Neoliberalism and Education: Rearticulating Social Justice and Inclusion

Neoliberalism and Education: Rearticulating Social Justice and Inclusion offers a critical reflection on the establishment of neoliberalism as the new global orthodoxy in the field of education, and considers what this means for social justice and inclusion. It brings together writers from a number of countries, who explore notions of inclusion and social justice in educational settings ranging from elementary schools to higher education. Contributors examine policy, practice, and pedagogical considerations covering different dimensions of (in)equality, including disability, race, gender, and class. They raise questions about what social justice and inclusion mean in educational systems that are dominated by competition, benchmarking, and target-driven accountability, and about the new forms of imperialism and colonisation that both drive, and are a product of, market-driven reforms. While exposing the entrenchment, under current neoliberal systems of educational provision, of longstanding patterns of (racialised, classed, and gendered) privilege and disadvantage, the contributions presented in this book also consider the possibilities for hope and resistance, drawing attention to established and successful attempts at democratic education or community organisation across a number of countries. This book was originally published as a special issue of the British Journal of Sociology of Education.

Kalwant Bhopal is Professor of Education and Social Justice at the University of Southampton, UK. She has published widely on educational inequalities, focusing on marginalised and excluded groups. She is the author of The Experiences of Black and Minority Ethnic Academics: A comparative study of the unequal academy (Routledge, 2015). She is currently conducting research exploring successful support strategies for BME senior leaders in higher education.

Farzana Shain is Professor of Sociology of Education at Keele University, UK. Her research and writing focuses on educational inequalities and social justice, and on young people’s understandings of the politics of oil. She is the author of The New Folk Devils: Muslim Boys and Education (Trentham, 2011), and The Schooling and Identity of Asian Girls (Trentham, 2003), which both explore the social and political identifications of young people in a schooling context in England, against the backcloth of the global ’war of terror’. She has also written widely about the politics of educational change in the further education sector in England.