Advanced neoliberal governance and Australian rural higher education
Article Sidebar
Main Article Content
Abstract
This paper adopts the concept of governmentality to understand a form of power at play within recent policymaking practices relating to rural higher education in Australia. While commonly constructed in terms of equity and the basic rights and opportunities of the Australian population, equity of access to higher education for regional, rural and remote (RRR) communities is one designed from its outset in relation to a broader set of national governance issues. In this work we argue that rural higher education is constructed as part of the solution to a broader problem – that of economic governance. We show how particular forms of reason built into modern approaches to governing work to obliterate difference, and we argue that RRR provision of higher education has become mired within the tensions and contradictions of competing problems of governance and economic interests. The final sections of the paper look to recent moments in Australian higher education policymaking whereby statistical indicators are gathered by consultants to identify ‘need’ and ‘readiness’, and we make the case that these sorts of processes, divorced as they are from local knowledges, can help to re-embed the ongoing creation of marginalisation in RRR communities. We close the paper arguing that a genuinely rural higher education requires different imaginations than those in train now, built instead through ethical recognition and inclusion of marginalised rural people within their own modes of governance, and with greater autonomy over the conditions by which rural higher education is constructed and enacted.
Article Details
References
Bacchi, C 2009, Analysing policy: What’s the problem represented to be?, Pearson Education.
Brynin, M 2012, ‘Individual choice and risk: The case of higher education’, Sociology, vol. 47, no. 2, pp. 284–300.
Bunn, M 2021, ‘Writing representations to life: Higher education and the production of equity realities’, Access: Critical explorations of equity in higher education, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 10–21.
Bunn, M, Threadgold, S & Burke, P 2020, ‘Class in Australian higher education: The university as a site of social reproduction’, Journal of Sociology, vol. 56, no. 3, pp. 422–438.
Corbett, M & Forsey, M 2017, ‘Rural out-migration and education: challenges to aspirations discourse in mobile modernity’, Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education, vol. 38, no. 3, pp. 429–444.
Dawkins, JS & Kerin, JC 1989, A fair go: the federal government’s strategy for rural education and training, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra.
Deloitte Access Economics (DAE) 2021, Informing future locations for Regional University Centres: Companion report to the Regional Needs Model/Dashboard and Regional Readiness Factsheets, Department of Education, Skills and Employment, Canberra.
Department of Employment, Education and Training (DEET) 1990, A fair chance for all: national and institutional planning for equity in higher education: a discussion paper, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra.
Department of Education, Skills and Employment (DESE) 2019, National Regional, Rural and Remote Tertiary Education Strategy: final report. Retrieved from: https://apo.org.au/node/309427
Department of Education, Skills and Employment (DESE) 2020, Independent Review into Regional, Rural and Remote Education. Retrieved from: https://www.dese.gov.au/quality-schools-package/independent-review-regional-rural-and-remote-education
Foucault, M 1991, ‘Governmentality’, in G Burchell, C Gordon & P Miller (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Harvester Wheatsheaf, pp. 87–104.
Fraser, N 2013, Fortunes of Feminism: From State Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis, Verso Books.
Gale, T & Tranter, D 2011, ‘Social justice in Australian higher education policy: an historical and conceptual account of student participation’, Critical studies in higher education, vol. 52, no. 1, pp. 29–46.
Halsey, J 2017, Independent Review into Regional Rural and Remote Education – Discussion Paper, Department of Education and Training, Canberra.
Halsey, J 2018, Independent Review into Regional, Rural and Remote Education, Department of Education and Training, Canberra.
James, R, Wyn, J, Baldwin, G, Hepworth, G, McInnis, C & Stephanou, A 1999, Rural and Isolated School Students and their Higher Education Choices. A re-examination of student location, socioeconomic background, and educational advantage and disadvantage, National Board of Employment, Education and Training Higher Education Council, Canberra.
Liepins, R 2000, ‘Exploring rurality through “community”: Discourses, practices and spaces shaping Australian and New Zealand rural “communities”’, Journal of Rural Studies, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 325–341.
Lim, P & Gemici, S 2011, Measuring the socioeconomic status of Australian youth, National Centre for Vocational Education Research.
Lockie, S Lawrence, G & Cheshire, L 2006, ‘Reconfiguring rural resource governance: The legacy of neo-liberalism in Australia’, in P Cloke, T Marsden & P Mooney (eds.), The handbook of rural studies, SAGE, London, pp. 29–43.
Marginson, S & Considine, M 2000, The Enterprise University: Power, Governance and Reinvention in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Oliveira, IB 2017, Boaventura and education, Sense Publishers, Boston.
Ozga, J 2021, ‘Problematising policy: the development of (critical) policy sociology’, Critical Studies in Education, vol. 62, no. 3, pp. 290–305, doi: 10.1080/17508487.2019.1697718
Pini, B & Leach, B 2011, ‘Transformations of class and gender in the globalised countryside: an introduction’, in B Leach & B Pini (eds.), Reshaping gender and class in rural spaces, Ashgate, Aldershot, pp. 1–23.
Pini, B & Mayes, R 2015, ‘Australian rural education research: A geographical perspective’, Australian and International Journal of Rural Education, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 26–35.
Pini B, Mayes, R & Rodriguez Castro, LR 2017, ‘Introduction: beyond stock photographs – imagining, experiencing, and researching rural education’, Discourse: Studies in the cultural politics of education, vol. 38, no. 3, pp. 321–327.
Pini B, Rodriguez Castro, L & Mayes, R 2022, ‘An agenda for Australian rural sociology: Troubling the white middle-class farming woman’, Journal of Sociology, vol. 58, no. 2, pp. 253–269.
Pomeroy, A 2022, ‘Reframing the rural experience in Aotearoa New Zealand: Incorporating the voices of the marginalised’, Journal of Sociology, vol. 58, no. 2, pp. 236–252.
Rabinow, P & Rose, N 2003, Foucault Today, in The Essential Foucault: Selections from The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, New Press, New York.
Rodriguez Castro, L & Pini, B 2022, ‘The “white middle-class farming woman”: Instagram and settler colonialism in contemporary rural Australia’, Journal of Rural Studies, vol. 94, pp. 83–90.
Rose, N & Miller, P 1992, ‘Political Power beyond the State: Problematics of Government’, The British Journal of Sociology, vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 173–205, doi:10.2307/591464
Santos, B 2014, Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide, Routledge.
Savage, GC, Gerrard, J, Gale, T & Molla, T 2021, ‘The politics of critical policy sociology: mobilities, moorings and elite networks’, Critical Studies in Education, vol. 62, no. 3, pp. 306–321, doi:10.1080/17508487.2021.1878467
Shore, C & Roberts, S 1993, ‘Higher Education and the Panopticon Paradigm: Quality Assessment as “Disciplinary Technology”’, Proceedings of the Society for Research into Higher Education Conference, Brighton December 14–16 1993. Retrieved from: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED368243.pdf
Sierk, J 2017, ‘Redefining rurality: cosmopolitanism, whiteness and the New Latino Diaspora’, Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education, vol. 38, no. 3, pp. 342–353.
Slaughter, S & Rhoades, G 2004, Academic Capitalism and the New Economy, Johns Hopkins University Press, London.
Threadgold, S, Burke, PJ & Bunn, M 2018, Struggles and Strategies: Does social class matter in Higher Education, Report prepared for the Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher Education, University of Newcastle, Australia.
Wacquant, L 2022, The invention of the ‘underclass’: a study in the politics of knowledge, Polity Press, Cambridge.
Woods, M 2011, Rural, Routledge, New York.