Time: 1-3pm
Presenter 1, Name: Raaper Rille, Francesca Peruzzo, and Mette Westander
Presenter 2, Name: Ameera Ali
To register: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/drf-seminar-series-20212022-event-4-tickets-265896963977
Talk 1, Title: Disabled student officers doing activism: borrowing from and transpassing neoliberal reason in English higher education
Talk 1, Abstract:
The relentless advance of a neoliberal reason continues to undermine education as a social good (Apple, 2013; Giroux 2011). The systematic withdrawing of the state is replaced by undeterred entrance of private actors and organisations in higher education, undermining equal opportunities and access to services based on principles of universalism (Carter, et alii, 2010). Competition and performativity engender widespread ableism (Beauchamp-Pryor, 2012; Dolmage, 2017), with disabled students being relentlessly sidelined, excluded and left behind even after a relatively more inclusive experience of distance learning during the series of lockdowns due to covid-19 (Disabled Students UK, forthcoming report).
In such a scenario, the role of unions has been increasingly weakened, in the name of individualised injustices that are dismembering the once united education community (Compton & Weiner, 2008; Stevenson, 2015). In particular, the neoliberal higher education agenda has impacted on the modalities of doing unionism, in which student unions suffer the increasingly consumerist environment in which students are asked to study and learn. This raises questions about how have disabled student unions been shaped by these processes of neoliberalisation of higher education? How have their practices of resistance been changed and moulded by the neoliberal drivers in HE governance?
In this presentation, we discuss the workings of neoliberalism and managerialism in education and the effects that years of corrosive processes of privatisation and managerialisation had on the strength of disabled students’ collective actions and on state’s commitment to socially just education, and fair working and studying conditions.
Merging Critical Disability Studies tools, in particular studies of ableism in academia (Dolmage, 2017; Campbell, 2009; Peruzzo, 2020); and Industrial relations studies on student activism in higher education and students’ political agency (Raaper, 2017, 2020; Brooks 2017; Brooks et al. 2015; Klemenčič 2011) we analytically mobilise Foucault’s (1991, 2000) ideas of governmentality and use qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with disabled students and documentary material produced by DSUK.
By enabling critical reflections on the role of politics, collectivity and on the meaning of resisting, this presentation strives to open a debate on renewed strategies, complexity and contradiction in activism, but also the potential to transpass the neoliberal episteme in higher education. Mobilising beauty, cooperation, ethics of diversity to break the ableist narrative of progress and the managerial university culture it invites to rethink the present and the future of higher education and what it means to thrive collectively (Moe & Wiborg, 2017).
References:
Apple, M. W. (2013). Can education change society?. New York and London: Routledge.
Biesta, G. J. (2015). Beyond learning: Democratic education for a human future. London: Routledge.
Beauchamp-Pryor, K. (2012) From absent to active voices: securing disability equality within higher education, International Journal of Inclusive Education, 16:3, 283-295, DOI: 10.1080/13603116.2010.489120
Carter, B., Stevenson, H., Passy, R. (2010). Industrial Relations in Education. Transforming the School Workforce. New York: Routledge
Dolmage, J., (2017). Academic Ableism: disability and higher education. Ann Harbour: University of Michigan Press
Giroux, H. (2011). On Critical Pedagogy. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Foucault, M. (1991). Governmentality. In G. Burchell; C. Gordon; P. Miller, (Eds.), The Foucault effect: studies in governmentality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Foucault, M. (2000). The ethics of the concern of the self as a practice of freedom. In Rabinow, P. (Ed.), Ethics: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984 Vol. 1. pp. 281 – 301. London: Penguin Books.
Moe, T. M., & Wiborg, S. (Eds.). (2017). The Comparative Politics of Education: Teachers Unions and Education Systems around the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Raaper, R. (2017). Tracing assessment policy discourses in neoliberalised higher education settings. Journal of Education Policy, 32(3), 322-339.
Raaper, R. (2020). Constructing Political Subjectivity:The Perspectives of Sabbatical Officers from English Students’ Unions. Higher Education, 79(1), 1-16
Stevenson, H. (2015). Teacher Unionism in Changing Times: Is This the Real “New Unionism”? Journal of School Choice, 9(4), 604–625. https://doi.org/10.1080/15582159.2015.1080054
Verger, A., Fontdevila, C., & Zancajo, A. (2016). The privatization of education: A political economy of global education reform. Teachers College Press.
Dr Rille Raaper is an Associate Professor in Sociology of Higher Education in the School of Education at Durham University. Rille specialises in student identity, experience and political agency in marketised higher education settings. She has conducted numerous research projects and published widely in the areas of higher education policy and practice and its impact on students as learners, citizens and political agents. Her most recent projects explore the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on disadvantaged students as well as student politics in the experience of disabled students.
Dr Francesca Peruzzo is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the School of Education at the University of Birmingham (UK). Her research interests lie in the intersection between politics, inclusion, ableism, and education policy. Her doctoral study focused on ableism and neoliberal policies in higher education and their implications for equity of opportunities, and she is currently the Research Lead of the DIGITAL in coronavirus project and the Education RESET project, analysing digital and non-digital technologies and inclusive assemblages in the Global South and North during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the implications of privatisation and neoliberal policies for social justice and inclusive education in a post-pandemic education.
Mette Westander is the Founding Director of Disabled Students UK (DSUK), recognised by Disability Power 100 as one of Britain’s most influential disabled led organisations. DSUK uses disabled led expertise to enable the Higher Education sector to provide equal access for their disabled students. They empower students, produce research and inform policy. Mette has led the work to create several influential reports on the situation for disabled students in Higher Education. Having graduated with a BA in Philosophy and Psychology from Oxford University Mette is currently studying for an MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience.
Talk 2, Title: “I Want You To Be Like Other Dads!”: Dis/Ableism in Children’s Picture Books featuring Disabled Parents
Talk 2, Abstract: In this talk, I will discuss the ways in which disability and disabled parents are discursively depicted within 18 children’s picture books featuring disabled parents. This talk seeks to elicit awareness surrounding disabled parents—a group that has traditionally been––and continues to be––stigmatized, marginalized, and excluded from conversations around parenting within the media, society, and academia. The discourse analysis guiding this research underscores the sociocultural messages that these books convey to their readers regarding ‘normalcy’ and ‘difference’ in parenting practices between disabled and non-disabled parents and reveals ableist discourses within these texts. This presentation seeks to elucidate the ways that these discourses intersect with one another and reflect broader sociocultural conceptions of disabled parents. Moreover, this presentation troubles dominant Western (contemporary and traditional) understandings of parenting by deconstructing the ways that parental expectations are often understood along ableist standards and strives to counter inaccurate and disableist conceptions of disabled parents. The implications of the books’ discursive messages will be explored in terms of how they may impact disabled parents, their children and families, as well as children of non-disabled parents. Finally, this presentation seeks to bring awareness into the realities of disabled parenting that are often unacknowledged, condemned, and seen as inferior.
Disability Research Forum 