Educational Diversity: The Subject of Difference and Different Subjects

Abstract

‘Diversity’ has become a key term in contemporary social theory, politics and practice and is often used as both a description of complex social realities and a prescription for how those realities should be valued, assessed and managed. In considering diversity in education, this collection of essays explores the relationship between new equality regimes and continued societal inequalities, exploring change, ambivalence and resistance as negotiated, lived-in and differently inhabited in and through policies, institutional practices and everyday interpersonal encounters. Legislative requirements sit alongside easy rhetorics and uneasy realities. The New Labour UK government (1997–2010) recognised and formalised six equality strands (age, disability, religion, race, sexual orientation and gender) with fresh legislation that addressed equality issues (Equality Act, 2010)1: these are negotiated at the EU level and, indeed, internationally, with a raft of recent ‘diversity’ legislation reconfiguring mainstreamed-marginalised identities. Yet these strands of equality and diversity are threatened in a climate of welfare cut-backs, economic crisis and an overhauling of higher education. As ‘diversity’ is increasingly invoked in changing educational landscapes, it is pulled in different directions: as capital, cure, caveat and check. We hear how diverse institutions can respond to tough times of educational cutbacks and economic crisis, to buffer their diverse subjects, as resilient, capacitated future-workers. These pronouncements frequently invoke a sentiment of to be ‘improved’, as a rejection of elitism via ‘internation-alisation’ and ‘widening participation’, whereby students are propelled into diverse, enhanced futures (Taylor and Allen, 2011). Diversity stories and sentiments are told despite the reality of unequal opportunities, entries and futures.