Affective governmentality and gendered labour in education policy: Sites of non-traditional coproduction

Abstract

In recent years shifts in education policy in Australia have generated new governance arrangements which have increased the material and affective labour of parents associated with school education. However, affective labour undertaken by parents is often understood as a private concern and an issue of personal choice. This article challenges this view by examining the labour of parents in connection with the aims of public policy in school education. By employing the concept of affective governmentality to connect governing strategies with citizen experience, the article explores the connection between the emotional labour of parents’ and policy aims in school education policy. Based on interviews and qualitative questionnaires with parents of school-aged children in Australia, the study uses an interpretive lens to unpack the role of emotional labour. The study reveals the dual role of parents, mostly mothers who serve both as recipients and active agents in public policy. The research shows that emotional responses and gendered labour are interconnected - depicting them as dynamic forces that both motivate and mobilise support for policy objectives. This research contributes to our understanding of the interplay between emotions, policy dynamics and gendered labour and has implications for our understanding of what constitutes a ‘policy actor’.

Introduction

Internationally, school education policy has undergone major reforms in recent years. In Australia, this broad shift has led to a range of reforms described by Ball as a ‘policy hyper-activity” where “reform is being done from top to bottom” (2019: 747). The reorganisation of school education has increased marketisation and decentred governance through a dependence “on the measurement of its performance for the improvement of human capital” (Grek, 2024: 25). Analysis of these reforms has animated education policy scholarship (Lingard et al., 2016), and concluded that under these reforms education is driven by performance goals using mechanisms which ‘govern at a distance’ (Rose, 1999: 50). The effects of these reforms on citizens have also received attention as the restructuring of education policy impacts citizen in diverse ways. Others have discussed the material effects of this reorganisation using a sociological lens focussed on school choice, including the socio-economic and racial dimensions of the changes (see for example Ho, 2011; Rowe, 2020). This article builds on a newer area of scholarship which brings policy analysis into conversation with this sociological scholarship by focussing on the role of emotions in governing the citizen (Gerrard and Savage, 2022; Olmedo and Wilkins, 2017). A key observation of this newer literature involves the emergence of the active parent citizen with the school as a key site of relations between the family and the state (Proctor et al., 2023: 1). This article extends this literature by exploring, not only how parents are governed by policy, but how they also contribute to policy outcomes through their affective and material labour.

Overall, this article argues that the labour of parents, including their emotional labour, is not just an outcome of policy but is necessary to support policy goals. Moreover, this labour occurs in gendered ways which disproportionately affect women. To develop this argument this article draws from a series of interviews and responses to two qualitative questionnaires from parents of school aged children in two states of Australia. Similar policy dynamics have been noted in many jurisdictions; including the UK, the US, Canada, Sweden and further a-field (see for example Ball et al., 2017). Although the dynamics noted here are discussed in relation to their expression in the Australian context, given the similarity in policy shifts internationally, the findings will likely resonate in other jurisdictions.

The remainder of this article proceeds as follow: first it briefly surveys the growing work on emotion in policy analysis. Second, the article constructs the conceptual framework, which combines affective governmentality with assemblage theory, to show how technical policy on the one hand, and parents’ emotions in supporting their children through school on the other, can be tied together in analysis. Third, it moves to consider the recent education policy trends which have occurred in Australia and the way that the restructured governance arrangements ‘govern’ through transparency and accountability. The methodological approach is then outlined before identifying the three areas where emotional responses are most profound; school choice, additional activities to support children at school and advocacy. Finally, the article draws together the themes to show how gendered labour emerges as a response to and, as a form of, policy activity.

Affect and emotions and affective governmentality

This article explores the relationship between policy and policy actors’ emotional labour. While the idea of an ‘affective turn’ in social sciences (Clough, 2007) which usefully highlights the role of emotions, has been developing for some time, analysis which considers the role of emotions and affect in governing and public administration scholarship is still emerging. There is a range of literature which focusses the study of emotions into policy analysis which challenges the ontological dominance of rationality in policy studies. Paterson describes this literature as, “a useful corrective to the neutral bureaucrat archetype that dominates the field” (2021: 254). While Durnová advocates for, “using emotions as a specific critical lens to examine the researched phenomenon” (2022: 44). Paterson also stresses the value of exploring emotional policy discourses because they provide insight into “contemporary governance regimes, constituting both the governing and the governed” (2021: 268). Durnová and Hejzlarová go one step further and call for, “a new kind of policy language that includes the emotional situation” to allow those experiencing emotions to be included and acknowledged as “policy intermediaries” (2018: 410). This article draws from and contributes to emotion studies by extending an analysis of policy and its impacts on citizens through the connection of emotions together with the governing of the parent citizen.

Affective governmentality is a field which emerged to explicitly tie affect to governing. It therefore provides a useful approach to explore the role of affective labour. The term ‘affective’ in affective governmentality operates to connect governing to emotional experience. Some authors argue that emotion and affect are distinguishable. For example, Massumi (2015) argues that affect, understood as bodily intensity of feeling, and emotions, understood as the social codification of feeling, should be treated as separate categories. Gorton (2007) and Ahmed (2013) dispute this distinction and use the terms affect and emotion interchangeably on the basis that they serve the same function.

At the end of the day, the difference between emotion and affect is still intended to solve the same basic and fundamentally descriptive problem it was coined in psychoanalytic practice to solve: that of distinguishing first-person from third-person feeling, and, by extension, feeling that is contained by an identity from feeling that is not (Gorton, 2007: 334).

In this article the terms emotion and affect are used interchangeably with reference to the way they emerge in policy users’ experience.

The specific form of affect and emotion explored in this article is the way it is connected to governing using affective governmentality. Affective governmentality is growing as a field of analysis which has developed two expressions. The first is an approach which analyses the interface between public sector workers and citizens as part of a ‘politics of care’ (Valenzuela, 2019). The second approach, adopted here, is to acknowledge the emotional responses that policy produces in citizens which are not explicit, but which are nonetheless key to the attainment of policy outcomes. For instance, Clarke notes that the emotional responses to school inspections in the UK arise in response to rational education policy not as the intention of the policy but as a by-product of it (2017). Similarly, in this study, citizens experience a range of emotions in relation to school education policy, though they are not clearly identified as policy targets.

Affective governmentality extends the understanding of traditional governmentality as an approach to analysis which shows how governing outcomes are achieved through “educating desires and configuring aspirations and beliefs” (Li, 2007: 275), rather than through direct or coercive methods. Further, traditional approaches to governmentality rely on an understanding of governing as predominantly rational and technical (Strong, 2021) and focus on the ‘programmatic’ aspects of rule, often drawing from ‘technical factors’ such as counting and statistics to drive their analysis (Miller and Rose, 2008). An analysis using governmentality focuses on how governing strategies ‘govern at a distance’, thereby separating the direct engagement between governing strategy, in this case policy, and the citizen. Affective governmentality flips the emphasis of the analysis and focusses instead on the emotional engagement between the citizen and policy as a means of analysing what it is that gives meaning to the activities that citizens engage in (Walters and Haahr, 2005). This is a useful way of understanding contemporary education policy, because although education policy governs the material sites of schools and the students within them, it also sends signals to the community about how people in the community should behave in relation to schooling.

The emotional impacts of policy can be captured by concentrating on the affective aspects of governmentality which position the citizen as being left with the emotional responses arising from governing even when they are unaware that policy is governing them (Strong, 2021). As Jupp, Pykett and Smith note, “emotion governance presents the site of active appropriations and negotiations with dominant logics of rule” (2017: 31). By this logic, there are new observations to be made about the role of emotions at the intersection of governing, policy and citizen experience.

To analyse the emotional responses produced by school education policy requires an understanding of the landscape that is productive of emotional responses. Because emotional responses are far from individual – they are both social and cultural practices (Ahmed, 2013) – thinking about them in this way allows an engagement with how they are deployed or mobilised within social settings, many of these settings are also connected to policy arrangements. However, the broader interplay between emotions and social, political and economic arrangements make causal connections with government policy less visible. This is particularly the case in education policy as education policy targets parents ‘at a distance’ rather than directly. However, drawing together the landscape of education policy through Assemblage Theory offers a clearer means of identifying the sites at which policy and emotion intersect around school education (Briassoulis, 2019).

The idea of an assemblage usefully shows how there can be coherence across areas without direct causation. As Anderson and McFalane note, assemblage is a relational way of thinking which functions as a name for unity across difference (2011: 162). School education policy works upon parents through multiple heterogenous factors which form connections and create meaning. Specifically, education policy works together with the current cultural environment in which parents feel a responsibility to provide all of life’s needs to their children, from housing to schooling, as well as the greater concentration on the importance of the child (Vincent, 2017) to create an affective atmosphere in which parents, and particularly mothers, feel compelled to engage in various forms of labour to support their children's schooling. Further, as market conditions become more commonplace in school policy (Lingard, 2020) there is less certainty that the state will take up the role of provider of education such that parents ‘feel’ responsible for their children’s experience at school (Warner, 2023). Within education, parent communities – mostly of women - emerge as parents seek connection through the school and the business of supporting and raising children through the school years (Rowe, 2014). It is within these assemblages that women find themselves making sense of their relationship with schooling for their children.

As a result, engaging with the emotions mothers experience provides insights into the gendered dynamics of care in new areas. However, a discussion of affect and emotion requires some engagement with what emotions are, and how to talk about them. There is a fuzziness in the capacity to be sure that language captures our thoughts, and capturing emotions is equally difficult. Whilst the way that emotions are connected to action is also difficult to assess, Barbalet (2002) shows the work that emotions do is in conditioning action. “Not only do emotions provide instant evaluation of circumstance, they also influence the disposition of the person for a response to those circumstances. It is for these reasons that it is possible to say that emotions link structure and agency” (Barbalet, 2002: 3). Emotions function as enablers of action by providing the motivation for action. The emotions of parents become a good way to study policy dynamics associated with parenting and school education.

Australian education policy and parent activity

The environments in which citizens find themselves negotiating and strategising around schooling is heavily influenced by education policy. The policy environment considered here began, in Australia, with the so-called ‘education revolution’ promised by government in the late 2000s, which generated a series of reforms in school education that were couched in terms of improving quality and excellence, accountability and transparency (Australian Government, 2008). These policy goals together generated policy which relies on learning metrics both inside education departments and in the community.

In the community, as a policy instrument the MySchool website has delivered on the ideas of transparency and accountability by publishing the results of Australia’s key learning metric, the standardised school testing program the National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), in the public domain (ACARA, 2022). This policy regime has worked together to restructure school education policy in Australia.

MySchool has been effective in changing the interface between citizens and the education system. MySchool is a government-run website which lists all the schools across Australia and their performance in standardised tests, whose promise to parents is “My School contains data on every school in Australia. This includes information on a school’s student profile, its NAPLAN performance and funding. Additional information includes enrolment numbers and attendance rates” (ACARA, 2022). Its goal is to ensure that, “schools and school systems are accountable to parents/carers and the broader community” (ACARA, 2022). Through this mechanism, schools can be compared to other similar schools. By placing the information about schools in the public domain it has normalised comparison, and ultimately, though not explicitly, school choice.

Further, in generating the reforms and through engaging with the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) as a key international learning metric which compares school systems, the quality of Australia’s school system has been questioned. Because the reforms are constitutive of significant change in the education landscape they have been subject to extensive scholarly analysis, however, it is not the intention of this article to contribute to this analysis. Key themes which have been drawn out of the reforms are: that there is a congruence across countries where similar policies have been enacted (Ball, 2019), that there is a greater emphasis on school choice within a quasi-market environment, and that performance indicators have been normalised as ways to encourage education performance (Lingard, 2020; Rowe, 2020). This policy environment forms part of the assemblage in which parents are enmeshed. The transparency measures which form part of these policy settings have moved risk, responsibility and the visibility of school education from the state into the hands of parents.

The attention of education policy upon parents is fostered by ‘the economisation of education’, whereby education has become increasingly seen as important to economic competitiveness, both for states and individuals (Lingard, 2020: 263). The rhetoric of marketisation and performance have been facilitated by greater transparency in education combined with the perceived importance of education to future economic success, all of which work upon parents to construct an environment in which the parent citizen has become an affectively activated agent in seeking success for their children in and through education.

The data on parent emotional responses

To explore the emotional experiences of mothers, this article employs an interpretive approach. The form of interpretive approach utilised here is to understand how meaning is interpreted within the policy context in which the participants are located (Durnová and Hejzlarová, 2018). The article draws from a series of interviews and responses to two qualitative questionnaires, which explored parent experiences of schooling for their children. The first tranche was collected in a PhD project and the second in a post-doctoral research project on the same theme. Both rounds of interview data were focussed on parents’ experience of supporting their children at school, as did the first tranche of questionnaires. However, in the second tranche the questionnaire asked questions about parents’ labour and their reflections on their labour in support of their children at school.

All interviews were semi-structured and allowed the interviewees to make contributions about their own stories and experiences. Interviews were conducted with parents from New South Wales and Queensland, Australia. These jurisdictions have been subject to significant school reforms in recent years which have reshaped education provision and created new dynamics which are worthy of study. A total of 28 interviews were conducted; 17 from the first tranche and 11 from the second. The questionnaires were structured as small-scale qualitative questionnaires which allowed participants to provide free text answers. There was a total of 185 questionnaire responses: 108 from the first round and 77 from the second. The gender breakdown of the interviewees was skewed toward women, with 25 women responding to the call for interviews and three men. The gender breakdown in responses to was 92% female in the first questionnaire and 70% female in the second, although in the second questionnaire a larger number of respondents did not answer the question on gender. Participants were sourced through an opt-in process whereby parent organisations (Parents and Citizens Associations, in public schools and Parents and Friends groups in private schools) within schools, but not governed by schools directly, were asked to forward the request to their members. Participants were predominantly from urban settings, however the respondents otherwise had a mix of experiences – comprising parents with children in primary and secondary schools and in public and private schools, with and without additional needs of various kinds. Sometimes all these experiences occurred within the same family. Further, no specific questions about ethnicity were asked however some interviewees volunteered their ethnic backgrounds. Several respondents were first generation Australians, from a range of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds.

Most governmentality scholarship draws only from archival sources, which does not allow an engagement with the emotional responses experienced by people. To develop the affective aspect of this article, interview and questionnaire responses were included which extend the governmentality approach by considering what Brady describes as an ‘ethnographic’ assemblage. Ethnography assemblage’ concentrates on “reflecting on geographic or temporal context within which practices or technologies of government unfold” (Brady, 2016: 4). In this instance the policy environment as it is experienced, forms part of the geographic and temporal context. Through the self-articulations of parents from interview and questionnaire responses, a picture of mothers’ emotional responses to policy can be constructed. As noted above there are challenges in communicating emotion. Researching emotion is equally difficult. In the data that was collected, participants are recounting their feeling or emotions, not necessarily experiencing them. The data provides an illustrative rather than a representative understanding of the citizen parent’s emotions in their experiences with policy environments in school education. Thus, consistent with the interpretive approach developed by Durnová and Hejzlarová, these emotions need not be felt by all mothers to provide useful insights into the policy process (2018).

The analytical strategy draws from interpretive policy analysis. First, a thematic grouping of the types of topics talked about was conducted. Next a survey of the language was undertaken to look for emotional cues, with attention not only to specific words but to the context they were situated in. In this sense the interpretive approach used here focussed on “what all these things mean, and for whom they mean something, and how these meanings are further transmitted across audiences and make politics” (Durnová, 2022: 45).

Analysis

Adopting the approach of affective governmentality as noted, moves the site of analysis from policy text to citizen experience, which allows the parent citizen’s emotional experience to become the focus of inquiry. Assemblage theory is deployed to connect parent experience with the policy environment. Heterogeneous elements of social and policy life are productive of an assemblage within which parents’ affective and material labour is called upon. In this section, some of the key elements of the assemblage within which parents operate are drawn out, with a focus on the way that parents described their experience, and not with the intent of defining all aspects of the assemblage. The data responses were overwhelmingly from women, which is consistent with other studies, which have noted that it is predominately women who take on the affective labour of school support (Vincent and Maxwell, 2015; Wilkins, 2014).

Overall, the data revealed three key areas where the role of emotions in parents’ labour is visible. The first is in relation to school choice. The second is the labour involved in the additional activities undertaken in support of their children’s education. The third is in relation to parents’ advocacy for their children in schools, and relatedly, the labour involved in advocating for children with additional needs. Students with additional needs encompasses a broad category of students, which is used here to refer to all children in regular school who require additional support to participate in schooling, regardless of whether this need is met by the school or not. This includes students who may have a formal medical diagnosis as well as those who do not. There is an overlap between all three of these areas. Each of these areas are, at times, sites of intense activity with significant emotional engagement by parents, mostly mothers.

Emotions and school choice

School choice emerged from the study as a key area of emotional and material labour for parents. Contextualised within shifts in governance in education which have activated market logics in more and more aspects of schooling, a greater emphasis on choosing schools has emerged (Lingard, 2020). This trend is evident internationally, with school choice a major site of scholarly and parental engagement in the US, UK, Sweden, Australia and beyond (Lingard, 2020). However, the discussion in Australia has to be understood against the already existing high levels of private school enrolments (35.55% in 2022) (ABS, 2023) due, in part, to the policy of part funding private schools. Nonetheless, school choice has become embedded in social life. It is a regular topic of conversation; real estate pages promote school zones in their advertising, thereby re-enforcing the importance of choice. Contextualized within the social and policy environment, school choice has become a central activity in contemporary parenting. Sociological scholarship largely examines the materialist outcomes of school choice namely, the marketisation of schooling driven by middle-class social capital and ‘white flight’ (Ho, 2011), although, importantly, Vincent and Maxwell suggest that working class and racialised mothers also engage in strategising practices, albeit using different strategies (2015).

Analyses often frame choice as a binary between choice and no choice, based on socio-economic capacity. However, this obscures the conditioning of choices through policy. School choice has become interconnected with performance, because choices are framed around the importance of getting the right school to ensure children’s success and in this way the school choice policies have been interpreted and reinterpreted in their uptake.

The interview and questionnaire results found that parents, especially mothers, recognise the importance of choice and an awareness that it can be a luxury. For example, one mother from the affluent suburbs of Sydney highlighted the inequity between her public school’s need to fundraise for a playground while a nearby private school built an Olympic pool. Although she was keen to stress that she could have afforded the private school, she chose the public school. Overall, her choices were not swayed by ‘luxuries’, but centred more pragmatically on ensuring her child could thrive in school, even when one with more luxuries was available.

In the UK, Wilkins has noted that the empowerment of women to “make choices” for schools is an outcome of the neoliberal need to reframe governing as an activity of self-care and individual advancement (2014). In this study, similar patterns, feelings and concerns were raised by parents who were strategising around schooling for their children: “We went looking at high schools, we tried out for the performing arts high school, she missed out on that and other schools that we preferenced” (IV16).

In interviews, parents consistently noted the importance of finding the right school for the child, asserting the importance of individualised choices which increased the affective and material labour exerted to deliver choices. One young mother felt that choosing schooling was, “probably the biggest parenting choice I will ever make, number one, more important than what I feed him, more important than where we live” (IV2). This quote reflects the central importance of schooling parenting, underpinned by anxiety about how to achieve this aim. One mother articulated her sense of shame and guilt at not being able to secure school choice: “I feel my own significant guilt. My husband doesn’t feel the same level of guilt, he thinks I am being ridiculous” (IV1). This quote also shows the anxiety that mother’s experience and reflects an often unarticulated view that there is a gendered element to the feelings around choice.

School choice and getting that choice right, involved not only emotional but also material labour. Many mothers talked about thinking about these decisions very early on in their child’s life. For some they were prepared to strategize to secure the best outcomes, thinking and planning years ahead for what they had to do to secure the ‘right’ school for their child. Ultimately, for some, the results paid off. As one mother who had secured a place in a religious school said, “Although we are not Catholic choosing this school was one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life” (Q19). The idea that school choice is the best decision of her life at once demonstrates the importance she placed on getting the right school, and also the role school plays in life. Others were more relaxed but had already accepted that they might have to move house to get to the ‘right’ school: demonstrating the material labour that they were prepared to invest in getting it right for their children.

As school choice has become normalised, both the emotional and material labour has become less visible, such that it is almost assumed. The emotion involved in school choice is complicated by the fact that the dynamics of choice normalise the idea that the labour of choosing is optional and/or that the exercise of such choice is a ‘privilege’, even though many mothers considered it central to the good parenting of their children. Further, the concentration on the issue of ‘privilege and luxury’ obscures the idea that policy environments have contributed to the importance of school choice as an activity of parenting. Mothers’ considered their choices through the lens of luxuries and privilege.

Additional activities to support child education

Many parents spoke about arranging private tutoring for their children – both in pursuit of academic excellence but also for children who needed support due to having specific learning needs. One mother explained that she was taking her children out of school in the middle of the day to attend a private tutoring session so as to assist them with their dyslexia. She chose to do this because of frustration with the formal school system which was unable to provide support for her children. The provision of additional support for children is relatively ad hoc within the school system but was a consistent theme in the interviews conducted. This demonstrates the desire by parents to secure a good education for their children, even when they need to engage in additional significant labour.

Parents reported numerous examples of seeking and providing support for their children in addition to the standard education offered within the school system. Parents mixed outside support with activities such as providing assistance in the classroom, engaging with the teachers or principal for support, and sometimes bringing external therapists into the school. When asked about this labour, one mother commented, “Well you know you’re a Mum” (IV12), as if to say that is what the job is. The mode and nature of these supports arose from parents’ attempts to engage their children in additional activities that advanced their children without putting them in conflict with their school. In engaging in these activities parents found themselves mediating between public and private spaces and mediating between emotional responses and more pragmatic approaches to bureaucratic problems thrown up by the school system. Successfully engaging in such activities necessitated problem solving, creating communities and fostering communities while continually advocating for the needs of their own children and others, all which required extensive affective and material labour.

Advocacy

The third area of emotional engagement reflected in the parent interviews concerns parent advocacy for their children’s schooling. The term advocacy is used broadly to reflect the various ways that parents might engage with their children’s school. Vincent calls such advocacy, ‘parent voice’ (2017). This was a tense area, as many parents in this study were actively advocating for their children. This is not surprising given that the study targeted parents in relation to their children’s school needs. One notable issue was that many parents engaged with the school and school community to support their children, who they often felt were not getting the support they needed. Their influence, if there was any (and parents were generally unsure that it had made much difference) came at a cost. One parent noted the ongoing material labour of running the Parents and Citizens Association.

“it is a lot of work. So is I spent a lot of time there. I'm at school all the time. All the time.” (IV18).

One notable example of the kind of advocacy and emotional labour engaged in was a sophisticated campaign to have the local single sex high school become co-educational. A number of parents in the study were part of this campaign through their involvement in a community group that was actively campaigning for change through community agitation, one mother was very engaged and reflected that “we’ve now got a lot of local members hugely engaged” on getting the local politicians interested in the issue” (IV24). This group had had some success in earlier years in getting a new high school in an adjacent area. This kind of parent activity was generated by the desire to have a choice in their children’s schooling options. Their desire for choice (of a co-educational environment) was encouraged by policy settings which have normalised choice. The lengths that parents will go to, to secure, in this case from the state, the school that they want for their children is labour intensive. These activities include engaging in campaign activities; meetings, letter writing, community activities all to secure the school that they want for their children. Mothers in this campaign were acting as policy stakeholders and devoted extensive time to the activity. It is worth noting that they have been successful in their campaign.

The area of advocacy for children with additional needs in mainstream classrooms and in their schools more generally, was another area where parents actively demonstrated material and emotional labour. While policy approaches and specific forms of support differ across school systems and schools in Australia, parents in this study indicated that the provision of support did not meet the needs of students. Consistent with this, as Slee notes, there is a divergence between rhetoric and practice in inclusive education: “community, diversity and inclusion animate official educational policy discourse” but do not necessarily translate into practice (2019). This results in a mismatch between expectation and reality whereby parents feel more inclusivity should be extended to their children than is forthcoming. This view is exemplified in this response: “I personally feel I can’t have been more open and honest about addressing the needs of my children and I have not received one iota of a response or a plan for my children” (Q2.22).

Many parents indicated that they had become involved in their child’s school because their child had additional needs, and this was a way to advocate for and support their child’s individual needs. Whilst some parents in the study felt that school was doing its best or had come to some kind of accommodation in their own minds with the place of schooling in their child’s life, for many parents it was an area of concern. Many parents felt schools were not able to provide what their child needed, but also, were not doing enough or even trying to do enough. One mother reported that, “I was running a parent group at my primary school, for kids with disabilities or learning difficulties. I pretty much figured any additional support was not going to be done by the school it was going to be done by us” (IV19). Parents were motivated by the need to not their children slip behind. Many felt that the emphasis on academic achievement was too great. This was a source of concern for them and motivated their advocacy.

Significant material and emotional labour is expended by parents in pushing a school for resources, knowing that their child’s school is not meeting their child’s needs and at the same time, understanding that there is little they can do about it. These emotions are part of a web of emotions involved in care which includes love, frustration, anger and fear. However, in the study, parents’ experience, and the emotion their experience engendered, varied based upon non-systematic factors such as the luck of the draw with their child’s teacher or school principal, the group of children in the class and/or their child’s friend group. Many parents just wanted to see their children happy or at least able to participate in schooling. For them, the labour they engaged in was generated by the emotions they felt about their children’s schooling needs.

Discussion

This article has used an affective governmentality lens to explore the emotional experiences of parent citizens in support of education policy. The affective lens has allowed everyday activity of parents to be understood not only as an effect of policy but as a contribution to policy. In this way it has exposed the two-way relationship of governing between mothers as non-traditional policy actors and education policy.

While the parent citizen has emerged as a descriptor for the parent in relation to schooling as a key site of engagement between families and the state, in this study it is the mother citizen who is most clearly bought into view. The parent citizen has become associated with active engagement with their child’s needs in education (Gerrard and Savage, 2022; Olmedo and Wilkins, 2017). This study extends the understanding of the parent citizen from a citizen who emerges from policy, to see the mother citizen as an actor who emerges to co-produce policy outcomes through her affective and material labour.

There is an increasing acknowledgment that policy is made by a variety of actors. Indeed, in education policy, international organisations, consultants and teachers all become actors in policy (Ball et al., 2011). However, focussing on how emotions drive policy from non-traditional actors outside the policy process, has not yet been considered. Mother citizens emerge as non-traditional policy actors through the private activities they engage in to support their children in school education. The three sites of school choice, advocacy and support for children with additional needs serve as the sites of policy production.

To fully understand the dynamics of affective labour and policy outcomes to the interplay with the gendered dynamics which underpin this labour require further attention. The idea that women play a greater role in caring for children and thus in supporting children’s education is a well-established claim, long recognized by feminists (Graham, 1991). Similarly, literature has observed that women’s participation in care work is often neither financially rewarded nor acknowledged (Fortunati, 1995; Staples, 2007). The focus of this article diverges from the traditional debate on the value dichotomy between waged and unwaged labour. Instead, it examines how labour dynamics change with shifts in governing strategies.

The affective governmentality lens asks what gives meaning to the activities that mothers engage in. The answer lies in the broad goals of education policy, which position educational success as keenly important. Whilst identifying emotions can be challenging, the study highlights mothers’ actions as motivated by ‘love’ for their children, as they engage in the process of choosing schools. This affective labour becomes intertwined with the activity of mothering, involving researching schools, comparing them, and strategizing for the ‘right’ school for their child. It is cast as, and ‘feels’ like a private concern, but can also be viewed as policy work as it supports the broader policy agendas in education.

As identified here and by others (Hogan and Barnes, 2024), gendered labour is expended to support children at school, through the sourcing and facilitating of additional tutoring and or additional therapies. Consequently, when mothers look outside the education system for support for their children’s needs, they are filling the gaps in the education system. This does two things. On the one hand it makes it easier for the state to rid itself of responsibility for additional needs in education by allowing the uptake of private therapies and educational support framed as discretionary requirements and, on the other hand it also makes it more difficult for the state to dispense with this responsibility as the visibility of mothers, often through advocacy and children in this space increases. Moreover, because these policies operate ‘at a distance’ the mother’s labour is not instrumentally understood in the context of the institutional operation of the school. It always sits outside.

The labour of mothers in support of their children’s education and the context in which it is expended is generally considered to be a private activity. However, as this article has explored, the public goals of education policy both rely upon, inform, and are informed by this labour. The conceptualisation of citizenship offered by Staeheli offers insight into this process, for her citizenship traverses both the public and the private spheres; and can be more or less public and more or less private – it “draws in a range of sites, from the spaces of formal power, to spaces of interaction and public address, to the sites of ordinary lives. It is in these diverse, imbricated sites that citizenship is forged, given meaning, contested, and changed” (2011, p. 395). So too, is policy forged, given meaning, contested and changed. The relationship between mother citizen and policy becomes a two-way endeavour or co-production which reinscribes the role of the mother citizen in policy dynamics.

The kind of labour expended in furtherance of government policy is important to take note of because as Fortunati suggests, the issue with gendered labour in neoliberal governing is that it recasts the debate over whether women’s household labour should appear as simply any other form of productive social labour: ‘‘The real difference between production and reproduction is not that of value/non-value, but that while production both is and appears as the creation of value, reproduction is the creation of value but appears otherwise’’ (Fortunati, 1995: 8). This is very visible in relation to the role of mothers’ labour in supporting school education, where her labour is often viewed through the rhetoric of ‘choice’ as though it is entirely discretionary. Her emotional engagement is likewise devalued, because it is seen as unnecessary. This disconnect between the instrumental, rational policy and the way mothers ‘feel’ policy, masks the role that mothers play in making education policy happen.

Staples argues that affective labour in the ‘women worker’ are as equally connected to questions of “new (bio)machinery” (connection between governing and citizens) as they are of political economy (2007, p. 138). In this sense this analysis extends the understanding of care work to include ‘education labour’ connected to the policy assemblage in education and the activities of the state in education. The broad goals of driving up education performance require mothers’ engagement to ensure that the schooling system is functioning and investing in the importance of performance.

The affective governmentality lens allows a focus on emotional labour which has drawn out the gendered dynamics involved in the production of education policy through the private, labour of mothers. However, the focus of the study has been on finding affective experience there is scope to understand the dynamics of gender and policy activity in greater detail by extending the focus to the interplay between experience, policy, emotion and action.

Conclusion

By concentrating on affective experiences, this article has opened-up new ways to think about the connection between everyday activities, policy and policy actors. The affective governmentality lens brings new life into the analytics of governmentality which reveal dynamics of governing and offers a way to unpack often underexplored sites of governing, such as mothers’ emotional labour.

Moreover, by concentrating on affective labour, this framework illuminates the gendered dynamics of educational policy and how women’s unwaged affective and material labour underpins policy objectives. The reliance on women’s invisible labour to support children’s education has several implications. First, it shows how gender inequalities are rearticulated as new governing dynamics emerge. Second, and relatedly, it shows an attention to women’s affective experiences is a productive way to tease out gender dynamics in policy. Finally, it points toward new pathways for understanding the relationship between policy and the citizen as a two-way interaction or a non-traditional coproduction.

For policymakers, paying attention to the role of labour (affective and material) produced by and for the policy process by non-traditional actors (mother citizens) who are outside the process, allows an opportunity to reconsider this labour and in a more productive way to engage directly with mother citizens to acknowledge the burdens and work to generate policy which minimises it. There are two clear implications for policy makers. One is that a broader definition of policy actors will capture the actual life of and activity of policy. The second is that by employing a gendered lens on the effects of policy it allows a consideration of the gendered impacts of policy, which produces a greater awareness and understanding of the way that gendered power dynamics impact women in education policy.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental Material - Affective governmentality and gendered labour in education policy: Sites of non-traditional coproduction

Supplemental Material for Affective governmentality and gendered labour in education policy: Sites of non-traditional coproduction by Sarah Adele Warner in Public Policy and Administration.