Rethinking adult education and lifelong learning research: the utility of an analytics of governmentality and assemblages

This paper suggests the utility of an analytics of governmentality perspective and assemblages in rethinking research on lifelong learning and adult education. It provides a way of exploring the linkages and relays between policies and practices at centres of calculation, authority and government with everyday practices. In particular this approach assists in foregrounding the political rationality underpinning the technologies of power, such as present-day liberalisms like neoliberalism and advanced liberalism (Rose 1999) in advanced liberal democracies.