In the first of this trio of entries (28 Feb 2024), triggered by the literature being produced on Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality, I spoke encouragingly about the possibility of identifying developments in this initiative for new experiments in deliberative democracy. In this entry I stand back and look more critically at the whole phenomenon of deliberative forums. 

As with many topics broached in the Research Hub there is a large literature on deliberative forums. We need to keep in mind the debates around the whole notion of deliberation in public institutions. Habermas (2006; Ritter et al. 2018) developed the classic position on an “ideal speech situation”, while numerous political theorists, notably Iris Marion Young, pointed out the “less than ideal” conditions facing many groups who aspired to be heard. Young (2000: 133, 8) insisted that women’s voices and the voices of other outgroups need to be included in deliberative proceedings. She and others (Bacchi and Beasley 2002) pointed out that the Habermasian notion of “complete rational consciousness” ignored the embodiedness and embeddedness of “citizens”. As a way forward Squires (2005: 381-184) endorses a “non-Habermasian dialogic ethics” based on “dialogue with diverse social groups” and facilitated by such institutional reforms as mediation, citizens’ forums, and citizen initiative and referendum.

The researchers we have been following in the previous two entries have written precisely on the democratic possibilities of deliberative forums:

Loughnane, C., Kelleher, C. and Edwards, C. 2023. Care full deliberation? Care work and Ireland’s citizens’ assembly on gender equality, Critical Social Policy, April. 

In this work they draw on Marion Barnes 2008. Passionate participation: Emotional experiences and expressions in deliberative forums. Critical Social Policy, 28(4): 461-481. 

I want to suggest that applying WPR to the phenomenon of citizens’ assemblies and other deliberative forums provides a useful critical perspective to supplement these other studies. The perspective provided by thinking through WPR is captured in a quote from Nikolas Rose (2000: 58): 

“if policies, arguments, analyses and prescriptions purport to provide answers, they do so only in relation to a set of questions. Their very status as answers is dependent upon the existence of such questions. If, for example, imprisonment, marketization, community care are seen as answers, to what are they answers? And, in reconstructing the problematizations which accord them intelligibility as answers, these grounds become visible, their limits and presuppositions are opened for investigation in new ways.”

It is not an easy quote but, in my view, is well worth the effort required to understand it. I am hoping that the parallel with WPR thinking becomes apparent with a little elaboration.

Basically, in this quote, Rose argues that theoretically it is useful to think of “imprisonment, marketization, community care” as answers and that we probe what they are seen as answers to. I suggest that we add “citizens’ assemblies to this list. Rose asks (in my adaptation): “if citizens’ assemblies are put forward as the answer, to what are they answers?” 

To describe citizens’ assemblies as an “answer” means that someone has promoted them as a useful intervention. In my work I refer to these starting points as proposals (or proposed solutions). We then need to ask: if citizens’ assemblies are put forward as a useful intervention (“proposed solution” or “proposal”), what is represented to be the “problem” they are designed to “address”? 

To answer this question, Rose (continuing my adaptation) suggests the need to trace the problematizations that make the answer “citizens’ assemblies” intelligible. In other words, how is it possible to put forward citizens’ assemblies as an answer? What meanings need to be in place for this to occur? And importantly, can we identify limits in the identified underlying presuppositions (the meanings that need to be in place) that ought to be named and considered critically? Here we are engaging Question 2 of WPR: “‘What deep-seated presuppositions or assumptions (conceptual logic) underlie this representation of the “problem” (problem representation)?”

This WPR way of thinking provides a specific kind of critique. It takes the taken-for-granted and asks how such conditions/practices/institutions came to be acceptable. It then asks us to think deeply about what these conditions/practices/institutions rely upon. 

To apply this thinking to citizens’ assemblies and other deliberative forums would take us through some familiar territory. We would want to consider the development of representative institutions and their rationales (Pitkin 1967; Phillips 1995). We would want to probe how political subjects are constituted in such institutions and rationales. Young’s concern, with others, about the presumption of rational autonomous subjects and what this conceptualisation leaves out, e.g. bodies (Bacchi and Beasley 2002) and emotions (Barnes 2008), would become important topics to pursue. The increasing reliance on expert knowledges and the very notion of “expertise” would also be subject to critical reflection. 

The article by Loughnane et al. 2023 provides an assessment of how Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality performed as a deliberative body. While noting that “CAGE’s [Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality) processes exhibited some potential in terms of care full deliberation”, there were “also significant constraints”. Specifically:

“CAGE’s ability to deliberate with care, particularly in terms of attentiveness and responsiveness, was diminished by limitations in membership criteria, the emphasis on expertise and official modes of engagement, time pressures and the one-off nature of deliberation” (Loughnane et al., 2023: 710; see the rest of this page for additional useful detail). 

Applying WPR thinking involves taking these insights and putting a different angle on them. Instead of seeing what occurred in the Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality as a matter of poor performance, we consider how what occurred relied upon deep-seated premises about modes of governing (e.g. presumptions about representation, cognition, consensus, information, etc.) that may need rethinking. 

Returning to Rose (see above), it can be argued that citizens’ assemblies and other deliberative forums are put forward as an “answer” to a “question” about good governing. They are meant to “solve the ‘problems’” of disengagement, underrepresentation of specific groups, and overreliance on expertise. In this sense, although put forward as a counter to conventional technocratic government practices, citizen assemblies continue to follow a problem-solving logic (Bacchi 2020). 

It follows that, while deliberative forums appear to offer a way to broaden community discussion and to involve more “citizens” in governing practices, they are invariably limited by the ways in which the “issues”/ “problems”/ “questions” are framed. Any proffered “recommendations”/ “solutions” will reflect these constraints. As with evidence-based policy initiatives, to query the logic of problem-solving approaches entails confronting who sets the questions (“problems”) that are asked:

“Within an evidence-based paradigm, where social and other scientists are positioned as (simply) delivering ‘evidence’ on questions and priorities set by governments, it becomes extremely difficult to put those questions and priorities under scrutiny. In effect, these questions and priorities presume the nature of the ‘problem’. As a result, by producing ‘knowledge’ for pre-set questions, researchers become implicated in particular modes of governance.” (Bacchi 2008; 2009)

Loughnane and Edwards (2022) highlight exactly this issue in their comments on how the agenda for the Citizens’ Assembly was determined. First, they point out that “The government-appointed chair, civil service secretariat and expert advisory group designed the process and agendas”. Next, they highlight the limitations of this process: 

“Further detail on how CAGE’s agenda was ultimately decided is not publicly available and there have been calls for such processes to be ‘more systematic, transparent, and open to public input’ (Courant, 2021: 11). The evaluation of CAGE (Suiter et al., 2021) recommended that the agenda-setting process for future assemblies be reconsidered”. (Loughnane et al. 2023: 701).

Thinking with a WPR framework, the critical question becomes: “who gets to set the ‘questions’/‘problems’ designated as relevant to the discussions/deliberation?”. And, going further, “would it be possible to conceive of deliberative forums as forums for generating ‘questions’ rather than ‘resolving’/‘solving’ them?” Considering this last intervention, focusing on how participants might be involved in setting the agendas for deliberative assemblies could produce new experiments in deliberative democracy.

References

Bacchi, C. 2008. The Politics of Research Management: reflections on the gap between what we “know” [about SDH] and what we do. Health Sociology Review, 17(2): 165-176.

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

Bacchi, C. 2020. Problem-Solving as a Governing Knowledge: “Skills”-Testing in PISA and PIAAC. Open Journal of Political Science, 10, 82-105.

Bacchi, C. and Beasley, C. 2002. Citizen bodies: Is embodied citizenship a contradiction in terms? Critical Social Policy, 22(2): 324-352.

Barnes, M. 2008. Passionate participation: Emotional experiences and expressions in deliberative forums. Critical Social Policy, 28(4): 461-481.

Courant D 2021. Citizens’ assemblies for referendums and constitutional reforms: Is there an “Irish model” for deliberative democracy? Frontiers in Political Science 2: 591983. 

Loughnane, C., Kelleher, C. and Edwards, C. 2023. Care full deliberation? Care work and Ireland’s citizens’ assembly on gender equality, Critical Social Policy, 43(4): 697-717.

Phillips, A. 1995. The Politics of Presence. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 

Pitkin, H. The Concept of Representation. Berkeley: University of California Press. 

Ritter, A., Lancaster, K. and Diprose, R. 2018. Improving drug policy: The potential of broader democratic participation. International Journal of Drug Policy,https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2018.01.016 

Rose, N. 2000. Powers of Freedom: Reframing political thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Squires, J. 2005. Is mainstreaming transformative? Theorizing mainstreaming in the context of diversity and deliberation. Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society, 12(3): 366-388.

Suiter J, Park K, Galligan Y, et al. 2021. Evaluation Report of the Irish Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality. Dublin: Technological University Dublin.Young, I. M. 2000. Inclusion and Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

In the last entry I suggested how to apply a WPR way of thinking to a wide range of topics. I see the WPR questions as a prompt to think about governing practices in uncommon but useful ways – teasing out deep-seated epistemological and ontological assumptions, developing a genealogy of the topic’s emergence, reflecting on silencing practices in problem representations, and examining interconnected effects (discursive, subjectification and lived) (Bacchi 2009). Whenever one spots a proposal (read broadly) about how things ought to be done, the opportunity arises to ask: what is the “problem” represented to be? And with what effects? The preceding entry posited the usefulness of this approach in contrast to a common focus on competing interpretations of issues. In this and in the subsequent entry, I suggest applying the WPR questions to two topics central to the literature on Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality: first, to the Feminist Ethic of Care (this entry); and second, to Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly and other deliberative forums (next entry). 

WPR and the Feminist Ethic of Care (FEC): Mixing methods?

As in the preceding entry I take as my starting point Loughnane and Edwards’ (2022) analytic agenda:

“Our analytical framework seeks to integrate Carol Bacchi’s (2009) notion of problematisation with an FEC lens to interrogate and potentially expand how societies represent and act on care.”

In this entry I consider whether, or not, this “integration” is possible and/or useful. To do so I reflect on the three key terms in the FEC –  “feminist”, “ethic” and “care” – asking how these concepts represent the “problem”, their underlying assumptions and their effects. In other words, I bring a WPR lens to an FEC, described as either “a Feminist Ethic of Care” or “the Feminist Ethnic of Care”. 

The question of whether it is possible to integrate or “blend” WPR with other analytic stances has arisen as a topic in several previous Research Hub entries. Many authors have endorsed the need to “supplement” WPR in specific ways, often because of a desire to have more specific value commitments and clear-cut reform agendas. In their exposition of CDPR (critical discourse problematization framework), Van Aswegan et al. (2019) defend the need for a “good cop/bad cop” approach to research methods, with WPR characterized as the “bad cop” while a form of Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1995; Hyatt 2013) serves as the “good cop”. The overall argument is that WPR provides questions while CDPR, which the authors describe as a “structural” and “problem-oriented” approach” (pp. 187, 195), provides “evidence” for, or answers to, those questions.

In an earlier Research Hub entry (31 August 2021) I make the case that contrasting paradigmatic assumptions sharply distinguish WPR from CDA, challenging Van Aswegan et al.’s (2019: 186, 195) description of the approaches as “complementary” and “in harmony”. I highlight how their focus on rhetoric and a form of “ideology critique” sits in contrast to the emphasis in WPR on deep-seated epistemological and ontological assumptions. In drawing this contrast, paradigms are understood to reflect competing worldviews due to contrasting ontological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions (Alvesson and Sandberg 2011: 255).

On this topic I find helpful Van Aswegan et al.’s distinction between, on the one hand, theoretical lenses, such as Critical Disability Studies, Post-Colonial Studies or feminist studies and, on the other hand, theoretical tools, such as Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA; Fairclough 1995) or critical higher education policy discourse analysis (CHEPDA; Hyatt 2013). In my understanding “tools” provide analytic techniques whereas “lenses” can be said to refer to selected aspects of social relations (topic areas). I would add that “tools” reflect contrasting paradigms whereas “lenses” can and do cross paradigmatic lines. For example, both disability studies (Meekosha and Shuttleworth 2009) and feminist studies (Davis, 2008; Scott 2005) are characterized by intense internal debates about paradigmatic assumptions.

In terms of the heuristic distinction between “lenses” and “tools”, WPR provides a “tool” for critical analysis that can be applied using a variety of “lenses” – e.g., disability studies (see Apelmo 2021), post-colonial studies (see Gordon 2011), feminists’ studies (see O’Hagan 2020). If such is the case, why do I express concern about “integrating” WPR and FEC? To answer this question requires a closer look at the FEC. 

WPR and the Feminist Ethic of Care (FEC): contrasting paradigms? 

I want to suggest that FEC is put forward as a “tool” rather than as a “lens”. Rather than paying heed to the intense debates within feminism about paradigmatic issues, such as subjectivity and knowledge, it weds itself to a particular stance. As described in the preceding entry, Loughnane and Edwards (2022) adopt a popular convention of examining care through three outlooks: care as value, care as relation and care as practice: 

“Care as value attends to the values displayed in undertaking, receiving and thinking about care (Held, 2006). The relationality of care recognises human interdependence within care relations, the fluidity of carer/ care receiver positions and connections between those relations ‘closest in’ to wider socio-political contexts (Barnes, 2012; Tronto, 2013). Approaching care as practice illustrates the labour involved in caring and the differences of care in intimate, institutional and commodified context.”

Some of the commitments I would associate with FEC sit more comfortably with a WPR stance than others. For example, there appears to be a shared relational ontology. Loughnane and Edwards (2022) describe FEC “as a political theory that understands human interdependence and relationality as fundamental (Held, 2007; Kittay, 2020; Daly, 2021). The focus on interdependence is put forward as a challenge to “the current neoliberal care limits”, in which care is a “closed circuit of ideas”, “thought of only in three ways: as personal responsibility, as family responsibility and as a problem for the market”. Usefully, Sevenhuijsen (2004: 36) characterizes an ethic of care as based upon a “weak ontology”. She identifies one element as “ambiguity”, which acknowledges that “life situations are always open to a range of interpretations”. However, the tendency to portray FEC as a kind of knowledge and the ways in which “care” is conceptualized in terms of “values” produce more problematic premises. 

FEC: “subjugated knowledge” or “situated knowledge”?

Loughnane and Edwards (2022) describe FEC as a “subjugated knowledge”, “in Foucauldian terms”. Sevenhuijsen (2004: 43) refers to an ethic of care as “situated knowledge”. Do these two terms mean the same thing and what sorts of claims are being advanced in relation to each?

In two previous Research Hub entries (3 Sept and 17 Sept 2018) I develop the argument that “situated knowledge” is tied to an assumption of epistemic privilege. Without oversimplifying Haraway’s (1988: 584) argument, her references to “situated knowledges” as “preferred” positions makes a claim that “vision is better from below” (583), that is, from groups positioned (or situated) as oppressed: “they seem to promise more adequate, sustained, objective, transforming accounts of the world”. 

By contrast, in the notion of “subjugated knowledge” Foucault is not claiming that any particular group has privileged access to “truth”; rather, he insists that truth claims are always political claims. In Foucault, the thing to examine in relation to “psychological knowledge”, for example, is its effects, not its truth. What needs to be questioned resides “in the political character of what it creates rather than in the epistemic character of its claims” (May 2006: 94-95).

Despite the reference to “subjugated knowledge” Loughnane and Edwards (2022) tend to privilege an account of experience in their elaboration of an ethic of care. They describe how the CA’s (Citizens’ Assembly for Gender Equality) care module made “efforts to centre individuals’ experiences of care”. However, the characterization of subjects as reliable sources of information (due to their “experiences”) depends upon the same independent and autonomous subject presumed in neoliberal accounts. 

Scott (1991: 792) puts the contrasting poststructural position: “Do not accept categories of evidence or structures of context as given, but instead view them as actively constituted within discourse”. With this starting point, WPR highlights the subjectification effects of governing mechanisms. It also emphasizes the importance of self-problematization as an acknowledgement of the need to question one’s categories and the assumptions they reply upon (Bacchi 2009). These issues are not addressed in the FEC literature that I have read. 

FEC and normativity

Sevenhuijsen (2004: 14) associates the ethic of care with a “moral framework”. There is interest in “the moral motivations that people employ in their actual daily practices” and an endorsement of “moral attitudes or virtues like altruism, compassion or unconditional love” (27). This moral framework is clear in the identification of an ethic of care with care as a value. As noted above, Loughnane and Edwards (2022) elaborate that “Care as value attends to the values displayed in undertaking, receiving and thinking about care (Held, 2006)”. Joan Tronto (2013) proposes that each phase of care is intrinsically linked to a specific value or virtue/quality: attentiveness, responsibility, competence and responsiveness. Sevenhuijsen (2004: 37) adds “trust as a fifth item to these core values”. 

Together with Chris Beasley I have written about the political limitations of analyses that link ethical behaviour to the development of certain kinds of character traits among citizens (Beasley and Bacchi 2007). In our view the assumed mechanisms by which “engaging in the practice of care” becomes a moral attitude (Sevenhuijsen 2004: 43) that may be translated to the public and international domains are taken for granted rather than explained. 

Associated with this stance, I detect a point of tension between the FEC and WPR on the question of reform. My reading on the FEC suggests that its advocates display a greater willingness to be prescriptive than is associated with WPR thinking. Sevenhuijsen (2004: 40; emphasis added) lists the “concrete questions of policy measures” that in her view follow an ethic of care analysis: “What can stay in? What should be removed? What should be modified? What should be added?” The kind of poststructural analysis associated with WPR does not prescribepolitical positions. Rather, it institutes a commitment to a form of ongoing critique, “an open-ended provocation of the problematic” (Osborne, 2003, p. 7).

In Poststructural Policy Analysis (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 25), Sue Goodwin and I directly confront the question of whether, or not, it is possible to support an egalitarian politics while refusing to advocate specific reforms (i.e. to refuse to be prescriptive). There we argue that, not only are the two perspectives compatible; they are actually necessary to each other. This is because reform programs often buy into problematic premises that need highlighting and questioning. As Brown (1998, p. 44) argues, the aim is

“to make visible why particular positions and visions of the future occur to us, and especially to reveal when and where those positions work in the same register of ‘political rationality’ as that which they purport to criticize”.

Such a situation arises, I suggest, in any singular understanding of “feminism”.

FEC, WPR and Feminism

The language of “a” or “the” Feminist Ethic of Care seems to assume a singular political stance. I was surprised to see little engagement with the well-recognized tensions and disputes within a broadly designated “feminist” community (see above regarding the intense internal debates about conflicting paradigmatic assumptions). 

In an earlier Research Hub entry (1 Sept 2019) I explain that I do not characterize WPR as “feminist” in any clear and obvious sense because I do not believe that feminism has a clear or obvious meaning. I have always considered feminism to be a contested space embracing diverse objectives and methodologies. Hence, I feel some discomfort with the suggestion that one can “think like a feminist” (Gherardi 2019: 45) or that “feminist aims” are readily identifiable and agreed upon (Kantola and Lombardo 2017: 329). In line with this thinking, I endorse the practice of using, wherever possible, a plural form, such as “feminisms”, “to indicate that those who call themselves feminists do not necessarily see the world in the same way” (Bacchi 2017: 36 fn 1). In this same spirit I now refer to “feminists’ theories” rather than to “feminist theory” (see above for “feminists’ studies”).

Care: to define or not to define

And so we come in the end to “care”, a slippery concept as is well-acknowledged among those who endorse the FEC. The CareVisions Report, entitled Re-Envisioning a Care-Centred Society in Ireland Beyond COVID-19, specified the need to “Clarify and reframe language and narratives around care, acknowledging the diverse meanings (both positive and negative) that the term care holds for different groups in society” (Edwards et al., 2023: 14). Alongside this recognition (in the very next paragraph) the Report stipulates the need to “recognise that care is central to human life”. It seems, then, that we are stuck with the word.

Loughnane and Edwards (2022) explain that their study focused on “how care itselfwas represented at the CA” (italics in original). This focus meant that their analysis targeted solely “the care module” (the CA was organized by modules). This decision meant that issues raised in the “work and social protection module” were side-lined. These issues included “gendered issues in low pay (of which care work emerged as an exemplar) and welfare entitlements, including the impact of care responsibilities on these”. It seems, therefore, that the demarcation of specific items as to do with “care” already worked to shape the boundaries of what was included/excluded. As Bové (1990, p. 5) argues, therefore, “key terms are finally more important for their place within intellectual practices, than they are for what they may be said to ‘mean’ in the abstract”. 

Dahl (2017) brings this perspective to existing research on care and how to develop a new analytic. She argues that it is time to stop asking “What is care?”, a question that risks essentializing “care” (p. 61). Instead, we need to reflect on how we think about care, asking: “How are the changing conditions of care and an attention to power and struggles reframing our theorizing about care?” (p. 62; italics in original). Here the point is that how we talk or theorize about care reflects the changing political landscapes we inhabit. Hence “care” is a “moving feast”; it is unwise theoretically to speak about “it” as a “thing”.

Changing the target of analysis from “care” as a “thing” to how we talk about or theorize care means examining critically the concepts we use – asking what they allow us to see and what they (may) leave out. This self-problematizing approach to research is highlighted in the undertaking in WPR to apply the WPR questions to one’s own problem representations. 

Conclusion

While I found the new publications on care ethics and the CA evocative and thought-provoking, it may have been useful to take on board greater “self” scrutiny – a willingness to question the FEC framework, to point to the ambivalence of invoking “moral” values, and to the complexities and pluralities in contemporary feminisms. In this context, WPR becomes a useful “self-problematising” tool. If this critical approach is deemed to be unfeasible politically, we face some important issues that need to be discussed. In the next entry, I ask what may be gained from bringing WPR to the whole notion/practice of deliberative forums, targeting Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly for Gender Equality. 

REFERENCES 

Alvesson, M., & Sandberg, J. 2011. Generating research questions through problematization. Academy of Management Review, 36, 247-271.

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

Bacchi, C.  2017. Policies as Gendering Practices: Re-Viewing Categorical Distinctions. Journal of Women, Politics & Policy.  18(1): 20-41.

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

Barnes, M. 2012. Care in Everyday Life – An Ethic of Care in Practice, Bristol: Policy Press.

Beasley, C. and Bacchi, C. 2007. Envisaging a new politics for an ethical future: Beyond trust, care and generosity – towards an ethic of “social flesh”. Feminist Theory, 8(3): 279-298.

BOVE ́, P.A. 1990. Discourse. In F. Lensticchia & T. McLaughlin (eds) Critical Terms for Literary Study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

Brown, W. (1998). Genealogical politics. In J. Moss (Ed.), The later Foucault: Politics and philosophy (pp. 33–49). London, England: Sage.

Dahl, H. M. 2017. Struggles in (Elderly) Care: A Feminist View. NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Daly, M. (2021) The concept of care: insights, challenges and research avenues in COVID-19 times, Journal of European Social Policy, 31(1): 108–18. doi: 10.1177/0958928720973923 

Davis, K. 2008. Intersectionality as buzzword: A sociology of science perspective on what makes a feminist theory successful. Feminist Theory, 9(1): 67–85.

Edwards, C., Daly, F., Kelleher, C., Loughnane,
C. and O’Riordan, J. 2023. CareVisions:
Re-Envisioning a Care-Centred Society in Ireland Beyond COVID-19. Cork: University College Cork. 

Fairclough, N. 1995. Critical Discourse Analysis. Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Gherardi, S. 2019. If we practice posthumanist research, do we need ‘gender’ any longer? Gender, Work and Organization  26: 40-53

Haraway, D. 1988. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.  Feminist Studies14(3): 575-599.

Held, V. 2006. The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Held, V. (2007) The ethics of care, in D. Copp (ed) The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp 537–66. 

Hyatt, D. 2013a. “The critical higher education policy discourse analysis framework”. In Huisman, J. and Tight, M. (Eds), Theory and Method in Higher Education, Vol. 9, Emerald, London, pp. 41-59.

Kantola, J. and Lombardo, E. 2017a. Gender and Political Analysis. NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kittay, E. (2020) Love’s Labor, 2nd edn, London: Routledge.

Loughnane, C. and Edwards, C. 2022a. Reimagining
care discourses through a feminist ethics of care: analysing Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality, International Journal of Care and Caring, (16 pp). https:// doi.org/10.1332/239788221X16686175446798. 

May, T. 2006. The Philosophy of Michel Foucault. Chesham: Acumen.

Meekosha, H. and Shuttleworth, R. 2009. What’s so “critical” about critical disability studies? Australian Journal of Human Rights, 15(1): 47- 75.

Osborne, T. (2003). What is a problem? History of the Human Sciences, 16, 1–17.

Scott, J. 1991. The Evidence of Experience. Critical Inquiry, 17(4): 773-797.  

Scott, J. W. 2005. Against Eclecticism. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 16(5): 114-137.

Sevenhuijsen, S. 2004. Trace: A method for normative policy analysis from the ethic of care. In S. Sevenhuijsen and A. Svab (eds) The Heart of the Matter: The contribution of the ethic of care to social policy in some new EU member states. Ljubljana: Peace Institute, Institute for Contemporary Social and Political Studies. Pp. 13-45. 

Tronto, J. 2013. Caring Democracy – Markets, Equality, and Justice, New York: New York University Press. 

Van Aswegen, J., Hyatt, D. and Goodley, D. 2019. A critical discourse problematization framework for (disability) policy analysis. “good cop/bad cop” strategy. Qualitative Research Journal, 19(2): 185-198

In the Keynote address ( KEYNOTE ADDRESS – CAROL BACCHI – 18 August 2022 for last year’s International Symposium on WPR I mentioned that WPR was being used as part of the assessment of Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality (CA, sometimes CAGE). I spoke encouragingly about the possibility of identifying developments in this initiative for new experiments in deliberative democracy. In this entry I outline the findings of the researchers on this topic and raise some questions about the uses of WPR. The intent is to provoke discussion, not to critique the impressive research that has been produced. 

In the first section below I summarize the major publications to emerge from this initiative. This summary will allow me to identify key topics, as listed here, that I then pursue:

1. Is WPR a “method” of “discourse analysis”? What differences appear if WPR is approached as an analytic strategy? 
2. Is it possible to combine WPR with the FEC (Feminist Ethic of Care)? Or should WPR be applied to the FEC? [next entry]
3. Is it useful to apply WPR to “citizens’ assemblies” and other forms of “mini-publics” (Courant 2021) as novel modes of deliberative governance? [subsequent entry]

My goal is to show how it can be fruitful to approach WPR as a way of thinking differently, keeping it to the fore on the full range of topics one is undertaking. I am not saying that WPR is the only valuable mode of critical analysis. Rather, I hope to indicate how it disturbs specific arguments that require interrogation and adds a layer to the analyses produced. 

Publications on Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality

The following references introduce readers to the topic of Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly and to related topics – most prominently the topics of care and care ethics. They deserve close reading. 

Loughnane, C. and Edwards, C. 2022a. Reimagining
care discourses through a feminist ethics of care: analysing Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality, International Journal of Care and Caring, (16 pp). https:// doi.org/10.1332/239788221X16686175446798. 

Loughnane, C., Kelleher, C. and Edwards, C. 2023. Care full deliberation? Care work and Ireland’s citizens’ assembly on gender equality, Critical Social Policy, April. 

Loughnane, C. and Edwards, C. 2022b. Reimagining care discourses through a feminist ethics of care: analysing Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality. International Journal of Care and Caring, 7(4): 675 – 690. 

The following Report for CareVisions extended the analytic framework to include both the Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality (2020–2021), and the Houses of Oireachtas Special Committee on COVID-19 Response (2020). The latter involved a cross- parliamentary committee established to examine the government’s response to COVID-19:

Edwards, C., Daly, F., Kelleher, C., Loughnane, C. and O’Riordan, J. 2023. Re-Envisioning a Care-Centred Society in Ireland beyond COVID-19. Institute for Social Science in the 21^st Century, University College Cork, Cork. 

See also: Daly, F. and Edwards, C. 2022. Tracing State Accountability for COVID-19: Representing Care within Ireland’s Response to the Pandemic. Social Policy and Society,

doi:10.1017/S1474746422000665

Loughnane and Edwards (2022a) lay out clearly their analytic agenda: 

“Our analytical framework seeks to integrate Carol Bacchi’s (2009) notion of problematisation with an FEC [Feminist Ethics of Care] lens to interrogate and potentially expand how societies represent and act on care.”

To undertake this task, they “draw on a discourse analysis of documents from the CA (Citizens’ Assembly) to explore how care itself was represented and understood”.

The authors describe their “methodology” as follows:

“The first author read and watched all the documents and videos a number of times to become immersed in the module material. Following this, text directly related to the problematisation of care was extracted from across the sample and organised by the relevant WPR question. An analysis guide was developed outlining the WPR questions and the elements of the FEC lens that might emerge or, alternatively, be absent in relation to each. Following the authors’ joint refinement of the analysis guide, the first author undertook open coding and documented emerging themes as she moved between the data, the WPR methodology and the FEC lens. Both authors individually reviewed this analysis before coming together to discuss interpretations and agree key themes (outlined in the following)”. (Loughnane and Edwards 2022a; emphasis added)

I have provided the detail here to show the way in which the project started from extracting text related to the problematisation of care and then organized the material by the WPR questions. In the recent blog on WPR and RTA (Reflexive Thematic Analysis) I suggest exactly this approach (Research Hub entry 28 Dec. 2023). The question I broach in the next entry is whether it is possible to apply a FEC lens to the materials identified. That is, is it possible to combine WPR with the FEC (Feminist Ethic of Care) as the authors propose to do. Or rather, should WPR be applied to the FEC?

The authors identify two problematisations:

         “Care as a ‘problem’ of gender inequality” and

         “The care market ‘problem’”. 

While the first problematisation was to be expected in a Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality, the authors provide a nuanced and careful analysis of the ways in which arguments could be seen to undermine particular visions of gender equality. They highlight for example how much attention was directed to men’s need to be encouraged into caring activities: “much more was made of the need to support men into care”. They also highlighted how “the care module [the Assembly was organised by modules] quickly attached to the possibility for salaries, facilities and career ladders to encourage care gender parity”. 

This form of thinking shows links to the second problematisation, “The care market ‘problem’”. In this problematisation, care “was broadly constructed as serviceswithin a care market” (emphasis in original). In addition, care provision was examined “through the lens of remunerated and unremunerated work”. 

Importantly, this discourse analysis of key problematisations was combined with the FEC lens. There is a large literature on feminist care ethics (see below). Loughnane and Edwards (2022a) adopt a popular convention of examining care through three outlooks: care as value, care as relation and care as practice: 

“Care as value attends to the values displayed in undertaking, receiving and thinking about care (Held, 2006). The relationality of care recognises human interdependence within care relations, the fluidity of carer/ care receiver positions and connections between those relations ‘closest in’ to wider socio-political contexts (Barnes, 2012; Tronto, 2013). Approaching care as practice illustrates the labour involved in caring and the differences of care in intimate, institutional and commodified context.”

WPR and discourse analysis

The authors cited are certainly in good company in describing WPR as a mode of discourse analysis. “Discourses” form a significant part of my 2009 book (Bacchi 2009). And many authors like to combine WPR with CDA (Critical Discourse Analysis; Fairclough 2013). 

At the same time, I have endeavoured to clarify a distinction between “discourse analysis” and “analysis of discourses” (Bacchi 2005). The point here is to emphasise that WPR is not a form of language analysis. Rather, it draws attention to the place of knowledges (discourses) in governing practices. 

Seeing WPR as discourse analysis leads to the conclusion that we are dealing with competing forms of interpretation of a “problem”. The argument becomes that different people, groups and texts offer a particular view of a “problem”. 

By contrast, since at least 2009 WPR has been associated with the way in which “problems” are produced/created/enacted as particular sorts of problem. We are not dealing with modes of interpretation, then, but with competing modes of governing. The language of “representation” in “What’s the Problem Represented to be?” can be seen to cause some of this confusion. However, as Shapiro (1988: xi) says, “representations do not imitate reality but are the practices through which things take on meaning and value …”. They form part of an “active, technical process” of governing (Rose and Miller 1992: 185). A problem representation therefore is not some image or interpretation of “reality”; it is the way in which a particular policy “problem” is constituted as the real (Bacchi 2012: 151).

To gain access to this production of “problems” WPR starts from proposals or proposed solutions. It then works backwards to see how the “problem” is implicit within a proposal. This form of analysis is what is intended in describing WPR as an analytic strategy. 

To apply this strategy a researcher seeks out recommendations and aims. More broadly, it is possible to read many statements as having within them an implied proposal for change. Think for example of a claim that there is a need to enhance social cohesion. Such a claim constitutes “lack of social cohesion” as “the problem”. 

The analysis offered by Loughnane and Edwards (2022a) is replete with recommendations that could provide starting points for WPR. For example, they list the “wide-ranging recommendations” that were an outcome of the care module:

better pay and conditions for paid carers; improvements to welfare payments and pensions for unpaid carers; augmented respite provision; movement towards a publicly funded childcare model; additional paid leave for parents; improvements in person-centred supports and resources for older and disabled people to live independently and to participate in their care decisions; a statutory right and enhanced access to home care; and an ending of the division of disability services for those aged under and over 18 years 

Each of these recommendations provides a fertile entry-point for examining the deep-seated assumptions, the genealogy and the effects called for in a WPR analysis. 

For example, “additional paid leave for parents” relies on assumptions about parental responsibilities and the need for the market to “accommodate” those responsibilities. Each proposal offers a treasure-trove of problem representations. Adopting WPR as an analytic lens creates the opportunity to rethink commonly endorsed proposals for change such as these. 

One topic area where WPR might have thrown up some novel questioning is around the topic of “men’s equality”, an issue that clearly concerned Loughnane and Edwards (see above). The authors identified the “individualised solutions the citizens debated”: 

“showing role models of both genders in various jobs with the focus on care type jobs’; a school programme ‘focusing specifically on normalizing the provision of care’; and ‘gender quotas to enable shared care’ in teaching, nursing and childcare” (Citizens) 

Asking the WPR questions of each of these proposals would assist in teasing out the underlying assumptions in these proposals. For example, asking what the “problem” is represented to be in a proposal for more men role models would provide interesting insights into the assumed place of men in social arrangements and into the theoretical assumptions underpinning role model arguments. 

I should note that on many occasions Loughnane and Edwards appear to start their analysis from proposals. Moreover, their nuanced assessment of the issues under scrutiny would often line up closely with the kind of insights a WPR analysis would generate. So, why do I think WPR assists in this kind of project? It seems to me that the systematic application of the WPR mode of thinking – analysing proposals and working backwards, with subsequent application of the other WPR questions – provides a way of thinking that keeps us alert to the governing mechanisms that shape our lives and worlds. 

The authors in these articles offer a different tool for this task– the Feminist Ethic of Care. In the next entry I take some time to explain my concerns about adopting FEC as a “standard or yardstick” for assessing policy documents (Sevenhuijsen 2004: 16). I also suggest that deliberative forums, such as citizens’ assemblies, offer excellent targets for a WPR analysis, pursued in the last entry in this series (late April). 

. 

References

Bacchi, C. 2005. Discourse, Discourse Everywhere: Subject “Agency” in Feminist Discourse Methodology’. NORA: Nordic Journal of Women’s Studies, 13(3): 198-209. Reproduced in C. Hughes (Ed.) (2012). Researching Gender. Sage Fundamentals of Applied Research Series. 

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

Bacchi, C. 2012. Strategic interventions and ontological politics: Research as political practice. In A. Bletsas and C. Beasley (Eds.), Engaging with Carol Bacchi: Strategic Interventions and Exchanges. Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press, pp. 141-56.

Barnes, M. 2012. Care in Everyday Life – An Ethic of Care in Practice, Bristol: Policy Press. 

Courant D 2021. Citizens’ assemblies for referendums and constitutional reforms: Is there an “Irish model” for deliberative democracy? Frontiers in Political Science2: 591983. 

Fairclough, N. 2013. Critical discourse analysis and critical policy studies. Critical Policy Studies, 7, 177–197.

Held, V. 2006. The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

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

Sevenhuijsen, S. 2004. TRACE: A Method for Normative Policy Analysis from the Ethic of Care. In S. Sevenhuijsen and A. Svab (eds) The Heart of the Matter: The Contribution of the Ethic of Care to Social Policy in Some New EU Member States.Ljubjana: Peace Institute, Institute for Contemporary Social and Political Studies.

Shapiro, M.J. 1988. The Politics of Representation: Writing Practices in Biography, Photography and Policy Analysis. Madison: Wisconsin University Press. Tronto, J. 2013. Caring Democracy – Markets, Equality, and Justice, New York: New York University Press

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

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

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

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

Performing realities

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

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

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

Questioning performativity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Performing Austin: the dangers of metaphors and analogies 

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

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

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

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

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

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

What realities are created? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

REFERENCES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Available at: DOI: 10.1177/0263276420966389 

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Several people have approached me to ask if it is possible to use coding in a WPR analysis. Coding in this context refers to the labelling of discrete items in research materials (contrast “learning to code” in Research Hub, 30 Oct 2023). The espoused goal is to find a way to organize a large mass of material, which seems unmanageable if one simply applies the WPR questions. The topic addressed here is relevant to earlier Research Hub entries on data, where I ask specifically about the place of data in a WPR analysis (30 May 2022, 29 June 2022, 29 Aug 2022). 

The most common way to approach qualitative studies that involve large amounts of material is thematic analysis. I have on occasion positioned WPR as opposed to or in contrast with thematic analysis. I wish to explain the basis of this claim and then to proceed to consider what RTA (reflexive thematic analysis) may offer WPR researchers. 

The title of this entry refers to my recent article introducing WPR to the study of music education where I list several “themes” and organize the paper around them (Bacchi 2023). The term “themes” is used incorrectly in this paper – hence the “oops”! As Braun and Clarke explain, I should have referred to “topics” rather than to “themes”. To qualify as a theme, the selected items would need to capture “some level of patterned response or meaning” (Braun and Clarke 2021: 341). I pursue this distinction between “topics” and “themes” later. 

On what basis have I distanced WPR from thematic analysis? 

To preview the discussion to follow, I contrast the types of analysis performed by RTA and WPR. The former seeks to identify themes; the latter identifies and interrogates problem representations. In RTA, themes are “picked out” by researchers; in WPR problem representations form part of an analytic strategy. 

Note, I am not saying that themes simply emerge from the data. Braun and Clarke (2021: 343) make it very clear that they have never said that themes simply emerge from the data:

An account of themes “emerging” or being “discovered” is a passive account of the process of analysis, and it denies the active role the researcher always plays in identifying patterns/themes, selecting which are of interest, and reporting them to the readers (Taylor and Ussher, 2001) 

They justifiably correct St Pierre for her characterisation of thematic analysis as a form of analysis “in which themes somehow miraculously emerge from the data” (St. Pierre 2019: 4). Rather, Braun and Clarke (2006: 80) have consistently identified themes as part of an interpretive process involving the researcher. 

My concern is that inadequate attention is paid to the central role played by research questions in this interpretive process. That is, RTA and WPR ask distinctly different forms of research question, informed by specific theoretical premises (see below). This contrast in theoretical perspective makes it difficult to bring the two approaches together. 

Braun and Clarke (2006: 95) attest to the powerful role played by research questions in their comments on a possible “mismatch between theory and analytic claims”: 

“if you are working within an experiential framework, you would typically not make claims about the social construction of the research topic, and if you were doing constructionist thematic analysis, you would not treat people’s talk of experience as a transparent window on their world.”

A recent worked example of RTA by Byrne (2022) illustrates the close ties between “themes” and one’s research questions. Likewise, Braun and Clarke (2006: 88) emphasize the goal of identifying what is “interesting” in the material, driven clearly by the researcher’s research questions. For this reason, researchers are enjoined to “spell out” their theoretical assumptions. 

I take this insight one step further. If research questions “manage” or “control” the analysis to the extent just described – if one’s research questions shape the analysis – it follows that the common distinction drawn between “inductive” (“data-driven”) and “deductive” (“analyst-driven”) accounts seems spurious (Braun and Clarke 2006: 83-84). Since all researchers are necessarily engaged in asking research questions and, since all research questions are theoretically informed, all research is “analyst-driven”. And, if this is the case, the selection of codes and the naming of themes are necessarily shaped by the research questions.

Following this reasoning, the kinds of research questions posed in any study play a prominent role in the kind of analysis produced. It is at this level that I detect a tension between thematic analysis and WPR. 

The politics of research questions

Alvesson and Sandberg (2013) provide a useful guide to the contrasting theoretical premises in varieties of research questioning.

They show, for example, how research questions problematise different sorts of assumptions underlying existing literatures. Their typology of assumptions includes: in-house assumptions, root metaphor assumptions, paradigmatic assumptions, ideological assumptions and “field assumptions” (2013: 54). To generate research questions “the focal point in problematization as a methodology” is “to illuminate and challenge those assumptions underlying existing theories (including one’s own favorite theories) about a specific subject matter” (Alvesson and Sandberg 2013: 53; emphasis in original). 

As an example of an in-house assumption, Alvesson and Sandberg (2013: 54) explain how researchers who question the status of certain characteristics as leadership traits, remain, theoretically, within “trait theory” as a theoretical proposition. “Trait theory”, as a framing logic, is considered to be uncontroversial. It is simply not mentioned. 

This example illustrates that the analysis (of leadership “traits”) necessarily reflects the researcher’s theoretical positioning and hence their research questions. In this sense, research questions shape what will be considered relevant. Trying to identify “themes” through coded terms will tell us little if the researcher’s own assumptions are not considered. 

Braum and Clarke (2006: 78) stress the need for researchers to “make their (epistemological and other) assumptions explicit”. However, the central role of research questions in shaping the parameters of what is analysed is underdiscussed. The framework for analysis is generated through research questions that are based upon assumed theoretical premises. It follows that the very different kinds of research questions produced by WPR and RTA means that blending the two forms of analysis faces significant obstacles.

Comparing research questions

WPR asks questions about problematizations (or problem representations), and these are tied to the specifics of practical texts (Bacchi 2009: 34). That is, to initiate a WPR analysis, the researcher identifies “proposals” or “proposed solutions” in policy and other forms of “text” and works backwards to draw attention to the implicit problem representations they produce. “Proposals” are taken from “practical” or “prescriptive texts” that provide guides to conduct. By telling us what to do, the proposals within “texts” indicate what needs to change and hence what is enacted as “the problem”. In this way WPR offers an analytic strategy built upon problematisations. The questions a WPR researcher asks will invariably be questions about problematisations, their presuppositions, origins and effects. 

Thematic analysis (and Reflexive Thematic Analysis) starts from different kinds of questions. While Braun and Clarke (2006: 77 Abstract) argue that RTA is a useful strategy in disciplines “beyond psychology”, the kinds of questions asked tend to presume the existence of states of being or states of mind. Byrne (2022) for example focuses on deciphering the “opinions” and “attitudes” of research subjects. 

Key premises in this approach sit uncomfortably with a WPR way of thinking. 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 knowledge and a contingent historical creation that needs “to be interrogated rather than enshrined as ‘truth’” (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 5).

The tensions between WPR and RTA also appear in relation to the kinds of material used for an analysis. In RTA and other forms of thematic analysis, the scripts from interviews and focus groups commonly form the basis of the analysis (Byrne 2022). In WPR interviews are not a straightforward source of “opinions”. Rather, interview texts are subjected to a style of questioning that looks to identify the presuppositions underlying “statements” (Bacchi and Bonham 2016). 

In other words, RTA and WPR rely on contrasting theoretical premises which shape the questions they ask. These contrasting premises make it difficult to imagine the use of RTA to identify “themes” in a study wishing to use WPR. 

“Coding”, “topics” and “themes”

In my paper introducing WPR to music education I discovered the usefulness of “topics” as opposed to “themes” (Bacchi 2023). In preparation for the presentation, I engaged with and read the critical literature in the field. This immersion alerted me to the areas of controversy under discussion by those involved in music education. Using WPR I wanted to illustrate how it was possible to recognize “proposals” and work backwards to identify the problem representations implicit within them. I chose “proposals” within the National Plan for Music Education 2022 that aligned with the areas of controversy I had identified: progression/development, inclusion and diversity, talent and creativity, teacher training and professionalism, and evidence-based policy. I mistakenly called these areas of controversy “themes” whereas they were (simply) topics.

Is anything gained from identifying topics, as I did in the music education paper? I would see this approach as useful in a “first run” through the material, a way of indicating that the selected text (National Plan for Music Education 2022) included many proposals for change in music education programs. I noted that, in the Plan, the word “should” was used some 250 times, illustrating the large number of proposals in this highly prescriptive text (Bacchi 2023: 6). 

My decision to highlight five “topic areas” allowed me to introduce WPR thinking and to encourage a more critical questioning of the Plan. I believe listing topic areas proved a useful strategy for these purposes. Hence, it is completely possible that, in your own work, identifying “topics” may contribute to your analysis. I would stress, however, that these topics are not themes, and that they did not require coding. 

“Themes” within problem representations? 

Forms of analysis depend, in the first and last instance, on research questions. Moreover, as argued above, the sorts of research questions associated with WPR are different in kind and scope from the sorts of research questions guiding thematic analysis. A WPR analysis targets governmental problematisations. It would be inappropriate, therefore, to try to identify “themes” prior to seeking out and interrogating those problematisations. 

However, might it be possible to use coding and theme identification to organizeidentified problematizations/problem representations? If you start your analysis with the WPR questions to identify problem representations, could some form of coding be useful in their analysis? Is the counting of word usage – e.g., the 250 mentions of the word “should” – in effect, a form of coding or thematic analysis? Given that there are often plural problem representations in any practical text and allied texts, might it be useful to assign different problem representations a code? 

I invite readers to send me examples where such an analysis has been performed. The example I wish to offer applied a conventional WPR analysis despite the large amount of material the study involved. Identified problem representations were then organized into categories, as outlined below, around “themes”. Does this case-study illustrate a way in which thematic analysis may be compatible with WPR? 

Suicide prevention initiatives targeting Sámi in Nordic countries 

A 2021 article by Jon Petter Stoor et al. set out to map and examine suicide prevention initiatives among Sámi. Seventeen initiatives targeting Sámi were identified during 2005–2019, including nine in Sweden, five in Norway, one in Finland and two international initiatives. Applying the WPR questions, the authors identified “40 problematizations regarding how to prevent suicide among Sámi” (Stoor et al. 2021: Abstract). 

The authors started their analysis from “proposals” in the selected texts and worked backwards to identify problem representations. Given the large number of identified problem representations (40), they introduced five categories to organize the material in a meaningful way: “pertaining to shortcomings on individual (5), relational (15), community/cultural (3), societal (14) and health systems levels (3)”. These categories can be described as themes (rather than topics) since they capture “some level of patterned response or meaning” (Braun and Clarke 2021: 341). Moreover, it is possible to imagine how some form of coding might have facilitated the organizing of the material into these categories/themes.

Importantly, Stoor et al. (2021) did not stop the analysis there. They produced a Supplementary Table listing the 40 problem representations that had been “read off” from identified proposals. 

I offer a sample of the identified problem representations to indicate the richness of the material.

Supplementary table 3. Problematizations, category and level of intervention suggested, yielded through applying the “What is the problem represented to be?”-approach on suicide prevention initiatives targeting Sámi in Norway, Sweden and Finland. 

Problematizations:  

Young Sámi men do not have enough tools for emotional regulation 

Sámi (and non-Sámi) youth at risk of suicidality do not have an active enough lifestyle 

Sámi (and non-Sámi) young kids do not have enough coping skills to deal with life’s challenges, conflicts and mental health issues 

Young reindeer herders do not have good enough skills to take care of themselves/increase mental well-being 

Young male reindeer herders do not have good enough conflict management skills 

Sámi youth do not have enough access to peer-support 

Young male reindeer herders do not have enough access to peer support 

Young reindeer herders do not have enough access to peer support 

Young Sámi men do not have enough access to peer support 

The Supplementary Material Table conveys something of the complexity involved in thinking through how suicide prevention among the Sami was problematized. Making this amount of detail available renders it possible to raise questions about the five categories produced by Stoor et al. Does the sample of problem representaions (above) suggest another schema for organisation, perhaps by age categories? The point is that, by listing the 40 problem representations, other ways to envision the “problem” could be extracted from the material. In this way, the authors protect against the dangers of simplification that can accompany coding and thematic analysis. 

Conclusion

To summarize, research questions shape an analysis. WPR and RTA consist of theoretically distinct research questions. Hence, it is inappropriate to seek out RTA-style themes prior to applying the WPR questions. it may on occasion suit your purposes to single out different topics within a body of material, as I did in the music education paper. This analytic intervention is not, however, a thematic analysis. 

Once (plural) problem representations have been identified, it may be possible to use themes to organize them. The Stoor et al. (2021) example illustrates how problem representations can be organized by themes. Importantly, the authors developed their framework of five categories (themes) only after they had applied the WPR questions. They applied WPR thinking as a first stage in the analysis to identify problem representations and then considered how to make this material more meaningful by categorizing the different approaches to suicide prevention. While such categorization may be useful, it is important to find ways to qualify such modes of simplification. Stoor et al. use Supplementary Material to this end. 

I see the possibility of this form of thematic analysis and even the use of coding to help organize large amounts of research material in the manner applied here. I stress, however, the need to acknowledge that any imposed categorisation could be otherwise and to provide, to the best of one’s ability, the full richness of the identified problem representations. The goal in a WPR analysis is to find ways to highlight the complexity of the heterogeneous factors involved in making lives and worlds and to resist the temptation to simplify for the sake of academic conventions. 

HAVE A HAPPY HOLIDAY SEASON!

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 Bonhan, J. 2016. Poststructural Interview Analysis: Politicizing “personhood”. In C. Bacch 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. 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. 

St. Pierre, E. A. 2019. Post qualitative inquiry, the refusal of method, and the risk of the new. Qualitative Inquiry. online first doi: 10.1177/1077800419863005.

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  

Taylor, G.W. and Ussher, J.M. 2001. Making sense of S&M: a discourse analytic account. Sexualities 4, 293/314