Oyarzun Morel, Juan de Dios; (2018) Discourses and Subjectivities in Education Policies in Chile: a Study in Rural Contexts. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

The research seeks to analyse the relation between discourses, education policies and students’ subjectivities in rural settings – schools and students – of three zones throughout Chile. The theoretical framework applied is based on post-structuralist postulates and concepts. This theoretical approach provides different conceptual tools to understand dominant discourses and techniques of power, which make possible an explanation and description of how neoliberalism operates through policies, which in turn affect and influence individual subjectivities. The purposes of this research are focused on a critical understanding of how neoliberal discourse permeates (or not) three educational policies in Chile, how they are deployed in rural schools and how these discourses and policies influence (or not) the experiences, decisions and future perspectives of rural students. These relations are mediated by geographical aspects and schools’ practices, which also constitute part of the analysis developed. The study applied qualitative methods of research and analysis. Through interviews with policy makers, academics, teachers and students, the results show particular perspectives regarding the educational policies analysed, principally in relation to their lack of clear purposes and design, in a vagueness that shows traces of neoliberal discourse, among other features. In relation to the rural schools’ practices, the study unveils specific assemblages, which relate intimately the strategies of the schools and the ones of the local business companies. The students, then, recreate their biographies and subjective perspectives responding to these influences, in an aspiration to accomplish the promise of a future that the educational policies offer them, but at the same time continuing the labour and social path which appears prepared for them in terms of economic functionality and precariousness. In geographical terms, the students live the tension between the rural and the urban, in the search of better life opportunities.

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