Mundane technologies of educational policy consultancy: Presentations and interpretive control

Abstract

This conceptual article examines how consultants use a mundane policy device, the powerpoint presentation, to manage education policy relations between international lenders and education ministries in the global South. The article theorizes presentations as socio-material assemblages that combine consultants, software, visualization conventions, presentation styles, and participant structures in ways that enable consultants to control public interpretations of program evidence. Our analysis is a “constitutive argument” (Pacewicz, 2022) about how to conceptualize presentations. We draw evidence from diverse sources including published accounts by consultants, descriptions of presentations in corporate settings, internet discussions of slide construction, online archives of slides, and data from semi-structured interviews with 12 current or former members of a education ministry in a South Asian country. We argue that consultants use mundane presentation technologies to establish closed interpretive spaces in which they can control interpretation by rendering project information in visually coded forms and structuring interaction through language ideologies and participant structures that ritualize presentation discourse. We close by highlighting implications of these arguments and noting lacunae in our account to be addressed in further research.