The politics of knowledge that govern the European Union lifelong learning policy space – A Foucauldian reading

This contemporary historical research calls into question the mentalities that construct the EU lifelong learning policy space in specific ways. By drawing on the Foucauldian concepts of governmentality and genealogy, this thesis analyses selected main EU lifelong learning policy literature by focusing on how this space has been articulated in governable forms. In line with a Foucauldian interpretation of power, the EU as a subject is decentred and considered as an epistemological form of assumption so that power and knowledge are analysed according to how they operate in this space. The governmentalist approach explores the technologies of the self and the technologies of government that construct and govern the conduct of conduct of the subject through the recurrent narratives in this space. In combination with this approach, the genealogical analysis of the episteme lifelong learning traces the different terminological interpretations which have been systematically reconfigured throughout the years to attain new connotations. These different connotations are problematised not only because the distinctiveness of the definition influenced the trajectory lifelong learning took throughout the years, but also because lifelong learning can, at one and the same time, control or liberate people. The distinctive contribution to academic literature that this thesis achieves is that it problematises the unquestionable truths that construct the EU lifelong learning policy space from a non-normative point of view. The overriding idea is for the actors in this space to make visible the taken-for granted principles and to create the possibility to challenge prevailing power relations and challenge what is uncritically taken as natural.