A Tall Order: Can schools deliver both diversity and inclusion?
Michael Merry, University of Amsterdam

5 – 6:30 pm BST

 

Poster available here.

 

Partly as a response to imposed segregation and exclusion, for decades now philosophers, policy makers and ordinary citizens have demanded that schools demonstrate their ability to accommodate and address more and more needs in the classroom. ‘Diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ are two buzzwords that often are used to convey these 21st century imperatives.

 

What conditions must hold for them to work? How well do diversity and inclusion hold together? And does it make sense to expect schools to succeed in both at the same time without producing new regimes of imposed segregation and exclusion?

 

Dr. Michael S. Merry is professor of philosophy in the department of Child Development and Education, University of Amsterdam. He is also affiliated with the Department of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities and the Departments of both Geography and Sociology in the Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences. He specializes in the following: the various features of educational inequality, both institutional and non-institutional; state paternalism and the ethics of intervention; the politics and epistemology of academic research; the ethics of school choice and school segregation, citizenship and civic education, religion and religious schools, and alternative education in its manifold forms. He authored the (2020) Palgrave Macmillan book Educational Justice: Liberal ideals, persistent inequality and the constructive uses of critique.

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