In this paper, we examine how Teach for Bangladesh (TfB) has utilised Facebook since 2012 in its effort to extend its policy influence and message to young Bangladeshi graduates and local population. We reveal this as an example of how Facebook has become a powerful new platform for policy mediatisation. This is also a developing worldexample of a [global] policy rewritten [locally] as audio-video bytes. Our analyses reveal three ways in which TfB sought to influence these graduates, but also the local government and public, via Facebook. First, it created opportunities for recurrent reading, hearing and seeing the policy in practice as animated by 'stars' , 'spectacles' , 'glamour' and 'statistics' , all of which regularise a sense of heroic bodily feeling-asvernacularisation. Secondly, it sought to inform and reshape the social imaginary and associated problem imagination of the graduates and locals to whom this message was directed. And thirdly, it involved what might be described as a 'post-truth' way of engagement via the excessive use of emotional stimulus, manifesting an understanding of the affective aspect of policy. We have used a combination of social network analysis, content analysis and videological analysis in establishing our argument. The medium is the message. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty-psychic or physical.
This article documents the methodological thinking that underpined a sociological study of Teach for Bangladesh ( TFB ), a globally mobile yet locally embedded education policy situated in a developing world context. In order to reassess education policy vis-à-vis
spatialities–power, relationships–resources, culture– change and imaginations–flows of globalization, this methodological thinking has to be both flexible and innovative. Analysis (topological) has demanded a combination of global ethnography and network ethnography,
the former allowing global forces to be understood as spatially and culturally imbricated within intersecting policy worlds ([g]local cases), and the latter mapping and analysing spaces (networks and relations) and places (cultural negotiations) that characterize power within such imbrications.
Data were collected both online and on site, resulting in both empirical advantages and practical challenges. As a sociological attempt to study policy mobilities in education in a Southeast Asian context, this study offers an innovative methodology and a befitting set of analytical vocabulary.
Some literature on World Bank education policies after 1999 tries to project a shift away of the Bank from its 1980s neoliberal mandate. This article argues that the shift is only in the form of rhetoric, which facilitates a hidden agenda of creating a worldwide higher education market, leaving the poor with primary education only. At the rhetorical level there is a greater concern for poverty and equity, showing the importance of primary education for the poor, but at an operational level the policies still are conducive to a market-driven approach to higher education.
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