Professorial Inaugural Lecture Series: Professor Charlotte Chadderton video transcript

(This lecture is titled "Structural and poststructural approaches to understanding the reproduction of race inequality in education". This can be seen in white text with a green background. In the right-hand corner is a webcam, showing Professor Charlotte Chadderton at a podium, presenting.)

[Charlotte] Good evening everybody. Before I start, I just want to say thank you for coming tonight. And the lecture, this evening, is dedicated to all those who've supported me over the years. And that's friends, colleagues and students, and made academia a joyful space where that's been possible. I appreciate it and thank you. So, those of you who are in the room, those of you who are online and others as well, thank you very much.

So, my research over the last 15 years has considered how inequalities are reproduced in educational spaces, and the area I've focused on the most is race inequality and issues such as white privilege and theory such as critical race theory. Racialisation have become more mainstream now than they were, say, 20 years ago.  There's more academic work in the field, and there's also more attention paid to these topics in the mainstream as well by the media and politicians. 

The notion of white privilege and critical race theory have even had considerable political attention, as you'll probably now be aware, although not necessarily from the point of view, of aiming to eradicate or address racial inequalities. In fact, we've had the Conservative equalities minister, Prime Minister, arguing that critical race theory, teaching about critical race theory and white privilege actually stokes divisions.

It's worth remembering that this is quite a tired argument, that mentioning the problem creates the problem. Also, until it was mentioned in Parliament, most people had never heard of critical race theory, I'll call it CRT from now on. Because in fact, it hasn't really made inroads into British schools, and it's been rather a niche theory of structural racism in academia up to now. So, it's rather surprised to hear it mentioned in Parliament. It's a niche theory of structural racism used to analyse and explore how structural racism works and to address it. 

(A white slide with black writing appears. The title is "Why do we need to understand how race inequality operates in education?". The text on the slide is listed into bullet points reading: 

[Charlotte] So, why do we need to understand how race inequality works in education? Why is this even important? Firstly, inequalities persist despite narratives of meritocracy and equality. Secondly, racism is often misunderstood as only overt or deliberate or individual acts, rather than structural or systemic or multi-layered. Thirdly, it's deeply embedded in social structures, including educational structures, and that makes it difficult to identify, especially for those who are actually privileged by race. I'll explain more about that later. Fourthly, if we don't understand how it operates, it's difficult to address. 

(Another white slide with black writing replaces the previous slide. The title of this one is "Research questions" with bullet points which read:

[Charlotte] The kind of research that my work focuses on, such as the following. Why is racial privilege and disadvantage important? How does it operate in education? How does it interact with other social structures to have social and educational impact? How can we analyse race inequality so that we can better understand and then address that inequality? 

Positionality is quite an important part of any research, and so I'll say at the beginning, the social position narrative of a researcher and the research participants needs to be considered at every stage in research and positionally is intersectional. That means it's classed, it's raced, it's gendered and other. 

So, in particular, when researching issues of race inequality, I need to consider my own racial positionality. I'm positioned as white and I benefit from white privilege in many different forms. And others position me as white. So in researching issues such as white privilege, I can't step out of that. That's unrealistic. But on the other hand, I also wouldn't argue that we need to leave research on racial oppression to those who are oppressed by it. That isn't right either. White people do have a role to play, and I hope that my role is that my work plays a role in challenging racial inequality. 

(The next slide appears in the same format, titled "Some examples from my work". A sub-heading of "Race and white privilege as a structure" contains two points - securitisation and militarisation of education and refugees and education. Under the sub-heading "Race and racism as a hegemonic norm" there is the points vocational education and apprenticeships and careers education and aspirations. The final sub-heading reads "Racism as a desubjectifier" with one point underneath, Covid schooling policy.)

[Charlotte] So tonight I'm going to talk about some examples from my work. I'm going to talk about race and white privilege as a structure, race and racism as a hegemonic norm, and racism as a desubjectifier. So those are the three areas I'll focus on. And in each of those, I'll provide examples of projects that I've been involved in or led. So on securitisation and militarisation, on refugees, vocational education, careers education and I'll finish with Covid schooling policy.

(The next slide is titled "Structural approaches: Critical Race Theory". The bullet points below the title read: 

Okay, so, looking at racism, white privilege as a structure, the theory that I've worked with the most is critical race theory, which I've adapted and changed and used different tenants of over the years. Now, critical race theory actually originated in the US 40 or 50 years ago as critical legal studies, by a group of scholars who were asking why. Although the civil rights movement had started to ensure that formally there were equal rights for everybody. In fact, African-Americans still did not in reality enjoy equal rights. They're still disadvantaged. This theory has been picked up by others, particularly in education, and become critical race theory. 

In order to answer the question why do African-Americans still experience disadvantage? The critical race theorists came up with a series of tenets. Critical race theory is a massive body of work. There are lots of tenets, but the ones which I've used the most are the following. Race inequality is structurally embedded in society and in all cultural, social and political relations. Race is socially constructed. Race inequality is difficult to spot due to its structural nature. So, the goal of CRT is to expose racism and to show how it works and develop strategies to address it. Critical race theorists also argue that it's impossible to achieve goals such as meritocracy. If society is unequal. Race inequality can be addressed in a number of ways, including via interest convergence. That's when the interests of the dominant majority coincide with the minorities.

Also, activism. Critical race theory is also referred to terms such as white privilege and white supremacy. And by white supremacy, they're not necessarily talking about apartheid. Although that may be, an aspect of, of a white supremacist society. What is what white privilege and white supremacy about, and they use white supremacy because it tends to really focus on the hegemony of whiteness in society. It's the flip side of racism. It's the idea that if one group in society is disadvantaged there, there's another group which is privileged automatically. So what this offers us is a structural, structural framework for analysing, for analysing racism, for how it's maintained despite efforts to eradicate it. It moves us on from descriptions of racism. It challenges traditional notions of racism as deliberate and overt because it also addresses unwitting racism, racism that we're not necessarily aware of, unconscious racism. 

It's important to point how that white privilege doesn't necessarily refer to skin colour. This isn't about skin colour. It's about structures, a structure of domination and oppression and it's also important to point out that not all people who are classified as white in society, are privileged in other ways. White people are not class privilege, they're not gender privilege, necessarily. It's about racial privilege. Though there is often confusion around white privilege, people tend to think it's about socioeconomic privilege. That's not, that's a different thing there. There could be links, of course, but we're not talking about class privilege or socioeconomic pledge. And importantly, systems and institutions which claim to be neutral and fair often actually do often unwittingly reproduce disadvantages including race inequality. 

(The slide changes to an example of "The militarisation of education" as a title, with a vertical line separating this with an excerpt from "Troops to Teachers, DfE, 2012: The policy)

[Charlotte] An example here is an analysis I did of the Troops to Teachers education program, from a few years ago now. Developed by the Department for Education, this was a teacher education program, introduced in 2013, aimed to fast track ex-service people into teaching. The idea was they wouldn't need a university degree necessarily to teach. They wouldn't need to be subject specialists, and they would provide military style discipline and they would bring all these skills with them, wouldn't necessarily need to learn them. 

So, taking a little look at the policy, it initially appears racially neutral. As an example up here, I've kind of honed in on a few important phrases here. It appears to be addressing a shortage of teachers and a route to employment for, ex army, so it appears to be a good idea on the face of it. It appears to be objective and target all young people. However, if you look more carefully, it actually seems to be aimed at poor young people, disadvantaged young people and racially subordinated young people because it's drawing on long standing racial stereotypes which are common in the popular imagination. 

So, you can see the word gangs, underclass, offenders, prisons, poverty of ambition, truancy, exclusion. These are long standing stereotypes, which are class and race and also gendered because there's elements of masculinity in here as well. We need more male teachers, it says. It was Michael Gove that's saying, who then was the Secretary of State for Education, to provide children who often lack male role models at home and again, that kind of draws on stereotypes. Often of black families, who are led by a female in the imagination. 

So, rather than this a critical education with subject specialists. The idea was to provide a military education for these people, authoritarian, perhaps patriarchal. These young people are portrayed as being in need of containment and discipline. It seems to be intended in fact, if you look closely at a program for the disadvantaged, perhaps inner city young people, because wealthier, perhaps whiter schools will continue to get those qualified teachers. And potentially as well, it's a gendered notion, as I've just said, the, the supposed the other side to this is that it needs to be seen perhaps, in the context of creation of an increasingly militarised society that was particularly important at this time when I was writing it.

(A new slide with the title "Troops to Teachers: some implications for race inequality" with bullet points under the headings of "findings" and "significance" to the left and an image of boots marching to the right. The bullet points read: 

Findings 

Significance 

[Charlotte] But actually, that has proven in some ways to be true. Society is becoming more, more militarised. So you could argue the context was part of a wider move to increase ideological support for foreign wars, which, of course, are often imperialist in nature. It could be about military recruitment, bringing soldiers into schools and in fact, the German version of it is quite explicit about that. It could be about creating a militarised environment in schools, getting young people used to prison, remembering that we still have the largest prison population. I've said here in the EU and it was in the EU when I did this, this project. Obviously we're not there now, but we still have a very large prison population and it's disproportionately minority ethnic, the prison population as well. 

So, it's raised at every level and the context is also raised. The significance of this project was that it demonstrated the racial implications of a project, which was thought of as neutral and it also demonstrates how racism is structural. White privilege is structural, embedded in policy. So it's both, it both fuels education policy and is fuelled by education policy. 

(The next slide is titled "Refugees and education" and contains the following text:

The barriers to VET for adult refugees to European countries 

[From the project: 'The Meso-Social Benefits of Vocational Education and Training for social groups and communities.' Centre Europeen pour le Developpement de la Formation Professionnele (CEDEFOP)]

Findings:

(Chadderton and Edmonds, 2015) )

[Charlotte] My next example is about the work I've done on refugees, that has shown that not only are there barriers, to refugees in Europe in accessing education as is reasonably well known, but in fact, these barriers are structural and they're racialised. So first of all, reporting on a project, from again, a few years ago with other colleagues, funded by a set of FOP, which is the arm of the EU, which funds vocational education, research. This examines the barriers to vocational education and training for adult refugees to European countries, and we conducted expert interviews across six different countries, including the UK. And what we found were a lot of similarities across the different countries. The systems were inflexible. 

There were restrictions on paid work, training and study for refugees, patchy provision of advice and guidance. Dispersal policies, which actually prevented refugees from accessing areas where they could get training and employment. There was a lack of official programs to accredit qualifications or recognise informal learning. There's very patchy language provision, and it's underfunded and there's a lack of specific provision for women. 

Now, you might argue some of those things affect us all. And of course they do. But cumulative they severely affect refugees. Combining this then with emerging ideas from Germany, which was also part of this study, I have a kind of mostly unacknowledged a European system of white privilege, which is shaped by a history of colonialism, and also drawing on historical analysis from the US, where analysis of the labour market, which have shown that, there's a division of occupations along racial lines. Which have resulted in the term worker itself being not only gendered but raced. What we found was that there's, these two aspects interact.

So, the systems for vocation, accessing vocational education and laws around migration and refugees actually contribute to, combat, compound social exclusion for refugees. They're working together to make it worse, and these programs, despite differences, I mean, these are generalisations, but despite differences in different, different countries, ultimately they tended to reinforce existing racial hierarchies in each country. So what we found was, like all education systems then, vocational education constitutes not only a barrier to social inclusion, but it's actually a key institution of social regulation. And perhaps may even be integral to ensuring that white privilege, is protected in the labour market to a certain extent.

(A new slide appears with the title "The barriers to VET for adult refugees to European countries" with two sections of bullet points: 

Findings 

Significance

(Chadderton and Edmonds, 2015) )

[Charlotte] So the significance of this then, is that the next slide, oh yes, the significance of this then, is that he challenged those prevailing ideas that barriers are individual. Again, showing how structural these issues are. All that just to do with arrangements for refugees? No, they have to do with the policies interacting. But also challenged the idea, and this is particularly common in Europe.

But you do get it here as well. That the disadvantaged position of refugees is based more on their lack of citizenship, for example, or religion or their migration background. It might be due to all those things, but it's also based on white privilege within our education systems.

(A new slide with an image of birds playing on the left and text along the right appears. The title reads, "Refugees and education". The below text reads:

Secondary education policy for young refugees 

Findings: 

(Chadderton and Wischmann, 2023) )

[Charlotte] The recent project that I've been doing on refugees is on secondary education and so some of you, I've been talking to some of you about this, this project already. So, this is a study of secondary education policy, in this country and in Germany with my colleague Ankur Fishman, and here I'm just going to talk about the English side of the study, but, so there's data in this country, which suggests that those from a refugee background are very disadvantaged in education. 

Now, we don't collect clear data on refugees, so it's actually quite hard to get the figures on the exact nature of the disadvantage and the extent of the disadvantage. But, one of the figures that's useful is that only 3% of those from refugee backgrounds go to university, for example. That's a very low percentage, there is a gap in research that we are filling at the moment because although we do know that refugees are disadvantaged in the education system, we haven't really looked at how that's a racialised nation. We haven't made that connection very well in research. So myself and my colleague, colleague, are analysing the two systems, to see how these different elements interact with. 

We found a complete absence of policy. I mean, this is just England. Now, these don't apply to Germany. Some of them might, but I'm not presenting the German data. Absence of policy targeted specifically at refugees, in education, at young refugees. There's nothing, and there's no kind of national integration program providing advice or bespoke support. Now there is in Germany. So that's interesting, I'm not saying it works well in Germany, but there is something. So, it shows that there can be something, we provide very inadequate language support, especially for young people. So, for example, we don't have a formal system of tweaking the language used in tests to establish, young newcomers' ability or level in, in subject areas. It could be done but we don't do it.

There's evidence that some schools are avoiding taking refugees because they've oversubscribed, meaning that less well subscribed schools are overstretched, and that is very difficult. We have a neoliberal system of school choice and there's plenty of research which says that, middle class parents know how to play that system, move to an area to get into certain schools. But obviously, refugees are coming fresh into that system. They're being disadvantaged within that because they don't have the social capital needed in this country to select those schools. And anyway, they're being refused entry and of course, then, that, that the wider immigration policies play into that, such as the age assessments for young people again, in this country in particular, which mean that while young children's age is assessed, they can't go to school. So, they're missing months and months of school. Dispersal policies, meaning that very often, families are being moved about, resulting in disruption, lack of training for educators as well, meaning that previous specialisms have been lost.

(A new slide appears with the title "Secondary education policy for young refugees", with text split into two categories: 

Analysis 

Significance 

(Chadderton and Wischmann, 2023) )

[Charlotte] Okay, so we brought all that together, we also, we use critical race theory to look at the extent that this is racialised. And we combine that with the notion of racist nativism, which is an American idea, but it's that it describes that link between racism and immigration, the positioning of the native as white and the non-Native as raced, as well as white people at native, and racialised minorities as non-Native. That connection and what that enabled us to understand, is that the disadvantaging of refugees as non-natives, which they are in all of those points, is actually also having a racialised effect. So they're being othered, excluded and disadvantaged by the system. And those are all, aspects of racialisation as well.  So that in turn, so the nativism is leading to racialisation as well. And that in turn reproduces existing native privilege and white norms. 

So what this does is it provides insight into that structural way in which immigration status and racialisation are interlinked in education and reproduce each other. 

(A new slide appears with navy blue on the left, in blue writing it reads "Judith Butler, Race and Education". On the right hand side the title reads "Race and white privilege as hegemonic norms which subjectivate" The text below reads:

A Butlerian approach enables: 

White privilege can function as a hegemonic constituting norm which shapes realities and subjects. 

(Chadderton, 2018) )

[Charlotte] I'm now going to move on to look at a more post structural approach that talks about structural approaches. That's my book there, "Judith Butler, Race and Education". And I talk about this in the book. So, we've talked about white privilege and racial inequality being a structure, but it's also a norm, a hegemonic norm in society. A norm, which is often unspoken, and from a post structural point of view, a norm, subjectivates. It creates subjects. That's what norms do.

Judith Butler tends to be best known for her work on gender and sexuality, but it's also more broadly about power and how power works in society. And that's what I'm drawing on, for this and using those arguments to look at race and racism. So what does a Butlerian approach enable? A deconstruction of essentialist notions of race and privilege. It allows us to examine the social construction of race and privilege and oppression. It provides a challenge to the existence of racial specificity, an exploration of racial positioning and racial location, and how this can shift. And an understanding of how white privilege is actually continually reproduced. It's not just there, work is being done to reproduce it. But it's also it allows us to investigate how these notions of race have such potency. 

So, although race is socially constructed, it's believed in and the work that we're doing to reproduce it creates a racist reality and makes people believe that race is real somehow. And so what this, what this Butlerian approach does is allow us to unpick that a bit. So, Butler's work theorises the process by which identities are produced. It provides a view of race not as a pre-given, not as a fixed identity, or as a fixed or essentialised category. She would argue that race, like gender, is made real through the repeated citation of norms. So, she argues that norms are often considered to be pre-existing categories, but in fact they're created by our citations that can be explicit or implicit. So, we are rendered a subject through norms, that's, that's basically her argument. It's not a conscious process. Everybody is implicated because every individual is subjectivated, right from the very formation of ourselves as subjects. 

So, what using Judith Butler brings us to is that the idea of white privilege, therefore, is maintained and produced and reproduced through discourses, through acts, through practices which are citing these norms. This is kind of an extension of the idea of racial stereotyping, which people are more familiar with. So, for Butler, race would be a subjectifying force. It creates identities, it creates roles.

(A new slide appears with the title "Vocational education and apprenticeships". The text on the slide reads as per below:

Realised norms in apprenticeship systems in England and Germany 

Research question:

Why do statistics from both England and Germany suggest that the percentage of minority ethnic young people/ young people from migrant backgrounds in apprenticeships is low, despite major differences in the respective labour markets and apprenticeship traditions?

What factors are said to affect under-representation?

(Chadderton and Wischmann, 2014) )

[Charlotte] In a project I did on apprenticeships, conducted again with my colleague Professor Wischmann, we looked at racialised norms in apprenticeships, in apprenticeship systems in England and Germany. And we had the research question why do statistics from both England and Germany suggest that the percentage of minority ethnic young people or young people from migrant backgrounds, which is how they are referred to in Germany, in apprenticeships is low, despite major difference in the respective labour markets and the respective apprenticeship traditions? 

We looked at the existing literature on this, because it was assumed that the answer is known, and what was said was the following. I'm not saying these are true, this is what research says. These young people, minoritised young people, choose more academic groups. They underachieve in compulsory education. They have language difficulties, they lack networks to get in to work. They have insufficient careers education and advice, to be able to know what choices to make. The images and language used in marketing materials tends to be, tends to give the idea that a typical apprentice is white. And discrimination, which is probably likely to be linked to all other things that we've said. Now, there's some evidence in some ways for all of these aspects, but we questioned it.

(A new slide with the title "Racialised norms in apprenticeship systems in England and Germany" is shown with the text below: 

Significance of the study 

(Chadderton and Wischmann, 2014) )

[Charlotte] More research found when we, when we connected these studies with other studies that have shown that the labour market historically is racially segmented, and in Britain, that skilled workers have traditionally been regarded as white and male, and minority ethnic people, and women historically regarded as unsuitable for skilled work, a pattern which actually continued post-1945, despite workers arriving from India, Pakistan and the Caribbean. These in general, new arrivals were doing secondary sector jobs in the labour market which fuelled these ideas that skilled work is done by men, and by white men. And then in Germany, the colonial structures influenced the treatment of guest workers, who helped build new Germany after 1945 and recorded and regarded as cheap labour and also not given citizenship rights in Germany.

Taking all of these different theories into account, what we found was that this produced, this is where these normative ideas of apprentices was coming from. This normative image of the apprentice is white or white native, also male, of course, in some areas, and very, very gendered as well. But there's plenty of work on that. That prevents some people from even considering becoming an apprentice. And it also prevents employers from considering minority ethnic people as apprentices. This, this is context, a structural element. So, this is the norm is constituting the subject. This is how it's working, the concept of what it means to be an apprentice is actually white itself. And that's establishing the norm of the norm by which the subject is known.

So, as with all norms, it's not a neutral norm. It's gendered, it's raced and it's historically present, historically produced. These norms, we argued in our study, are still driving, they still have some force in vocational education systems in the labour market today. And that is kind of fuelling a white privilege in some areas of higher, more highly regarded apprenticeships, very visible in Germany but also in this country. So you've got two countries, excuse me, with very different vocational education systems. And yet the racial norms are very similar and if we want to address this at a structural level, the argument we made was fair enough all the other research on this, but what it's, what it was missing was the importance of the norms. And we need to look at how the norms are reproduced. 

(A new slide with a blurred image of a bookcase on the right, text on the left and a title which reads "Career education and aspirations" appears. The text reads: 

Secondary career education and school 'aspirations' programmes 

[Project funded by Aldgate and Allhallows, London (2014-2020)]

(David Cameron cited in Wintour 2012) )

[Charlotte] Another example about the norms is my work on careers education and aspirations. So, this was a project funded by Aldgate and Allhallows, which is a charity in London and it looked at programs which aim to raise people's aspirations. So, these have become kind of institutionalised in secondary education. The idea of raising aspirations, as other people have argued, is based on the discourse that young people's aspirations are too low and that their low aspirations is responsible for the fact that they're disadvantaged.

So, I've got a quote here from ex-Prime Minister Cameron. And again, I've highlighted some important ideas which I think illustrate what I'm trying to say here. This, this idea of cultural, culture of low expectations, transcending your background, overcome circumstances, succeeding on your own terms. The toxic culture of low expectations, the lack of ambition of every child. So, what this is, is a classic neoliberal discourse. Structural issues such as poverty, for example, are presented as being dependent on an individual attitude rather than other wider structural issues, so the lack of success in, in neoliberal times here is regarded as a lack of aspiration or maybe a lack of ambition or a lack of individualism, a lack of that, that want to transcend your background, also portrayed as if you see that that last line which just held this country back. So, the poor are actually being, being blamed for, damage to the economy in this case, because they're so inactive economically. If you follow that logic, in order to improve, economic productivity, they need to be taught to aspire more highly, make better choices, improve their lifestyles. 

And this has been, this is what's institutionalised in schools, this idea that they need, if only we just aspire to a bit higher, then we sort out our economic problems.

(The title of a new slide reads "Secondary career education and school 'aspirations' programmes". The text reads as per below: 

Teacher interview 

Student focus group 

[Charlotte] I've got some interview data here. So, this from a case study at a school where I did a longitudinal study over five years. It's a single sex school, girls only comprehensive school. A high proportion of the pupils receive free school meals and a high proportion are of minority ethnic heritage, mostly from the local Bangladeshi population, but also Somali and mixed heritage as well. 

So, here's a teacher interview, CC's me. So what's the main aim of the Student Aspirations program? Teacher says the girls all want to go down the school, down the road to the local university. They never think about going outside this city. We need to encourage them to go further afield. But many of their families don't want them to. Is that right? It's like coming to work in a different country, working here. I worked in a school where there were lots of black children before, but these are quieter and don't give their opinion as much. 

So, in this conversation, a quick analysis, there's lots to say, but for the purposes of this lecture, the pupils are being perceived as unaspirational, lacking in aspiration by the teacher here. They're also seen as subservient to family. So not having their own opinion. But why is that? And if you look at the next example, which is from a student focus group, and just consider that for one moment.

Student one, they make it seem like we have to make our own choices. And I said, what do you mean? Like, there's no one who can help us make the choice we want to make. They were like, don't do what your family do just because they did. Don't do what your friends did. That's the only advice they gave. My older sister, my older brother, they're twins. They've just done their GCSE's because our choices were coming up. So I told them I wanted to choose drama and my sister was saying how hard it is, stuff like that. My cousin brother, I asked him what he found easy and what he found hard. He liked business and I was thinking, well, I should take business. And my sister said, well, I wanted to do dance and drama. And I asked my sister and she said, go ahead, do what you want. 

(A new slide with an image of exam desks in a hall appears on the left, the title reads "Secondary career education and school 'aspirations' programmes". The text below reads:

Analysis: 

Operation of two hegemonic norms:

These students remain unintelligible as agentic and aspirational to their teacher. 

Significance: 

(Chadderton, 2018) )

[Charlotte] Okay, so there's lot going on here. Picking out two norms because this is about norms, thinking again about picking out two norms which are, which are being operationalised in these conversations. So first of all, there's one hegemonic norm, which is about that neoliberal individual aspiration that I've just talked about. So, it's operating actually quite explicitly in the original, in the first, the first conversation. So, these programs tend to be these student aspiration programs. They tend to be considered as part of careers education. But actually what's really going on is this, this element of teaching children to be neoliberal. And that's implicit in these, this idea that neoliberal leaners aspire. They're rational, they're autonomous, their individual, their agentic, they make individual choices.

The other norm here is a race norm, the notion of whiteness, and also of middle classness, which is feeding in here, as a hegemonic norm which perceives these mostly Muslim, brown females as other in society, as subservient to family, as passive. And there's also an element of what might be referred to as white saviour within that norm as well, which is being picked up by the teacher. 

I think so in this conversation, the students are not talking about making choices alone. They're talking about collaborative choices and giving me lots of examples of how helpful it was to them to get the perspective of their siblings and cousins. And if we view that through the work of Judith Butler, where agency and decision making are collaborative, it could certainly be argued that the students are demonstrating agency because they're seeking help and advice from their family, and informing themselves through the experience of others. But if we read it along the previous example, where the teacher sees the students of, as subservient, it looks like that collective agency isn't intelligible to the teacher. The teacher's not recognising it, so these two norms, firstly the racial frame constituting these young females as not agentic, and secondly, the neoliberal frame of careers education which constitutes aspiration as individual. According to these narratives, these Muslim students, mostly Muslim, are almost being viewed as demonstrating their lack of freedom because they're not, being they're not aspiring individually. So, they, they remain not intelligible to the teacher as agentic students. 

So, race is functioning here as a hegemonic norm, masking the teacher's own role because the teacher has power here to a certain extent, reproducing those racialised structures. We're looking at norms interacting with each other, which is quite complex to be able to read what's happening here and the teacher's perceptions. If we're going to address these perceptions, we can't do that without taking these different norms into account. 

(On a new slide, the left hand side is in blue with the title reading "Judith Butler, Race and Education" with the main title on the right reading "Racism and white privilege as desubjectifier". The text below reads: 

"Oppression works not merely through acts of over prohibition, but covertly, through the constitution of viable subjects and through the corollary constitution of viable subjects and through the corollary constitution of a domain of unviable (un)subjects - abjects we might call them - who are neither named nor prohibited within the economy of law". (Butler, 1991, 20)

(Chadderton, 2018) ) 

[Charlotte] Finally, I'm going to look at racism and white privilege as a desubjectifier. And this is also drawing on the work, the work of Butler. So desubjectivation, and we've talked a little bit about that in some ways in the last example, it's when the subject isn't intelligible or isn't viable as a full subject, or it's about the removal of the subject's recognition as a legitimate subject. So, subjects who don't fit with dominant norms are often unintelligible, as we've just said. But they're often unintelligible as full subjects so constituted, as Butler would argue, beyond an imagined community, and via that mechanism, marginalised or oppressed. Butler would argue this process goes beyond subjects being not socially acceptable. Their status as a subject is drawn into question, so subjectivation can be a form of existence and survival. One can be desubjectivated, constituted as less than fully human, because we're only recognised as human in relation to social norms. 

This may sound extreme, but for Butler, this is actually how oppression works through the creation of not viable subjects, and she, she talks about this idea of normative schemes, of intelligibility, establishing what will and will not be human, what will, as she calls it, be a liveable life, for those of you who know Butler. And what will be a grievable death. Whose death do we grieve more? And therefore, who is being assigned the status of full subject or less full subject? This can be explicit, implicit, and it can also be a legal issue, it can be legally regulated or not.

So, full subject can also be removed from an individual through a lack of rights. For example, if a law is differentially applied, thinking back to critical race theory, which is also relevant here. But some people, they're not being fully protected by that law even though it's the same law. So, we'll come to that in a minute. So, as an example, Butler, in her work, considered the effects of the killing of mostly unarmed black people on the streets in the US at the hands of mostly white police officers. That's the example she gives. So there's this danger of police violence on the streets, particularly against black people, which has, which reaches on an everyday basis and the often lack of consequences for the perpetrators, for the police. This has created a situation where the law, same law, but it's being applied differently in how it plays out on racial grounds because that's where the difference is. So, basically, even this the same law, the law is being applied differently and Butler argues that white supremacy functions through a process of desubjectivation of racially minoritised groups. Of course, not all black people directly experience this violence. It's the threat of violence, which means that the law is being applied differently. The differential power of the law. That's what's doing the desubjectifying, creating an idea of disposability and unviability and ungrievability, which is where the Black Lives Matter movement came from, drawing on these arguments.

Now, the idea of people in colour or people of colour in the US being treated less than human is not, is not new. It's not Butler that pointed this out. Of course it's not. It's not me that's pointing this out. But where Butler's work does differ from a lot of other work is it focuses on the desubjectivation of the individual via their social position. And this kind of extends the notion of race as a social construction, because it's going right to the heart of how the subject is being formed on an everyday basis. 

(A new slide is shown with the title "Covid schooling policy" and the below text: 

'Had we introduced lockdown a week earlier, we would have reduced final death toll by at least half' 

(Professor Neil Ferguson)

'Often, pandemics 'follow the fault lines of society - exposing and often magnifying power inequities' 

(Gravlee 2020, 1) 

'What is in the best interests of those in the education arena will vary according to the level of risk which presents itself in a particular place at a particular time. Accordingly, the Act seeks to take a suite of powers to enable Government to react flexibly to manage differing levels of risk'. 

(UK Government, Coronavirus Act 2020)

'Schools are safe' 

(Health Minister Matt Hancock) )

[Charlotte] So, my final argument here is around a final example for this argument, is around Covid schooling policy. So, very recent work, this. So what I look at here was secondary schooling policy in this country in response to the pandemic, with regards to the impact on race inequality. So, as we know, the policy that the UK government followed, it's different U-turns and everything that have meant that disadvantaged children suffered disproportionately in terms of their access to learning and their outcomes. But we tend to not recognise the fact that there's also a racialised element to this. In pointing this out I am in no way saying that other disadvantaged groups were not disadvantaged they were, but there's a racialised element to this. 

During the pandemic then, there was lots of attention paid to issues of health and race. And you'll remember that, of course, widespread, widespread reporting of the fact that in this country, black, Asian and minority ethnic people have been more likely to die of Covid than white people. And it's important just to remember what the reasons for this are. So research has shown, not my research, other research on, on from health, high infection rates because minority ethnic population groups, often work in healthcare settings and other frontline work or in low paid and precarious roles, and therefore are perhaps less able to isolate when required or less able to socially distance. 

Seems weird talking about this now, doesn't it? It was, it was so, so recent and yet we don't, we're not talking about social distancing anymore really. Also racialised minorities are more likely to live in overcrowded housing and therefore, again, less likely to be able to socially distance. Figures show that workers in insecure jobs were more than twice as likely to die than average, of Covid, and minority ethnic individuals were more likely to occupy those roles, and also that minority ethnic people have higher rates of death once infected, due to higher incidence of existing health issues. 

Now, these are just a few reasons, but the point here is that this, this is systemic. The health issues are systemic. They're already in the system, they're due to entrenched inequalities in the health system that are there anyway and are exacerbated, by the pandemic.

(A new slide with the same, "Covid schooling policy" appears and the below text:

Findings:

Significance: 

There are other issues to talk about here, actually, but just today, I just want to focus on what, what I actually found. And I was, I was looking at, existing data and synthesizing it. In fact, the government's response to the pandemic for schooling increased the risk to life, particularly for minority ethnic families, keeping in mind the existing risks. So firstly, keeping schools open when cases are high. So, slow closure of schools in March 2020, keeping them open again in autumn 2020. Despite denials, opening schools at that time was shown to increase transmission of the virus and therefore lead to higher cases overall. So, that put everybody at increased risk, but particularly for families, such as minority ethnic families who were already at increased risk. That risk was exacerbated. 

Secondly, children obviously had to occupy how to access learning online, more possible for better off children. But many children from less wealthy homes and a large proportion of those in minority ethnic, had little access to a device. The government was supposed to provide them with a device, but less than half of those that they ordered ever arrived. They eventually issued guidelines saying children who cannot learn remotely due to a lack of devices should attend school. And so we had a kind of dual approach there, forcing families to choose between risking potentially their whole family's health, and risking their, their children's schooling and potentially pushing them towards, just sending their children to school to prevent them from missing out on learning and therefore risking that their own health. 

And then thirdly, on the return to school after the second lockdown, masks and twice weekly Covid tests were not made compulsory. They were in many other countries for that time. And at that time there was increased scientific evidence which suggested that mask wearing was actually affecting, to a certain extent, the transmission of the virus and therefore, that it, that increased the risk as well. So obviously the risk of it and how ill health and death increased via the schooling policy for everybody, but particularly for racially minoritised families whose risks of ill health and death were higher than the average population anyway.

What can be argued here is that this is an example of desubjectivation. Now, there's a real risk to extra exposure, exposure to death. There's also that threat that I talked about, it's the, it's the threat of exposure to death. The threat which matters here because it's the same policy, but it's affecting people differently along racial lines as well as on class lines. So minority ethnic people don't have the same protection as white people under that law because of the existing differential vulnerabilities. 

So what this shows then, is that we need to take into account when we're thinking about these things. And so the way that health policy and education policy work together, which they weren't really doing at the, at the time. They could have done better. And they're interacting with existing structural vulnerabilities. You can't understand the effects of one without looking at the effects of the other, and this is the kind of thing that should be taken into account when we're planning for future pandemics. 

(A new slide is shown with the title "Working towards race equality in research" with the below text: 

Interventions and insights which draw upon CRT 

Interventions and insights which draw upon poststructural work 

(Chadderton 2012, 2013) ) 

[Charlotte] Finally, I just wanted to draw out a few points about what, what we can do about this. And I know with each of them I've made a suggestion of what can be done. But broadly, there are insights which can help us address or try and address race inequality. Obviously, depending on one's own social location and one's own role and what interventions are possible, especially from the point of view of a researcher, because that's, that's where I'm coming from on this. So, some points which have come out of my work that we need to avoid the impossible position of neutrality, reject that notion of whiteness as norm. And there are obviously, there are different ways of doing these. These are broad. Avoid a kind of fetishistic gaze, upon those who are socially located as racial others.

Criticise, problematise the structures of white privilege in education, take into account that these structures exist as a context. They're already there, they shape our access to resources, they're shaping policies as we've seen, and they will shape our response to policies. Allies, for example, white allies should mainly aim to support this work, not always to lead.

And then ideas which draw upon poststructural work because it's important I think, I think these two different theoretical traditions provide us with slightly different angles that are all important. So, reject and problematise essentialised notions of race. And I say that with a caveat, because strategic essentialisation is very important, politically can be very important but poststructuralists might reject it.

Be aware that research and educational practices traditionally have reproduced racial inequalities, and that's the context that we're working in. And we risk doing the same if we're not very careful, we need to examine how our own actions and our own practices and the norms that we cite, as I've mentioned, sometimes unwittingly, but try and be aware of it. They constitute our positions. They constitute the discourses and this can be explicit and implicit.  

We need to remember that we're all subjectivated by norms. If we're following Butler and those norms are raced, gendered, classed, they're intersectional. It's not conscious. But the more we understand it, the more we work at it. Perhaps we can do our bit, and also from, from a Butlerian point of view, because Butler would argue identity categories are unstable and white privilege needs to be reproduced in order to function. That obviously means within the idea, that obviously means that we don't actually have to reproduce it. So there's a, there's an idea, there's a grain of hope there that we could, we could aim to destabilise it and to break that automatic link so often that, there is so often between whiteness and privilege. 

I'll leave it there. Thank you. 

(The final slide with the title "References to this research" appears with the below references:

(Audience applause as University of Derby logo ends the livestream)

Professorial Inaugural Lecture Series: Professor Charlotte Chadderton video

Back to Approaches to understanding the reproduction of race inequality in education