Educational leadership and Nancy Fraser

Drawing on the work of Nancy Fraser, this book offers a critical view of contemporary educational leadership and reform discourses, exploring how her key concepts of redistribution, recognition and representation may apply to social and therefore educational justice.Fraser offers a political and pragmatic reconciliation between feminist, neo-Marxist, critical and post-structuralist theories. This book outlines how Fraser has worked on and worked over theories of social justice and how this can inform how we can understand educational theory, policy and practice generally. In particular, the book focuses on the field of educational administration and leadership (ELMA) as it relates to equity issues such as school choice and inequality, gender and inclusive leadership, and alternative schooling. Fraser’s argument about ‘scaling up’ social justice theory is shown to be highly salient given the emergence of the field of transnational education policy and its role in the context of intensified nation-state and edu-business competition.Overall, through the lens of Nancy Fraser’s unitary framework, this book considers epistemological questions about the nature of knowledge, examines the relationship between the state, the individual, education and social movements, addresses the difficulties and dilemmas which arise due to the intersections of gender, class, race, sexuality and culture in a globalized context, and illustrates how the principles of social justice can be mobilized by leaders in everyday practice.

Schooling and social justice through the lenses of Nancy Fraser

This review essay draws on Nancy Fraser's work as featured in Adding insult to injury: Nancy Fraser debates her critics to explore issues of schooling and social justice. The review focuses on the applicability and usefulness of Fraser's three dimensional model for understanding matters of justice in education. It begins with an overview of the principles of economic, cultural and political justice as they are reflected in specific examples of equity and schooling policy and practice.This is followed by (1) a consideration of Fraser's concerns that current forms of identity politics are reifying group identity and displacing matters of distributive justice and (2) with an account of her concerns about the political justice issues of representation and misframing in the contemporary global era. With reference to the sphere of Indigenous education, the review examines some of the problematics involved in pursuing distributive, recognitive and representative justice. Fraser's'status model' is presented as a way through these problematics because it engages with a politics that begins with overcoming status subordination rather than with a politics of group identity. Against this theoretical backdrop, the final section of the review briefly considers some of the future challenges for schooling and social justice.

Schooling and social justice through the lenses of Nancy Fraser

This review essay draws on Nancy Fraser's work as featured in Adding insult to injury: Nancy Fraser debates her critics to explore issues of schooling and social justice. The review focuses on the applicability and usefulness of Fraser's three-dimensional model for understanding matters of justice in education. It begins with an overview of the principles of economic, cultural and political justice as they are reflected in specific examples of equity and schooling policy and practice. This is followed by (1) a consideration of Fraser's concerns that current forms of identity politics are reifying group identity and displacing matters of distributive justice and (2) with an account of her concerns about the political justice issues of representation and misframing in the contemporary global era. With reference to the sphere of Indigenous education, the review examines some of the problematics involved in pursuing distributive, recognitive and representative justice. Fraser's ‘status model’ is presented as a way through these problematics because it engages with a politics that begins with overcoming status subordination rather than with a politics of group identity. Against this theoretical backdrop, the final section of the review briefly considers some of the future challenges for schooling and social justice.