- Title
- Contestation, contradiction and collaboration in equity and widening participation: In conversation with Geoff Whitty
- Creator
- Burke, Penny Jane
- Relation
- Knowledge, Policy and Practice in Education: The struggle for social justice p. 233-254
- Publisher
- UCL Press
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2020
- Description
- In this chapter, I reflect on my work with Geoff Whitty in establishing, as its co-directors, the Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher Education (CEEHE) at the University of Newcastle, Australia; the first centre in the world of its kind, focused on developing a unique, decentred and innovative praxis-based framework for equity and widening participation. This process necessitated close collaboration and deep, challenging discussions about the nature of ‘equity work’, which we both understood in relation to social justice. We discussed what it means to be ‘inclusive’ and ‘equitable’ and how we understood ‘access’, ‘equity’ and ‘widening participation’, concepts that had challenged us both for many years in our mutual commitment to social justice in and through education. Shaped by an eclectic interweaving of critical, feminist and post/structural perspectives, praxis enabled us to ‘foreground the need for critical reflexivity in dynamic spaces constituted of complex relations of power and difference’, ‘creating spaces of refusal against hegemonic frameworks that are complicit in insidious inequalities and misrecognitions’ (Burke, Crozier and Misiaszek 2017: 28). Geoff and I were concerned to make our understanding of praxis as accessible to others as possible, particularly for those outside of the critical sociology of education, which is where we were both positioned. In collaboration with our colleagues in CEEHE, we developed the following definition of how we understood ‘praxis’ in the context of equity and social justice in higher education.
- Subject
- equity work; collaboration; sociology; higher education
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1440458
- Identifier
- uon:41150
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781782772774
- Language
- eng
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