The paper will examine the transnational circulation of policy ideas as a visual enterprise. From the pedagogy of the international World Fairs of the 1870s (Lundahl and Lawn 2015), all the way to the data visualisation techniques that have exploded over the last few years, the transnational movement of policy instruments, modes and ideas could also be examined as the art of collecting, selecting, classifying and visually representing assemblages of reality, carefully presented and narrated for an external audience. Although previous research has highlighted the role of documents and meetings in the emergence of transnational policy learning (Freeman and Maybin 2011), it has largely ignored the role of the visual in establishing policy convergence. This paper will argue that visualisation constructs a transparent space where nothing is hidden; indeed, the visual image comes to represent the system itself. Thus, visual assemblages become ‘systems of objects’ and thus ‘systems of values’ (Baudrillard 1968; 135).
Building on the examination of the case of the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tables and graphs, the paper will work with public policy analysis, visual culture theory and critical discourse analysis methods, in order to explore education comparisons through the ‘logic of the gaze’. ‘Killer charts’ (Stevens 2011), rating and ranking tables, and other visual comparisons will be explored through analysis of two interrelated notions, those of the spectacle and identity-building (through constructions of ‘us’ and ‘them’). The paper will show how both are prevalent in the logic of constructing visual comparisons; crucially, they are interdependent when constructing new transnational governing panoramas.
In more detail, through an examination of the OECD education data tables and graphs, the paper will explore data visualisation methods more broadly before going into an analysis of the visual representation of some of the rating and ranking tables PISA used. There will be an analysis of the ‘archaeology’ of these tables starting from those in 2001 all the way to 2016, as well as an examination of the ways these tables were used by the OECD, member states and the European Commission DG Education and Culture.
The paper is exploratory and aims to go beyond analysis of the circulation of policy ideas through textual discourse or numbers. Thus, the focus is on an understanding of the movement of transnational expertise through the ‘life and work’ of ‘killer charts’, and thus examine the centrality of vision as an apparatus of comparative investigation, verification, surveillance and cognition.
