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 paradigmbeyond 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
being reflexive to practising 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 researches and writes in the fields of politics, policy theory and feminists theories.
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