Suffering through shuttering: Closure, identity, and subjectification at a Japanese women’s university

This study explores how institutional closure shapes the subjectivities and identity formation of current and former students at a small-scale Japanese women’s university. Drawing on an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of six participant interviews, we employ Foucauldian readings of governmentality, subjectification, and discourse to understand how closure operates as a form of institutional power. Findings reveal that closure policies produce ‘rational’ subjectivities, characterised by pragmatic individualism, affective disengagement, and entrepreneurial self-governance. More damagingly, however, the accounts of participants in this study suggest that neoliberal governance within this institutional context positioned students as ‘docile’ subjects who navigated institutional precarity primarily through processes of self-responsibilisation. Within this case, institutional closure emerges as a site where market rationalities were enacted, normalised, and internalised through self-management and adaptation. In doing so, our research contributes to understandings of educational policy as a technology of power that shapes not only institutional futures but also the identities and subjectivities of those within closing institutions.