Locating Social Justice in Higher Education Research

Jan McArthur, Paul Ashwin, Jan McArthur, Paul Ashwin

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350086777
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Istruzione superiore

This book focuses on the relations between social justice and higher education research. Jan McArthur and Paul Ashwin bring together chapters from international researchers that explore these relations in a range of national contexts and consider their implications for policies, pedagogy and our understanding of the roles of graduates in societies. As a whole, the book argues that social justice needs to be more than a topic of higher education research and must also be part of the way that research is undertaken. Social justice must be located in research practices as well as in the issues that are researched.

Part One

Locating Social Justice in Higher Education Research and Policies

1

Bridging Near and Far Perspectives in Socially Just Higher Education Research

Jan McArthur

Introduction

Perspective is a social justice issue. The astronomer and popular science writer Carl Sagan draws our attention to perspectives when he describes the earth and its position in the universe:

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. (Sagan, 1994, p. 6)

A commitment to social justice requires an appreciation of alternative perspectives and the interplays between these vantage points. Social justice requires a recognition that we are bound by commonalities that are both large and minute and similarly distinguished by diverse and eccentric differences: an overemphasis on one or the other leads to distortions and pathologies and in their name grave social injustices.

As the earlier quote suggests, we can gain perspective and thus greater understanding through knowing the difference between close and far; the enormity of the cosmos evokes an intimacy within life on earth we might otherwise miss. However, we can also be mistaken – and through such mistakes distort what there is to know and act in unjust ways. This is the case with Sagan’s generals and emperors; they hold a distorted sense of distance that enables them to deny mutual recognition of each other’s shared humanity, and thus to justify their own acts of terror. This is a story still familiar today. To deny or misrepresent recognition to another is to do injustice.

In this chapter, I argue that bridging these perspectives of near and far is both a central purpose for higher education research committed to social justice, and made possible by the mediating role that a commitment to social justice brings. In particular, I draw on the critical theory of the Frankfurt School to inform both my understanding of social justice and its location in higher education research. My argument is in two parts. First, I discuss the problem of dichotomization of the social world in our approaches to research and how this can reduce our ability to see and comprehend issues and understandings core to social justice research. Next, I outline how research undertaken in the spirit of critical theory’s dialectics can avoid such problems and take us further in our goal towards both greater social justice and deepening our understandings of higher education. Finally, I consider several areas of higher education research and the relative roles of dichotomization and dialectics in understanding these areas. In particular, I consider how we understand student identity and our conceptualizations of the purposes of higher education. I argue that the mediating role of a critical theory approach to social justice, which encourages a radical dialecticism, can enhance the research we do by ensuring a more diverse, inclusive and robust understanding of the phenomena we research. Most important is a commitment that justice should never just be a topic of research. Social justice embraces the motivation, means, approach and focus of our research. Social justice must exist in our philosophies, relationships and demeanour as we research. To research social justice within higher education is to embody the principles of social justice in our actions and thoughts, our relationships and dispositions and our methods and methodologies. There is, therefore, no dichotomization of what we research and how we research; each informs the other and each is as important as the other.

Perilous Dichotomies

I begin my argument by emphasizing that a commitment to social justice when researching higher education demands that we avoid imposing artificial distance or harmful separations as these represent misdirections of our perceptions of the world in which we live. In addition, they consequently can lead to greater injustice as they misrepresent the experiences of diverse groups and individuals within higher education and society. I argue that social justice, understood from a critical theory perspective, illuminates the need to breach these separations and, indeed, shines light on how that can be done, and I elaborate on this way forward in the next section when I consider dialectics and the research process.

The distances and separations I refer to are represented by a number of common dichotomies to be found in the research methods literature and the higher education literature. Key among these are qualitative and quantitative, individual and social, conceptual and empirical, structure and agency and theory and practice. The problem with these enduring dichotomies is that they ghettoize, distort and put a veil over the richness of what can be known. They can also impair understandings of power relations and their impact, especially those nurtured by artificial separations. Seen through the lens of a critical theory approach to social justice, such dichotomies are revealed as fictions. In this section, I consider the dichotomies that apply to how we research. Then, in the final section of this chapter, I consider some examples of dichotomization of what we research and the associated benefits of a more dialectical approach.

Arguably the most common dichotomy in social science research is the qualitative–quantitative divide. Sometimes, qualitative and quantitative are used almost as synonyms for the close-up and the large scale. Similarly, the conflation of quantitative and positivism and qualitative and interpretivism severely hampers the social justice project. The term ‘mixed methods’ also often only serves to reinforce the dichotomy, affirming that there is some inherent difference here that must be revered and canonized. Qualitative researchers have done themselves no favours by perpetuating stereotypes of the quantitative ‘other’. I still read far too many papers that begin their methodology along the lines ‘because I am not a positivist I am going to do small-scale, qualitative research’ and therefore pity anyone who does quantitative research for they then bear the mark of the positivist!

We are wrong to decree that positivists monopolize numbers: social justice is located in quantitative research, and furthered through it, every bit as much as in qualitative. All we are talking about here are numbers and words. Neither binds us to particular world views; neither absolves us of responsibility for thinking through the nature and implications of our own research dispositions and actions. Dichotomization is a form of othering – a form of epistemological power through false separation. It is also a form of not taking responsibility and is thus anathema to a social justice commitment. For example, I might be concerned about the plight of individual students from working-class backgrounds; thus, I position myself as a close-up, qualitative researcher. But this makes no sense, for the individual and the group cannot be sheared apart for analytical purposes. This serves to truncate identity, and hence works against social justice.

I suggest that it is necessary to openly embra ce a range of approaches to researching higher education in order to ensure we fulfil the promise of social justice. This need not mean that each of us individually does a little bit of everything, but rather that we all engage with diverse and varied forms of research when we seek to understand our social world. We have to understand that social justice is a communal research project, in which we all play different contributing parts. Close-up research is clearly key to revealing and understanding the minutiae of commonalities and differences that so eluded Sagan’s generals and emperors, and which I fear continue to elude many of their current day counterparts – political leaders, captains of industry, the rich and the powerful. However, it cannot do this alone or in isolation. As close-up researchers, we need to consider our relationships with large-scale, survey work, for example. In Britain, research such as that undertaken by Charles Booth and Seebhom Rowntree in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries laid bare the extent of poverty and also demonstrated the fallacious nature of assertions at the time that poverty was somehow a lifestyle choice: it changed social opinion and public policy. Even so, such research can only provide one facet of the experience. Other forms of research and historical analysis – such as E. P. Thompson’s later, The Making of the English Working Class (1963) – provide the complementary close-up insights. The raw pain of losing a child, the endless fatigue of working for scraps – all these are there in the work of Booth and Rowntree but are illuminated in different ways by Thompson. Both works draw our attention to power imbalances and injustices in society, albeit in different ways. Thus, a commitment to social justice research requires a methodological openness and the capacity to locate our own work within often multiple narratives of other contrasting and complementary work.

The distinction between theory and practice is another common dichotomy and one which undermines our ability to truly understand the social world and to appreciate injustice within it. The problem that arises if we artificially separate theory and practice is that we leave theory inert and practice unguided. Adorno’s critical theory is helpful here for understanding that there is no simple dichotomy between theory and practice (Adorno, 2008). For Adorno, ‘thinking itself is always a form of behaviour’ (Adorno, 2000, p. 4, 2008, p. 53) and to think about reality is itself a practical act. He describes thinking as ‘a doing, theory a form of praxis’ (Adorno, 2005, p. 261). Theory and practice ‘are neither immediately one nor absolutely different, … their relation is one of discontinuity. No continuous path leads from praxis to theory. … But theory is part of the nexus of society and at the same time is autonomous. Nevertheless praxis does not proceed independently of theory, nor theory independently of praxis’ (Adorno, 2005, p. 276).

Moreover, because thought can more easily escape what already ‘is’, that is more easily step outside the prevailing mainstream, then for Adorno thinking can be a more powerful form of resistance than action alone (Tettlebaum, 2008). To separate thinking from doing is surely to perpetrate the greatest of injustices. Such distance allows licence to behave without thought – to pretend away the myriad of complex social factors that bind us together. It enables us to act like warmongering generals and emperors.

Indeed, Adorno illuminates that what binds these two concepts together is indeed social justice:

Theory that bears no relation to any conceivable practice either degenerates into an empty, complacent and irrelevant game, or, what is even worse, it becomes a mere component of culture, in other words, a piece of dead scholarship, a matter of complete indifference to us as living minds and active, living human beings. (Adorno, 2000, p. 6)

The essence of bringing practice and theory together in this way is that practice is actually strengthened by not dominating theory. This has interesting implications for higher education research and for the apparent privileging of data. From an Adornean perspective, the privileging of data or empirical research – a sense that this is what research is ‘really’ about – is self-defeating as it leads to only a partial understanding of such data. The purposes of social justice are ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Author Biographies
• Introduction: Locating Social Justice in Higher Education Research
• Part One Locating Social Justice in Higher Education Research and Policies
• Part Two Locating Social Justice in Higher Education Pedagogies
• Part Three Locating Social Justice in the Preparation of Graduates to Contribute to Societies
• Part Four Conclusions
• Index
• Copyright