This book extends the thinking behind the innovative ‘What’s the Problem Represented to be?’ approach, to new areas of investigation. It poses a challenge to problem solving as the dominant way of thinking about human existence and human endeavours and offers a fresh alternative that turns attention to the contours of designated ‘problems’.
Originally developed as a mode of critical policy analysis ‘What’s the Problem Represented to Be?’: A New Thinking Paradigm extends the thinking behind the innovative ‘What’s the Problem Represented to be?’ (WPR) approach, to new areas of investigation. It poses a challenge to problem solving as the dominant way of thinking about human existence and human endeavours and offers a fresh alternative that turns attention to the contours of designated ‘problems’.
By focussing on proposed ‘solutions’ to conditions labelled ‘problems’ the WPR approach produces a dynamic form of analysis and critique targeting how ‘problems’ are represented. This critical analytic posture is extended from ‘problems’ to a wide range of putative conditions, including ‘indeterminate situations’, ‘issues’, ‘controversies’ and ‘matters of concern’. In this new thinking paradigm, items, such as buildings and maps, are analysed as proposals for change and hence as problematisations, with important political implications. The book brings together the theoretical resources underpinning the WPR approach and considers important methodological ramifications. A table of WPR questions incorporates changes to the approach signalled in the book.
This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, early career researchers and academics in a wide range of fields, including public policy, education, law, international relations, and disability, Indigenous and feminist studies.
Introduction: A New Thinking Paradigm: Beyond Problem Solving; Part I:
Introducing a WPR Approach
1. Initiating a WPR Analysis: Key Premises
2.
Widening the Scope of Application
3. Troubling Problems: Challenges for Researchers; Part II: Theoretical
Elaborations
4. What is a Subject? Who is a Subject?
5. The turn to
Practice: What are Practices?
6. Moving from iBeingi Reflexive to
iPractisingi Self-problematisation
7. Governmentality and WPR: Exploring
Governing Practices
8. Cultivating a Genealogical Sensibility
9. The Politics
of Change: Resistance, Counter-conducts and Subjugated Knowledges; Part
III: Theoretical Engagements
10. Strategic Interventions: Feminisms, Problem
Representations and Gendering Practices
11. Analysing Differencing Practices:
Racialising, Colonising, Disabling, Heteronorming, Classing, Caste-ing
12.
Problematising (in) a Material World: Empiricism, Description, Affectivity
and Social Flesh
13. Critical questions: From Ideology Critique to
Postcritique
14. Questioning Performativity: Whats at Stake?; Part IV: The
Thorny Issue of Mixed Methods
15. Problematising (with) Paradigms:
Reality, Problems and Mixed Methods
16. Analysing Discourse/s as
Knowledge Practices
17. How to Deal with Data
18. The Use of Ethnography; Part V: WPR and Governing in the Time of COVID-19
19. Governing through Experimenting: A Political Rationality
20.
Researching a Pandemic
21. Applying WPR to Concepts: Questioning Risk, Crisis and Uncertainty
22. Making Mortality Social: How Death Certificates Undermine the social
Determinants of Health; Conclusion: Why we Need a New Thinking Paradigm
Carol Bacchi is Professor Emerita of Politics, Adelaide University, Australia. She researchers and writes in the fields of politics, policy theory and feminists theories.
