This event is part of the School of Education's Bristol Conversations in Education research seminar series. These seminars are free and open to the public.

Hosted by the Comparative and International Research in Education (CIRE)

Speakers: Dr. Navin Kikabhai, University of Bristol

This presentation/discussion, focuses on how educational systems respond to diversity, inclusion and social justice. It is a brief summary of a recently published article (link below). It offers a critique of how universities engage in conversations of diversity and yet simultaneously support and sponsor segregation. While widening participation has increased some marginalised social groups attendance in higher education, these are typically measured by single identity characteristics, and generally focus on what students lack. The presentation/discussion shifts across disciplinary epistemic boundaries making use of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari. It also focuses on social justice, drawing on the work of Fraser. This is in relation to the experiences of disabled people and of concern is the misframing of disability. This is amidst global insecurity and growing inequality. The presentation/discussion, highlights that schools alone are the wrong place to look. It identifies a disablist cultural capital within teacher education, where ‘special’ education has become an all embracing metaphor for the ‘defective’ child, and its label being a refugee camp for the casualties of schooling. Individuals on “Special” education programmes staffed by ‘special” education tutors are taught about human defect, in turn produce essays that are open invitations to prejudice. Higher education masks the myth of upward social mobility, here are forms of segregation, territorialised spaces.. Arguably, education has been used to perpetuate a narrowly defined notion of meritocracy, only to advance the already advantaged. Epistemic territorial boundaries of knowledge about disability are rooted in expressions of power relations. For discussion the presentation invites response to a series of questions, some of which are:

• Is higher education fair?
• What are universities for? What are their purpose and function?
• How can the university address the role it has played and continues to play in reproducing global inequalities?
• Why are educational practitioners fixated on medical understandings of disability?
• In relation to higher education participation; what is its substance and frame of justice that address issues of recognition, redistribution and representation in a globalizing age?

Article: How Educational Systems Respond to Diversity, Inclusion and Social Justice

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