This event hosted by the School of Education's Centre for Higher Education Transformations (CHET). These seminars are free and open to the public.

Speaker: Professor Penny Jane Burke (UNESCO Chair in Equity, Social Justice and Higher Education, Global Innovation Chair of Equity, Director of the Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher Education (CEEHE) at the University of Newcastle)

Mobilising Higher Education for Social Justice Praxis

This seminar presents the vision and focus of the UNESCO Chair in Equity, Social Justice and Higher Education (HE) to mobilise HE as a vehicle for social justice. Efforts to address inequalities in HE are profoundly limited by deficit imaginaries and overly simplistic, mono-dimensional and individualising frameworks for equity. This misframes equity as located in the perceived deficiencies of individuals constructed through the lens of disadvantage. Deficit imaginaries get lodged in policies and practices that lock us in a viscous circle of perpetuating the very inequalities we are seeking to remedy. The UNESCO Chair develops a multidimensional framework for collaborative social justice praxis committed to generating constellations of impact through sustaining communities of praxis. A key aim is to dislodge deficit imaginaries that are built into HE structures, policies and practices in ways that are insidious and almost impossible to see. To illustrate this, the seminar presents work being developed as part of the UNESCO Chair considering the impact of gender-based violence (GBV) on higher education access and participation. GBV is an insidious and wide-spread social problem across the globe rooted in gender injustice but is a silent issue in relation to HE equity agendas. Through the collaboration taking place under the UNESCO Chair, which includes research, evaluation, new programs, student advocacy and inter-agency collaboration, the UNESCO Chair is producing critical knowledge and action to mobilise HE in its capacity to contribute to gender justice and challenge GBV.

Bio

Professor Penny Jane Burke is UNESCO Chair in Equity, Social Justice and Higher Education, Global Innovation Chair of Equity and Director of the Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher Education (CEEHE) at the University of Newcastle. She is committed to mobilising higher education as a vehicle of social justice and has developed PPOEMs (Praxis-based, Pedagogical, Ethically-oriented Methodologies) as a way to open time and space to do equity differently. Her personal experience of returning to study via an Access to Higher Education program has fuelled her deep commitment to generating research with impact, firmly located in social justice principles. An influential scholar and practitioner, Penny is co-editor of the Bloomsbury book series on gender and education, was executive editor of Teaching in Higher Education (2010 – 2020), received the Higher Education Academy’s National Teaching Award (2008) and was an expert member of the Australian government’s Equity in Higher Education Panel (2020-2021) and Equity Research & Innovation Panel (2018-2020). She has published widely in the field and her books include Accessing Education, Reconceptualising Lifelong Learning: Feminist Interventions, The Right to Higher Education, Changing Pedagogical Spaces in Higher Education and Gender in an Era of Post-Truth Populism. She also holds honorary positions at the University of Bath, as Global Chair of Social Innovation, and the University of Exeter, as honorary professor.