The work of Michel Foucault has become a major resource for educational researchers seeking to understand how education makes us what we are. In this book, a group of contributors explore how Foucault’s work is used in a variety of ways to explore the ‘hows’ and ‘whos’ of education policy – its technologies and its subjectivities, its oppressions and its freedoms. The book takes full advantage of the opportunities for creativity that Foucault’s ideas and methods offer to researchers in deploying genealogy, discourse, and subjectivation as analytic devices. The collection as a whole works to makes us aware that we are freer than we think! This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Education Policy.

Stephen J. Ball is the Karl Mannheim Professor of Sociology of Education at the Institute of Education, University College London, UK. He was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2006; and is also Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. He is the co-founder and Managing Editor of the Journal of Education Policy. His main areas of interest are in sociologically informed education policy analysis and the relationships between education, education policy, and social class. He has published over 140 journal articles and written 20 books, including How Schools do Policy (with Meg Maguire and Annette Braun, Routledge, 2012), Global Education Inc. (Routledge, 2012), Networks, New Governance and Education (with Carolina Junemann, Policy Press, 2012), and Foucault, Power and Education (Routledge, 2013).