a poststructural theoretical position, as John Law (2008, p. 637) explains, is to

“refuse to be overawed by seemingly large systems, and the seeming ontological unity of the world enacted by large systems. It is, instead, to make the problem smaller, or better, to make it more specific”.

Indeed, it is common to draw on the language of “assemblage” to capture the heterogeneous complex of factors targeted in such analysis (Bacchi and Ronnblom 2014), raising questions about Latour’s debunking/assembling contrast. The term “assemblage” is adopted by Deleuze (1988), for example. The poststructuralist John Law also embraces the term: 

“Buyers, sellers, notice boards, strawberries, spatial arrangements, economic theories, and rules of conduct, all of these assemble and together enact a set of practices that make a more or less precarious reality.” (Law 2007: 13; emphasis added). 

Elsewhere, with Jennifer Bonham, I identify overlaps between the languages of assemblage, discursive practices and dispositifs in Foucault (Bacchi and Bonham 2014).

To say you are in favour of assembling or assemblages, therefore, tells us little, and a simple “debunking” versus “assembling” dichotomy confuses issues. As with many analytic terms, it becomes necessary to see how particular adaptations of “assemblage” function in political analysis (see Ong and Collier 2007). 

In Deleuze, the French word agencement (“assemblage”)

refers to a tentative and hesitant unfolding that is at most only very partially under any form of deliberate control. By contrast, in Savage’s (2020) particular adaptation of “assemblage theory”, which draws on the work of Tania Li (2007), the emphasis is on the practices of policy actors. Li (2007: 264) explains that the primary focus of her assemblage theory is on “agency”, “the hard work required to draw heterogeneous elements together, forge connections between them and sustain these connections in the face of tension”. Li notes that her account “stresses agency, process and emergence over the kind of completed order suggested by Foucault’s term dispositif”. She (287 fn 4) elaborates that her argument “builds upon those of Clarke (2004) and O’Malley et al. (1997) who critique the neglect of practice and instability in studies of government”.

• Political affiliations: Where does “assembling” lead?

LI’s characterisation of Foucault’s work as a “completed order” sits awkwardly alongside his endorsement of “assembling”. Moreover, it seems odd to criticize Foucault for neglecting “practice” given the centrality of practices to his theoretical toolkit (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016). Of course, as with assemblage itself, it is necessary to look closely at how “practices” are understood (Research Hub 30 Nov. 2019). To move this discussion forward, therefore, we need to know more about the political agendas associated with specific adaptations of the language of “assemblage” and “assembling”.

On the poststructural side, following Law’s (2004) position on “reality making” and “reality work”, the critical tasks become (i) to show that, as with “truth”, “reality” is a political creation and (ii) to undo “the singularity of the real” (Munk and Abrahamsson 2012: 54).  On the other side, for Latour (2004), researchers need to do more than “dismantle” (or “debunk”) this singular “reality”. He suggests they take up a “compositionist” aim, “to craft new and comprehensive common worlds supported by notions of due process and parliamentary procedure” (Munk and Abrahamsson 2012: 54). With “matters of concern” Latour (2004) intended to “replace excessive critique and the suspicion of socio-political interests with a balanced articulation of the involved concerns” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011: 91).

In tune with Latour, Isabelle Stengers (2005, 2011, 2018) encourages “a more respectful way of making knowledge and realities” (Fraser 2020: 4), which she describes as “symbiotic research”. The objective here is to incorporate “interested parties into the process of research, and articulating findings and conclusions without undue attention to the State’s preferences” (Fraser 2020: 4).

It is useful to see Latour’s (and Stenger’s) position as an attempt to challenge some of the divisions and oppositional standoffs that characterize a good deal of contemporary political discussion. However, in the desire to move beyond polarization, we need to retain an ability to interrogate specific positions critically. Keller (2017: 62), for example, is concerned that in Latour’s “Parliament of things”, echoing Habermas, social actors, assembled around a table, decide in a setting “free of domination” upon “hierarchies of concerns”.  Countering this claim, Keller (2017: 62; emphasis in original) notes that:

“Social relationships of knowledge are asymmetric relationships of power. Material and symbolic resources for politics of knowledge are anything but equally distributed throughout society.”

It follows, says Keller, that we need modes of empirical analysis and of genealogical and reconstructive discourse research to “make visible these asymmetric relationships of knowledge and the work of knowledge politics” (Keller 2017: 62).

Puig de la Bellacasa (2011) also debates how “the problem” is represented in Latour, and how “respect for concerns” – or for “matters of concern” – becomes an argument to moderate a critical standpoint.  Specifically, she argues, Latour’s labelling of criticisms as “fundamentalist” exhibits “mistrust regarding minoritarian and radical ways of politicizing things that tend to focus on exposing relations of power and exclusion”. As Lemke (2018: 42) suggests, in Latour’s “assembling”, there is a need to analyse what comes to matter and what does not. Van Wyk (2012: 135; emphasis added) makes a similar point:

“A politics of the future which is a sustainable politics must account not only for the force of life, of the vibrancy of matter, but the force of the negative as well, the forces that demarcate the field of becoming into the possible and impossible, determining what matter can come to matter.”

WPR is designed to facilitate such an endeavour. It interrogates all assumed starting points for analysis – including “matters of concern”, “knowledge controversies” (Whatmore 2009) and “emergencies” (Lancaster et al. 2020). With Keller (2017: 62) it asks about the criteria designating a “matter of concern”. Indeed, I would want to ask: “What is the specified matter of concern represented to be?” (see Puig de la Bellacasa 2011: 92). To engage critically with this question, I would apply the WPR analytic “template”: start from “proposals”, work backwards to problem representations that require interrogation, and ensure that one’s own proposals receive the same treatment through “self”-problematization.

The last point on “self”-problematization is critical. WPR is not a “finger pointing” exercise. It does not demonize. Researchers ought to be cautious therefore when they enlist WPR to assist them in forms of “ideology critique”. There is a distinction here between WPR and the “Essex School of Hegemonics” (Keller 2017: 59), which emphasises “the antagonisms that emerge through the radical contingency of discourse” (Howarth et al. 2020: 1). By contrast, “self”-problematization offers an “immanent critique” in which “‘we’ … do not pre-exist the entangled movements out of which subject and objects, agents and patients, emerge” (MacLure 2015).

The promise of deconstruction, therefore, lies in the commitment to apply its philosophical premises to one’s own work (Bacchi 1999: 42; MacLure 1994: 285). Complementing this analysis, Question 4 in WPR (see Chart, p. 20 in Bacchi and Goodwin 2016) opens up the opportunity to be inventive, to imagine worlds in which a specific confluence of circumstances is either not problematized or problematized differently (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 22). In this way it shows the promise of critique. 

• Political futures

What does poststructuralism add to reflections on sociopolitical relations? While Foucault “espouses a clear commitment to unravelling domination”, he is “concerned to avoid any homogenization of domination” (Purvis and Hunt 1993: 487), creating room to move. To this end Foucault practices a style of research in which the “grand complexes” of conventional sociology – classes, institutions, cultures, beliefs, ideologies – are studied through the “mundane practices of the prison, the hospital, the school, the courtroom, the household, the town planner and colonial governor”. The target becomes the multitude of heterogeneous factors that produce what is “real” and what is “in the true”. The term “mundane” signals the everyday nature of the “conditions” that need to be traced.

The move here is from the general to the specific. “Micro-practices” replace generalized speculation about assumed “forces” shaping history. The goal is to make “visible a singularity at places where there is a temptation to invoke a historical constant, an immediate anthropological trait, or an obviousness which imposes itself uniformly on all” (Foucault 1991: 76; emphasis in original). To make these singularities visible requires detailed records of discontinuity, provided through genealogies that trace “an unstable assemblage of faults, fissures, and heterogeneous layers” (Foucault 1977: 82; emphasis added). Because of the level of detail at which they are described, new connections come into view, connections that “seem to become more amenable to action and transformation” (Rabinow and Rose 2003: 9-10).

We have a different vision here of the way the world works. It is not solely the impact of the powerful that needs to be traced and attended to. It highlights, instead, the taken-for-granted nature of the institutions and other influences that shape lives and worlds. Interventions are required at this level. 

References

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

Bacchi, C. and Bonham, J. 2014. Reclaiming discursive practices as an analytic focus: Political implications. Foucault Studies, 17, 173–192.

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

Bacchi, C. & Rönnblom, M. 2014. Feminist Discursive Institutionalism—A Poststructural Alternative, NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, DOI: 10.1080/08038740.2013.864701 

Barad, K 2012, “Interview”, in R Dolphijn and I Van der Tuin, New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, Open Humanities Press, Ann Arbor, pp. 48-70, ISBN: 10 1-60785-281-0.

Clarke, J. 2004. Changing Welfare, Changing States: New Directions in Social Policy. London: Sage.

Chaufan, C.; Hemsing, N.; Heredia, C.; McDonald, J. Trust Us—We Are the (COVID-19 Misinformation) Experts: A Critical Scoping Review of Expert Meanings of “Misinformation” in the Covid Era. COVID 2024, 4, 1413–1439. https://doi.org/10.3390/ covid4090101 

Coole, D. 2000. Negativity and Politics: Dionysus and Dialectics from Kant to Poststructuralism. London: Routledge.

Deleuze, G. 1988/ Foucault. Translated and edited by S. Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). 

Felski, R. 2011. Critique and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion. M/C Journal, 15(1). https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.431

Felski, R. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Felski, R. 2016. Introduction to the special issue “Recomposing the Humanities with Bruno Latour”, New Literary History 47:2–3.

Foucault, M. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge, translated by A. Sheridan Smith, New York: Pantheon Books.

Foucault, M. 1977. Nietzsche, genealogy, history. In D.F. Bouchard, (Ed.), Language, counter-memory, practice: Selected essays and interviews Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Foucault, M 1981, “Inaugural Lecture at the Collège de France”, given 2 December 1970, in R Young (ed) Untying the text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, Routledge and Kegan Paul, Boston, pp. 51-77, ISBN: 9780710008046.

Foucault, M. 1991. Questions of method. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (Eds) The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

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

Howarth, D., Standring, A. and Huntly, S. 2020. Contingent, contested and constructed: a poststructuralist response to Sevens’ ontological politics of drug policy. International Journal of Drug Policy. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2020.102965 

Keller, R. 2017. Has Critique Run Out of Steam? – On Discourse Research as Critical Inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 23(1): 58-68.

Lancaster, K., Rhodes, T. and Rosengarten, M. 2020. Making evidence and policy in public health emergencies: lessons from COVID-19 for adaptive evidence-making and intervention. Evidence & Policy, 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1332/174426420X15913559981103

Latour, B. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 

Latour, B. 2004. Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern, Critical Inquiry, 30(2): 225-248.

Law, J. 2004. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research (New York: Routledge).

Law, J. 2007. Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics, version of 25 April 2007, available at http://www. heterogeneities. net/publications/Law2007ANTandMaterialSemiotics.pdf.

Law, J. 2008. On sociology and STS. The Sociological Review,56(4): 623-649.

Lemke, T. 2018. An Alternative Model of Politics? Prospects and Problems of Jane Bennett’s Vital Materialism. Theory, Culture & Society, 35(6): 31-54.

Li, T. M. 2007. Practices of assemblage and community forest management. Economy and Society, 36(2): 263–293.

MacLure, M. 1994. Review Essay: Language and Discourse: the embrace of uncertainty. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 15(2): 283-300.

MacLure, M. 2015. The “new materialisms”:  a thorn in the flesh of critical qualitative inquiry? In G. Cannella, M. S. Perez & P. Pasque (Eds) Critical Qualitative Inquiry: Foundations and Futures. California: Left Coast Press. 

Munk, A. & Abrahamsson, S. 2012. Empiricist interventions: Strategy and tactics on the ontopolitical battlefield. Science Studies, 25(1): 52-70. 

O’Malley, P., Weir, L. and Shearing, C. 1997. Governmentality, criticism, politics. Economy and Society, 26: 501-517.

Ong, A. & S. J. Collier (Eds) 2007. Global assemblages: Technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems (pp. 91-104). London: Blackwell.

Puig de la Bellacasa, M. 2011. Matters of care in technoscience: Assembling neglected things. Social Studies of Science, 41(1): 85-106.

Purvis, T. and Hunt, A. 1993. Discourse, Ideology, Discourse, Ideology, Discourse, Ideology … The British Journal of Sociology, 44(3): 473-499.

Rabinow, P. and Rose, N. 2003. Introduction: Foucault Today. In P. Rabinow and N. Rose (Eds) The Essential Foucault: Selections from the Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984. NY: New Press. pp. 1-30.

Savage, G. C. 2020. What is policy assemblage? Territory, Politics, Governance, 8(3): 319-335.

Stengers, I. 2005. Introductory notes on an ecology of practices. Cultural Studies Review. https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v11i1.3459.

Stengers, I. 2011. Comparison as a matter of concern. Common Knowledge, 17(1), 48–63. 

Stengers, I. 2018. Another science is possible: A manifesto for slow science. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 

Van Wyk, A. R. 2012. What Matters Now? Review of Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, Duke University Press, 2010. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, 8(2): 130-135. Whatmore, S. J. 2009. Mapping knowledge controversies: science, democracy and the redistribution of expertise. Progress in Human Geography, 33(5): 587-598.

The term “poststructuralist” appears often in the Research Hub entries. I thought it was time to indicate how I have come to self-identify as “poststructuralist”. To this end I am reproducing a talk I gave in 2006 entitled “Postmodern by default” (not published elsewhere). The talk traces developments in my thinking over time and draws links with particular books, chapters and articles to illustrate how I have come “here” from “there”. Interventions in the talk, providing more up-to-date reflections, appear in parentheses in upper-case letters.

… 

“When I was kindly asked to offer a retrospective on my work a thought immediately popped into my mind – I have found that I am increasingly content to describe myself as postmodern in orientation and I had no idea how I had arrived here [NOTE: AT THIS STAGE I AM USING THE TERM “POSTMODERN” WHEREAS NOW I WOULD SAY “POSTSTRUCTURAL”]. I wanted to think about how I became postmodern by default (without even trying).

When I reflected on the influences that might have contributed to the theoretical stance I currently adopt, I identified four:

1. my training as a historian
2. my engagement with feminist theory and feminist epistemology
3. my shift from the discipline of History to the discipline of Politics in 1984

AND

• LIFE!!!

I’m going to trace this intellectual journal through some of my major publications, mostly books.

…

1. LIBERATION DEFERRED? THE IDEAS OF THE ENGLISH-CANADIAN SUFFRAGISTS, 1877-1918. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS 1983 (REPRINTED IN 1986 and 1989).

I grew up in Montreal, Canada. Received my PhD in History in 1976 from McGill University. The thesis finally emerged in published form as Liberation Deferred? in 1983 (reprinted 1986, 1989).

Note the question mark after Liberation Deferred?  I would like to pretend that this might have signaled the beginnings of a postmodern ambivalence and uncertainty. Actually, it was a very pragmatic response to publishers who said that, between 1976 (when I wrote the thesis) and 1983, when it was to be published, the debate had moved on and I needed to signal that I was aware of these developments. In response I added a question mark to the existing thesis title. The publishers were satisfied!

You may recall that I listed my background in History as one of the factors influencing my current theoretical stance. This connection has several reasons:

1. History in my view, with its focus on the particular, creates ambivalence about grand claims. Some would say it is “atheoretical”. Perhaps now we could say it is postmodern. 
2. My thesis/book is a history of ideas. Hence, from the outset I have been interested in what people thought and in what contexts. Foucault makes clear that his genealogical approach is not simply a “history of ideas” but a “history of thought”, a history of what made (particular kinds of) thought possible. Still, I think that training as an intellectual historian creates the kind of curiosity about how people think about things that is quite close to some of Foucault’s work.
3. I encountered E. H. Carr’s What is History? (1961) in my study of the philosophy of history. Skepticism about claims to truth (or ‘fact’) was born. 

• NATURE-NURTURE ARTICLE.

Bacchi, C. (1980). The nature-nurture debate in Australia, 1900-1914. Historical Studies, 199-212.

I arrived in Australia in 1976 and started teaching (tutoring) Australian History at the University of Newcastle in that year.

I became interested in turn-of-century Australian history, in particular some of the scientific debates that were going on about how to shape the new Australian “man”. Unsurprisingly, I had encountered some of these ideas among my middle-class English-Canadian suffragists [NOTE: THE SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT WAS MOST ACTIVE AT THE TURN OF THE 20^TH CENTURY AND MANY SUFFRAGISTS WERE URBAN REFORMERS AND INTELLECTUALS]. 

In this 1980 article I argue that beliefs about the respective roles of nature and nurture tended to reflect political agendas (with lots of overlaps and ambiguities, of course). That is, those who held out hope that the Australian environment could produce a new, healthier “type” tended to support environmentalism (nurture) while those skeptical about environmental claims invested their hope in the “new genetics” (nature).

In a sense I was arguing (without realizing it) that ideas did not necessarily line up with “truths”, at least not in any conventional sense.

INTERREGNUM # 1 (1984-1990): (def: a period of absence of some control, authority, etc.) 

1. I joined the Politics discipline/department.
2. I read Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality Vol. I.
3. My second marriage broke up.
4. I started researching, writing and teaching feminist theory. 

• SAME DIFFERENCE: FEMINISM AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE (Allen & Unwin, 1990; re-issued by Routledge 2024 as part of their Revival Series).

This book brought together my history background and my immersion in feminist epistemology.

I read Sandra Harding (1995) on “strong objectivity” and Donna Haraway (1988) on “situated knowledges”. Genevieve Lloyd (1993) helped me put the “man of reason” under the microscope.

I developed a healthy questioning of the intellectual traditions that had dominated my training.

I began (more and more) a trend I had started in the nature-nurture article, examining how people came to think and argue certain things and in certain ways.

My topic in the 1990 book (Same Difference) is how feminists, historically and currently, use the language of “sameness” and “difference” (from men) for a whole range of reasons including their intellectual location and the way in which context affected the feasibility of particular political stances. I developed this argument not knowing specifically where this kind of analysis located me theoretically. I wasn’t interested in those sorts of questions (though I can remember puzzling over how feminism and postmodernism could possibly be compatible). Where I stood in 1990, I was simply telling it like it was/is. 

• AN ARTICLE I PUBLISHED IN 1992:

Bacchi, C. (1992). Affirmative Action—is it un-American? International Journal of Moral and Social Studies, 7(1): 19-31.

I mentioned my move to the Politics department/discipline as the third key influence shaping my current (2006) theoretical position. This occurred for two reasons. Until this point in time, I had no labels to attach to the kinds of thinking I was doing. The shift to Politics began the long, slow process of making these languages available to me.

The second reason is that I arrived in Politics with no particular commitment to its precepts or concepts. I think this disregard (easier when one comes to a discipline later in one’s intellectual development) is healthy. It allowed me to put the concepts/precepts associated with the study of “politics” under scrutiny, to ask where they came from, instead of accepting them as “truth”.

So, in this article (entitled “Affirmative Action: Is it un-American?”) I examined the historical genesis and trajectory of the concept of “political culture”, and how it featured in debates about affirmative action. I still didn’t really think about what I was doing in terms of theory. I didn’t see the article as an example of Foucauldian genealogical analysis (which it was). One thing I did realize was that I was developing greater and greater skepticism about the nature of the academic enterprise. The realization that ideas were promulgated and defended for a range of reasons, few of which had any connection to a desire for “truth”, became central to my thinking.

• THE POLITICS OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: “WOMEN”, EQUALITY AND CATEGORY POLITICS (Sage, 1996)

This realization bore fruit in my first major explicitly theoretical work, The Politics of Affirmative Action. In that book I declared myself committed to a view that concepts have no fixed meaning, that language is a tool deployed in accomplishing a range of tasks. I applied this theory to the experience of affirmative action in the six countries that were supposed to be leading the way in developing effective affirmative action policies for women (the United States, Canada, Australia, Sweden, the Netherlands and Norway). I discovered the range of mechanisms by which progressive change was kept in check. Overall, these mechanisms reflected the importance of meaning making in politics – the power to make meaning. 

• WOMEN, POLICY AND POLITICS: THE CONSTRUCTION OF POLICY PROBLEMS (Sage, 1999).

These ideas culminated in my 1999 book, which argues that, in order to understand how policy operates, we need to understand how policy “problems” are represented.

In Women, Policy and Politics I develop an approach to policy, called ‘What’s the Problem Represented to be?’. I have described the approach, based on five questions (with a number of sub-questions), as a lay person’s guide to deconstruction. [NOTE: IN WOMEN, POLICY AND POLITICS (1999) AND IN THESE 2006 COMMENTS I AM STILL REFERRING TO FIVE QUESTIONS IN WPR. BY 2009 AND THE PUBLICATION OF ANALYSING POLICY (PEARSON EDUCATION) THE WPR APPROACH HAD SIX QUESTIONS. BY 2016 IN POSTSTRUCTURAL POLICY ANALYSIS: A GUIDE TO PRACTICE (PALGRAVE MACMILLAN) SELF-PROBLEMATIZATION, WHICH HAD ALWAYS APPEARED IN CHARTS LISTING THE QUESTIONS, NOW APPEARED AS STEP 7. THIS CHANGE WAS MADE NECESSARY DUE TO THE FACT THAT RESEARCHERS HAD TENDED TO IGNORE THIS IMPORTANT PART OF THE ANALYSIS.]

The WPR approach is very popular in the Scandinavian countries and in Canada, and in Australia it is used effectively in interpretive approaches to health policy [NOTE: AT THIS TIME I WAS USING “INTERPRETIVE” IN A BROAD SENSE; I LATER DREW DISTINCTIONS BETWEEN POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND INTERPRETIVISM – SEE Bacchi, C. (2015). The Turn to Problematization: Political implications of contrasting interpretive and poststructural adaptations. Open Journal of Political Science, 5: 1-12.]

In Women, Policy and Politics (1999) I used the language of discourse and believed I knew (fully) what it meant [NOTE: I WENT ON TO EXPLORE VARIED UNDERSTANDINGS OF DISCOURSE IN Bacchi, C. (2005). Discourse, Discourse Everywhere: Subject “Agency” in Feminist Discourse Methodology’. NORA: Nordic Journal of Women’s Studies, 13(3): 198-209. Reproduced in C. Hughes (Ed.) (2012). Researching Gender. Sage Fundamentals of Applied Research Series.]

I started to ask questions about subjectivity and read more postructuralist feminist theory, especially by those trained in psychology (Potter and Wetherell 1987; Davies 1994; Blackman et al. 2008).

The “What’s the Problem Represented to be?” approach offers a way to analyse representations, but it retains a place for talking about lived experience and even exploitation. [NOTE: IN SUBSEQUENT PUBLICATIONS I CHALLENGE WHAT APPEARS HERE AS A CONTRAST BETWEEN “REPRESENTATIONS” AND “THE REAL”. SEE ANALYSING POLICY, 2009, P. 35 WHERE I SAY: 

A problem representation therefore is the way in which a particular policy “problem” is constituted in the real. 

BY 2012 I CHANGED THE LANGUAGE TO REFER TO THINGS ‘as the real’ RATHER THAN ‘in the real’. See Bacchi, C. (2012). Strategic interventions and ontological politics: Research as political practice. In A. Bletsas and C. Beasley (Eds.), Engaging with Carol Bacchi: Strategic Interventions and Exchanges. Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press, pp. 141-56.

ALSO NOTE THAT THE ACRONYM ‘WPR’ DID NOT EMERGE UNTIL 2009 IN ANALYSING POLICY.]

I continue to worry less about whether, or not, my ideas are theoretically consistent than in my conviction that they are useful.

There is a simple logic here. If our categories of analysis (including our theories) are human constructs (see The Politics of Affirmative Action, 1996), it is just possible that they may not capture everything that needs capturing. 

From the beginning I have developed ideas and then found labels when they suited. I intend to continue in this tradition and, if the labels don’t fit, it doesn’t worry me. 

INTERREGUM #2 [1992 and beyond]:

I mentioned LIFE as the fourth influence on my current postmodern disposition.

1992: I gave birth to my son, Stephen. I had expected life to go on as usual and enrolled him in a childcare centre at 3 months old. Somewhere, in the back of my mind, the belief that feminism had delivered on the promise to make the work/care nexus navigable exerted a powerful influence. But then Stephen became very ill. He developed a feeding disorder that meant I had to take all my long-service leave (6 months) to care for him, one on one. During my next long-service leave (in 2000) I wrote up our story as a memoir (see next item).

• FEAR OF FOOD: A DIARY OF MOTHERING (Spinifex Press 2003).

On many occasions, including when I was trying to convince Susan Hawthorne from Spinifex Press to publish my book, I referred to Fear of Food as my “postmodern moment”. This comment was usually accompanied by a sly smile, almost apologetic.

By calling it my “postmodern moment” I meant that here was the story of one mother and her child and just maybe this story would resonate with the life of some other mother and her child. However, there was another reason for writing the book – I believed that the messages it contained about the inflexibility of our workplace structures would, through this book, reach a wider audience than my conventional academic writing. I continued and continue to believe that it is possible to talk about “one woman’s story” and institutional inflexibility. 

So, how postmodern am I? And does it matter?

Since Fear of Food I have been asked whether anything in the experience of that piece of writing has carried over to what I do now. I replied that, “No. I’m back to writing dense, theoretical prose that only the few will be able to penetrate”. But that’s not quite the case. I have decided to write an undergraduate text in public policy based upon the “What’s the Problem Represented to be?” approach. It will be called: Problems and Policy: Australia in the World. Deadline – December 2008. [NOTE: IN THE EVENT THE TEXTBOOK WAS CALLED – ANALYSING POLICY: WHAT’S THE PROBLEM REPRESENTED TO BE? published by Pearson Education 2009. I’M MUCH HAPPIER WITH THIS TITLE.]

Importantly, to write this new book I’m having to re-read key writings I have used before. I’m re-reading Foucault and understanding more. I’m understanding that the ‘What’s the Problem Represented to be?’ approach is richer in its understanding and more flexible in its uses than I ever imagined. Some of these insights have been due to examples of its application by talented postgraduates such as Zoe Gill, Angelique Bletsas and Zoe Gordon, and talented undergraduates such as Anne Wilson.

[NOTE; FOR MORE UP-TO-DATE ELABORATIONS OF THE WPR APPROACH AND ITS APPLICATIONS, SEE POSTSTRUCTURAL POLICY ANALYSIS: A GUIDE TO PRACTICE (with Susan Goodwin; Palgrave Macmillan 2016) AND Bacchi, C. (2017). Drug Problematizations and Politics: Deploying a poststructural analytic strategy, Contemporary Drug Problems, 1-12. DOI: 10.1177/009/450917748760.]

Thank you for the opportunity to share this intellectual retrospective with you. I have enjoyed and continue to enjoy the journey. Should you be tempted to follow the same path, some things you could try include: switch disciplines, re-read key texts, keep your mind open, don’t worry if you don’t get something first time around, don’t worry about labels, and have a baby!

I was thinking about this talk the other day as I was listening to Radio National (ABC) – an interview with Mavis Staples of the Staples Singers (‘Respect yourself’). She reflected on what she says when people ask her if she sings ‘gospel’ or ‘blues’ or ‘country’. She answered: “I don’t like categories. I just like to sing”. 

Now, if a theorist says something like this, they are bound to be called “postmodern”. So, why fight it? I decided. Here I stand – postmodern by default.”

… I do hope that this reminiscence proves useful in some way to some readers. Feedback is always welcome. 

All the best

Carol

REFERENCES

Blackman, L., Cromby, J., Hook, D., Papadopoulos, D. and Walkerdine, V. 2008. Creating Subjectivities. Subjectivity 22: 1-27.

Davies, B. 1994. Poststructuralist Theory and Classroom Practice, Deakin University, Geelong.

Harding, S. 1995. “Strong objectivity”: A Response to the New Objectivity Question. Synthese, 104(3): 331-349. 

Haraway, D. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective”, Feminist Studies, 14(3): 575-599.

Lloyd, G. 1993. The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy. NY: Routledge.Potter, J. and Wetherell, M. 1987. Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour. London: Sage