Concentration 1:  Education, Inequality, Difference and Inclusion

Research projects developed in this concentration focus on the singular and collective aspects of the configuration of subjects involved in a broad variety of educational contexts, especially students, teachers and family members facing the challenges of inclusive educational practices and affirmative action. We work towards constantly denaturalizing personal and collective asymmetries in order to shed light on how the very same dynamics that constitute students also determine “non-students”. We focus primarily on subjects who are permanently discredited, seen as unfit for/unable to manage institutional socialization. Those subjects express untamed, irrepressible aspects of human nature and pose a challenge to the enlightenment process, thereby exposing its frailty. The experience of diversity in school education is permeated by performance evaluations and by a partiality towards intellectual and bodily achievements that stems from our society’s ideal of a productive and competitive man. Therefore, this degree concentration focuses on the social construction of difference, normalizations and norms, but also on exclusionary dynamics, on conduct strategies and on the production of differences and singularities, including those related to ethnicity/race and gender. Studies developed in this concentration may approach human diversity using the analytical toolsets from Anthropology, Sociology, Philosophy, Historic-Cultural Psychology and Critical Theory, thus employing theoretical approaches that acknowledge inequality and difference as a core element of the production of social controls and violence that takes on various and complex forms. As a counterpoint to such controls, this degree concentration calls upon the body of knowledge on the construction mechanisms of difference-based individual and collective identities. We also seek to identify the power and knowledge relationships present in the processes that award certain groups the argumentative and prescriptive authority to define “the difference of the diverse” and institutionalize practices and knowledges that reduce the impact of inclusive action by means of strategies that pathologize certain behaviors and categorize certain bodily configurations and intellectual particularities as “less-than”. Therefore, this degree concentration gathers analytical efforts to understand the mechanisms of social and personal disadvantages present in educational inclusion processes, trying to identify in each case the specificities of the mutual dependence between social production of inequality and the configuration of individual diversity.

Advisors

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