Research Interests
Individual Research Interests
Research Supervision Interests
- Education policy, especially governance and problematizations
- Studies in power and force, 3-faces;
- Globalisation and governance;
- Accountability and surveillance studies;
- School choice and race, education markets;
- Neo-liberal and post-liberal education policy (homo economicus, responsibilizations, entrepreneurialisms), educational proto-fascisms and populisms;
- Computation and data studies
- Policy aesthetics
- Governmentality studies in education, particularly micropolitics, performativities / enactments, and subjectivities, folds, and foldings (not auto-ethnographies)
- Teacher education and teacher worklife studies
- Biopolitics, ethopolitics, biosociality and various cares-of-the-self, necropolitics, vitapolitics;
- Neuroplasticity and vitality studies;
- Artificial intelligence and cyber- and xeno-feminisms;
- Desire, affect and embodiment studies;
- Governing [dis] / bodies
- Methodological uses of fieldwork-in-philosophy, concept work, and post-qualitative approaches
- Foucaultian problematization, genealogy, archaeology, dispositif;
- Deleuzian dramatization, transcendental empiricisms, vitality studies;
- Eventalisation and event studies
- Non-representation, non-coherent representation, more-than representation studies
- Mappings, networks, assemblages (cartographies), Cytoscape
- Science and Technology Studies (STS);
- Michel Foucault
- Gilles Deleuze
Bio
P. Taylor Webb is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia. He received his BA in philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley; his MA in curriculum at the University of Colorado, Denver; and his PhD in educational policy studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. His books include Teacher Assemblage (Sense, 2009) and, with Kalervo N. Gulson, Policy Science 3.0: Policy Geophilosophy and Education (Sense, 2014) and Education Policy and Racial Biopolitics in Multicultural Cities (University of Chicago, 2017). Webb taught at the University of Washington, Bothell prior to Vancouver, and taught elementary school for five years in Denver where he also served as the director of a community service program at the Downtown Aurora Visual Arts <http://www.davarts.org/>.
My work examines and critiques how education rationalizes and produces ‘governable subjects’ within liberal and neo-liberal normative architectures. I have analyzed such productions by examining policies of education accountability (‘surveillance’), school choice, and through the recursions of such practices and logics in educator preparation programs (e.g., ‘professionals’). I analyze alternative productions that education might make, including how different expressions of education might reconfigure contemporary political life.
In this sense, my work ‘experiments’ with education as a way to rethink the political, and always in relation to an immanent political life rather than treating education as something to transcend political life. To accomplish these goals, I examine the intentions or desires in policy (and curricula) and treat these as material productions rather than as only representations of discourse and/or ‘ideology’. Here, the locus of my work is interested in micropolitics and various subjectivizations that arise as undecided moments, and possible moments of flight, during policy events or policy becomings. My methodological commitments rest in a broad and dispersed set of methods that pertain to a fieldwork in philosophy where I treat policy as discrete, spatial, emergent, affective, performative, non-representational, and again, material.
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. Sense Publishers (2015).
Teacher assemblage. Sense Publishers (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. (2017). Eulogy for democratic teacher education. Teacher Education & Practice, 30(2), 297-299.
- Gulson, K. N. & Webb, P. T. (2018). ‘Life’ and education policy: Intervention, augmentation and computation. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 39(2), 276-291.
- Gulson, K. N. & Webb, P. T. (2017). Mapping an emergent field of ‘computational policy’: Policy rationalities, prediction and data in the age of artificial intelligence. Research in Education, 98(1), 14-26.
- Webb, P. T. (2015). Fucking teachers. Deleuze Studies, 9(3), 437-451.
- Webb, P. T. & Gulson, K. N. (2015). Faciality enactments, schools of recognition, and policies of difference (in-itself). Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 36(4), 515-532.
- Webb, P. T. & Gulson, K. N. (2015). Policy scientificity 3.0: Theory and policy analysis in-and-for this world and other-worlds. Critical Studies in Education, 56(1), 161-174.
- Webb, P. T. (2013). Policy problematizations. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 27(3), 364-376.
Selected Invited Talks
- 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.
- Webb, P. T. (2014, March). Policy scientificity 3.0. Keynote plenary of the Globalization and Education SIG at the annual meeting of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES), Toronto, Canada.
- Webb, P. T. (2013, December). The dogmatic image of education and the production of the new. Keynote conference address. “Deleuze. Guattari. Schizoanalysis. Education.” Murdoch University, Perth, Australia.
- Webb, P. T. (2011, November). Fieldwork in philosophy. In “New directions in qualitative methodology in education and the social sciences.” Faculty of Arts and Sciences, University of New South Wales.
- Webb, P. T. (2011, February). Methodologies as thinking: Problematizations and indeterminacies. In “Methodologies: Truth, lies, and indeterminacies.” Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia.
Students Supervised
Representative projects
- The problematic of life in education: Theorizing the implications of the recent advancements in life sciences for education policy. Dr. Petra Mikulan, Postdoctoral Research, 2018-2020.
- Subjectivity in the folds: Education, media practices and environmental activism amongst more-than-human pleats. Marcelina Piotrowski, PhD, 2018.
- Otherworlds: High school teachers’ experiences of power vis-a-vis accountability policies in South Carolina. Mary Cartee Adkins, MA, 2013.
- (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) (April, 2013)
- Micropolitics and decision-making: A study of one elementary school. Chris Covey, MA, 2003.
Courses Taught
- EDST 401: Education, School, and Social Institutions (Teacher Education Program)
- EDST 508: Post-qualitative Research Methods
- EDST 531: The Politics of Education Governance
- EDST 596: Philosophy and Education Policy: Neoliberalism
- EDST 601A: Critical Social Theory in Education (Doctoral Program)
Community Work
Editorial Boards
- Editorial Advisory Board, Journal of Education Policy, 2016-.
- Editorial Advisory Board, Critical Studies in Education, 2016-.
