This entry was prompted by the recent publication of McMahon’s (2024) chapter entitled: “Using Poststructural Policy Analysis for Social Justice”. McMahon identifies as an objective “achieving progressive social change” and targets “critical policy analysis as a research method for social justice”. I imagine that many of us share these objectives. McMahon (p. 83) points to an occasion where I refer to “justice goals” and how “we can produce a just society” (Bacchi 2016, p. 8). 

Here I mention a few WPR applications that invoke the concept “justice”. There are many others included in the Master List of WPR applications, distributed through the WPR list (“WPR Network” WPRNETWORK@jiscmail.ac.uk).

            Olsson, D. 2022. From Technocracy to Democracy: Ways to Promote Democratic Engagement for Just Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience Building. Sustainability, 14, 1433.

            Rask, N. 2022. An intersectional reading of circular economy policies: towards just and sufficiency-driven sustainabilities. Local Environment, DOI: 10.1080/13549839.2022.2040467

            McGarry, K. and FitzGerald, S. A. 2019. The politics of injustice: Sex- working women, feminism and criminalizing sex purchase in Ireland. Criminology & Criminal Justice, 19(1): 62-79.

            Mulinari, P. et al. 2023. Exploring Swedish “Family Planning”: Reproductive Racism and Reproductive Justice. In A. Kochaniewicz (Ed.) Struggles for Reproductive Justice in the Era of Anti-Genderism and Religious Fundamentalism. 

            Zemandl, E. J. 2018. The Roma experience of political (in)justice: The case of school (de)segregation in Hungary. ETHOS – Towards a European Theory of Justice and Fairness, European Commission Horizon 2020 research project.
Available at: https://ethos-europe.eu/sites/default/files/ethosd5.2hungary.pdf 

So, “justice” is very much part of the vocabulary adopted in WPR analyses. However, all these invocations of “justice” face a challenge. Sotiropoulos (2021: 851-852) points out that “social justice” is one of the “cherished notions of the western philosophical and political tradition”, problematised in poststructural accounts. We have seen on many occasions that, as a poststructural intervention, WPR questions taken-for-granted categories of analysis. The task in these instances is to see how these categories represent the “problem” they purport to address. For example, the term “equality” is often analysed using WPR – showing how the term can have different meanings with contrasting implications. A large number of WPR applications examine how “women’s equality” is conceptualised in different approaches (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 64-66). 

So, what about “justice”? How can we invoke “justice” without querying different invocations of the term? How, in short, can we describe WPR as a social justice analytic strategy? 

Poststructuralism and “doubling practices”

To pursue these questions, it is useful to adopt what is commonly described as poststructuralism’s “double move”. Lather (2001) introduces the notion of a “doubled research practice” to deal with what she calls “stuck places”: “a way of thinking through of some of the complexities, ambiguities and contradictions involved in the process of doing qualitative research that is concerned with recognizing difference and with pursuing social justice” (Gunaratnam 2003: 3). We have just encountered one such “ambiguity”: how to pursue social justice while subjecting “social justice” to critical analysis. 

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

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

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

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

WPR through a social justice lens

I locate the first perspective in relation to McMahon’s (2024) chapter. Her goal is to consider how PPA (Poststructural Policy Analysis), and hence WPR, serve social justice objectives. The starting point for analysis is a social justice orientation. This “social justice orientation” comprises policy work and policy practice as “key skills for social justice advocacy” (p. 79). Policy advocacy is linked to a commitment to “give voice to disadvantaged and marginalised groups”. 

McMahon (2024: 82) highlights the usefulness, for social justice concerns, of exploring research policy as a governing technology. As part of this project, she emphasises the role of “policy as discourse” and of problematisations. She includes a variety of WPR applications that “address social justice issues” (2024: 86). Importantly, she notes that 

“All discourses, all reforms and proposals for change (including those of the researcher themselves), whether conservative or progressive, seek to govern conduct in particular ways, and from a poststructural perspective all must be opened up to problematisation in order that there is governing ‘with a minimum of domination’ (Foucault, 1987: 129, cited in Bacchi and Goodwin, 2016: 24)”.

At the same time, the starting point for the analysis is a conception of social justice. As McMahon (2024: 93-94) explains: “There are no ‘rules’ for representing a WPR analysis, and the researcher will need to shape the write-up in a way that best conveys the research story based on the social justice orientation of the analytical work undertaken”. Referring to her research on “value for money”, McMahon (2024: 89) argues that “the dominant economic thinking and assumptions pervading the policy discourse failed to take account of very important social justice perspectives”. Poststructural policy analysis, in this account, “enables the social justice researcher to engage in a deeper critical analysis of the role of policy in constructing social problems in particular ways and potentially undermining social justice principles and values” (McMahon 2024: 94). 

“Social justice” through a WPR lens

While McMahon offers an insightful analysis of the critical perspective associated with PPA, the category of “social justice” continues to function as unproblematised. That is, the notions of “social justice principles” and “social justice perspectives” operate as taken-for-granted concepts with some form of assumed meaning. 

One of the chief tasks undertaken by WPR scholars is the questioning of taken-for-granted categories of meaning – to see what they effect (and affect) and what they fail to effect (and affect). Many applications have made good use of this approach (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 44, 63, 71, 94).

This way of using WPR finds its inspiration in Tanesini’s (1994) argument that concepts have no definite meaning but are proposals about how we ought to proceed from here. As proposals, then, different uses of a term contain implicit representations of the “problem” they purport to address. A way forward, therefore, is to consider different uses of the concept “justice”, probing their underlying assumptions, the genesis of different meanings, their effects and their silences. The analytic strategy adopted here involves applying the WPR questions to “justice”.

Dillon (1999), a well-known postructuralist researcher in the field of international relations, provides links to the kind of thinking and analysis required here. His article invokes Deleuze’s call for “another justice”, “a justice that is different from the justice of the state” (Sotiropoulos 2021: 862). Dillon uses a capital letter for this “other Justice” to distinguish it from “normal justice”. He is concerned that what he calls “normal justice”, characterized as distributive justice, is embedded in conventional state-based politics. Sotiropoulos (2021: 861) also highlights the “statist conception of justice that has dominated political philosophy since antiquity”. That is, “normal justice” presumes nation-states, which become the grounds for determining those called “citizens” and “non-citizens”. 

Digging deeper, Dillon argues that a particular understanding of individual “human beings” underpins this distinction, an understanding of a subject as sovereign and “a fungible unit of account”. From this stance it is a short step, says Dillon (1999: 171), to 

“systems of calculability, commensurability, and expendability which characterise the arithmetic politics and political arithmetics of much of the international relations and strategic studies – military and managerial – as well as the inter and intra genocidal politics of modern times”. 

Hence, to offer “another Justice” it becomes necessary to disrupt these assumptions/presuppositions. For Dillon (1999: 171), “The self that is the place of the taking place of Justice is not a what. For it does not possess an unchangeable essence”. Rather: “The self is a divided self from a beginning that is itself incomplete. It is only by virtue of that very division, that very incompleteness, that the question of justice arises at all” (Dillon 1999: 157). 

Dillon (1999: 157) elaborates how the analytic strategy he deploys assists in developing “another Justice”: “Thought of another Justice is therefore a continuous displacement of normal justice, a radical discomfort to it. But I have first to note how normal justice understands its place before considering the taking place of Justice differently”. He provides more detail: “The other way of thinking has continuously to be contrasted with the thought that underlies distributive justice, so that the characteristic features of another Justice may be differentiated from those of the normal model” (Dillon 1999: 158).

In effect, Dillon’s analysis indicates precisely the sorts of issues that arise when applying Question 2 in WPR to the question of “justice” – “What deep-seated presuppositions or assumptions underlie this representation of the ‘problem’ (problem representation)?” (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 20). We begin by asking how “normal justice” is conceptualised, opening up the space to think of “justice” differently. This way of thinking is captured in the second part of the title for this entry: “‘social justice’ through a WPR lens”. Importantly, Dillon describes this “making way for other ways of being” as a political act, with politics referring to “an irruptive and inventive practice called up by specific historical circumstances”. We pursue these issues in the next entry. 

REFERENCES

Bacchi, C. 2016. Problematizations in health policy: Questioning how “problems” are constituted in policies’, Sage Open, 6(2): 1–16.

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

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

Dillon, M. 1999. Another Justice. 27(2): 155-175.

Foucault, M. 1987. The ethic of care for the self as a practice of freedom: An interview with Michel Foucault on January 20, 1984, with R. Fornet- Betancourt, H. Becker, A. Gomez-Müller, J.C. Gauthier, Philosophy & Social Criticism, 12, 112–131.

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

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

McMahon, S. 2024. Using Poststructural Policy Analysis for Social Justice. In K. McGarry, C. Bradley, and G. Kirwan (Eds), Rights and Justice in Research Advancing Methodologies for Social Change. Bristol Policy Press. pp. 79-98. 

Sotiropoulos, G. 2021. Between order and insurgency: Post-structurlism and the problem of justice. Philosophy and Social Criticism, Vol. 47(7) 850–872. Tanesini, A. 1994. Whose language? In K. Lennon & M. Whitford (eds) Knowing the difference: Feminist perspectives in epistemology. NY: Routledge

In a recent chapter in a Handbook on governmentality, I describe “a distinctive family” (Rose 2000, 19) of research questions – usefully described as “how” questions and “how possible” questions (Foucault 1982). These questions are set in contrast to the more common “why” question brought to research on governing. The suggestion is that “how possible” questions provide a more useful starting place for reflecting on complex social relations. Before I consider this proposition in greater depth, we need to get a handle on just what “how possible” questions ask, what a “how possible” question looks like. 

Here are some sample “how possible” questions to start us thinking: “how have certain things (e.g., the psychiatric hospital come to pass?  What is it possible or impossible to think? Under what conditions is it possible to think certain things and impossible to think others? (Gougelet 2014). 

Asking these sorts of questions, explains Foucault, allows us to explore the ways in which power relations are “rooted deep in the social nexus, not reconstituted ‘above’ society as a supplementary structure [for example, “the State”] whose radical effacement one could perhaps dream of” (Foucault 1982, 222). The last comment here about dreaming of radical effacement refers to the temptation to think that it might be easy to target a single/simple source of power (in for example something referred to as “the State”). By contrast in Foucault’s account power relations are “rooted deep” in the social nexus – no simple “solution” here! Dean (1999, 29) describes how, from this point of view, power is “not a zero-sum game played within an a priori structural distribution. It is rather the (mobile and open) resultant of the loose and changing assemblage of governmental techniques, practices and rationalities”.

Let’s linger on this “social nexus” for a moment. To see what Foucault’s analytic target comprises in this term, I propose a hypothetical: “when you ask a ‘why’ question of your material, what kind of answer could you offer?” Most commonly, the form of explanation turns to individuals and their motivations, or to social groups and their ambitions (e.g. “interest groups”). As signalled above there may be a temptation to “blame” “the State”, or some other “structure”. 

For Foucault-influenced analytic approaches these forms of explanation are limited in their usefulness. The position is taken that social relations and social practices are more complicated than these foci allow. These complicated social relations constitute Foucault’s “social nexus”, described by Foucault (2007, 108) as an “ensemble” of “institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations and tactics” through which governing takes place. The challenge becomes finding ways to question this “social nexus”. WPR is offered as one means to open up the “social nexus” to critical interrogation. 

WPR and “how possible” questions

Put simply, the goal in deploying WPR as an analytic strategy is to consider and question how the “social nexus” has come to be. This goal is pursued through looking at how particular aspects of social activities and existence are problematised. A key component of this analysis is the “problem representation”. To reflect critically on identified problem representations, we ask how they become/became possible – how were they possible? 

You may not immediately recognise WPR is this description. Connections with “how possible” formulations become clearer when we examine the WPR questions. Most explicitly, Question 2 (see Chart in Bacchi and Goodwin 2016, 20) asks: “What deep-seated presuppositions or assumptions underlie this representation of ‘the problem’ (problem representation)”. In effect, we are asking what meanings (presuppositions, assumptions, “unexamined ways of thinking” [Foucault 1994, 456], knowledges/discourses) need to be in place for this problem representation to be intelligible (to be possible). To understand how specific policies and their problematisations become possible, it is necessary to identify the forms of thought that made these practices intelligible and practicable.

Consider the example I often use involving the application of WPR to the commonly endorsed reform policy of training schemes for women. These schemes constitute women’s lack of training as “the problem”. They also rely upon certain knowledge forms – e.g., the proposal to train women relies on a particular understanding of how “people” develop “skills” – a behavioural focus in other words – and an ontological conception of “people” as having something called “skills”. The proposal to train women relies upon these meanings to make sense. The knowledges (physiology, psychology, philosophy, etc.) producing these meanings, in effect, make possible the proposal of training schemes. 

Foucault spoke about the need to examine precisely what is done and what is said through considering the “conditions” that are/were necessary to these practices. Asking “how possible” questions destabilizes presumably fixed entities and opens them up to this form of critical interrogation. This approach allowed Foucault to query the assumed “existence” of objects of knowledge, such as “madness” (Foucault 1972) or “sexuality” (Foucault 1986). Asking “how possible” reveals the contingency of assumed “objects” and “subjects”, and the power relations involved in their formation. 

This form of analysis provides the grounds for thinking differently. In relation to his study of prison systems, Foucault (2020) notes that he wanted to indicate what the “postulates of thought” were that need to be re-examined if one intended to transform the penal system. Attention is directed precisely to “what is done” rather than to the motives or intentions of people, which would invoke the interior consciousness Foucault was challenging (see Research Hub, 30 Sept. 2019). The analytic task becomes examining how it is possible for those things to be done, “constructing their external relations of intelligibility” and the knowledges (discourses) upon which they rely (Foucault 1991: 77) The analytic target becomes “the connections, encounters, blockages, plays of forces, strategies and so on” in order “to show that things ‘weren’t as necessary as all that” (Foucault 1991: 76), demonstrating a clear challenge to deterministic views of social relations.

The focus on what is said invites an analysis of “what could be said”, what it is possible to say. Thinking again of our “how possible” formulation (above) – what meanings need to be in place for what is said to be intelligible? where do those meanings come from? Should they be interrogated? Asking, as Foucault (1972, 59) does, “What is it possible to speak of?”, provides a novel and powerful form of political analysis. Poststructural policy analysis aims to study, not people’s views, but how it is possible for such views to exist. 

Jennifer Bonham and I develop this thinking to produce a form of poststructural interview analysis, with the acronym PIA (Poststructural Interview Analysis; Bacchi and Bonham 2016). 

Process 2 in PIA calls for “Producing Genealogies of ‘What is said’”. I provide a brief extract here to elaborate what this involves, with bracketed comments in italics to signal connections with “how possible” thinking: 

Such genealogies look to identify the “conditions” necessary in a particular period “for this or that enunciation to be formulated” [i.e., to be possible] (Foucault 1972: 15 fn 2). Attention is directed to the multitudes of practices—the “processes, procedures and apparatuses” (Tamboukou 1999: 202)—involved in the production of “what is said” as “sayable”, as “within the true” [i.e. as possible]. Take, for example, the comments “I felt depressed” or “We work with mental trauma”. The political target is not how psychology or psychiatry control or label people but all the interconnected practices that make depression and mental trauma apparent and intelligible [i.e., possible], and give these knowledge formations authority. (Bacchi and Bonham 2016, 116).

For both WPR and PIA the focus on heterogeneous relations rather than on “fixity” undermines any sense of linear causality, of one thing (or a few things) causing another – a form of thinking about causation that is common when “why” questions are asked. In a Foucault-influenced analytic strategy, there is a “sort of multiplication or pluralization of causes” (Foucault 1991, 76), a proliferation of “events” as the random results of “the interweaving of relations of power and domination (Tamboukou 1999, 207). “Everything depends on everything else” (Veyne 1997, p. 170): “in Foucault it is not a question of one set of changes ‘influencing’ or ‘causing’ others but of a complex series of interactions which allow the production of possible objects of history” (O’Farrell 2005, 38). 

I trust that this brief excursion into “how possible” questions has provided some indication of what it means to tackle “the social nexus”. I hope it has also produced a curiosity about “how possible” questions and their potential as political interventions. 

I find myself asking frequent questions prompted by keeping “how possible” to the fore in my thinking: “How has this come to be?” “What is assumed if this occurrence is to be taken for granted as truth?” “Where did this thing/position/argument come from?” “What meanings/knowledges/discourses does it rely upon?” “Do I need to question those meanings/knowledges/discourses?” “Do I need to re-think how I assume their credibility?”

Lots of food for thought!

References

Bacchi, C. 2023. Governmentalizing “policy studies”. In W. Walters and M. Tazzioli (Eds) Handbook on Governmentality. Massachusetts: Edward Elgar. pp. 54-71. 

Bacchi, C. and Bonham, J. 2016. Appendix: Poststructural Interview Analysis: Politicizing “personhood”. In C. Bacchi and S. Goodwin, Poststructural Policy Analysis: A guide to practice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 113-122. 

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

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

Foucault, M. 1972. Histoire de la folie a l’age classique [History of Madness in the Classical Age] (Paris: Gallimard).

Foucault, M. 1980. The History of Sexuality, Vol. I. An Introduction New York: Vintage Books. 

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

Foucault, M 1991. Politics and the study of discourse, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon & Peter Miller (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

Foucault, M. 1994 [1981]. So is it important to think? In J.D. Faubion, (Ed.), Power: Essential works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 3, Hurley, R. and others (trans.). London: Penguin. 

Foucault, M. 2020. What is called “Punishing”? In Michel Foucault, Power: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984. Penguin Books.

O’Farrell, C. 2005. Michel Foucault. London: Sage.

Rose, N. 2000. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought, 2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Tamboukou, M. 1999. Writing genealogies: An exploration of Foucault’s stra-tegies for doing research. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 20 (2), 201–217. Veyne, P. 1997. Foucault revolutionizes history. In A.I. Davidson (Ed.), Foucault and his Interlocutors, Porter, C. (trans.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press

This entry is prompted by a question I received about PIA (Poststructural Interview Analysis) (Bacchi and Bonham 2016). I was asked if it would be acceptable to change the order of the “processes” listed for PIA. I will list the processes simply so that we all know what I’m referring to:

Process 1: Noting “What is Said” 

Process 2: Producing Genealogies of “What is Said”

Process 3: Highlighting Key Discursive Practices

Process 4: Analysing “What is Said” 

Process 5: Interrogating the Production of “Subjects” 

Process 6: Exploring Transformative Potential 

Process 7: Questioning the Politics of Distribution

What I have to say about PIA in response to the query about changing the order of the processes applies equally to the “seven forms of questioning and analysis” in WPR (see Table in Bacchi and Goodwin 2016, p. 20). 

My reply to the query was an enthusiastic “Yes, of course”. I have mentioned many times that the WPR questions are interconnected. The same is the case in PIA. And, as a result, there is overlap and hopefully fruitful conjunctures. 

When Jennifer Bonham and I developed PIA, we hoped that the language of “processes” would convey the kind of fluidity and movement between forms of analysis that we wished to encourage. However, the imposition of a listing and numbering of “processes”, as in PIA, or “questions”, as in WPR, can undo the best of intentions. There can develop a tendency to “tick off” certain numbered items and then move on, failing to reflect on the mutual imbrication of all the processes/questions. The processes/questions feed off one another. Treating them as separate activities imposes limitations on what can be seen. 

Allow me to attempt an analogy, though I am wary of analogies. Both PIA and WPR can be conceptualised as trips to places less well known and less often visited. However, the focus is on the travel itself, not on the destination. I think of it as a sightseeing trip with the joys of discovery along the way. The questions/processes serve as prompts to encourage certain lines of thought. They are not a recipe with either processes or questions as ingredients added sequentially. 

An example of the “listing” peril

I need to tell the sad story of “Step 7” in WPR to illustrate the dilemma of developing a research “tool” (I prefer the word “approach” or analytic strategy). If you look back to Analysing Policy (Bacchi 2009), the book that lays out the WPR questions systematically (Chapters 3 and 4), you will see that each time the WPR Table appears (pp. 2, 48) there is a list of six numbered questions, followed by the comment (with no number): “Apply these questions to your own problem representations”.

The Table was set up in this way because the last comment could not be listed as a question since, grammatically, it was an instruction not a question (on the challenges this situation throws up, see the Research Hub entry on 30 August 2023, called “Applying WPR to WPR”). It followed that WPR came to be described as consisting of six questions and everyone ignored the reference to “self”-problematisation. Since this reference did not have a number, it disappeared from people’s analyses (see Research Hub entries on 21 Oct 2018 and 5 November 2018). 

I decided I needed to do something about this “disappearing” of “self”-problematisation. In 2016, in the book with Sue Goodwin (Poststructural Policy Analysis: A Guide to Practice), the Table (p. 2) now includes a “Step 7” – “Apply these questions to your own problem representations”. Again, since the statement is not a question, I decided to call it a “step”. 

Over the next little while, it became clear to me what had happened. Making the “self”-problematising undertaking a “Step” implied that you could somehow embrace this practice easily. Making it Step 7 seemed to imply that you should undertake this exercise at the end of your analysis or paper, once you had done everything else.

The layout of a Table with numbered questions imposed a structure that had all sorts of unintended consequences. There is a reference in Poststructural Policy Analysis (p. 24) regarding the need to maintain a “self”-problematising ethic throughout one’s analysis. However, the placement of “Step 7” at the end of the Table undermines this commitment. 

The practice of “choosing” some questions

One effect of the “listing” peril is that the “questions” in WPR are thought of as separated from one another. Such a separation leads to the practice of choosing some questions as the basis of one’s research and removing others. I am well aware that, both in 2009 and in 2016, I stated that it was “possible to draw selectively upon the forms of questioning and analysis” in WPR (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016, p. 24). 

I apologize for this misleading phrasing. In the 2022 Keynote at Karlstad ( KEYNOTE ADDRESS – CAROL BACCHI – 18 August 2022 I note that “a researcher can foreground certain WPR questions and bypass others”. What I ought to have said is that it is possible to foreground some part of the analysis in a research paper. As an example, the researcher may want to highlight the politics of subjectification (from Question 5) or a particular silencing practice (from Question 4). 

As the WPR approach has matured, I take every opportunity to stress the linkages among aspects of the approach, the interconnections, the interactions, rather than the separations. This is clear in the 2016 reference to maintaining a “self”-problematising ethic, already mentioned (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016, p. 24). And in the Karlstad keynote address, I highlight the importance of developing a “genealogical sensibility” as an integral part of WPR. Hopefully, these interventions make it possible to think about WPR and PIA as “ways of seeing” rather than as lists of “steps” to perform. 

Producing an “integrated analysis” 

To acquire some grasp of the kinds of analyses these suggestions promote, I would recommend looking at the last five chapters in Analysing Policy (Bacchi 2009). Each of these chapters applies what I call an “integrated analysis”. If you read those chapters, you will see no separate listing of the WPR questions and no imposed sequential analysis. Instead, you will observe how the aspects of WPR/PIA thinking influence an argument. To achieve this effect, I experimented with inserting the notation, Q1, Q2 etc to signal when the thinking behind a particular question is being applied. There is no intention in these chapters to suggest that researchers ought to use similar notation, although it may prove useful as a theoretical exercise.

Why are the questions in the order they appear currently? 

What you see in the current listing of WPR/PIA questions/processes is one way of thinking through the material being analysed. The current listing illustrates the thinking processes as I developed them. This approach does not rule out other ways of “ordering” the processes/questions. 

One interesting suggestion sent me by a researcher who draws on WPR suggests making genealogy the priority and then seeking problem representations throughout this analytic process. The argument here is that such a repositioning of genealogy would make it easier to identify a plurality of problem representations. I am still thinking through the implications of this suggestion but would certainly encourage further experimentation of this kind.

Other possible models?

I have been thinking about the other sorts of visual representations people use to convey “directions” in a research protocol, other than a numbered list as in WPR currently. There are many possible models, often with circles or speech bubbles linked to each other with arrows. In a 2014 article Jennifer Bonham and I produced a diagram that attempted to map the network of relations which might apply to any field of statements, with statements used in a Foucauldian sense (Bacchi and Bonhan 2014, p. 186). The diagram is intricate and yet Jennifer and I felt it still did not invoke the “action, fluidity and potential variability of continually enacted relations” (p 185, fn 85) that we wanted to capture. To achieve that effect, we decided, the connected lines in our diagram need to be in motion! Tricky!

In the event, the discursive practices diagram has been taken up by very few researchers. In contrast, the WPR questions form the basis of numerous research articles in a wide range of fields and across many regions/countries. Simplicity, it appears, trumps elegance! 

How to handle the peril of lists

Can you use the questions as listed? Yes, but the message in this entry is to try to become so familiar with the questions/processes that you can hold them up together like juggling balls. My suggestion is to avoid treating the processes/questions as a formula and to resist the implication in their listing that they follow a certain order. The suggestion that Step 7 is something to tack on at the end of the other questions (if there is space) in an analysis indicates one of the clearest ways in which WPR can be misleading. 

I take some responsibility for the misunderstandings. The WPR approach has matured and continues hopefully to reflect the insights generated by the many researchers who find it useful. I do my best to find ways to make WPR more responsive and flexible. I genuinely appreciate your comments, suggestions and questions as prompts to make improvements. So please keep in touch at carol.bacchi@adelaide.edu.au

References

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

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

Bacchi, C. and Bonham, J. 2014. Reclaiming discursive practices as an analytic focus: Political implications. Foucault Studies, no. 17, pp. 173-192. 

Bacchi, C. and Bonham, J. 2016. Poststructural Interview Analysis: Politicizing “personhood”. In C. Bacchi and S. Goodwin, Poststructural Policy Analysis: A Guide to Practice. Palgrave Macmillan: NY. pp. 113-121.

In this entry I want to tell you the story of some of my earlier publications and how I ended up debating with myself over a particular issue – how the “problem” of “women’s inequality” was represented in women’s movement politics. Things might have been easier had I had the WPR approach to give me some guidance but in the cases I discuss here, WPR did not yet exist (and would not exist for a decade). It is possible, I believe, to see the emergence of the need for a WPR way of thinking in the material I proceed to analyse. 

I hope the story is of interest to you for other reasons as well. For one, it indicates that a researcher/theorist can and often does alter their position. It would be odd if that were not the case. What is more interesting is why they altered their position in this particular case, and what can be learnt from the episode. Second, I think the case reveals something about the “locatedness” of social theory. And third, the story indicates the reason WPR includes an undertaking to engage in self-problematisation. 

We will be looking at two books:

1. Liberation Deferred? The Ideas of the English-Canadian Suffragists, 1877-1918. University of Toronto Press. First edition 1983. Reprinted in 1985 and 1987.
2. Same Difference: Feminism and Sexual Difference. Allen & Unwin, 1990. Scheduled for reissue in Routledge’s Revival Series, 2024.

https://www.routledge.com/9781032829739

I want to forecast two important points:

1. In the 1990 book in Chapter 1 fn 3 (p. 272) I state that “the author [me] has dramatically altered her interpretation since the publication of Liberation Deferred? in 1983”. 
2. The 1983 book was based on my PhD thesis, completed at McGill University in 1976 (now I’m ageing myself!). The 1976 thesis title reads: Liberation Deferred: The Ideas of the English-Canadian Suffragists, 1877-1918. The 1983 book is titled: Liberation Deferred? Etc. – where did the question mark after the word “deferred” come from? What does it mean?

The Context

Liberation Deferred? (University of Toronto Press, 1983) set out to understand the “ideas” that motivated the English-Canadian women and men who joined “woman suffrage” organisations and who campaigned for women’s right to vote in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. My PhD involved gathering the “information” for this study. I travelled across Canada visiting the archives in each province (state) where I sought out membership lists for woman suffrage societies and where I proceeded to identity the interests of those who joined by looking at their other memberships. I found that women suffrage campaigners forged alliances with temperance and social purity organisations, child welfare leagues, urban planning movements, anti-prostitution campaigns, and similar sorts of reform.

I also found that many were professionals, or were married to professionals. Their support for woman suffrage indicated their hope that women could lend their voices to the reform causes just mentioned and help to defend the social order against political unrest and the destabilising effects of rapid industrial growth. Women’s assumed role as “keepers of the hearth” suggested that they would eagerly rally to this endeavour. 

The Debate

Liberation Deferred? forms part of a long-standing debate on the nature of what is commonly called “first-wave feminism”, which includes the suffragists. Here I quote the publisher’s 1983 Foreword:

“Historians have at times castigated the women of this movement for accepting and reinforcing traditional sex-role stereotypes for women. More recently (this is written in 1983) emphasis has been placed on their solid contributions to female liberation as they extended woman’s domain from the domestic to the public sphere.”

My interpretation

Not to put too fine a point on it, in the 1983 book, I came down on the side of those who found the suffragists’ agenda for change limited. Indeed, in the Preface (p. viii), I stated: “the limitations of this type of feminism are fairly obvious”. I elaborated this stance on p. 11: 

“Because they belonged to a social group which considered the family the key to the progress of society and the race, they did not question the conventional allocation of sex roles”. 

While acknowledging the role of “more radical feminists” I described the majority as committed to Protestant morality, sobriety and the family order (p. 3). I adopted the label of “maternal feminism” to describe this cohort, claiming this was “its chief and only contribution to women’s status in this period”. 

In the Conclusion (p. 145-146) I took up the debate about whether the suffrage movement had failed or succeeded, and suggested that it had succeeded but only in terms of the limited goals I had described. Unwisely, I concluded that only some suffragists could “legitimately be called feminists”, those who “demanded complete equality of the sexes [yes, we said “sexes” not “genders” in those days], including equal educational and occupational opportunities”. I described these “few feminists” who challenged “the supposed blessings of wifehood and motherhood” as voices in the wilderness. With the “takeover of the suffrage movement by the social reformers”, I declared, the reform “became moderate in their hands”. 

Why the title changed: where did the question mark come from? 

The PhD thesis (title without the question mark) was completed in 1976. Due to my move from Canada to Australia I lost touch with the first potential publishers. So, the book appeared only in 1983. The University of Toronto Press editors kindly pointed out that the debate on the issues raised in the thesis had “moved on”. How was I to reflect these changes in the book? My solution –inserting the question mark after Liberation Deferred suggested that the certitude in the PhD about the “deferral” of “liberation” among “maternal feminists” (no question mark) had softened, that at least the issue was debatable. I now wish this position could be made clearer in the text. However, it is sadly too late for amendments. 

How I changed my mind (Same Difference 1990) 

In the footnote 3 for Chapter 1 in Same Difference (mentioned above), where I state that I had dramatically altered my interpretation, I also offer a few reasons for the alteration: “the discovery of the 1980s that equal opportunity and justice were further apart than at first estimated, and the quite remarkable outpouring of feminist analyses in the last decade (1980s)”. The point being made here is that I had become less enamoured of an “equal rights” approach to “women’s inequality”. I had been doing my reading and had come to realize that aspiring to “equality” with men produced a limited range of desirable changes, that it was necessary to challenge the male norm not to join it. 

Onto Same Difference (1990) 

The major argument in Same Difference is that disagreements among feminists about possible reforms reflect the institutional contexts that shaped the options available. I suggest that talking about women’s sameness to or difference from men, a persistent theme in the media and some scientific research even today, mystifies what is really going on. 

A major focus in Same Difference is the shape of feminist arguments and attempting to explain their genesis. Inevitably, then, I had to reflect on the debates about the suffrage movement I had dismissed in Liberation Deferred? I pointed out how the representations of the suffrage campaign picked up the language of “sameness” and “difference”:

“Here the interpretation has been that the movement occurred in two phases, an earlier phase (1848-1890) concerned mainly with asserting women’s and men’s common humanity (the justice [or sameness]) argument, followed by a later phase (1890-1920), which emphasised women’s differences (the expediency argument)”. [Same Difference, p. 19]

I proceeded to explain why I found these debates less than useful: “Any attempt to divide the movement into “justice” or “expediency” camps, therefore, oversimplifies the historical reality” and that most suffragists “claimed equal human status at the same time as eliciting women’s particular virtues” [Same Difference, p. 20; emphasis in original].

You may now, hopefully, see that I had indeed shifted position or “changed my mind”. 

In Liberation Deferred? I had insisted that the suffrage movement did not operate in a vacuum and that, to understand the participants, we needed to understand the conditions shaping their worlds and their other reform affiliations. This is a fair enough point and probably makes Liberation Deferred? relevant in histories of the suffrage moment. 

What I forgot is that commentators (on the suffrage movement) also do not operate in a vacuum. We too need to be located historically. I had grown up as an equal rights feminist in the 1960s and these views are reflected in Liberation Deferred?. The position taken in Same Difference reflects my disappointments with an equal rights agenda and, as mentioned, the “remarkable outpouring of feminist analyses”. 

If you read Same Difference, you will notice that there is no longer an attempt to identify “legitimate” feminists. I hope it displays a greater sensitivity to the challenges involved in improving “women’s” lives. 

Locating Same Difference

Does this mean that I am completely happy with Same Difference? In fact, I would say that my position has altered yet again. As I currently embrace a non-binary view of gender relations, I could no longer comfortably refer to “sex-specific characteristics” as I do in Same Difference. I need to do more thinking on this point (a bit more self-problematisation), but I suspect there could a way to link non-binary thinking to the argument in Same Difference:

“ ‘Sameness’ and ‘difference’ in some abstract sense therefore are not in dispute. In dispute is the nature of the social arrangements which inadequately cater for the personal side of people’s lives.” [Same Difference, p. 265]

Changing my mind

The larger argument in this rather discursive entry is that changing one’s mind is a positive thing not a negative thing. It indicates a willingness to keep thinking and to keep questioning. If we accept that our theories reflect our social/political location, changing one’s mind is also inevitable. 

I have changed my mind at other times over my career. I’d be happy to share these experiences if you think it worthwhile. Please let me know if you would like further entries such as this one. Contact me at: carol.bacchi@adelaide.edu.auAll the best. Carol 

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.