Higher education in the UK has become preoccupied with debates over the authority of knowledge and of criticality. In this article we argue that approaches to knowledge in higher education might benefit from a network sensibility that foregrounds the negotiated processes through which the material becomes entangled with the social to bring forth…

Drawing upon the work of Foucault and Latour, this article reflects on 25 years of critique of competence-based education and its continuing strength as a way of framing education and training. Using an example from England, it rehearses the argument from Foucault that, despite its student-centred discourse, competence-based education can be…

This article provides a material enactment of educational theory to explore how we might do educational theory differently by defamiliarising the familiar. Theory is often assumed to be abstract, located solely in the realm of ideas and separate from practice. However, this view of theory emerges from a set of ontological and epistemological…

Drawing upon concepts from actor-network theory (ANT), this article explores how the principle of symmetry can provide alternative readings of the translations of the prescribed into the enacted curriculum, without reducing understanding to explanation. The paper explores the contrasting ways in which the prescribed curriculum is translated into…

Educational analysts need new ways to engage with policy processes in a networked world of complex transnational connections. In this discussion, Tara Fenwick and Richard Edwards argue for a greater focus on materiality in educational policy as a way to trace the heterogeneous interactions and precarious linkages that enact policy as complex…

This article explores the significance of theories of the post-human for lifelong learning. Drawing upon the works of Karen Barad and Bruno Latour, it suggests that education has focused on the learning subject as a result of an a priori assumption of a separation of matter from meaning, the object from the subject. By contrast, a post-human…

Conceptualizing adult learning draws on two types of analysis: (1) describing and understanding practice and (2) discourse analysis. These forms of analysis are linked to modern and postmodern perspectives. (SK)

Drawing on Foucault's notion of discourse, it is suggested that post-Fordism and globalization trends can be found in changing theories of distance education and open learning. Argues that notions of distance education are part of a trend towards uniformity under conditions of globalization, while those of open learning are part of a trend to…

This book examines different notions of a learning society and the changes in adult education theory and practice that will be required to create a learning society. Recent developments in the United Kingdom and, to a lesser extent, in other countries are cited as evidence that creating a learning society will require new forms of thinking about…

Recent empirical and theoretical literature in cultural geography, feminist and postcolonial philosophy, cultural studies, and political economy, was explored in an examination of the significance of spatiality to the changes taking place in the policy, practice, and study of adult education and lifelong learning. The following were among the key…