Collective identities beyond homogenisation: implications for justice and education

ABSTRACT

In this article, I highlight what Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s (re)conceptualisation of the plurality within identities implies for justice and education. Laclau and Mouffe (re)theorise the plurality of identities by framing and understanding identities within the wider theoretical context of discourse analysis and radical Democracy. I argue that the significance of this specific (re)theorisation of the plurality within identities for justice and education has not yet been tackled by the related educational-philosophical scholarship, not even by that which focuses on Laclau and Mouffe. As a first step, I provide a brief overview of Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory and their approach to Democracy. Then, I show that, in their wider framework, one of the things that meaningfully connect discourse theory with radical Democracy is the theorisation of the plurality within identities. Finally, I suggest that acknowledging the plurality within any identity may offer important tools for expanding the scope of educational justice and for promoting justice in education. Amongst other things, by theoretically recognising the plurality and multi-dimensionality of collective identities, we obtain better insight into the pitfalls of homogenising identities and of cultivating reductive outlooks on identities in and through education, and encourage students’ critical thinking and self-reflective stances toward subjectivities.

KEYWORDS:

• Discourse theory
• multiple identities
• plurality
• critical thinking
• democracy

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Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Particularly, ‘in most bibliography, educational justice is explored from the prism of outcomes. Distributive justice and educational justice are often co-examined since the former is considered a condition or enabling factor for the latter. […] Distributive justice in education regards students as recipients of distributive goods and education as a distributable good’ (Papastephanou 2021c, 5).

2. Elsewhere (Drousioti 2021b), I have argued that the theoretical effort to subvert gender binarism in and through the example of homosexuality is not as fruitful as the relevant literature has assumed. As I have explained, homosexuality, like heterosexuality, remains adhered to the metaphysical unity of gender-sex-desire: the corporeality of the body still constitutes a criterion for sexual orientation and choice of partner(s) both in homosexuality and heterosexuality. I have stated that this criterion is eliminated in bisexuality, and thus bisexuality subverts the metaphysical unity of gender-sex-desire. Still, regardless of which sexual/gender identities subvert gender binarism (and how), their invisibility in and through their homogenisation is by no means legitimised.

3. Such neat associations of the un-patriotic with the progressive underlie the lack of academic interest in (or even the incrimination of) states’ claims to sovereignty and principles related to democratic statehood when these become threatened by invasions or trampled over by strong global players. It would be very interesting to investigate what the implications of such associations are for outlooks on international events such as the invasions of Cyprus, Iraq, former Yugoslavia and now Ukraine.

4. As much as the contemporary world has time and again criticised stereotyping, it still continues to use stereotypes when new challenges of collective identification emerge.

5. Szkudlarek (1993) has tackled this kind of exclusion and concluded that education should be against identity due to the exclusionary function of identity. However, as I have shown elsewhere (Drousioti, 2019), collective identities are not by definition exclusionary of an otherness; or, even if we accept that they are so, this otherness does not necessarily concern a present and personalised Other (Drousioti 2021a).

6. After all, it is the supposed essential and ontological character of identities that leaves no space for identities to be understood as plural and flexible.