Nancy Fraser and Participatory Parity

Reframing Social Justice in South African Higher Education

Vivienne Bozalek, Dorothee Hölscher, Michalinos Zembylas, Vivienne Bozalek, Dorothee Hölscher, Michalinos Zembylas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429619410
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Nancy Fraser and Participatory Parity provides a philosophical framework based on the work of Nancy Fraser, examining how her ideas can be used to analyse contemporary issues in higher education and reimagine higher education practices. Providing a forum for considering Fraser's work in relation to participatory parity in higher education, the book shows how her political philosophy is relevant to higher education pedagogies, scholarship and practice.

The recent student protests in South Africa in 2015 and 2016 has created an impetus to think about how to do things differently in higher education in response to economic, cultural and political inequities. This South African experience is aptly used as a prime example of rethinking issues of coloniality and social injustice in higher education. The contributors' use of Nancy Fraser's theories provides their analyses and reflections with a particularly sharp lens and clear focus. The book also puts her work into conversation with other contemporary writers on social justice and explores the resonances and differentiations of the various approaches.

This book will be of great interest for academics, researchers and post-graduate students in the fields of social justice in education and educational policy.

Part 1

Fraser’s contributions to higher education

Affirmations and contestations

1 Nancy Fraser’s work and its relevance to higher education

Dorothee Hölscher and Vivienne Bozalek

There is a recognised need to focus on issues of social justice in higher education, due to continuing inequalities in the field of education generally, and more specifically in higher education. The recent student protests in South Africa in 2015 and 2016, led by #feesmustfall and #Rhodesmustfall activists, and taken forward in other parts of the world, has re-ignited a focus on the need to reconsider how higher education is privileging some and excluding others. This has created an impetus to think about how to do things differently in higher education in response to economic, cultural and political inequities. Various academic texts have been written using Nancy Fraser’s work to examine social justice issues, particularly her writings on redistribution, recognition and representation (see Bozalek & Carolissen 2012; Bozalek & Zembylas 2019; Hodgkinson-Williams & Trotter 2017; Luckett & Shay 2017, as well as Chapters 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 in this collection). What this chapter offers that is distinctive is the inclusion of Fraser’s earlier texts and the most recent ones, which deal with issues of social justice. The chapter sets out to show how this more extensive range of Fraser’s work has been used in higher education contexts – this includes her work on participatory parity as social justice and the three dimensions she describes as contributing to participatory parity or a lack thereof. Chapter 10, on the other hand, is distinctive in focusing on Fraser’s later work.

There has been some engagement in the literature as to how higher education, particularly in contexts of extreme inequality, needs to change in order to commit to more just practices (see for example Burke 2013; Hodgkinson-Williams & Trotter 2017; Leibowitz & Bozalek 2015; 2016; Nordensvärd 2014; Olsson & Peters 2005). There is limited consensus, however, as to what such a commitment entails, and how academic practices such as enrolment, teaching and research can fall short of this commitment. Issues of access and equity have recently come to the public forefront in higher education, as a result of the #Rhodesmustfall and #feesmustfall student protests in South Africa, which have called for the decolonising of the university and its curricula, and universal access for students into higher education (Gillespie & Naidoo 2019; Kusá 2018). These movements have ignited similar demands from students in other parts of the world.

Despite these calls for decolonisation¹ and free access to higher education, there remains a lack of clarity around what kinds of international, national and institutional policies, curricula, scholarly and pedagogical practices may be required to advance just social arrangements and just ways of relating and access so that students and academics feel that they belong and can participate on an equal footing in this sector. In the face of escalating crises of injustice in economic, ecological, social, political and cultural spheres, questions need to be asked both around what should be taught, and around how it is taught, what is researched and how it is researched, and how students how students gain access to higher education, both physically and epistemologically, and how much they are able to participate in all aspects of academic life. In this chapter, we propose Nancy Fraser’s work, as a political philosopher and critical theorist, is particularly apt to consider these issues. Our purpose is to present a selection of her key concepts, with a view to exploring the nature of Fraser’s contribution to higher education, both by referring to examples of where her work has already been put to use, and by suggesting where it could be used. We intend to show that this potential resides, firstly, in the historical depth and conceptual scope of her work and, secondly, in her conceptualisation of justice for higher education as a matter of both substance and process.

We begin with a discussion of the early phase of her work, during which she engaged with concepts such as needs interpretation, and dependency, and which culminated in the development of her seven principles of gender justice. These principles laid the foundations for Fraser’s theory of justice, which we discuss in the next two sections. The first of these sections explicates Fraser’s notion of participatory parity as a principle and a standard of justice, as well as discussing its cultural and economic dimensions. The latter traces the development of the political dimension of justice, which Fraser conceptualised across three levels, thereby articulating (in)justice as structural processes spanning from the global to the local levels of discourse and practice. Finally, we present selected aspects of Fraser’s most recent work, on the capitalist crisis in the 21st century, focusing on the introduction of an ecological dimension into her work, as well as the concepts of transformative politics and abnormal justice.

1. Needs interpretation, dependency and Fraser’s principles of gender justice

In 1989, Fraser introduced the notion of a politics of needs interpretation (Fraser 1989). With this, she provided an important analytic tool for ascertaining how needs are interpreted, and who, on behalf of which institutions, are seen to be authoritative in interpreting whose needs, providing a critical lens for higher education, where needs are generally taken as objective and absolute (Bozalek 2012; Bozalek & Carolissen 2012). This politics of needs interpretation alerts scholars to the ways in which higher education can become complicit in the constitution of, and surveillance over, rather than care for, both students and academics. The politics of needs interpretation (Fraser 1989) is at the heart of contestations which exist in institutions such as universities, regarding caring practices. From the politics of needs interpretation, it is erroneous to believe that needs are pre-determined and objectively identifiable.

Fraser (1989, p. 156; 2013, pp. 64–65) sees the ‘social’ as a site of discourse and contestation about people’s needs, specifically about needs that are considered problematic in that they have broken out of what the state would prefer to be contained as ‘private matters’. In this terrain of the ‘social’, Fraser identifies a number of competing discourses about such ‘problematic’ needs. One is the needs discourse of experts, which in higher education would include that of academic development staff and teaching and learning specialists in higher education, whose raison d’être is to intervene in situations defined as problematic, such as students who are ill-prepared for higher education and academics who are in need of ‘academic development’ in terms of teaching and scholarship knowledge and skills. A second discourse identified by Fraser (1989, 2013) is the oppositional needs discourse in which social movements of black, women, gay, lesbian, students and workers in higher education, collectively contest hegemonic interpretations of their respective identities, roles – and needs – which have served to disadvantage them. Such oppositional discourses like the #feesmustfall or #Rhodesmustfall student movements, ‘from below’, subvert official discourses (Fraser 1989, p. 171). The third type of needs discourse identified by Fraser is the reprivatisation discourse which aims at dismantling state provision of services such as higher education, by relegating the needs to the private sphere or ‘the market’. With the global spread of neoliberalism, the reprivatisation discourse has affected higher education dramatically, as state support for higher education is either being chipped away and rolled back and a marketisation of needs in higher education is becoming increasingly prominent, as is seen, for example, in the student as consumer. Furthermore, there are more and more private businesses offering higher education courses (Pearson, for example), and private providers of higher education which have mushroomed across geographical contexts, where northern countries take advantage of a lack of higher education provision in Southern contexts (Ng’ambi & Bozalek 2016).

Neoliberalism and its associated discourses of managerialism have resulted in fundamental shifts in the way in which higher education conceptualises, carries out and defends institutional purposes and practices (Kandiko 2010; Olssen & Peters 2005). This has meant that higher education has become increasingly seen in market terms, bringing with it an emphasis on competition and freedom of choice for consumers, which has a strong normative impact on all aspects of the academic project (Nordensvärd 2014). With its emphasis on human capital, neoliberalism shifts the responsibility to the individual. In this way, students, teachers and institutions are made responsible for their own successes or failures in relation to the competitive global market (Ball & Olmedo 2013; Harris 2005; Johnstone 2004; Nordensvärd 2014; Olssen & Peters 2005). Neoliberalism abdicates the state from providing higher education (HE) as a service to citizens (Kandiko 2010; Nordensvärd 2014). The competitive imperative drives higher education institutions into assessing their worth through league tables, throughput and productivity (Burke 2013). Neoliberalism has resulted in universities constructing students as customers who consume educational products. As Ball and Olmedo (2013, p. 91) observe, some of the consequences of neoliberalism in HE teaching and learning are that ‘[r]esults are prioritised over processes, numbers over experiences, procedures over ideas, productivity over creativity’.

The particular advantage of using Fraser’s (1989, 2013) notion of the politics of needs interpretation, is to alert us that In higher education, the danger exists that students’ learning needs and academics’ professional development needs will be understood as self-evident and without dispute, rather than as being socially constructed and thus open to interpretation. Political struggles about who determines the needs of care receivers – involving contestation between such parties as regulating bodies, professionals, academic experts, big business or students themselves – would, in all likelihood, have a profound impact on the academic project and on parity of participation there. Experts, such as those involved in professional academic development in higher education institutions (HEIs), for example, may believe that they are best positioned to determine the needs of the recipients of care (in this case the academics and the students). It is therefore important for HEIs to provide spaces for democratic dialogue about how these needs should be prioritised and met (Bozalek & Carolissen 2012). This recognition may create opportunities to disrupt dominant and singular hegemonic discourses about needs in HE such as the neoliberal view of students as consumers, and the gendered and racialised understanding of needs and division of labour in HE where historically white institutions and men are able to pursue research-intensive careers on the backs of caring labour provided by historically black institutions and female academics (see Bozalek & McMillan 2017 for an analysis of the inequalities between these institutions and the implications of this for students and academics working there).

Linked to the notion of needs interpretation is Fraser and Gordon’s (1994, 2013) genealogy of the term dependency. This genealogy allows those in higher education to interrogate some of the taken-for-granted assumptions and tacit accusations underlying the idea of dependency, used by politicians intent on either cutting back existing, or stunting new demands for public higher education expenses. Regarding dependency as an anomaly or something to be shunned and stigmatised also impacts on how students whose needs are seen as different or excessive are relegated to special courses, such as the Extended Curriculum Programme for those who need extra tuition to cope with university education. Here, the default idea of the ideal human being underlying such notions of dependency is the rational, autonomous, economic, unencumbered and middle-class male, with everyone deviating from this ideal being at risk of pathologisation and seen as ‘less than’. This male breadwinner is presumed to have an independent personality and status, as well as being able economically to take care of his dependents, that is, ‘his’ wife and children. As Fraser notes, this independent personality is implicit in many binaries found in late capitalist societies: ‘masculine/feminine, public/private, work/care, success/love, individual/community, economy/family, and competitive/self-sacrificing’ (Fraser & Gordon 2013, p. 110). Unacknowledged in these binaries is that, from the early years of higher education in the Global North to contemporary neoliberal contexts the world over, it always has been a small, socially, economically and culturally privileged strata of society who have been able to meet these definitions and live up to their expectations. So, while held up as ‘the norm’, the ideal of economic independence has never been normal in any society, more particularly in Southern and colonial contexts such as South Africa, where colonisers both saw colonised populations as dependent and less than and appropriated t...