Repositioning Policy Making: The Clash Between Policy Makers and the Field

This article explores new types of disadvantage which are produced by global scale dynamics, and adopts the phenomenology approach to propose a new kind of metrics. The paper builds its theoretical argument on the latest sociological approaches of disadvantage understanding it as effective functioning and positioning in spatiotemporal terms within a space of appearance. The paper translates the above working hypothesis into a methodological protocol using visual methodologies and elicitation interviews, and conducts a mixed methods qualitative research taking 222 vocational education students, aged 14-19 years old, from Italy, France and Greece as a case study. The results reveal a new type of disadvantage that moves beyond the concept of educational inequality and brings into scene the notion of dispossession as a form of clustering relational disadvantage preventing students’ effective functioning across the educational, social and political sphere. The paper concludes with addressing the gap between policy discourse and the field and stresses the need for policy directives to match their context.