The entanglement of place in the corporatised governance of schools: Thinking poetically with Barad

The study argues that place matters in the corporatised governance of schools in England and materialises this through poetic inquiry. Against understandings of place as background or container for governance, it places place at the centre of analysis, arguing that it entangles with governance policy, architecture, and actors. Grounded in three multi-academy trusts and a poetic inquiry approach, with two agential cuts embodied in distinct poetic forms; the evidence is theory-driven qualitative material and poetic presentation.

The study proposes that place is co-agentic in technocratic governance practices of relationship management and risk mitigation. This moves place from a passive object of governance to an acting element that helps configure parental engagement, expanding the analytical focus of critiques of corporatised governance. The argument rests on Barad's concepts of intra-action and the agential cut, presenting entanglements of governance policy, architecture, and actors through poetic form.

Methodologically, the study entangles theory, data, and poetic form, so that the poetic approach constitutes both data analysis and presentation. Rather than treating poetry as style or supplementary material, it makes poetic form itself an analytical device. Operationalised through two agential cuts corresponding to two distinct poetic forms; this is an argument for methodological innovation rather than a quantitative test.

Internationally, the study contributes to critical understandings of how neoliberal logics shape educational governance, suggesting that place both legitimates corporate rationalities in school governance and offers possibility to subvert them. It connects the English corporatised governance case to global discussions of neoliberal educational governance and assigns place a dual political potential. A theoretical and critical argument based on contextualised analysis of three multi-academy trusts, without reporting generalisable statistical effects.

The chapter applies to school corporatised governance and the configuration of parental engagement in three multi-academy trusts in England, analysing entanglements among governance policy, architecture, and actors; it addresses researchers and postgraduate students in education policy, educational governance, and critical methodology who wish to reconsider the role of place in comparable corporatised governance settings.

A careful reader might still watch how knowledge generated through poetic inquiry connects with the practical decisions of policymakers and school governors; how far the contexts of three multi-academy trusts travel to other institutional settings; and how the claim of place as co-agentic might be further examined across governance levels. Because the loaded text is the chapter abstract and bibliographic record, the specific poetic texts, analytical steps, and empirical details of the chapter are not unfolded here and await consultation of the original chapter.