Rethinking inequalities between deindustrialisation, schools and educational research in Geelong

Abstract

Inequalities have historically been conceptualised and empirically explored with primary reference to the human. Both measurements of educational inequalities through the production of data about students, teachers and schools, and ethnographic explorations of inequalities in the spoken accounts of human actors in schools can elide affective histories and material geologies of the earth that entwine with societal inequalities, and political questions of the relation between particular human bodies and the earth. In this article, we question: What might it do to rethink the concept of educational inequalities beyond human relations, from within a specific geographical territory? We seek to rethink inequalities including but exceeding these human relations; we argue that inequalities between humans, and between humans and the more-than-human, are materially generated and perpetuated. We offer three theoretical trajectories that consider the affective, spatial and material dimensions of inequality to rethink the relations between inequality, deindustrialisation and schooling. Educational research is implicated in the (re)production of inequalities, as well as having the potential to be part of the production of more equitable relations.

Keywords:

• Inequality
• deindustrialisation
• new materialism
• Barad
• affect
• space

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the editors and anonymous peer reviewers for their engagement and suggestions, and Yasmin Mobayed for research assistance in the final stages of the paper. Eve Mayes acknowledges conversations and work with Deb Hayes and Debra Talbot as inextricably entangled with the thinking in this paper. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2017 British Educational Research Association conference and at the 2017 Oceania Ethnography and Education Network conference; feedback from attendees strengthened later versions. As Barad writes, ‘writing’ is not a process ‘that any individual ‘I’ or even group of ‘I’s’ can claim credit for’ (2007, p. ix).

Acknowledgement of Country

We acknowledge the Wadawurrung people of the Kulin nation who are the Traditional Owners of the land where this research work has taken place, and pay respect to past, present and future Wadawurrung Elders of the Kulin nation. We seek to always remember that this land is, was and will always be the Wadawurrung People's traditional land.

Notes

1. The terminology used to account for processes of economic and social change associated with shifts in industrial capacity varies—from deindustrialised, to deindustrialising, to post-industrial. It is beyond the scope of this article to review these debates (for an early account of deindustrialisation in the USA, see Bluestone & Harrison, 1982; for a later account, see Cowie & Heathcott, 2003). Cowie and Heathcott extend earlier accounts of deindustrialisation concerned with ‘plant shutdowns, the immediate politics of employment policy, the tales of victimisation, or the swell of industrial nostalgia’ to argue that deindustrialisation is ‘a more socially complicated, historically deep, geographically diverse, and politically perplexing phenomenon than previously thought’ (p. 2). For the purposes of this article, we refer to Geelong as a deindustrialising city, as an acknowledgement of ongoing social and material entanglements of the city with industry, even after the official closures of prominent industrial sites.

2. Djillong (the traditional custodians’ spelling) is known as ‘Geelong’—though there is some discussion about whether ‘Djillong’ is the name for the bay (and Corayo the name for the land), or whether ‘Djillong’ is the name for the region.

3. There are contemporary debates among indigenous groups in Geelong relating to traditional custodianship of Geelong. We cannot speak authoritatively about these matters of custodianship, as non-indigenous people. As Jones et al. (2016) explain, ‘Country implies a four-dimensional landscape with deep languages, beliefs, customs and clan associations of which the latter is responsible to only speak of the lands and waters to which they have traditional affiliations and responsibilities to look after or ‘care for country’ (p. 262).

4. As an example, in Hattie’s (2009) Visible Learning, a comprehensive meta-analysis is conducted of the in-school factors (in particular teacher practices) that significantly impact student learning. While Hattie acknowledges that other contextual factors influence student learning outcomes, including socio-economic status, and that these contextual factors might have greater effects than in school factors, he notes that he is not dealing with these factors in the book.

5. The MySchool website provides open access to individual school data that include the school’s literacy and numeracy scores, justified initially on the grounds that it would provide parents with data to allow informed choice of schools. In practice, the My School website has a wider application and has become a resource for parents, educators and the community and a mechanism of accountability for school principals and teachers. It has also become a source of stories and scandals for newspapers, by providing tools that enable comparisons to be made among schools serving students from statistically similar socio-educational backgrounds.

6. For example, the weakening of social justice policy frames and the shift to educational policies that emphasise individual responsibility, private contributions to school funding and market approaches to school choice.

7. Note that Walkerdine and Jiminez work with psychosocial approaches to affect rather than an explicitly Spinozan approach.

8. While we use the term ‘new materialisms’ in accordance with contemporary usages, these materialisms are not ‘new’. Van der Tuin and Dolphijn trace the contemporary use of the term ‘new materialism’ back to the work of Rosi Braidotti and Manuel De Landa in the late 1990s—for example, Braidotti’s introduction of ‘a more radical sense of materialism’: the enfleshed human subject as ‘an ‘in-between’: it is a folding in of external influences and a simultaneous unfolding outwards of affects’ (Braidotti, 2000, pp. 158, 159, cited by van der Tuin & Dolphijn, 2010, p. 155). Van der Tuin and Dolphijn argue, after Deleuze’s account of the ‘mavericks of the history of philosophy’, that a monist style of thought (that rejects the dualism of mind and matter for the univocity of Being) can be found in Spinoza’s work, as well as in the work of Lucretius, Duns Scotus, Hume, Nietzsche, Whitehead and Bergson (van der Tuin & Dolphijn, 2010, p. 154).