Public policy is often framed as a response to social problems rather than the cause of them. Carol Bacchi’s influential ‘What’s the Problem Represented to Be?’ (WPR) approach – first published in her 2009 book, Analysing Policy – addresses this contrast and has become an essential methodology for post-structural analysis of public policy. This edited volume brings together leading international scholars to rethink, extend and reflect on the WPR approach in novel ways, demonstrating its applicability beyond policy documents and across diverse social science disciplines. It presents innovative perspectives on a radical methodology, making it a must-read for research methods scholars and critical policy analysts. Engaging with multiple theories, concepts and purposes, this book provides cutting-edge insights and real-world applications that make it an essential tool for interrogating policy and power in practice. 

In this paper, we build on the focus of our edited collection to consider what the WPR approach brings to the analytic field, in contrast to other critical takes on policy analysis. How does its particular epistemological and methodological perspective illuminate policy and governance in a critical manner beyond somewhat narrower, descriptive interrogations? What are the potential extensions and elaborations of the approach? Our ambition is to discuss what we regard as the characteristics of the WPR approach in relation to other ways of doing critical policy studies - its affordances but also any drawbacks, as well as to consider the potential for the approach in the future. Our discussion is informed both by our shared feminist position and by our locations within post-structuralism, where Malin is a longstanding WPR researcher, while Rosalind is drawn more toward the end of the spectrum of post-structuralism that builds links with structuralism and constructivism.

Over the past decade, social networking platforms have become an important communication channel for protesters in autocratic countries. In August 2020 and January 2021, the messaging application Telegram and social media platform Tik-Tok became platforms for protest mobilization and coordination in Belarus and Russia respectively. This article applies previous research within social movements and democratization studies about the use of Facebook and Twitter to instigate and galvanize protests in autocratic countries in order to explore how protest mobilization on newly politicized platforms such as Telegram and TikTok is manifested. For this purpose, we conducted a qualitative content analysis of 1,128 protest-related publications (posts) on Telegram’s channel NextaLive and 100 videos on TikTok. The conclusion provides an extended framework for analyzing political mobilization online and argues that social networking platforms can themselves be considered spaces that are commensurate with those of offline protest and not merely tools to stimulate democratic participation.

The intense attention to how AI technologies (AIT) are increasingly permeating aspects of society as well as people’s everyday lives often ends in a call for ethics. The need for ethical AI, or responsible AI, or trustworthy AI is put forward by scholars as well as policymakers as the answer to the potential risks that the implementation of different forms of AITs could bring. This chapter has the ambition of bringing together the state-of-the art regarding the discussion on AI and ethics in policy – including a focus on the growing strand of critical studies on governing and policy. In doing this, the chapter also demonstrates the analytical merit of a governmentality framework when focusing on the political implications of the ethics discourse. Hence, the chapter focuses on what ethics ‘does’ with and in policy, and what the political implications of these ‘doings’ are. 

Both early and more contemporary feminist utopias and dystopias present us with alternatives that are both disruptive and transgressive of the existing order, making us aware of the unequal power relations embodied in society that interlock in producing urban space and the subjectivities available to women and other ‘Others’. They highlight the normalizations of hegemonic masculinity and heteronormativity in the city that produce some bodies as ‘normal’ and ‘in place’ and others as ‘out of place’. We discuss the possibilities these utopian/dystopian imaginings reveal for what feminist urban spaces can be, challenging taken-for-granted power relations, hierarchies and systems of exclusion/inclusion. Finally, we consider how envisaging feminist utopias and/or dystopias encourages thinking outside the box and offers a way of contesting dominant discourses: how, by developing a critical approach to what exists, such imaginings may open up changing cities physically, emotionally, environmentally and democratically by picturing (an)other future city. 

In this paper, we develop an approach for analyzing the increasingly important strand of research that deals with automated systems of governing. Such systems, which figure prominently in public policy and regulation, are designed to utilize the rapid advancement in computer technology, like artificial intelligence, with the purpose of governing something or someone. Drawing on a large sample of articles we present a comprehensive analysis of scholarly works where these systems are studied as political, rather than neutral, instruments of governing. We find that the current state of the art articulates the politics of automated systems of governing in three ways. Namely, as part of ontological, epistemological and ideological questions. We conclude that future research should investigate the complex forms of marketization nested in these systems, that it should move from theoretical examples to detailed empirical studies and that political science should get more involved with the issue.

In this chapter we present a broad overview of research on what we call the politics of automated systems of governing (ASG). We define such systems as the enlisting of algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and various utilizations of so called ‘big data’ with the purpose to control, direct, steer or guide something or someone. Drawing on selective parts of a larger systematic review of 1667 peer-reviewed scholarly works dealing with politics in relation to big data, AI and algorithms, we illustrate two things. First, by taking stock of this literature we show its context as we reconstruct seven major themes from a wide range of topics through which scholars investigate ASG. Second, we theorize how the notion of politics can be said to operate along three dimensions as researchers mobilize the concept in relation to ASG across the seven themes, namely politics as ontology, epistemology and ideology.