Inspection and the fabrication of professional and performative processes

This paper is about the issue of the performance of inspection. Based on research conducted in an English secondary school in the years following its time under Special Measures, I discuss the idea that during an inspection the school becomes focussed around performing for inspection. I discuss performance theory here as well as notions of performativity. I set the scene with middle and senior managers' recollections of life under Special Measures, in effect the time in which they learnt to perform. I then use data from time spent in the school before and during the school's OfSTED inspection, and discuss inspection as performance.     

Anxiety of performativity and anxiety of performance: self-evaluation as bad faith

ABSTRACT

Self-evaluation, a devolved, rigorous form of teacher inspection, has increasingly been promoted in educational circles as a way to balance both teacher autonomy and accountability. Such balancing acts help to alleviate anxiety around inspection, for the teacher who would otherwise face a visit from an inspector, and for the public who are concerned about self-evaluation being less objective. Using the Irish policy of self-evaluation, this paper will first explore the evidence-based approaches and the appropriation of a ‘language of evaluation’ that are inherent to so-called low-stakes accountability systems. In part, such mechanisms are used in order to alleviate anxiety. The anxiety that self-evaluation focuses on, however, corresponds only to aspects of teaching that are conducive to measurement, and therefore refers solely to what may be called an anxiety of performativity. Furthermore, its attempts to repress an anxiety of performativity ironically fails to acknowledge a more fundamental form of anxiety that teaching as a ‘performance’ involves. Using Sartre’s idea of ‘bad faith’, this paper will ultimately argue that teaching inevitably involves an element of anxiety that should not be repressed but rather should be lived and worked with well, something which self-evaluation in its current form fails to capture.     

Unravelling Data Journalism

The centrality of data in modern society has prompted a need to examine the increasingly powerful role of data brokers and their efforts to quantify the world. Practices and methods such as surveillance, biometrics, automation, data creeping, or profiling consumer behaviour, all offer opportunities and challenges to news reporting. Nonetheless, as most professional journalists display a degree of hesitancy towards numbers and computational literacy, there are only limited means to investigate the power dynamics underpinning data. This article discusses the extent to which current data journalism practices in the United Kingdom employ databases and algorithms as a means of holding data organisations accountable. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with data journalists, data editors, and news managers working for British mainstream media, the study looks at how data journalism operates within the news cycle of professional newsrooms in the United Kingdom. Additionally, it examines the innovations data journalism brings to storytelling, newsgathering, and the dissemination of news.     

Documenting financial performativity: film aesthetics and financial crisis

Marc Bauder’s finance film, Master of the Universe (2013) won the European Documentary Film Prize in December 2014. Bauder’s film focuses on a series on interviews with a former leading investment banker, Rainer Voss, high up in one of Frankfurt’s deserted bank skyscrapers. Voss’s statements, set against the skyline of Frankfurt’s ‘Mainhattan’ financial sector, allow Bauder to constitute an aesthetic that, I argue, successfully addresses a key problem in moving image studies, namely how to find an appropriate film form to register the workings of contemporary finance. Bauder’s film offers an unusual depiction of the self-constitution and self-understanding of a banker-turned-whistleblower, focusing on Voss’s speech acts of explication and justification. Drawing on Judith Butler’s analysis of performative agency and of the separation of economics and politics through iterative perlocutionary acts, I argue that Bauder’s investigation into the performativity that establishes the autonomy of the financial sector and grants it extensive social power offers a significant aesthetic engagement with financial performativity and contributes to debates about documentary and performativity and about routes to a reconnection of economics and politics.     

Classification and framing of interviews in ethnographic interviewing

Based on interviews with prominent ethnographers, this paper describes some of the diversity of forms of interview that are conducted by ethnographers in the field. It is suggested that there is utility in using the concepts of classification and framing to describe some of the differences in the nature and process of carrying out ethnographic interviews.     

‘I think I would have learnt more if they had tried to teach us more’ – performativity,learning and identities in a Swedish Transport Programme

This study is based on an ethnography that was carried out in the Transport Programme (TP) in a Swedish upper secondary school (in this paper referred to as Rockmeadows High). The research is part of a larger project focusing on discourses on Intelligence in Swedish upper secondary school, and how these are produced and used in different educational contexts. The title of the article quotes Emily, a hardworking and high-achieving TP student. Emily is disappointed that the academic courses much of the time operate on a rote level, and that teachers’ expectations on the students in the programme generally are quite low. The present study also indicates, in line with several studies of vocational education in Sweden, that academic courses in vocational programmes often seem to provide scarce opportunity for theoretical learning and higher order thinking. Others suggest that the vocational courses present better conditions for such learning. The present article explores learning and instruction in different subjects and the conditions that are structuring them. It discusses the possibility that performativity pressure is one of the structuring forces. ‘Performativity’ is used here to refer to the notion that individuals and systems are valued based on their measured performances in regard to standards, and identified by those standards. Thus ascribed values become ends in themselves and render the use value of knowledge subordinate to the exchange value. This means that not only knowledge but also the pedagogical interaction and relationships become commodified. This is exactly what happens when new managerialism and economic rationality are imposed on the education system, as it has been throughout the Western world in the last decades. Swedish educational policy has gone far down this road, focusing measurable outcomes, individual choice and competition on all levels as means for quality. Still, not all spheres of education are dominated by the economistic rationality, as this articles aims to demonstrate and discuss.     

Speaking ‘over’ performativity

In a time where standards and accountability override trust in teachers and principals, mandated versions of pedagogy have recently appeared in the Australian landscape. This article critiques one pedagogical reform initiative and suggests that in performative times, it may be preferable for principals and teachers to speak ‘over’ reform than to speak ‘back’ to it. While reference to competency standards increasingly replaces discussion about professionalism, the argument is developed here that key elements of professionalism include trust, agency, identity and judgement, which are excluded from the standards discourse. The article proposes that the tenuous hold teachers have on professionalism might be strengthened by critical school leaders adept at navigating their way around performative demands and who encourage teachers to speak ‘over’ codes about appropriate behaviour to instead explore what it means to be a teacher professional.     

Kindness in pedagogical practice and academic life

The paper presents the argument that kindness in teaching is both commonplace yet unremarked and that, moreover, it is subversive of neo‐liberal values. In arguing for the value of attending to kindness, we reject the dichotomy between emotion and reason and the associated gendered binaries. We distinguish kindness from ‘due care’ and acts that are required of professionals, and instead locate it philosophically in personal values and with a concern for lay normativity. We illustrate our claims for the pervasiveness of kindness through a re‐reading of student data from an earlier study. These data are used to elaborate the concept. We conclude by suggesting that what is subversive in thinking about higher education practice through the lens of kindness is that it cannot be regulated or prescribed.     

Financial performativity as evidence of immanence: the phenomenology of liquidity crisis in contemporary markets for risk

The sociologist Bruno Latour has often expressed aversion to immanent critique, framing actor-network theory in terms of focus on visible phenomena. In spite of this, research on financial performativity inspired by Latour’s perspective can still be interpreted in terms of immanent critique and related to Political Economy (a critical discipline), through Kant’s critique of metaphysics as a ‘regulative axiom’. Research on financial performativity has uncovered evidence of the existence of constructive processes that show how an idea (like a financial model) can become something like an ‘object’. This ‘objectivity’ appears to contradict Kant’s critique of metaphysics – that there always remains a gap between our ideas and the world itself. This paper therefore explores financial performativity as a ‘contradiction’, historicizing it to argue that ‘Barnesian performativity’ and ‘financial liquidity’ are ‘immanent’ to one another in the events of recent financial crises. The paper conducts this interpretation to provide a new conceptualization of ‘financial liquidity’ that is more empirically apparent, helping to overcome some of the limits in the discussion of ‘liquidity’ in Political Economy (that Latour might want to highlight), where discussion occurs in metaphysical terms difficult to connect to actual events.     

Performativity and pedagogising knowledge: globalising educational policy formation,dissemination and enactment

Critical policy scholars have increasingly turned their attention to: (1) the work of policy actors engaged in globalised and globalising processes of policy formation, (2) the global flows or movements of education policies across multifaceted, hybrid networks of public–private agencies, and (3) the complex politics of global–national policy translation and enactment in local school contexts. Scholars have emphasised firstly, the economic turn in education reform policies, a shift from a social democratic education orientation and secondly, policy convergence towards a dominant neoliberal political agenda. This paper suggests that Bernstein’s concepts of the totally pedagogised society (TPS) and the pedagogic device, as the ensemble of rules for the production, recontextualisation and evaluation of pedagogic discourses may add to this corpus of critical policy scholarship. It does this by firstly reviewing the take up of Bernstein’s concept of the TPS in the critical policy sociology literature, arguing that this interpretation presents a largely dystopian account of globalising educational policies. In contrast, the paper argues for and presents an alternative open-ended reading and projection of Bernstein’s concept of the TPS and pedagogic device for thinking about globalised processes and devices of the pedagogic communication of knowledge(s).