Carol Bacchi

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

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

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

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

Using WPR thinking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collective and collaborative research

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

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

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

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

AI and modes of analysis

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

Methodological Pluralism

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

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

Problematising through Metaphors

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

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

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

Ethnographic Study of AI in Education

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

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

Imaging Futures through Fiction

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

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

Humanistic Grounding in AI Design and Development

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

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

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

Third space professionals in AI educational research

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

Entanglement of Open Education and AI

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Initial influences

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

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

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

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

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

• Shifts in theoretical perspective

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

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

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

This position is reflected in the argument, put forward in Analysing Policy, that we are governed through problematisations (Bacchi 2009: xxi). It is consistent with the focus in performative accounts on the “realities” created through practices. As Shapiro (1988: xi) says, “representations do not imitate reality but are the practices through which things take on meaning and value …”. They form part of an “active, technical process” of governing (Rose and Miller 1992: 185). A problem representation therefore is not some image of “reality”; it is the way in which a particular policy “problem” is constituted as the real.

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

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

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

• New developments

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

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

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

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

• Future work

There is always more work to be done. It has become clear to me that several of the WPR questions would benefit from providing more guidance on how to proceed. More work is needed, therefore, on developing approaches that give effect to the WPR questions. I enthusiastically welcome new contributions that address this task. Here are a few examples: 

On presuppositions (Question 2) – see: Fischer, K. et al. 2024. Progress towards sustainable agriculture hampered by siloed scientific discourses. Nature Sustainability, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-024-01474-9 (See the contrast between relational vs reductionist epistemology).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sincerely, Carol

And now to our topic:

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

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

Constraints on research

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

I identity three interconnected forms of constraint: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ways forward: reframing and reflexivity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

Does poststructuralism then remain “relevant” today? 

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I imagine that many readers of this Research Hub are deeply troubled by recent political developments, specifically in the United States but with repercussions in Australia and around the world. I have been asking myself if these developments somehow reduce the relevance of WPR and its associated theoretical perspectives. It appears that I am not alone in expressing these qualms. A recent special edition of Global Society raises critical questions about the usefulness of governmentality as an analytic concept. It broaches the need for deploying the concept of “authoritarian governmentality” to help make sense of the times we are living in. 

In this entry I reflect on aspects of the contributions to the special edition by Julia Simon (2025a, 2025b) and by Mitchell Dean (2025). I recommend reading their articles in full (several times!). Both authors are concerned to highlight the need to include authoritarian developments in a governmentality perspective. Indeed, they suggest that the absence of attention to authoritarian aspects of governing practices leaves us ill-equipped to deal with the current “rise” of authoritarian regimes, including those that appear where they are least expected – i.e. in previously described “liberal democracies” (the United States).

Whither neoliberalism? 

Simon and Dean raise concerns about the way in which neoliberalism is theorised in many governmentality accounts – how treating neoliberalism (a neoliberal rationality) as a “master category” can make it difficult to observe and understand authoritarian aspects of governing practices. In the most recent Research Hub entry (27 August 2025) we reviewed the uses of the concept of “rationalities” in WPR analyses. I emphasised that the concept of “rationality” in governmentality accounts is meant to keep a focus on fluidity in modes of political analysis and change and that “problematisation” as an analytic strategy has the same goal (see Bacchi 2023). The object of the exercise in each case is to consider how power relations are “rooted deep in the social nexus”. This fluidity, however, can be lost through treating neoliberalism as a singular phenomenon. 

For good reason many WPR applications take as their primary focus neoliberalism as governmentality (rationality). This focus is apparent in the many references to “responsibilisation” as a mode of governing. That is, asking “What’s the problem represented to be?” has frequently identified the tendency to hold individuals responsible for improving their health, their job readiness, their use of drugs and gambling, etc., described as a neoliberal logic.  

However, more attention needs to be paid to how “neoliberalism” is conceptualised. In the previous entry I draw on Larner’s (2000) work, which cautions against the tendency to characterise neoliberalism as ideology. Simon (2025a, p. 5) echoes this caution. She challenges the tendency to use neoliberalism as “a more or less constant master category”, reifying neoliberalism (see Rose, O’Malley and Valverde 2006, pp. 97-98). She makes the case that such an approach weakens the “unique analytical potential” of a governmentality approach that is strongest 

“when it does not take globalising concepts or macro phenomena as starting points and explanatory principles but rather zooms in on how these very phenomena are continuously reproduced, homogenised, altered, annexed, and reformed as effects of historically and site-specific practices (cf. Lemke 2000, 43; Bröckling, Krasmann, and Lemke 2011b, 12). (Simon 2025a, p. 5; emphasis in original)”

Treating neoliberalism as some sort of “master category”, she argues, leads to “blindspots” “by failing to fully explore, visibilise, and critically investigate the multivocal and inconsistent character, the patchwork, or frankly, the ‘messiness’ of governmentalities”. 

These blindspots or omissions, as she describes, are consequential for the present moment because they tend to include a rather characteristic “neglect of non-liberalforms of power” (Triantafillou 2017, 385, emphasis added by Simon 2025a, p. 5). The implication here is the need to be wary of adopting classifications that categorically separate (neo)liberal democracies from authoritarian or non-liberal logics/rationalities. Rather, we need to critique the implicit assumption of a fundamental conceptual dichotomy or even incompatibility between neoliberalism and authoritarianism (Simon 2025a, p 5).

“Refraining from precategorising countries as (neo)liberal or authoritarian or democratic allows us to cast light on and trace a broad range of actually existing (re)combinations and shifts” (Simon 2025a, p. 8). 

In a related argument, according to Dean, we struggle to understand current political developments due to some blockages in early governmentality theory. Echoing Simon, Dean (2025) defends the need to move beyond liberal rationalities (and neoliberalism) in the study of governmentality. He suggests that the term “authoritarian” be added to the governmentality lexicon. While, he argues, “Foucault and his followers do not intend to reduce ‘governmentality’ to its liberal and neoliberal manifestations”, “such a teleological narrative makes it difficult to avoid this elision” (Dean 2025, p. 21). 

“Authoritarian governmentality” operates as a subset of the “conduct of conduct”, a subset in which conduct involves binding obligations: “while liberal governing is grounded in orders that work through providentially beneficial outcomes accruing through individual free conduct, authoritarian governing works though orders that leaves no alternative for individuals and collectives other than to be bound by them”. (Dean 2025, p. 30)

Dean (2025, p. 27) adds that Foucault’s focus on conduct of conduct “needs to be supplemented by a developed, and not simply residual, concept of sovereignty”. We need an “analytics of sovereignty” in his view because Foucault’s “government” excludes violence. The goal here is to understand how governing in the Foucauldian sense becomes intertwined with types of rule that discharge or delegate authority not simply through direction or persuasion but through coercivemeans. 

In earlier work Dean (2002) uses unemployment policy to illustrate the confluence of liberal and authoritarian practices. He offers the example of unemployment benefits, with benefits conditional on certain behaviours, to illustrate the illiberality of liberal government.

“When the governmental practice becomes binding for whatever reason, in this case because the economic costs of not following the welfare officer’s advice are too high for those with limited means of subsistence, then we have crossed into an authoritarian government” (Dean 2025, p. 24)

Dean (2025, p.31) points out that such authoritarian practices tend to target specific sectors of the population, with his example being “the differential treatment of subjects within liberal democracies using coercive and disciplinary instruments on those incapable, or not yet capable, of acting with the attributes of responsible freedom”.

Dean (2025, p. 29) looks to developments in immigration policy in Denmark to illustrate this argument. He notes that “While in general, one would clearly want to argue that Denmark relies on a more liberal set of practices of government than, say, Putin’s Russia with its propensity for the repression of political opponents”, this does not preclude the discovery of practices of authoritarian governmentality in the Scandinavian country. As an example, Dean highlights the passing of legislation, and its implementation, “that forcibly removes the homes and relocates segments of the Danish population to better integrate ethnic groups within the Danish community and prevent the formation of what were initially called ‘ghettos’ and more recently, ‘parallel societies’ (Bubola 2023)”. 

The COVID-19 pandemic also illustrates the confluence of (neo)liberal and authoritarian interventions. Sjölander-Lindqvist et al. (2020) point out that the full range of approaches to controlling COVID-19 in Sweden (e.g. social distancing, hygiene) included an aspect of ‘responsibilisation’, with the implication that citizen subjects are responsible for the outcomes of the pandemic. At the same time questions about how to deal with the pandemic involved debates over forms of authoritarian intervention (restrictions on movement, tracking devices, curfews, prison, etc.). As Dean (2025, p. 31) maintains, “The difference here between liberal and authoritarian government is relative”. 

Many WPR studies point to the operation of similar dynamics. In relation to the law and justice, Yassine (2019) offers a detailed WPR analysis of a specific practice in Australian juvenile justice: the risk assessment tool. She describes how this particular tool regulates and actively shapes who is defined, marked and classified as “risky”. Being Indigenous “is reduced to a potential risk factor for involvement with the criminal justice system, akin to alcohol and drug abuse, offending history, and so on” (Cunneen 2016, p. 36 in Yassine 2019, p. 154–155). This targeting of Indigenous subjects illustrates the intertwining of liberal and authoritarian logics. 

Colonial relations of other forms operate in a similar fashion. Odida (2022) produces a decolonial analysis of the United Nations policy of Constitutional Assistance (UNCA). The UNCA represents an initiative by which Western forms of government can be sustained in the wake of decolonisation. As a specific example of how colonial practices are embedded in UNCA, Odida identifies “discourses of infantilization” as particular practices “which represented Eritreans and Libyans as vulnerable, weak and incapable of self-governance” (2022, p. 27).

In the WPR studies by Yassine and Odida it becomes possible and appropriate to identify racialisng and colonising practices as authoritarian. The suggestion in this entry is that it is important to call out authoritarian tendencies where they appear as part of the analysis. Attending to “authoritarian governmentality” prepares us to recognise the “authoritarian potential of the (neo)liberal modalities of rule” (Simon 2025a, p. 7). This recognition positions us to better understand current authoritarian developments.

Resistance and counter-conduct

A particular challenge in WPR and in governmentality studies involves theorizing resistance. One of the chief criticisms of governmentality is that assumptions about subjectification produce determined, in the sense of controlled, subjects (Brady 2014, p. 11). We return here to the topic of “responsibilisation” (see above) and the suggestion in many WPR accounts that subjects take on self-regulation due to neoliberal policies that produce them as “governable”. 

Simon (2025b) notes how in studies of neoliberalism there is an all too enthusiastic acceptance of the production of neoliberal subjects. “Neoliberal governmental techniques always seemed to dovetail seamlessly with self-fashioning practices and to secure the desired individualising, autonomising, and responsibilising”. She makes the case that incorporation of authoritarian modes of rule in governmentality analyses provides an opening for investigating practices of resistance and contestation, as opposed to simply becoming “governable”. 

Simon offers an interesting adaptation of Foucault’s notion of counter-conduct to develop this argument. Her analytic target is the organisation self-described as Moms for Liberty (M4L), which emerged in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic:

“The group took shape during the SarsCov2-pandemic amidst a protest movement that problematised mitigation policies like temporary (school) closures or mask mandates in a language of ‘government tyranny’ (Westermeyer 2021).” (Simon 2015b, p. 9) 

Simon usefully highlights the engagement of M4L in efforts to “change people’s sense of what is politically desirable and right …”, which she characterises as the “epistemic dimension of politics” (Simon 2025b, p. 4). She shows, for example, their strong critique of expertise and “tactics of scientific distrust” (Simon 2025b, p.5), indicating an unexpected alignment with left-wing criticisms of expert knowledges. 

Her study thus provides a corrective to the tendency to pre-categorise actors in “an overly general manner as ‘populist’” (Simon 2025b, p.17). She produces an analysis of “reflected, relational, and productive contestational practices” (2025b, p.17). “It visibilises distinct far-right/populist patterns of shaping ‘resisting’ subjectivities, techniques of counter-practice, underlying truth-claims as well as particular fields of intervention” (Simon 2025b, p. 1). 

I was surprised to see this alignment of the Foucauldian concept of counter-conduct with right-wing politics. Simon acknowledges that “counter-conduct has initially been equated with inclusive, emancipatory efforts”. She argues that, in point of fact, the governmentality/counter-conduct perspective as such has no fixed normative foundation (Simon 2025b, p. 7 fn 6). 

I am not quite convinced by this argument. Simon (2025b, p. 19) goes on to note that the Moms for Liberty organisation seeks to “invisibilise past and present discrimination and (epistemic) violence against non-binary or trans individuals and African-Americans”. Clearly, in this description, Simon indicates that, in her view, discrimination and epistemic violence against the identified groups exist, a position that I suspect would be challenged by M4L. In other words, I’d suggest that acknowledging or denying the existence of discrimination and epistemic violence has normative implications. 

Is it possible therefore to rework “counter conducts” to describe the M4L organisation? Simon marshals “counter conducts” to make two important points. First, her work shows the usefulness of focussing critical attention on “agents” “beyond the state”, avoiding the tendency to reduce populism to political parties (Simon 2025b, p. 2). Her targeting of a group such as M4L signals a need to go beyond broad diagnoses of an “era of ‘authoritarian populism’” (Rose 2017, 305). Further, she illustrates “how particular epistemic repertories are drawn on and thus become productive in the formation of alternative or resisting, instead of governable, subjects” (2025b p.18):

“This desubjugation, the discarding of the docile, governable subjectivity of the conservative parent, facilitates the fashioning of an alternative – alert, assertive, knowledgeable, and insubordinate – awakened maternal subjectivity. (Simon 2025b, p.12)”

However, I query the reliance on interview transcripts to produce this analysis and suggest that asking what is “sayable” in the contexts Simon describes could produce a quite different interpretation of developments. I’m referring here to PIA (Poststructural Interview Analysis), developed with Jennifer Bonham (see Bacchi and Bonham 2025, Chapter 8). In PIA, a major purpose is to consider the particular kinds of “subjects” produced within interview settings, while also reflecting on how subject status can be questioned and disrupted. It therefore challenges the tendency to accept interview subjects as having privileged (“first person”) access to a kind of “truth” about their “experience/s” (which I believe underpins Simon’s characterising of M4L), while paying heed to how subjects come to occupy specific subject position and how they open spaces to disrupt those positions. 

Conclusions

To better understand and critically engage with the temper of the times there are clear benefits to drawing attention in WPR research to authoritarian practices. Such an approach would mean being wary regarding how we conceptualise neoliberalism, encouraging researchers to trace authoritarian tendencies in neoliberal practices and to name them as such. Incorporating attention to authoritarian governmentality could also raise useful questions about subjectification, cautioning against any tendency to produce subjects as “governable” in some determined sense. The implications for research practices are pursued in the next entry. 

References

Bacchi, C 2023, ‘Governmentalizing “policy studies”’, in W Walters & M Tazzioli (eds), Handbook on governmentality, Edward Elgar, Northampton, MA, pp. 54–71, DOI:10.4337/9781839108662.00010.

Bacchi, C. and Bonham, J. 2025, ‘Poststructural Interview Analysis: Politicizing “Personhood”’, in C. Bacchi and S. Goodwin, Poststructural Policy Analysis: A Guide to Practice, Second Edition, NY, Palgrave Macmillan, Chapter 8. 

Brady, M 2014, ‘Ethnographies of neoliberal governmentalities: from the neoliberal apparatus to neoliberalism and governmental assemblages’, Foucault Studies, no. 18, pp. 11–33, DOI:10.22439/fs.v0i18.4649.

Bröckling, Ulrich, Susanne Krasmann, and Thomas Lemke. 2011b. “From Foucault’s Lectures at the Collège de France to Studies of Governmentality.” In Governmentality. Current Issues and Future Challenges, edited by Ulrich Brückling, Susanne Krasmann, and Thomas Lemke, 

1–33. New York: Routledge.

Bubola, E. 2023. “Denmark Aims a Wrecking Ball at ‘Non-Western’ Neighborhoods.” New York Times, October 26. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/26/world/europe/denmark-housing. html?smid=url-share. 

Dean, M. 2002. “Liberal Government and Authoritarianism.” Economy and Society 31 (1): 37–61. 

https://doi.org/10.1080/03085140120109240.

Dean, M. 2025. The Concept of Authoritarian Governmentality Today, Global Society, 39:1, 16-35, DOI: 10.1080/13600826.2024.2362739

Larner, W. 2000. Neo-liberalism: Policy, ideology, governmentality. Studies in Political Economy, 64, 5-25. 

Lemke, Thomas. 2000. “Neoliberalismus, Staat und Selbsttechnologien. Ein kritischer Überblick über die governmentality studies.” Politische Vierteljahresschrift 41 (1): 31–47. https://doi.org/ 10.1007/s11615-000-0003-8. 

Odida, A 2022, ‘Making policy, problems, and constitutions: decolonising the UN policy of constitutional assistance’, PhD thesis, University College London, London.

Rose, Nikolas. 2017. “Still ‘Like Birds on the Wire’? Freedom After Neoliberalism.” Economy and Society 46 (3–4): 303–323. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2017.1377947. 

Rose, Nikolas, Pat O’Malley, and Mariana Valverde. 2006. “Governmentality.” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 2 (1): 83–104. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.lawsocsci.2.081805. 105900. 

Simon, J. 2025a. ‘After Neoliberalism’ and on the ‘Dark Side’? Governmentality and Counter-Conduct in Times of Growing Autocratisation, Global Society, 39:1, 1-15, DOI: 10.1080/13600826.2024.2401552 

Simon, J. 2025b. An Analytics of Far-Right Populist Contestation and the Case of ‘Awakened Mothers’ in US Public Education and Beyond, Global Society, DOI: 10.1080/13600826.2025.2468946 

Sjölander-Lindqvist, A, Larsson, S, Fava, N, Gillberg, N, Marcianò, C & Cinque, S 2020, ‘Communicating about COVID-19 in four European countries: similarities and differences in national discourses in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Sweden’, Frontiers in Communication, vol. 5, article 593325, DOI:10.3389/fcomm.2020.593325.

Triantafillou, Peter. 2017. “Governmentality.” In Handbook on Theories of Governance, edited by Christopher K. Ansell and Jacob Torfing, 378–388. Cheltenham: Edward Elga Yassine, L 2019, ‘Governing through “neutrality”: a poststructural analysis of risk assessment in the NSW juvenile justice system’, PhD thesis, University of Sydney, Sydney, https://hdl.handle.net/2123/21228.

It has been some time since we paid attention to the difficult concept of “political rationalities” (see Research Hub entry 7 January 2018). I decided that it would be worthwhile to revisit the place of political rationalities in a WPR analysis and to illustrate the usefulness of the concept with examples. Following the pattern in recent entries, I have been inspired to pursue this path due to some new and insightful articles applying WPR. The topics they tackle are: UBI (Universal Basic Income) and food in/security. 

Emily Clark (04 Feb 2025): Is the universal basic income a neoliberal trojan horse? Analyzing representations of ‘the poor’ and ‘poverty’ in UK UBI policy discourses, Critical Policy Studies, DOI: 10.1080/19460171.2025.2456695 

Inza-Bartolomé, A.; Escajedo San-Epifanio, L. (2025). Assistentialism in food aid resources. An analysis of the problematization of food insecurity through the What’s the Problem Represented to Be (WPR) framework. Cuadernos de Trabajo Social 38(1), 149-157. https://dx.doi.org/10.5209/cuts.96795 

Connections in arguments

As a preliminary thought, I draw to your attention how the topics covered in the Research Hub (which I have maintained now for some eight years) are likely to be interconnected. We are, after all, pursuing a specific question about the character and impact of governing practices. Hence, connections are to be expected. 

In the previous entry (29 July 2025), Skjold points to the effects of “personalization” in Norway’s activation services. Applying WPR thinking (Question 4 on silences) she (2025, p. 14; emphasis added) notes that 

“the current bias toward collaborative forms of personalization has the potential to undermine other legitimate rationales and values that offer long-term unemployed people other options of inclusion (such as in the Norwegian case, proposals for basic minimum income for the unemployed suggested in Paper 33, 2023–2024).” 

Serendipitously, the next article to come to my attention (Clark 2025) applies WPR thinking to UBI (Universal Basic Income). We are alerted therefore to the need to keep asking the WPR questions – to assume that the topics we address or issues we raise may themselves require some WPR thinking. I hope you do not find this proposition depressing since it seems to suggest that our thinking is never done, never complete. But that, of course, is the nature of the task at hand – closure is not to be expected. Decisions will need to be made but these decision will be informed by careful interrogation. 

Another connection is struck between the article by Clark and the one by Inza-Bartolomé and Escajedo San-Epifanio. Clark (2025, p. 10) points out that, in her analysis of UBI proposals in the UK Parliament, “food banks” are, at times, “pathologized as a ‘symptom’ of absolute poverty”. Unsurprisingly, there are connections here with the analysis by Inza-Bartolomé and Escajedo San-Epifanio of food in/security policies. Conceptions of “poverty” are central to both analyses, as we shall see.

Finally, in the previous Research Hub entry (29 July 2025) I raised questions about the place of proposals in a WPR analysis. The two articles we examine in this entry contribute to this topic.

Political Rationalities: Review

What are political rationalities? Where are we likely to encounter them? Where do they feature in a WPR analysis? Why are they important? 

I start reflections on these questions with some brief and necessarily simplified comments on governmentality (see Bacchi 2023 for elaboration). Governmentality provides a way to expand our thinking about what governing entails. Foucault (2007, p. 108) has this goal in mind when he describes the need to critically interrogate the “ensemble” of “institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations and tactics” through which governing takes place. His argument is that power relations operate in and across this “ensemble”. They are “rooted deep in the social nexus, not reconstituted ‘above’ society as a supplementary structure [for example, ‘the State’]” (Foucault 1982, p. 222). We therefore need modes of analysis that include but go beyond conventional studies of State-based politics. 

Foucault’s “ensemble” points the way to the targets for this broader analysis. In the quote above, he mentions “institutions” and “procedures”, alongside “analyses and reflections”. In governmentality theory, the former constitute “technologies of rule”, while the latter form “rationalities”. That is, to study how governing takes place we need to study both the techniques and mechanisms involved in governing practices (“technologies of rule”) and the “thinking” underpinning those techniques (“rationalities” or “rationales” – the reasons given for those techniques). In this way “political rationalities” provide access to the “thought” in government. Dean (1999, p. 24) describes them as “relatively coherent ways of understanding the tasks and objects of rule”. Put simply, to understand how specific practices/mechanisms become possible, we need to understand the forms of thought – the governing logics – that made these practices intelligible and practicable. Rationalities refer to the specific combinations of concepts and reasons guiding rule (Rose 2000, p. 24). 

I find it easier to grasp this notion through examples. Doubtless, you will have heard references to “a liberal rationality” or a “neo-liberal rationality” or an “authoritarian rationality” (see next entry). These “short-hands” refer to the clusters of theories, suppositions, and notions that produce a particular understanding of the operations of government. Foucault found the concept of “problematisation” a useful supplement to rationalities. If we want to probe the “thinking” behind certain government practices, an effective way to do this is to ask how “things” are being problematised – hence, the usefulness of the WPR questions which take on this task. 

I now use the two selected articles to illustrate how they deploy these conceptual tools. 

ARTICLE 1: 

Emily Clark (04 Feb 2025): Is the universal basic income a neoliberal trojan horse? Analyzing representations of ‘the poor’ and ‘poverty’ in UK UBI policy discourses, Critical Policy Studies, DOI: 10.1080/19460171.2025.2456695 

Brief summary: 

Clark takes up the contentious issue of “universal basic income” (UBI), a reform proposition (proposal) that has found supporters across the political spectrum. Instead of pursuing competing definitions of the reform, she explores the rationality/ies underpinning it in UK Parliamentary debates. Specifically, she asks whether “representations of ‘the poor’ and ‘poverty’ in UK parliamentary UBI proposals signal breaks with, or continuations of, dominant neoliberal governing logics” – i.e., rationalities. She concludes that, despite popular characterizations of UBI as a “progressive” social policy, its “dominant constitution in UK Parliament” reflects neoliberal rationalities (p. 3). Importantly, Clark highlights two “disruptive proposals” for UBI that constitute it as a “right to the commons of the earth”. 

Materials and methods:

Clark (p. 7) specifies that her “data corpus” consists of 135 parliamentary texts. In the main these are extracts from Parliamentary debates to do with UBI: “All debates, questions and answers, Early Day Motions, committee discussions, and evidence sessions in UK Parliament referencing ‘basic income’ were examined from this period [September 2016 to July 2024]”. She provides “example statements” from MPs and peers’ speeches that “expose the logics underpinning the formation of UBI”. 

Clark adopts an additional “text”. She uses Foucault’s (2008) examination of Friedman’s Negative Income Tax (NIT) policy idea, to tease out the parameters of a neoliberal rationality (see below). 

Applying WPR:

Clark specifies that she applies selected WPR questions (questions 1, 2, 4 and 5) to the material. The material (“key discursive constructions”) was “first coded on NVivo with a focus on the constitution of UBI policy problematizations/prescriptions”. Discourses were then analyzed according to the four WPR questions. From this analysis “three dominant codes, or typologies, of the ‘poor’, underpinned by neoliberal nationalities (sic; should be “rationalities”), emerged”, alongside the two disruptive codes. 

Basically, Clark looks to characterise the understanding of UBI in UK Parliamentary debates through examining how it is problematised in readily accessible Parliamentary materials (e.g., Hansard debates). She concludes that, with the exception of the two disruptive “codes”, these texts reflect a neoliberal rationality. This rationality (or neoliberal governing logic/s) can be seen to be in operation through the ways in which “poverty” and “the poor” are constituted as 1) the impotent poor; 2) the idle poor; 3) the industrious poor – typologies adopted from Dean’s (1992) examination of the genealogy of poverty. 

Theoretical Issues: 

Clark’s paper raises a number of theoretical issues.

Referring to the previous Research Hub entry (29 July 2025), I look to see where she “finds” the “proposals” that provide the starting place for a WPR analysis. 

I suggest she finds them in two places: first, in Friedman’s proposed Negative Income Tax (see Camporesi 2024), and second, in the “example statements” of politicians. 

How does this work? 

On the former, it is possible to think of theoretical propositions as proposals, in the WPR sense of the term. Consider, for example, Marx’s theory of historical materialism, or a realist perspective in international relations. Both, in effect, indicate or propose how things ought to be and hence what needs to change. You can recognise here the starting premise in WPR – what we propose as what needs to change indicates what is produced as problematic. This argument means that, in effect, “every piece of published research is in a sense a ‘prescriptive text’” (Backman and Lofstrand (2022, p. 273). Illustrating the usefulness of this approach, it is becoming increasingly popular to use WPR to conduct systematic reviews or scoping reviews (see for example Johansson and Larsson 2023; Byrt et al. 2023; Puukko 2024). On these grounds, Friedman’s NIT constitutes a proposal and Foucault’s critical comments perform a kind of WPR analysis, probing and elaborating a neoliberal rationality.

On the latter source of proposals (the statements of politicians), in an earlier Research Hub entry (30 June 2021), I consider the possibility of using WPR with legislative debates as “practical texts” – which is basically the approach Clark develops. There I distinguish between statements that clearly target the “conduct of conduct” and hence fit within the parameters of a WPR analysis, and other statements that reflect “pervasive cultural logics” (or “dominant cultural imaginaries) (Spivakovsky and Seear 2017, p. 463). For the latter, I suggest the usefulness of Poststructural Interview Analysis (PIA) which focuses on how certain comments are “sayable” (Bacchi and Bonham 2016).

Clark’s “example statements” refer at times to the desirability of shaping certain behaviours and hence to a prescriptive targeting of “conduct”. At the same time, as Clark (p. 10) notes, they are “underpinned by neo-liberal governing logics”. In other words, thinking through PIA, the selected statements are possible or “sayable” due to their coherence with a neoliberal rationality. A challenge here is to keep the focus on the rationality and to resist slippage into an interpretive analysis that targets policy actors and/or politicians and their “concerns”. 

ARTICLE 2: 

Inza-Bartolomé, A.; Escajedo San-Epifanio, L. (2025). Assistentialism in food aid resources. An analysis of the problematization of food insecurity through the What’s the Problem Represented to Be (WPR) framework. Cuadernos de Trabajo Social 38(1), 149-157. https://dx.doi.org/10.5209/cuts.96795 

Brief summary:

Inza-Bartolomé and Escajedo San-Epifanio bring a critical perspective to “food charity”. They emphasise several factors, including that “the dominant problematization of food insecurity neglects the right to food and the structural reasons for poverty”. They draw attention to the trend towards “food charity” in a period of “reduced entitlements in social security”. A particular concern is the effects of this trend on recipients who become “dependent on the generosity of strangers and discretionary donations”, with accompanying stigma. The term “assistentialist” (or assistance-oriented) is introduced to describe the underlying charity orientation of this approach. 

Materials and methods: 

The authors draw upon a wide range of official documents from the European Commission concerning poverty and aid (see references in the article). They incorporate policy documents, legislative texts and academic (theoretical) texts. 

Applying WPR:

The authors (p.151; emphasis added) clearly lay out the way to commence a WPR analysis:

“The first question of the WPR methodology, ‘What is the problem represented to be in a particular policy or policies?’ aims to identify a place from which to begin the analysis, to examine the problem representation to see what is being problematized (Bacchi and Goodwin, 2016, p. 20). Therefore, it is essential to start with the proposed solutions”.

They follow through this commitment through targeting a specific practice: The Fund for European Aid to the Most Deprived (FEAD). They proceed to probe the proposals associated with FEAD. For example, “food banks” are put forward as a “win-win solution to prevent food waste and reduce food insecurity: it is an economically, environmentally, and socially responsible alternative” (FEBA, 2023a). The authors proceed to apply the WPR questions to these proposals. To do so they emphasise the need to “work backwards” and “revisit and interrogate unexamined ways of thinking to show that they have a history, and insist on questioning their implications (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016, p. 16)”.

Theoretical Issues: 

As with Clark, a prominent focus for critique is neoliberalism. By contrast with Clark, neoliberalism is described as an “ideological perspective” not a rationality (152), and it is noted that “this process implies an intentionality from a neoliberal ideological perspective”. Despite this contrast, there are overlaps in interpretation. I have already mentioned the shared observation that food banks can be associated with stigma. 

We return therefore to the need to specify what we mean when we use the term “political rationality” and the need to distinguish its use from analyses that talk about ideologies. Larner (2000) clarified this distinction some time ago and I highly recommend her article. The concept of “rationality” is meant to keep a focus on fluidity in modes of political analysis and change. “Problematisation” as an analytic strategy has the same goal (see Bacchi 2023). The object of the exercise is to consider how power relations are “rooted deep in the social nexus”, not in the intentions of “bad actors”. 

Conclusions: 

The implications of adopting a rationality framework are manifold. Here I emphasise what follows from identifying rationalities as reflecting power relations that are “rooted deep in the social nexus”. Basically, such a perspective alerts us to the need to check our own positions and proposals. Brown (1998, p. 44) clarifies this point nicely.

“it [poststructural analysis] aims 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”.

It follows that one of the main tasks of WPR is to examine the possible place of specific rationalities in our own proposals/arguments (see Step 7 on “self”-problematisation; Bacchi and Goodwin, p. 20). Inza-Bartolomé and Escajedo San-Epifanio (2025, p. 154) end their piece with a plea to construct a different problematization and to ensure that the “path” of “vulnerable people” who “need the help of the welfare system to achieve food security” is protected by the right to food. We have an instance here where applying WPR and the concept of rationality to terms such as “vulnerable” may prove useful analytically. 

References

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Bacchi, C. and Bonham, J. 2016. Poststructural Interview Analysis: Politicizing “personhood”, in C. Bacchi and S. Goodwin, Poststructural Policy Analysis: A Guide to Practice. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 113-123. 

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

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FEBA. European Federation of Food Banks (2023 septembere 11) (2023a). 10 facts about food banks and food waste prevention. FEBA. https://www.eurofoodbank.org/publications/10-facts-about-food-banks-and- food-waste-prevention/ 

Foucault, M. (1982), ‘How is Power Exercised?’, in Dreyfus, H. L. and Rabinow, P. (eds), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Brighton: Harvester Press, pp. 216–226.

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Puukko, O 2024, “Rethinking digital rights through systemic problems of communication”, Revista Latina de Comunicación Social, vol. 82, pp. 1-19, DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.4185/RLCS-2024-2044. 

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Skjold, S. M. (22 Jan 2025): From ‘user-oriented’ to ‘holistic’: evolving contours of personalization in Norway’s activation policy between 2000 – 2023, Critical Policy Studies, DOI: 10.1080/19460171.2025.2456151 Spivakovsky, C. and Seear, K. 2017. Making the abject: problem- solving courts, addiction, mental illness and impairment, Continuum, 31(3): 458-469, DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2016.1275152