Research Interests
Research Supervision Interests
- Educational governance, including:
- Globalisation and international policy formations (e.g., OECD, World Bank, public-private relationships, etc.);
- Disciplinary and control societies, including accountabilities and surveillance studies (e.g., rankings);
- Computation and algorithmic studies (e.g., artificial intelligence, ‘fourth industrial technologies’);
- Biopolitics;
- Neoliberal education policy (e.g., homo economicus, financializations), and advanced-liberal education policy (populist authoritarianisms, proto-fascisms);
- Therapeutic governmentalities and “care of the self” (affect, ‘resilience’, social-emotional, well-being, etc.);
- Micropolitics, including subjectivity, subjectification, and identity studies
- Michel Foucault
- Gilles Deleuze
Bio
Dr. Webb’s fields of interest include contemporary Continental theories in relation to conceptions and practices of education governance. He uses several Continental theorists to examine formations of power and force in education, often manifest through ideas of policy. He is concerned with how education rationalizes and produces ‘governable subjects’ within liberal and neoliberal normative architectures, and his research has been identified as a significant reason for the development of educational policy studies over the past decade.
Dr. Webb received his BA in philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley; MA in curriculum studies at the University of Colorado, Denver; and PhD in educational policy studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. Prior to coming to UBC, Dr. Webb taught at the University of Washington, Bothell. Dr. Webb’s book Teacher Assemblage won the Critics’ Choice Book Award from the American Educational Studies Association in 2009 (AESA), and won the Outstanding Book Award from the Qualitative Research SIG of the American Educational Research Association in 2010 (AERA). From 2016 to 2020, Dr. Webb served as a Managing Editor for the journal Critical Studies in Education (CSE) and continues to serve on the Editorial Advisory Panel of CSE. Today, Dr. Webb serves as the Associate Regional Editor – Americas for the Journal of Education Policy and as a member of its Editorial Advisory Board.
At UBC, Dr. Webb offers graduate courses on educational governance, educational neoliberalism, and post-qualitative methodologies (fieldwork-in-philosophy; concept work). He regularly teaches the departmental PhD course on critical social theory (EDST 601A) and in the teacher education program to examine the political, social, and cultural histories of schooling (EDST 401).
Education
Awards
Research Projects
Grantor: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Role: Principal Investigator
Grantors: (1) Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) & (2) Killam Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (UBC)
Role: Principal Investigator, with Dr. Petra Mikulan (Postdoctoral Research)
Grantor: Australian Research Council (ARC). Role: Collaborator
Grantor: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Role: Principal Investigator
Selected Publications
Books
Education policy and racial biopolitics in the multicultural city. University of Chicago (2017).
Policy geophilosophy and education. (2015).
Teacher assemblage. (2009).
- *Outstanding Book Award, Qualitative Research SIG, American Educational Research Association, 2010
- *Critics’ Choice Book Award, American Educational Studies Association, 2009
Recent Articles
- Webb, P. T., Sellar, S., & Gulson, K. N. (2020). Anticipating education: Governing habits, memories and policy-futures. Learning, Media and Technology.
- Webb, P. T. (2017). Eulogy for democratic teacher education. Teacher Education & Practice, 30(2), 297-299.
- Webb, P. T. (2015). Fucking teachers. Deleuze Studies, 9(3), 437-451.
- Webb, P. T. (2013). Policy problematizations. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 27(3), 364-376.
Selected Invited Talks
- Webb, P. T. (2018, May). Considerations for implementing neuroscience in educational practice: A policy perspective.
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- Educational Neuroscience Research Cluster, Vice President Research + Innovation (VPRI), University of British Columbia.
- Webb, P. T. & Gulson, K. N. (2018, April 24). The education of, and by, machines: The impact of artificial intelligence on education policy.
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- Critical Dialogues Seminar Series, Department of Educational Studies, UBC.
- Webb, P. T. (2018, April). Quina és la política educativa? (What is education policy?)
- Invited presentation at the Facultat d’Educació, Traducció i Ciències Humanes (Faculty of Education, Translation, and Human Sciences), University of Vic, Spain (UVIC).
- Webb, P. T. (2018, April). La política educativa, les biologies i la política de la pròpia vida. (Education policy, biologies, and the politics of life itself).
- Invited presentation at the Centre d’Història de la Ciència (CEHIC), Facultat de Medicina (Center for the History of Science, Faculty of Medicine) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). Barcelona, Spain.
- Webb, P. T. (2018, April). Leadership in 2030: A brief history of tomorrow. Neuroplasticity.
- Keynote talk at uLead: Visionary leadership for today’s learner. The Alberta Teachers’ Association. Banff, Alberta.
Students Supervised
Representative projects
- (tentative title) Becoming-other: Educational implications of affective ‘co-existence’ between Asian immigrant youth and a Japanese researcher-videographer when digital video-making as minor cinematic literacy practice.
- Masayuki Iwase, PhD, expected 2021
- The problematic of life in education: Theorizing the implications of the recent advancements in life sciences for education policy.
- Dr. Petra Mikulan, SSHRC and UBC Killam Postdoctoral Research, 2018-2020.
- Chinese international students’ engagement with democratic discourses and practices in Canada and the United States.
- Gang Li, PhD, 2020.
- Subjectivity in the folds: Education, media practices and environmental activism amongst more-than-human pleats.
- Marcelina Piotrowski, PhD, 2019.
- Exacerbation, concealment, and co-option: Neoliberalism’s effect on educational, gendered inequalities and feminism.
- Natasha Green, MEd, 2019.
- Otherworlds: High school teachers’ experiences of power vis-a-vis accountability policies in South Carolina.
- Mary Cartee Adkins, MA, 2014.
- (De/re)-Constructing teachers and their work: A discourse analysis of British Columbia’s 21st-century policy agenda.
- Cory (Tobey) Steeves, MA, 2012.
- “Highly Commended” Award, Teachers’ Work/Teacher Unions SIG 127 of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) (2013).
Courses Taught
- EDST 401: Education, School, and Social Institutions (Teacher Education Program)
- EDST 531: The Politics of Education Governance
- EDST 596: Philosophy and Education Policy: Neoliberalism
- EDST 601A: Critical Social Theory in Education (PhD Program)
Community Work
Editorial Boards
- Editorial Advisory Board, Journal of Education Policy, 2016-.
- Editorial Advisory Board, Critical Studies in Education, 2016-.
