Upper Secondary School in Norway: Discourses About Dropout in White Papers

Abstract

This article investigates how two White Papers from the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research, one from 1999 and one from 2017, articulate the concept of dropout. Bauman's concepts of strangers (Bauman, 1997) and retrotopia (Bauman, 2017) are used as a backdrop to support a broader understanding of the white papers' discourses. The article seeks to answer the following question: How has the concept of dropout been discursively articulated in political documents in Norway over two decades?