Introduction

This chapter makes an intervention in the literature on knowledge mobilization and global education policy by presenting a novel approach to studying policy movement. The central purpose of this approach – labeled bibliographic ethnography – is to highlight the work that bibliographic references do in the context of academic and organizational texts, while also keeping one eye on the larger implications of the productive nature of such citations beyond the limits of the text itself. The approach brings an ethnographic sensitivity to the analysis of the role that citations play in the sense that it asks: what kinds of statements or claims are enabled in the context of academic and organizational texts by the invocation of a given reference? As will be explained, this analysis is then placed within a second level of reflection where the researcher assesses the work of citations in relation to the dominant features of the sociohistorical and political- economic context. The method we suggest breaks with the internalist reading of texts – in our case, scientific research and organizational publications on global education policy – thus enabling us to critically analyze the structures and practices that grant authority to particular kinds of research in the first place. Analysis of this kind necessarily has a political dimension, because the underlying phenomenon itself is political. That is, the issue of who to cite and how to interpret and instrumentalize existing research has political implications, even when authors do not have open political intentions with their research.

Because the method being proposed here represents an innovation, the purpose of the present chapter is not only to describe what this method entails, but also to clarify the theoretical assumptions upon which it stands, which are based on linguistic anthropology and Bourdieu's work on language. The chapter then demonstrates the kinds of insights related to policy movement that can be produced through bibliographic ethnography. It does so by sharing an example of how this approach has been applied previously to one global education policy in particular, namely, the policy for charter schools that emerged in Colombia in 1999 and has subsequently been widely cited and promoted.