The will to include – education for becoming a desirable citizen

Abstract

ABSTRACT Contemporary understandings about the importance of a ‘desirable population’ have become intimately related to the pursuit of education and lifelong learning. In order to enable this, higher education operates as a technology for shaping desirable citizens. This paper focuses on a project in Sweden that aimed to include students with intellectual disabilities in higher education. Drawing on Foucault’s notion on governmentality and subjectivity, the analytical focus is on which kinds of subjects are created in and emerge from the project’s policy documents. The prospective students emerge as different and in need of special measures and are assigned particular knowledge that creates expectations and opportunities for them to regulate and foster themselves as desirable subjects in spaces where governing techniques such as surveillance and confession operate. Rather than including these students, the measures instead lead to further exclusion by creating, manifesting and reproducing the otherness it was supposed to counteract.