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P. Taylor Webb

University of British Columbia, Educational Studies, Faculty Member

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My work examines and critiques how education rationalizes and produces ‘governable subjects’ within liberal and neo-liberal normative architectures. I have analyzed such productions by examining policies of performance and accountability, school choice and urban policy, and through emerging technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence, bioinformatics).

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Books by P. Taylor Webb

Education policy and racial biopolitics in multicultural cities

The empirical focus of this book is on the twenty-year struggle by parents and members of the Bla... more

Policy, Geophilosophy and Education

Education policy is premised on its instrumentalist approach. This instrumentalism is based on na... more Education policy is premised on its instrumentalist approach. This instrumentalism is based on narrow assumptions concerning people (the subject), decision-making (power), problem-solving (science and methodology), and knowledge (epistemology). Policy, Geophilosophy and Education reconceptualises the object, and hence, the objectives, of education policy. Specifically, the book illustrates how education policy positions and constitutes objects and subjects through emergent policy arrangements that simultaneously influence how policy is sensed, embodied, and enacted. The book examines the disciplinary and multi-disciplinary approaches to education policy analysis over the last sixty years, and reveals how policy analysis constitutes the ontologies and epistemologies of policy. In order to reconceptualise policy, Policy, Geophilosophy and Education uses ideas of spatiality, affect and problematization from the disciplines of geography and philosophy. The book problematizes case-vignettes to illustrate the complex and often paradoxical relations between neo-liberal education policy equity, and educational inequalities produced in the representational registers of race and ethnicity.

Teacher Assemblage

Critics' Choice Book Award, 2009 - American Educational Studies Association (AESA) Outstanding B... more

Papers by P. Taylor Webb

Webb Mikulan 2021 Escape Education

by P. Taylor Webb and petra mikulan

Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2021

The aim of this short paper is to identify the conditions and political possibilities to escape e... more

Anticipating education: governing habits, memories and policy-futures

The use of data to govern education is increasingly supported by the use of knowledge-based techn... more The use of data to govern education is increasingly supported by the use of knowledge-based technologies, including algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI), and tracking technologies . Governing Knowledge: Comparison, Knowledge-Based Technologies and Expertise in the Regulation of Education. New York, NY: Routledge]. 1 New forms of datafication and automation enable governments and other powerful stakeholders to draw from the past to construct images of educational futures in order to steer the present. This paper examines the competing conceptions of time and temporality that AI posits for policy and practice when used to anticipate educational futures. We argue that most educational futures are already delineated, and machinic expressions of time are the chronologies, habits, and memories that the educated subject inhabits rather than produces. If resetting educational habits and memories can be an alternative to algorithmic anticipations of education then we believe, paradoxically, that machines may help to reset them by accelerating them.

Eulogy for democratic teacher education

Policy mobilities and methodology: a proposition for inventive methods in education policy studies

by Steven Lewis, Bob Lingard, Christopher Lubienski, and P. Taylor Webb

The argument of this paper is that new methodologies associated with the emerging field of ‘polic... more The argument of this paper is that new methodologies associated with the emerging field of ‘policy mobilities’ can be applied, and are in fact required, to examine and research the networked and relational, or ‘topological’, nature of globalised education policy, which cuts across the new spaces of policymaking and new modes of global educational governance. In this paper, we examine the methodological issues pertaining to the study of the movement of policy. Informed by contemporary methodological thinking around social network analysis and the ethnographic notion of ‘following the policy’, we discuss the limitations of these approaches to adequately address presence in policy network analysis, and the problem of representing speed and intensity of policy mobility, even while these attempt to solve the problem of relationality and territoriality. We conclude that the methodologies of policy mobility are inexorably intertwined with the (constantly) changing phenomena under examination, and hence require what Lury and Wakeford describe as ‘inventive methods’.

Nial-a-pend-de-quacy-in: Teacher-becomings and the micropolitics of self-semiotics

Cartographies of Becoming in Education, 2013

Fucking teachers

Schizoanalysis is the variable analysis of the n sexes in a subject, beyond the anthropomorphic r... more Schizoanalysis is the variable analysis of the n sexes in a subject, beyond the anthropomorphic representation that society imposes on this subject, and with which it represents its own sexuality. The schizoanalytic slogan of the desiring-revolution will be first of all: to each its own sexes. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 296 Ball (2003: 221) noted that teachers exhibit 'a kind of values schizophrenia' within the performative cultures of schooling. These exhibitions occur when teachers enact pedagogical fabrications to meet measurable outputs desired by policy, whilst simultaneously attempting to maintain educational commitments that lie outside the 'capitalist axiomatic' of schooling (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 184). 1 As one teacher put it:

Faciality enactments, schools of recognition and policies of difference (in-itself)

This article discusses the idea of difference in relation to schools of recognition. The analysis... more This article discusses the idea of difference in relation to schools of recognition. The analysis is based on a three-year study that mapped the development of the Africentric Alternative School in the Toronto District School Board. Within, we review the concept of difference and juxtapose it with Gilles Deleuze’s concept of difference- in-itself as a way to think about educational policy enactments. In order to understand how difference and recognition were enacted – and enacting – we examine how the idea faciality positioned eight key people in the development of the school.

Policy scientificity 3.0

This paper examines the epistemologies and ontologies of education policy studies. Our aim is to ... more This paper examines the epistemologies and ontologies of education policy studies. Our aim is to posit a reinvigoration of policy studies to hedge against undue ossification and co-option of critical policy studies. We do so by arguing for the need to develop new concepts for policy studies using the ‘posts’ (e.g., post-structuralism and post-humanism). The paper aims to create a vocabulary and conceptual contribution to the new ways of undertaking, and new ontologies of, policy studies that are emerging as part of what we term policy scientificity 3.0.

The neo-liberal education policies of epimeleia heautou: Caring for the self in school markets

Policy intensions and the folds of the self

In this essay, P. Taylor Webb and Kalervo N. Gulson argue that educational policy is a spatial pr... more In this essay, P. Taylor Webb and Kalervo N. Gulson argue that educational policy is a spatial process and that implementation processes in particular produce crucial emergent geographies for policy research. Webb and Gulson describe how emergent geographies are produced when policy folds actors through senses and enactments of policy. The idea that policy is sensed and enacted is developed into the concept of a policy intension that extends approaches to spatial and, in particular, micropolitical analyses in policy research. Webb and Gulson conclude by discussing cartographical methods that better map the geographies of subjectivity produced through policy intensions.

'We had to hide, we're Muslim': Ambient fear, Islamic schools, and the geographies of race and religion

Over the past 30 years, there has been virulent urban politics surrounding the provision of gover... more Over the past 30 years, there has been virulent urban politics surrounding the provision of government-funded Islamic K-12 schooling in suburban southwestern Sydney, Australia. In this paper, drawing on examples of local government opposition to Islamic schools, we argue that race and religion constitute contestations of urban space around the establishment of governmentfunded Islamic schools. We argue that these particular contestations arise from the changing nature of, and historical continuities between, urban politics, education, Islamophobia and racialisation, in pre-9/11 and post-9/11 Australia. The politics surrounding Islamic schools reveals a coded urban politics that can be understood by paying attention to the ambiance of racialised-religious fears produced Á in part Á by the policies of government-funding of non-secular education.

Policy problematization

This article places Michel Foucault’s concept of problematization in relation to educational poli... more This article places Michel Foucault’s concept of problematization in relation to educational policy research. My goal is to examine a key assumption of policy related to “solving problems” through such technologies. I discuss the potential problematization has to alter conceptions of policy research; and, through this discussion, I provide a set of alternative pragmatics with which to conduct research for, and on, education policy.

'A raw, emotional thing': School choice, commodification and the racialized branding of Afrocentricity in Toronto, Canada

In this paper we contend neo-liberal education policy which supports the creation of schooling ch... more In this paper we contend neo-liberal education policy which supports the creation of schooling choices in public education systems is reshaping, conflating and branding ethnicity. We make these points in reference to school choice in Toronto, Canada, and the establishment of an Africentric ethno-centric school. We argue that one of the registers within which education and ethnicity in Toronto operates relates to the conflation of commodification, ethnicity and geography, and that this conflation indicates one of the limits of school choice as a possible way to redress Black student disadvantage. We suggest education policy, which enables the establishment of ethno-centric schools, enters the realm of other debates about race, equity and difference that include the practices of marketing and branding.

Education policy racialisations: Afrocentric schools, Islamic schools, and the new enunciations of equity

This paper draws on ideas of assemblage to examine the contingency and (in)coherence of education... more This paper draws on ideas of assemblage to examine the contingency and (in)coherence of education policy. The paper is a conceptual and thematic attempt to understand the policy terrain, broadly conceived, pertaining to opposition to the establishment of private Islamic schools in Australia and public Afrocentric schools in Canada. This opposition is located within complex policy terrains relating to multiculturalism, whiteness and race/racism. The paper focuses on the complex racialised politics surrounding education policy initiatives that support marketisation and choice in private and public K-12 schooling – with an interest in what forms of choice are legitimated in and by a racialised education market. The paper concludes that opposition to Islamic and Afrocentric schooling highlights the ambiguity of equity, and the fragility of identity in racialised education policy environments.

Policy prolepsis in education: Encounters, becomings, and phantasms

We argue that the concept of a policy prolepsis is a category of becoming-policy that actualizes ... more We argue that the concept of a policy prolepsis is a category of becoming-policy that actualizes educational practices within spaces of desired policy initiatives and implementations. Policy prolepses represent a range of emergent policy ontologies produced through the interface of educational actors’ senses of policy and their estimations of possible outcomes. We use Deleuze's (1990) logic of sense to argue that becoming-policy occurs in a pre-conscious space, and that this space is produced politically and used strategically for desired, yet ostensibly unformed, policy outcomes. Educational policy, then, is an ontological activity representing a myriad of policy outcomes through the management of semiotic desires and actors’ inferences about these persuasive signs. The paper illustrates the practical idea of policy prolepsis by demonstrating how policy apparitions use fear in becoming-policy. Policy apparitions, then, are just one species of policy prolepses that utilize the affect of fear to manipulate educational actors’ interpretations.

Education policy as proto-fascism: The aesthetics of racial neo-liberalism

We argue that neo-liberal educational policy has emerged as a proto-fascist governmentality . Thi... more We argue that neo-liberal educational policy has emerged as a proto-fascist governmentality . This contemporary technology relies on State racisms and racial orderings manifested from earlier liberal and neo-liberal practices of biopower . As a proto-fascist technology, education policy, and school choice policies in particular, operate within a racial aesthetics that connects ultra-nationalisms with microfascisms of racialized bodies . We discuss historical examples of liberal school segregation and residential schools in relation to contemporary examples of chartered ethnic-identity schools to illustrate the complexities of proto-fascist education policy .

The evolution of accountability

Education policy and racial biopolitics in multicultural cities

The empirical focus of this book is on the twenty-year struggle by parents and members of the Bla... more

Policy, Geophilosophy and Education

Education policy is premised on its instrumentalist approach. This instrumentalism is based on na... more Education policy is premised on its instrumentalist approach. This instrumentalism is based on narrow assumptions concerning people (the subject), decision-making (power), problem-solving (science and methodology), and knowledge (epistemology). Policy, Geophilosophy and Education reconceptualises the object, and hence, the objectives, of education policy. Specifically, the book illustrates how education policy positions and constitutes objects and subjects through emergent policy arrangements that simultaneously influence how policy is sensed, embodied, and enacted. The book examines the disciplinary and multi-disciplinary approaches to education policy analysis over the last sixty years, and reveals how policy analysis constitutes the ontologies and epistemologies of policy. In order to reconceptualise policy, Policy, Geophilosophy and Education uses ideas of spatiality, affect and problematization from the disciplines of geography and philosophy. The book problematizes case-vignettes to illustrate the complex and often paradoxical relations between neo-liberal education policy equity, and educational inequalities produced in the representational registers of race and ethnicity.

Teacher Assemblage

Critics' Choice Book Award, 2009 - American Educational Studies Association (AESA) Outstanding B... more

Webb Mikulan 2021 Escape Education

by P. Taylor Webb and petra mikulan

Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2021

The aim of this short paper is to identify the conditions and political possibilities to escape e... more

Anticipating education: governing habits, memories and policy-futures

The use of data to govern education is increasingly supported by the use of knowledge-based techn... more The use of data to govern education is increasingly supported by the use of knowledge-based technologies, including algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI), and tracking technologies . Governing Knowledge: Comparison, Knowledge-Based Technologies and Expertise in the Regulation of Education. New York, NY: Routledge]. 1 New forms of datafication and automation enable governments and other powerful stakeholders to draw from the past to construct images of educational futures in order to steer the present. This paper examines the competing conceptions of time and temporality that AI posits for policy and practice when used to anticipate educational futures. We argue that most educational futures are already delineated, and machinic expressions of time are the chronologies, habits, and memories that the educated subject inhabits rather than produces. If resetting educational habits and memories can be an alternative to algorithmic anticipations of education then we believe, paradoxically, that machines may help to reset them by accelerating them.

Eulogy for democratic teacher education

Policy mobilities and methodology: a proposition for inventive methods in education policy studies

by Steven Lewis, Bob Lingard, Christopher Lubienski, and P. Taylor Webb

The argument of this paper is that new methodologies associated with the emerging field of ‘polic... more The argument of this paper is that new methodologies associated with the emerging field of ‘policy mobilities’ can be applied, and are in fact required, to examine and research the networked and relational, or ‘topological’, nature of globalised education policy, which cuts across the new spaces of policymaking and new modes of global educational governance. In this paper, we examine the methodological issues pertaining to the study of the movement of policy. Informed by contemporary methodological thinking around social network analysis and the ethnographic notion of ‘following the policy’, we discuss the limitations of these approaches to adequately address presence in policy network analysis, and the problem of representing speed and intensity of policy mobility, even while these attempt to solve the problem of relationality and territoriality. We conclude that the methodologies of policy mobility are inexorably intertwined with the (constantly) changing phenomena under examination, and hence require what Lury and Wakeford describe as ‘inventive methods’.

Nial-a-pend-de-quacy-in: Teacher-becomings and the micropolitics of self-semiotics

Cartographies of Becoming in Education, 2013

Fucking teachers

Schizoanalysis is the variable analysis of the n sexes in a subject, beyond the anthropomorphic r... more Schizoanalysis is the variable analysis of the n sexes in a subject, beyond the anthropomorphic representation that society imposes on this subject, and with which it represents its own sexuality. The schizoanalytic slogan of the desiring-revolution will be first of all: to each its own sexes. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 296 Ball (2003: 221) noted that teachers exhibit 'a kind of values schizophrenia' within the performative cultures of schooling. These exhibitions occur when teachers enact pedagogical fabrications to meet measurable outputs desired by policy, whilst simultaneously attempting to maintain educational commitments that lie outside the 'capitalist axiomatic' of schooling (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 184). 1 As one teacher put it:

Faciality enactments, schools of recognition and policies of difference (in-itself)

This article discusses the idea of difference in relation to schools of recognition. The analysis... more This article discusses the idea of difference in relation to schools of recognition. The analysis is based on a three-year study that mapped the development of the Africentric Alternative School in the Toronto District School Board. Within, we review the concept of difference and juxtapose it with Gilles Deleuze’s concept of difference- in-itself as a way to think about educational policy enactments. In order to understand how difference and recognition were enacted – and enacting – we examine how the idea faciality positioned eight key people in the development of the school.

Policy scientificity 3.0

This paper examines the epistemologies and ontologies of education policy studies. Our aim is to ... more This paper examines the epistemologies and ontologies of education policy studies. Our aim is to posit a reinvigoration of policy studies to hedge against undue ossification and co-option of critical policy studies. We do so by arguing for the need to develop new concepts for policy studies using the ‘posts’ (e.g., post-structuralism and post-humanism). The paper aims to create a vocabulary and conceptual contribution to the new ways of undertaking, and new ontologies of, policy studies that are emerging as part of what we term policy scientificity 3.0.

The neo-liberal education policies of epimeleia heautou: Caring for the self in school markets

Policy intensions and the folds of the self

In this essay, P. Taylor Webb and Kalervo N. Gulson argue that educational policy is a spatial pr... more In this essay, P. Taylor Webb and Kalervo N. Gulson argue that educational policy is a spatial process and that implementation processes in particular produce crucial emergent geographies for policy research. Webb and Gulson describe how emergent geographies are produced when policy folds actors through senses and enactments of policy. The idea that policy is sensed and enacted is developed into the concept of a policy intension that extends approaches to spatial and, in particular, micropolitical analyses in policy research. Webb and Gulson conclude by discussing cartographical methods that better map the geographies of subjectivity produced through policy intensions.

'We had to hide, we're Muslim': Ambient fear, Islamic schools, and the geographies of race and religion

Over the past 30 years, there has been virulent urban politics surrounding the provision of gover... more Over the past 30 years, there has been virulent urban politics surrounding the provision of government-funded Islamic K-12 schooling in suburban southwestern Sydney, Australia. In this paper, drawing on examples of local government opposition to Islamic schools, we argue that race and religion constitute contestations of urban space around the establishment of governmentfunded Islamic schools. We argue that these particular contestations arise from the changing nature of, and historical continuities between, urban politics, education, Islamophobia and racialisation, in pre-9/11 and post-9/11 Australia. The politics surrounding Islamic schools reveals a coded urban politics that can be understood by paying attention to the ambiance of racialised-religious fears produced Á in part Á by the policies of government-funding of non-secular education.

Policy problematization

This article places Michel Foucault’s concept of problematization in relation to educational poli... more This article places Michel Foucault’s concept of problematization in relation to educational policy research. My goal is to examine a key assumption of policy related to “solving problems” through such technologies. I discuss the potential problematization has to alter conceptions of policy research; and, through this discussion, I provide a set of alternative pragmatics with which to conduct research for, and on, education policy.

'A raw, emotional thing': School choice, commodification and the racialized branding of Afrocentricity in Toronto, Canada

In this paper we contend neo-liberal education policy which supports the creation of schooling ch... more In this paper we contend neo-liberal education policy which supports the creation of schooling choices in public education systems is reshaping, conflating and branding ethnicity. We make these points in reference to school choice in Toronto, Canada, and the establishment of an Africentric ethno-centric school. We argue that one of the registers within which education and ethnicity in Toronto operates relates to the conflation of commodification, ethnicity and geography, and that this conflation indicates one of the limits of school choice as a possible way to redress Black student disadvantage. We suggest education policy, which enables the establishment of ethno-centric schools, enters the realm of other debates about race, equity and difference that include the practices of marketing and branding.

Education policy racialisations: Afrocentric schools, Islamic schools, and the new enunciations of equity

This paper draws on ideas of assemblage to examine the contingency and (in)coherence of education... more This paper draws on ideas of assemblage to examine the contingency and (in)coherence of education policy. The paper is a conceptual and thematic attempt to understand the policy terrain, broadly conceived, pertaining to opposition to the establishment of private Islamic schools in Australia and public Afrocentric schools in Canada. This opposition is located within complex policy terrains relating to multiculturalism, whiteness and race/racism. The paper focuses on the complex racialised politics surrounding education policy initiatives that support marketisation and choice in private and public K-12 schooling – with an interest in what forms of choice are legitimated in and by a racialised education market. The paper concludes that opposition to Islamic and Afrocentric schooling highlights the ambiguity of equity, and the fragility of identity in racialised education policy environments.

Policy prolepsis in education: Encounters, becomings, and phantasms

We argue that the concept of a policy prolepsis is a category of becoming-policy that actualizes ... more We argue that the concept of a policy prolepsis is a category of becoming-policy that actualizes educational practices within spaces of desired policy initiatives and implementations. Policy prolepses represent a range of emergent policy ontologies produced through the interface of educational actors’ senses of policy and their estimations of possible outcomes. We use Deleuze's (1990) logic of sense to argue that becoming-policy occurs in a pre-conscious space, and that this space is produced politically and used strategically for desired, yet ostensibly unformed, policy outcomes. Educational policy, then, is an ontological activity representing a myriad of policy outcomes through the management of semiotic desires and actors’ inferences about these persuasive signs. The paper illustrates the practical idea of policy prolepsis by demonstrating how policy apparitions use fear in becoming-policy. Policy apparitions, then, are just one species of policy prolepses that utilize the affect of fear to manipulate educational actors’ interpretations.

Education policy as proto-fascism: The aesthetics of racial neo-liberalism

We argue that neo-liberal educational policy has emerged as a proto-fascist governmentality . Thi... more We argue that neo-liberal educational policy has emerged as a proto-fascist governmentality . This contemporary technology relies on State racisms and racial orderings manifested from earlier liberal and neo-liberal practices of biopower . As a proto-fascist technology, education policy, and school choice policies in particular, operate within a racial aesthetics that connects ultra-nationalisms with microfascisms of racialized bodies . We discuss historical examples of liberal school segregation and residential schools in relation to contemporary examples of chartered ethnic-identity schools to illustrate the complexities of proto-fascist education policy .

The evolution of accountability

Preparing teachers for the neoliberal panopticon

by P. Taylor Webb and Felecia Briscoe

Re-mapping power in educational micropolitics

Accounting for teacher knowledge: Reterritorializations as epistemic suicide