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Published in Studies in

This article focuses on the idea of the educable adult subject in Sweden and the ways this idea has re-emerged in different practices during the 20 th century. It's a policy analysis where official documents from the 20 th century and early 21 st century concerned with adult education in Sweden are analysed based on the Foucauldian notion of governmentality. The results show that the idea of the educable adult subject has been present during the major part of the 20 th century. But there are differences in how it is inscribed into the practices. The main difference is that the educable subject today is created in relation to a new rationality of governing where it is governed and constructed through its own choices and actions instead of through institutions based on knowledge produced by the social sciences and experts. Further, the ambition today is that everyone should be included in lifelong learning. At the same time, these ambitions also create exclusion. What happens to those who cannot or do not want to participate in lifelong learning? I argue that such practices of inclusion/exclusion are present in all the documents analysed, but that today, this practice has taken a specific shape.

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We argue two major difficulties in current discourses of citizenship education. The first is a relative masking of student discourses of citizenship, by positioning students as lacking citizenship and as outside the community that acts. The second is in failing to understand the discursive and material support for citizenship activity. We thus argue that it is not a lack of citizenship that education research might address, but identification and exploration of the different forms of citizenship that people already engage in. We offer a fragmentary, poststructuralist theorization oriented to explore the 'contemporary limits of the necessary', drawing on specific resources from the work of Michel Foucault and others for the constitution of local, partial accounts of citizenship discourses and activities, and exploration of their possibilities and constraints. We argue this as a significant tactic of theorization in support of an opening of discourses of citizenship and in avoiding the discursive difficulties that we have identified. Our theorization then is significant in its potential to unsettle discourses that confine contemporary thought regarding citizenship education, and support exploration of what might be excessive to that confinement.