This article focuses on problematizing the harmonisation of higher education in Europe today. The overall aim is to analyse the construction of the European citizen and the rationality of governing related to such a construction. The specific focus will be on the rules and standards of reason in higher education reforms which inscribe continuums of values that exclude as they include. Who is and who is not constructed as a European citizen? Documents on the Bologna process produced in Europe and (...) in Sweden are analysed drawing on the Foucauldian notion of governmentality, showing a neoliberal rationality of governing. The European citizen needs to become flexible, autonomous and self‐regulating as a way of facing the threats of the constantly changing future. The technique of diversity is a condition of possibility for constructing such a citizen and for harmonising higher education in Europe. Further, the current power relations in the discourse define what is and what is not European, thus constructing ‘the other’, the one who is excluded. (shrink)

Over the last twenty years there has been increasing interest in the work of Michel Foucault in the social sciences and in particular with relation to education. This, the first book to draw on his work to consider lifelong learning, explores the significance of policies and practices of lifelong learning to the wider societies of which they are a part. With a breadth of international contributors and sites of analysis, this book offers insights into such questions as: What are the (...) effects of lifelong learning policies within socio-political systems of governance? What does lifelong learning do to our understanding of ourselves as citizens? How does lifelong learning act in the regulation and re-ordering of what people do? The book suggests that understanding of lifelong learning as contributory to the knowledge economy, globalisation or the new work order may need to be revised if we are to understand its impact more fully. It therefore makes a significant contribution to the study of lifelong learning. (shrink)

The role of education in citizen training has been well mapped out in youth education. What has been less studied is how this role comes into being in adult education. By providing illustrative empirical examples from a recently completed study of adult students enrolled in adult education, this article aims to offer a theoretical response to the question of the role of adult education in adult student citizen subjectivity formation. Taking on Diken’s concept of ‘reactive nihilism’, we wish to make (...) the following arguments. First, that citizen formation in adult education, when students are asked about it, is actualised as processes of recovery of will in order to be a successful and happy citizen in society. Secondly, that these processes point towards a role of adult education as one where these formation processes work in tandem with those of the reactive nihilists. This means that the citizen formation processes made possible in this educational site are those marked out by the desire to mobilise one’s will formation so that it adapts to the prevailing societal situation—that of late capitalism, which is a situation not considered by the adult students as possible to change. (shrink)

A tendency of previous studies of lifelong learning to focus on learning and learning subjectivities may have led to an underestimation of potential effects in terms of a system of knowledge constitutive processes that operates powerfully to shape our societies. In this paper we explore lifelong learning and practices in the construction of knowledge at the point where a new relationship is being attempted between university courses and workplaces through programmes for learning. Drawing from Foucault and others we argue a (...) strategic relation between discourses of lifelong learning and knowledge practices in such locations. Discourses of lifelong learning appear to support the reaching out of disciplinary practices into the workplace where theoretical knowledge is combined with knowledge derived from work experience, as a new form of knowledge that has use value. Discipline as a modality of power appears reconfigured and multiplied in new power-knowledge constellations which aim to subdue the desire and power of know how. Rather than lifelong learning as learning apparatus and strategy in the promotion of a will to learn as has been suggested elsewhere, we offer an alternative account. Here the promotion of a will to learn articulates with the will to knowledge in part through discourses of lifelong learning. Practices of knowledge constitution support the pacification of know how through its reconfiguration as knowledge that can be codified and mobilized for economic innovation. (shrink)