Politicians and scholars often frame schooling as one of society’s most important crime preventive measures. The object of the study is to examine and problematize the hopes and ambitions that have evolved around what the study conceptualizes as the crime preventive educational task of public schooling and its historical trajectory as articulated in government publications. Drawing on governmentality theory, the study focuses on the liberal conception of the autonomous and self-regulating subject, and how the liberal mode of government works through the governing of freedom. The study identifies three discourses on crime preventive education: The emancipatory (1970s onwards), the deterrence (late 1980s onwards) and the safety/security discourse (21st century). The discursive shifts identified are further analysed in respect to how i) the explanation of crime, and the relationship between the deviant and the law-abiding subject, ii) control and iii) freedom and responsibility, are conceptualized over time. The conceptualization of criminal behaviour goes from being caused by social deprivation, becoming instead a calculated rational act. Subsequently, the deviant is altered from a person in need of reintegration to a deterrent example and a risk. The problematization of control has a trajectory from being a matter of social control and integration, ending instead as a matter of risk control and prudentialism. The conceptualization of the kind of freedom and responsibility the crime preventive education should foster is also reframed, from a strategy to counter a lack of democracy and influence, to a way of making prudent citizens. In this, the notion of a collective responsibility has been superseded by a belief in individual responsibility. The key problematization vindicating the process has gone from how to integrate youths into a society in constant flux, to how to restore control if lost and how to protect a pre-given social order.

This thesis explores elementary schools’ homework practices on Prince Edward Island. I employ a feminist perspective that incorporates Foucault’s concept of governmentality (Foucault, 1991a) to examine homework as a ‘site’ where institutions (family and school) interact and power circulates. I focus on the ways in which the daily lives and subjectivities of mothers, and to a lesser extent teachers, are organized and regulated in the process of making homework work. I assembled and analyzed reports and policies related to education reform, parental involvement and homework. I draw on Foucault’s approach to genealogy (Foucault, 1984) to examine how homework has been established in these texts as a ‘good’ educational practice for young students, in spite of its dubious effects on educational achievement. Mothers and teachers are explicitly and implicitly addressed in education policy and practice as primary agents for the accomplishment of homework. Following qualitative research methodology, I conducted twenty in-depth interviews with mothers and teachers of elementary aged students. These mothers and teachers often have ambivalent feelings about homework, sharing frustrations about its effects on family time and relations and doubting its value for children. At the same time, ‘doing homework’ was closely linked to being a ‘good mother.’ Thus, my analysis draws attention to the complex ways that homework and parental involvement discourses work on and through people, to produce particular kinds of experiences and feelings. While homework may ‘fail’ to accomplish its professed educational aims for students, I argue that it serves to render women responsible for growing portions of educational labour. My study sheds light on the workings of power in the home/school relationship and more generally on the workings of neoliberal governance and educational reform. Modern government works through routine administration of our lives, in schools and families, and other institutions, often through persuasion, incitement and engagement rather than through explicit policy. I suggest the daily practice of homework is a concrete example of this and, extending Foucault’s analysis through feminist perspectives, I explore the unequal operation and effects of homework for those who are its main targets.

The object of this study is a program of government that has, as its immediate objective, the modification and regulation of consumer conduct deemed pertinent to climate change. Drawing from the analytical grid and conceptual tools of governmentality, this study has organized and analyzed an archive of documents related to the One-Tonne Challenge, a ‘public education’ program implemented by the Government of Canada from 2003 to 2006. There are numerous forms of conduct targeted by this program, involving many of the mundane and routine practices of everyday life. Despite their heterogeneity, the targeted forms of conduct can all be measured and evaluated according to the greenhouse gas (GHG) inventory, an ecological technology of government that has had its application extended to the ‘personal’ level. As consumers increasingly engage in practices that are energy efficient, a ‘low intensity GHG emission lifestyle’ will emerge as a new societal norm, which is declared to be the ‘ultimate strategic objective’ of the program. The analysis indentifies and describes two rationalities of government articulated within the archive of the program. Liberal principles and assumptions regarding the market economy are ascendant in practice; they delimit the range of governmental techniques that can be put into operation by the state. Nevertheless, the objectives and technologies of this program belong to an ecological rationality of government. It problematizes the liberal emphasis on ‘voluntary action’ and advances state planning of the market economy through price formation as a necessary governmental technique with which to manipulate the demand for energy and ensure that consumers become energy-efficient. The conclusion interprets and diagnoses the main dangers that could arise from the radical transformation of the market economy that would be brought about by an ecological political reason.

This thesis is an exploration of the institutional engagement between farmers and government, as well as a discourse about the development process in Ethiopia. The discussions are based on the fieldwork conducted from January 2012 to March 2012 in the eastern Ahmara region of the Dewa Chefa district (woreda). The ethnographic material will show how the public’s opinion is altered by the government and national media in terms of the discourse on development, economic growth and change of a farmer’s life. The discourses portray an unrealistic view of real, existing practices and engagements among the farmers and the agricultural bureau in the woreda. The main argument of the thesis is to show how the government's development discourses have multiple purposes that are not only attributed to the development practices and engagements, but also to the political realities and relations which exist between the government and the rural agricultural people. The thesis will explain how engagements, practices and discourses are strategized by the government and its institutions to assert power and to ensure farmers’ compliance. Also, it will explain the farmers' engagements and practices, and their strategies to deal with the development process and the government's strategies to assert power.   The theoretical framework is based on the deconstructive, or anthropological development critique. It will argue that understanding development as governmentality and discourses will be vital in discussing development as a power relationship and way of controlling others and extending government's power over its subjects. In such a view of development as nation state construction, the thesis will explain how development knowledge and discourse are reworked, reformulated and multiplied as new forms of knowledge and discourses to serve the purpose of the government in power within the nation.

In 1999, the World Bank launched the K4D initiative as part of its new development agenda. The Bank also established itself as the global development knowledge bank suggesting that these moves would yield more pro-poor development results. This thesis examines the Bank’s knowledge ventures and contends that they are part of the apparatus of advancing the Bank’s neoliberal agenda. The governmentality approach is used to argue that the knowledge ventures are a move away from the direct and interventionist mechanisms of control prominent in the earlier development agenda, but at the same time, representative of new, more subtle and indirect mechanisms of control. Furthermore, a close investigation of the literature published in connection to the knowledge ventures and the practical projects created as part of these ventures, reveals that neoliberal policies traditionally promoted by the Bank feature prominently in the propaganda surrounding the Bank’s knowledge ventures.

Den här uppsatsen analyserar relationen mellan lärares skapande av en professionell yrkesidentitet och centralt standardiserade prov- och uppföljningssystem, i syfte att skapa kunskap om politisk styrning av den svenska skolan. Studien utgår från det skolpolitiska reformarbete som sedan år 2011 resulterade i fler och tidigare nationella ämnesprov i svenska grundskolor. Uppsatsen söker synliggöra hur detta tagits emot och uppfattats av lärarna genom att undersöka om och hur det påverkat deras arbetssituation. Det empiriska material som studien grundar sig på har därför inhämtats med hjälp av kvalitativa samtalsintervjuer. För att analysera materialet har jag använt mig av tidigare forsknings teoretiska utgångspunker gällande begrepp som professionalism, läroplansteori samt governmentality. Undersökningen finner att lärarna i studien på ett gemensamt sätt identifierar kompetens, tillit och handlingsfrihet som grundläggande delar i definitionen av professionalism, och att de nationella proven på olika sätt uppfattas påverka dessa delar. Uppsatsens slutsats är därmed att de nationella proven utöver sina formulerande intentioner också kan förstås utöva en form av politisk styrning av läraryrket.

This paper sets out to conduct a critical policy analysis of the government report SOU 2017:47 with a focus on Sweden’s pursuit of equal health. This is done within a theoretical framework based mainly in governmentality theory, with a focus on governing through self-regulation. This theoretical framework identifies a need for a balance between people’s ability to problematize their behaviour (self-regulation) and their ability and capacity to act on their problematization for equal health to be possible. Due to Sweden’s pursuit for equal health the assumption is made that this balance must be absent form Swedish policies. This problem is made operationalized by searching for indications of a focus on “the individual” or “the system”.Hence the goal of this paper is to identify how and if this balance can be identified in SOU 2017:47. This is done with the method “What’s the problem represented to be?” (WPR) based on Bacci’s (2009) approach to analyse public policy. The method is structured after six questions that sets out to find and analyse how problems are represented in policies. The problem representation shows the problem of unequal health as resource based which can be solved with the help of the Swedish welfare system. The analysis shows that no balance can be identified in SOU 2017:47. Instead the results show that focus lies on various systematic changes in regards to public and welfare institutions. Therefore it can be concluded that focus lies on people’s abilities and capabilities to act and no clear balance can be identified.

This thesis provides a history of the sense of touch in modern Britain. Seeking out fugitive intimacies and incidental brushes of lover and stranger alike, it argues that far from being a natural constant, what, how, and why people touched, and what they felt when they did, has a history. Through five case studies of different domains - the mind sciences, visual impairment, public transport, law, and commercialized leisure - it explores how these uses changed, and how they transformed Britons' understandings and experiences of their bodies. Both as a practice and a metaphor, from making space on the bus to keeping 'in touch', touch established the distinctions that Britons made between their bodies and the world and themselves and others. In doing so, touch crucially shaped histories of law, labour relations, scientific experiment, education, and love in the early twentieth century. But it also reformulated the very distinctions of selfhood - distinctions of inner self and outer body, person and thing - on which our accounts of modernity are based. By tracing a history of touch, then, this thesis turns touch into a means of critique. It challenges histories of modernity for which selfhood is a substance rather than produced only through particular social relationships. But it also proposes a new way of thinking about selfhood as an immanent relationship the self has with itself through use of the body. Through historically specific ways of touching, early twentieth-century Britons shaped not only their experience of themselves as bodies, but also the boundaries defining them as selves. Their selfhood was, in short, what they did with the body through touch. By exploring the history of touch between 1870 and 1960, this thesis therefore offers an alternative account of British modernity and a way of re-examining histories of selfhood within and beyond modern Britain.

The thesis explains the socioeconomic differences among the Roma through a historical exploration of the relations established between Roma and significant Others at local, regional, and central levels in different, overlapping spheres of power (state, politics, religion, informal economy). Through a historical-ethnographic analysis of difference and power struggles, the thesis seeks to bring the political aspects of Roma lives back into the discourses of empowerment which are highly depoliticized by both the state and transnational neo-liberal governance (World Bank, UNDP, EU etc.). It is largely an explanation of transformations undergone by two Roma groups in Romania who experienced utterly different living conditions (while some got ’poorer’, the others became more affluent) in the period from socialism to post-socialism. The qualitative analysis, based on 7-months of ethnographic fieldwork, overcomes the flaws of policy-oriented research based primarily on statistics. The latter is produced by state and transnational development actors and ignores qualitative differences between Roma groups, the context of Romanian and Eastern European transformations (e.g. clientelism, informal economy, neopatrimonial state) and constitutes ’identities’ (’the poor’, ’the marginal’, ’the vulnerable’) through which the Roma are governed and maintained in a subordinate position. These symbolic categories are used as part of a larger neoliberal problematization of governance called ’social integration’, which constitutes itself as a ’regime of truth’ and follows an economic rationality which reproduces the status quo and does not necessarily empower the Roma. In addition, these ’regimes of enunciations’ are adopted un-reflexively as objects of study in social science and Romani studies. Distancing itself from these academic and policy practices, my comparative historical ethnography of power relations and discursive practices among the Roma challenges and brings a reconsideration of the current mentality of governance as social integration. Furthermore, my thesis constitutes an important contribution to Romani studies by 1) challenging a unilateral perspective directed by political agendas, and 2) producing reflexivity in relation to the object of study. It indicates that the historical study of power struggles as “an ascending analysis of power” (Foucault 1980: 99) is more beneficial in terms of empowerment than the study of predefined themes of governance (e.g. poverty and marginalization). The Roma continuously negotiate their relations with the Others in interaction with an uncertain socioeconomic environment, and these struggles constitute mechanisms of transformation in their lives. My thesis thus reveals different interactions Roma have had within and across spheres of power struggle (economy, state, politics, religion), which suggest an explanation for the two Roma groups’ different living conditions. A ‘mobile’ or a ‘sedentary’ interaction with the socialism-to-postsocialism socioeconomic transformations provided opportunities or restrictions for the improvement of the Roma’s material living conditions. While a ‘mobile’ and trans-local approach was adopted by Caldarars, a ‘sedentary’, localized socioeconomic practice was experienced as a restriction by the Romanianized Gypsies. Although these ‘patterns’ largely correspond to the groups studied, there was a variation in terms of mobility and wealth within both. Nevertheless, the mobile-sedentary distinction is relevant as it shows different ways of governance. While a trans-local mobile approach with low levels of subjection to state governance worked as a form of self-governance, a local ‘navigation’ of limited field of possibilities restricted access to better living conditions and increased the subjection to state governance. My thesis also draws attention to possible sources of empowerment (Roma politics) which are blocked by particular transformations of state and politics (patronage politics and political patronage), or translated by the state into the language of ‘social integration’ (e.g. Pentecostalism as self-governance). To sum up, I consider that my thesis undertakes a re-evaluation of the existent problematization of social integration and constitutes a reflexive knowledge base for the support of genuine forms of empowerment among the Roma.

An increasing concern for biodiversity loss transformed politics and society in Ecuador beginning in the late 1980s. Amidst a proliferation of expert work to gain new knowledge of what biodiversity existed where in order to curb species extinctions, both the state of biological science and the way that Ecuador was governed were remade. To examine the institution of biodiversity and its contemporary consequences in Ecuador, this dissertation draws on ethnography with and archival research on a community of botanists connected with Ecuador's National Herbarium. It begins by examining the specialized work that formed the foundation for NGO-led biodiversity conservation. It then looks at the rise of environmental impact assessment used to anticipate and mitigate the impacts of development projects. Finally, the dissertation examines the contemporary dilemmas of Ecuadorian field biologists in the context of the recent dismantling of much of this institutional infrastructure from the last 30 years. The dissertation's central argument is that biodiversity is an intrinsically modern (and relatively recent) relationship to biological resources, and that it comes with many of the dilemmas and problems that characterize modern institutions. Its emergence as a recognizable domain, either of expert management or more general social commitment, is inextricably bound up with the production of certain forms of specialized knowledge, and the use of that knowledge in authorizing certain kinds of institutional interventions. A mis-recognition of this aspect of biodiversity (for example, by conflating 'biodiversity' with 'biological things themselves') risks misunderstanding what kind of an object it is, to the detriment of anthropological critiques of environmental politics.