Anticipatory policy rhetoric: exploring ideological fantasies of Finnish higher education

This research explores how anticipatory policymaking played out in Finnish higher education reform. The study applies a discourse theoretic framework to explore how policy narrative might prove attractive to subjects by mobilizing ideas, norms, and fantasies through affective identification. Fantasies frame and stabilize our sense-making practices, thereby providing affective belonging and (ir)rationale for our actions. As an empirical case, the analysis of the Vision Development 2030 reform elucidates how the policy documents construct fantasmatic narratives (with reference to obstacles, threats, and plenitude to come) that set the terms of debate in articulating the ‘problem’ of Finnish HE and in supplying the favorable policy solutions. Scrutinizing a range of ideological fantasies, such as articulating gloomy forecasts and reactivating cognitive and affective memories of past successes, Vision Development sought to evoke subjects’ latent emotions and desires, mobilizing them toward a reproduction of the techno-managerialist order. Applying poststructuralist discourse theory and the concept of fantasy in policy studies, the role of desire and affective rhetoric in anticipatory future-making can be critically evaluated and the implications of such policy doctrines contemplated.