Biography as Education Governance

Abstract

This paper examines the increasing interest of Swedish schools to construct, analyze, assess and control the individual progression and social integration of students using biographical registers. I argue that this tendency—involving biography as a form of governance—can be seen as a revision of early 20th-century biographical research by the Chicago School of Sociology. In this paper I consider the theoretical, methodological and political background of the Chicago work in order to compare it to the Swedish use of student biographies. Their current use involves a twofold subjectification of students—as “objects” of assessment and as “relays” for assessment. Finally, this subjectivity is understood in relation to international initiatives in education restructuring where new ways of governing—often labeled as progressive—impose social control, heighten individual responsibility and, not least, create new forms of social exclusion.