Please join us for this CPPR seminar. No registration necessary, just come along!

In this talk, Dr Walker considers how the implementation and enactment of education policy are implicated in the reproduction of human difference in racialised terms. This includes education policy aimed at achieving social and racial justice goals. To illustrate this, Dr Walker draws on findings from a multi-sited ethnographic study to explore the racialised discourse of the widening participation policy agenda in UK higher education. Reflecting on the discursive practices of widening participation policy implementation, she demonstrates how research participants experience widening participation as a battlefield. Against this backdrop, she discusses the concepts of white allyship and BME (Black and Minority Ethnic) ambassadors, integral to many widening participation initiatives. Dr Walker argues that ambassadors and allies, positioned on opposing sides in a racial conflict, are engaged in a ‘race war’ (Foucault, 1997/2003). The discussion demonstrates that education policy aimed at addressing racial inequalities requires a critical engagement with the cultural processes that continue to constitute, and arguably divide, individuals and communities along racial lines.

About the Speaker 

Sharon Walker, Lecturer in Education (Racial Justice and Education), School of Education at Bristol University is a sociologist of race. Her research has examined the material and discursive processes that reproduce the idea of racial difference and racist practices and outcomes in education. More broadly, she is interested in the cultural politics of race, and in race as a technology of state formation and governance. Methodologically, her research draws on critical discourse analysis, corpus approaches to discourse analysis and multi-sited ethnography. Theoretically, her work is influenced by perspectives from cultural studies, postcolonial sociology, and intellectual history.