Mobilising Foucault’s dispositif as a method: examining engagement and wellbeing as education policy knots

This article analyses engagement and wellbeing agendas in Australia and Denmark, framing them as powerful organising ideas in education policy with shared as well as distinct features across different national settings and policy histories. It deploys the metaphor of policy knots to conceptualise the interweaving threads comprising these agendas and to emphasise the analytic task of unpicking their effects and what might appear as universal or natural configurations. Extending this analysis, we draw on Foucault’s concept of the dispositif to develop a methodological approach. Three key analytic moves are elaborated to examine the dispositifs of engagement and wellbeing. Mobilising this approach, we identify a recalibration of engagement as inclusive engagement in Australia, positioned as a means and measure of educational equity. In Denmark, wellbeing is (re)configured from earlier framings as a democratic welfare function to its contemporary function as a quantifiable and instrumentalised outcome. Across both policy sites there is a preoccupation with measurement and data on wellbeing and engagement. We examine what this data orientation does, arguing that it shapes student subjectivities and reconfigures schooling priorities. Finally, we suggest the methodology and analytic moves we developed offer a useful model for investigating other tight policy knots in education.