Educational policy-making in post-communist Ukraine as an example of emerging governmentality: discourse analysis of curriculum choice and assessment policy documents (1999-2003)

Educational policy-making in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) is still building upon the ambivalences and uncertainties of post-communist transformation. The international support, expertise and discourses - coupled with communist legacies, stalled democratic developments and national discourses - produce unique effects on education in each of these countries. This paper is an attempt to conceptualise educational policy-making (with its disparities between 'democratised' discourses and 'Sovietised' practices) as a form of emerging governmentality or governmentality-in-the-making on the level of the state, using Ukraine as a case study. Analysing policy-making through the perspective of emerging governmentality brings into focus the genealogy of post-independent reforms, which is (as a part of the technologies of government) threaded into a broader governmental project of restructuring the state and legitimising its rationality. The final empirical part of the paper presents a discourse analysis of selected curriculum choice and assessment policy documents (1999-2003) and embedded in them the complex interplay of internal and external discourses, which work together to construct and justify the emerging governmental rationality of post-communist Ukraine.

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Educational policy-making in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) is still building upon the ambivalences and uncertainties of post-communist transformation. The international support, expertise and discourses - coupled with communist legacies, stalled democratic developments and national discourses - produce unique effects on education in each of these countries. This paper is an attempt to conceptualise educational policy-making (with its disparities between 'democratised' discourses and 'Sovietised' practices) as a form of emerging governmentality or ...  [+] Show more