Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive of over 1,500 titles.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
This chapter examines the shooting deaths of several young Black men from 1988-2007 and how these deaths produced a spectrum of affects for those working to develop the school. This affective spectrum would coalesce with other feelings of empowerment and safety produced by the governing and patterned sequences of neoliberalism and biopolitics. The shootings accelerated the becoming of the school, and specifically, how the school settled into an established array of dispositifs concerned with recognition, difference, and safety. The chapter maps the policy landscape that used and perpetuated these specific dispositifs, largely products of anti-racist literatures. The second half of the chapter maps how Toronto District School Board Trustees used - and were used by - these dispositifs. The chapter concludes with showing how Trustees altered anti-racist dispositifs in favour of the ascendent logics of economic and educational choice. Trustees were simultaneously constituted by the ensemble of anti-racist dispositifs but in ways that accommodated and reinforced the policy mechanisms of educational choice and neoliberal ideas of freedom, understood as unfettered access to (quasi) educational markets.
The empirical focus of this book is on the twenty year struggle by parents and members of the Black community in Toronto to introduce an Africentric Alternative School (AAS) with Black-focused curricula.
It brings together a seemingly disparate series of events that emerged from equity and multicultural narratives about the establishment of the school – violence, anti-racism and race-based statistics, policy entrepreneurs, and the re-birth of alternative schools in Toronto - to illustrate how these events ostensibly functioned through neoliberal choice mechanisms and practices.
Gulson and Webb show how school choice can represent and manifest the hopes and fears, contestations and settlements of contemporary racial biopolitics of education in multicultural cities.
The chapter provides readers with a brief background to the study, including an orientation to the theoretical and methodological approaches used in the research. The chapter outlines how the book is organized, including brief introductions to each of the six chapters that comprise the book. The chapter concludes by informing readers about the purpose of each subtext that accompanies each chapter, and the reasons for reflecting and problematizing each chapter.
This chapter maps the event of the alternative school policy of the Toronto School Board District understood as neoliberalism, and specifically racial neoliberalism. This analysis asserts how power and force operate within educational equity attempts and illustrates the necessary but insufficient attempts at educational equity that rely solely on moral and epistemological, including statistical, arguments. The chapter focuses on the material and ontological aspects of the policy environment affecting the event. The spatial and temporal analysis of this chapter underscores how objects and subjects easily interchange positions depending on the location of the analysis, including how (1) policy ‘activists’ simultaneously are policy ‘subjects’; (2) school mission statements are simultaneously efforts to develop a brand within quasi educational markets; (3) discourses of parental choice are conflated into contradictory discourses of educational entrepreneurialism and equity and, (4) moral statements against racism are erased through pressures to maintain the dominant policies and practices of colourblind (neoliberal) multiculturalism.
This chapter connects race-based violence, ideas of counting and race-based statistics, with ideas about racial biopolitics. The focus is on two events. The first is a 2008 a report into school safety, the Falconer Report, which urged for the use of ‘race-based statistics’ in the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), which reignited the overall move towards Black-focused schooling. We connect this report, and its plea to use race-based statistics in discipline related incidents in schooling, to racial profiling and policing in Toronto in the early 2000s. The chapter concludes with the TDSB decision in 2004-5, to collect race-based statistics, as a second policy event that preceded the Falconer Report.
The first chapter introduces and discusses the theoretical choices of the book. The chapter introduces how education policy can be thought of in ways consistent with the philosophical and historical ideas of an event. Through the idea of an event, the chapter discusses the ideas of race and racism, recognition and representation, cities and neoliberalism, biopolitics, and eventalisation.
The final chapter concludes the book by examining some of the effects of problematizing ideas of race, racism, equity and so forth, and explicitly takes on the challenges that emerge when education policy is constituted by contradiction, incompleteness, and indeterminacy. The chapter revisits the key concepts of the book (events, biopolitics, race, cities, neoliberalism, difference) and places them within variegated histories of inequality and what alternatives policy scholars might consider in relation to these histories, and potential futures.
This chapter examines the event of finding a location for the school, and examine the connections between the ways in which the city was (and is) racialized and undergoing urban change around gentrification and the rebranding of neighbourhoods. The question about ‘where to put the Black school in the White city’ would produce strong feelings across Toronto given its long and troubled histories with placements of non-White populations (and in relation to each other). The argument within is based upon the idea that the question of location affected the entire process of the becoming of the school rather than just at the ‘end’ of a rational and sequential process. That is, the question ‘haunted’ Trustees and community members prior to any governance and policy-development activities designed to produce the school.
This chapter provides a summary of the central conclusions of the book. It begins by discussing the lessons of the analysis for the question of managing the global mobility of students, and it discusses in summative form the main findings of the work. The central themes are exposed afresh for the purpose of rounding the discussion off.
Having discussed the Australian and Zealand models of international student welfare regulation respectively in the two previous chapters, this chapter conducts a comparative analysis of the two national cases. The comparison is in terms of the formal regime in each country as well as the impact of that regime on the ground in terms of student welfare, analysed principally through review of formal and informal regulation in interviewee feedback. The context for the Australia-New Zealand discussion is set by a comprehensive review early on in the chapter of ‘the comparative evolution of welfare’ in the two countries. The comparative politics and policy literatures are harnessed to shed light on the findings of the chapter and the book more generally.
