Tyler John Hook

In 2016, following the Ebola crisis, Liberia’s Ministry of Education partnered with two social investment firms to usher in a new era of corporatized educational policy and school provision known as the Liberian Educational Advancement Program (LEAP). As this partnership attempts to align social and educational policy and development in Liberia with the “invisible hand of the market” through increased monitoring and evaluation and the involvement of for-profit actors, I seek to understand how these processes of “corporatization” are transforming social-policy and educational landscapes, while creating new forms of governance and development that potentially reproduce systems of inequality. This 12-month multi-sited ethnographic study focuses on the new configurations of power, the changing forms and norms of governance, and how a new corporatized model of social development (LEAP) materializes and is experienced by communities on the ground. As corporations increasingly become development organizations, move into roles previously held by the state, and attempt to align and narrow social policy and practice with supposedly value-neutral technologies and evaluations, the question arises, what kinds of governable spaces, subjects, and forms/opportunities of resistance are produced?