Inclusive Practices in Institutions of Higher Education

In this chapter, the author will highlight some of the hurdles students with disabilities (SWDs) face in institutions of higher education (IHEs) and share some recommendations on how best faculty and staff can support SWDs matriculating through their programs and graduate on time with a baccalaureate degree. The author addresses concepts such as resilience, deficit models, instructional roles (instructor versus facilitator), myths, and misconceptions of working with SWDs, social justice, advocacy, public policy reform, and inclusive models for IHEs. In this chapter, the author approaches these concepts by illustrating the social justice notions related to identity and access to IHE as experienced by SWDs. The author considers whether institutions perceive some programs as unsuitable for some SWDs or whether SWDs perceive some courses as inaccessible, hence not worth pursuing.

Running head: Bail, Reform, and Foucault’s Dangerous Individual

Over 2.5 million people in the US are incarcerated annually for the sole reason that they cannot afford cash bail. This nearly exclusively affects the working-class, and disproportionately affects Black and brown individuals and communities. Whether someone is incarcerated pending trial affects employment, family stability, and even likelihood of conviction. Across the US, reform efforts are being considered and adopted, but in this paper, I use a political theory approach to argue that racial capitalist ideologies that construct the accused as specifically ‘dangerous’ impede just policy transformation. I start by centralizing Michel Foucault’s genealogy of the ‘dangerous individual’ as a frame for analyzing the logics and movement of the dangerous figure, and then re-situate the concept of the dangerous person in the contemporary US bail context. Ultimately, I argue that the dominance of oppressive ideologies in the bail discourse demonstrates the pervasive race and class biases that persist in the criminal justice apparatus, even in policy reform approaches that promise unbiased outcomes like algorithmic assessments.

Neoliberal Fatigue: The Effects of Private Refugee Sponsorship on Canadians’ Political Consciousness

Private sponsorship has become a primary way that refugees access resettlement to Canada. Key in this program are the private Canadians who volunteer their money, time, and labor to sponsor and support refugees. Drawing on 25 interviews, this article examines the insights that these privileged citizens of the global north gain as they help refugees struggling with the marginalizing consequences of neoliberal austerity in their new hostland. While sponsors learn about the challenges facing working-class racialized newcomers (otherwise obscured to sponsors by their racial, class, and citizenship privileges), the program robs sponsors of the time and mental bandwidth to reflect on the structural nature of these challenges. Consequently, sponsors rarely understand refugees’ struggles as public troubles necessitating broader intervention, including modest policy reform. I call this cognitive outcome neoliberal fatigue. I conclude by discussing how this fatigue thwarts social change and reinforces neoliberal capitalism.

The Politics of Activism and Biculturalism: the emergence of bicultural consultancies in New Zealand

<p>In what many commentators have characterised as a contradictory trajectory, a number of people involved in radical anti-state activism, which defined New Zealand from the late 1960s to the 1980s, became consultants on biculturalism for government agencies by the late 1980s. These consultants ran seminars for Pākehā public servants on the history and contemporary impact of Māori oppression under colonialism; Māori language, culture, and protocol; and the proposed future of the Crown-Māori relationship. This thesis uses genealogy and case study methodology to track the emergence of bicultural consultancies, their ideology and techniques, and their role in Māori policy reform beginning in the late 1980s. It aims to reveal the connections and disjunctions between the goals of anti-state activists active from the late 1960s to the 1980s, and the bicultural consultancies which emerged by the late 1980s. Māori anti-racist and anti-state activists and their Pākehā allies skilfully leveraged the state by invoking the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi to call for a new partnership between Māori and the state, a partnership that by the 1980s was officially termed biculturalism. The public sector, which was identified as institutionally racist by activists, was an important focus of this activism. Activists demanded that Pākehā-dominated government departments be reformed to better reflect and serve Māori. The state’s response to these demands, beginning in earnest with the 1988 policy paper Te Urupare Rangapu and additionally sustained by the precepts of so-called ‘bicultural’ or ‘Treaty’ issues, created the demand for consultants to assist with reforming Māori policy making and delivery, and by extension, those public servants that would be responsible for the success of these reforms. While bicultural consultants were still working with anti-racist ideas and frameworks, the ascendancy of bicultural and Treaty discourses by the end of the 1980s somewhat obfuscated the ontologies of race and institutional racism in their work.</p>

The Politics of Activism and Biculturalism: the emergence of bicultural consultancies in New Zealand

<p>In what many commentators have characterised as a contradictory trajectory, a number of people involved in radical anti-state activism, which defined New Zealand from the late 1960s to the 1980s, became consultants on biculturalism for government agencies by the late 1980s. These consultants ran seminars for Pākehā public servants on the history and contemporary impact of Māori oppression under colonialism; Māori language, culture, and protocol; and the proposed future of the Crown-Māori relationship. This thesis uses genealogy and case study methodology to track the emergence of bicultural consultancies, their ideology and techniques, and their role in Māori policy reform beginning in the late 1980s. It aims to reveal the connections and disjunctions between the goals of anti-state activists active from the late 1960s to the 1980s, and the bicultural consultancies which emerged by the late 1980s. Māori anti-racist and anti-state activists and their Pākehā allies skilfully leveraged the state by invoking the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi to call for a new partnership between Māori and the state, a partnership that by the 1980s was officially termed biculturalism. The public sector, which was identified as institutionally racist by activists, was an important focus of this activism. Activists demanded that Pākehā-dominated government departments be reformed to better reflect and serve Māori. The state’s response to these demands, beginning in earnest with the 1988 policy paper Te Urupare Rangapu and additionally sustained by the precepts of so-called ‘bicultural’ or ‘Treaty’ issues, created the demand for consultants to assist with reforming Māori policy making and delivery, and by extension, those public servants that would be responsible for the success of these reforms. While bicultural consultants were still working with anti-racist ideas and frameworks, the ascendancy of bicultural and Treaty discourses by the end of the 1980s somewhat obfuscated the ontologies of race and institutional racism in their work.</p>

Universal Credit and Automated Decision Making: A Case of the Digital Tail Wagging the Policy Dog?

Intended to simplify the benefit system and ’make work pay’, Universal Credit (UC) is the UK’s first ‘digital by design’ benefit. Proponents of UC highlight the greater efficiency and effectiveness of digitalisation, while critics point to costly IT write-offs and the ‘digital divide’ between people with the skills and resources to access digital technologies, and those without. Less attention has been paid to automation in UC and its effects on the people subject to these rapidly developing technologies. Findings from research exploring couples’ experiences of claiming UC suggest that automated processes for assessing entitlement and calculating payment may be creating additional administrative burdens for some claimants. Rigid design parameters built into UC’s digital architecture may also restrict options for policy reform. The article calls for a broadening of thinking and research about digitalisation in welfare systems to include questions of administrative burden and the wider effects and impacts on claimants.

The Prospects for Socialist Politics in South Africa

Our article endeavours to critically examine the prospects for socialist parties and socialist policy reform in South Africa. Firstly, we seek to provide an appraisal of modern socialist politics and policies globally. Secondly, we attempt to diagnose why South Africa has been as yet unable to fashion a suitable socialist workers’ party during the democratic epoch. In this, the article discusses the prospects of socialist parties and policy reform in South Africa after examining the failure of the Socialist Revolutionary Workers’ Party (SRWP) to make an impact at the 2019 polls. Using a combination of comparative methodology and critical inquiry, our study presents not only that socialist politics and policies are valuable to democratic systems, but also that socialist politics should have a more viable vehicle in South Africa. The prospects for deepened ideological development, particularly the formation of a successful socialist or workers’ party, remains quite weak in South Africa but there is considerable evidence to suggest that civil society both requires and desires a more vibrant relationship with modern socialism.