‘Smart state’ for a knowledge economy : reconstituting creativity through student subjectivity

Abstract

Rejecting notions of creativity as self-realisation through free expression, this article argues that such discourses currently driving education policy comprise intellectual technologies for the production of student subjectivities required by neoliberal contexts. Using a governmentality framework, it locates the conditions of possibility for the creative subject within policy articulations of the global knowledge economy and emerging rationalities of risk and uncertainty. The analysis focuses on an industry school partnership formed by a state education system in Queensland, Australia, and several multinational corporations. It examines how the partnership has emerged as a novel neoliberal space for the constitution of new education figures such as the enterprising teacher and the entrepreneurial student-worker. These subjectivities are functional to the devolved governing strategy of social investment, which seeks to achieve a broad reconstitution of relationships between students, schools, communities and industry in Queensland.