The empirical focus of this book is on the twenty year struggle by parents and members of the Black community in Toronto to introduce an Africentric Alternative School (AAS) with Black-focused curricula. It brings together a seemingly disparate series of events that emerged from equity and multicultural narratives about the establishment of the school – violence, anti-racism and race-based statistics, policy entrepreneurs, and the re-birth of alternative schools in Toronto - to illustrate how these events ostensibly functioned through neoliberal choice mechanisms and practices. Gulson and Webb show how school choice can represent and manifest the hopes and fears, contestations and settlements of contemporary racial biopolitics of education in multicultural cities.

The empirical focus of this book is on the twenty year struggle by parents and members of the Black community in Toronto to introduce an Africentric Alternative School (AAS) with Black-focused curricula. It brings together a seemingly disparate series of events that emerged from equity and multicultural narratives about the establishment of the school – violence, anti-racism and race-based statistics, policy entrepreneurs, and the re-birth of alternative schools in Toronto - to illustrate how these events ostensibly functioned through neoliberal choice mechanisms and practices. Gulson and Webb show how school choice can represent and manifest the hopes and fears, contestations and settlements of contemporary racial biopolitics of education in multicultural cities.

The study of 'education governance' is a significant area of research in the twenty-first century concerned with the changing organisation of education systems, relations and processes against the background of wider political and economic developments occurring nationally and globally. In Education Governance and Social Theory these important issues are critically examined through a range of innovative theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches to assist in guiding those interested in better understanding and engaging with education governance as an object of critical inquiry and a tool or method of research. With contributions from an international line-up of academics, the book judiciously combines theory and methodologies with case study material taken from diverse geo-political settings to help frame and enrich our understanding of education governance. This is a theoretically and empirically rich resource for those who wish to research education governance and its multifarious operations, conditions and effects, but are not sure how to do so. It will therefore appeal to readers who have a strong interest in the practical application of social theory to making sense of the complex changes underway in education across the globe.

Viv Ellis, Lauren Gatti and Warwick Mansell present a unique and international analysis of teacher education policy. Adopting a political economy perspective, this distinctive text provides a comparative analysis of three contrasting welfare state models – the US, England and Norway – following the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Arguing that a new political economy of teacher education began to emerge in the decade following the GFC, the authors explore key concepts in education privatisation and examine the increasingly important role of shadow state enterprises in some jurisdictions. This topical text demonstrates the potential of a political economy approach when analysing education policies regarding pre-service teacher education and continuing professional development.

Affirmative action in college admissions has been a polarizing policy since its inception, decried by some as unfairly biased and supported by others as a necessary corrective to institutionalized inequality. In recent years, the protected status of affirmative action has become uncertain, as legal challenges chip away at its foundations. This book looks through a sociological lens at both the history of affirmative action and its increasingly tenuous future. J. Scott Carter and Cameron D. Lippard first survey how and why so-called "colorblind" rhetoric was originally used to frame affirmative action and promote a political ideology. The authors then provide detailed examinations of a host of recent Supreme Court cases that have sought to threaten or undermine it. Carter and Lippard analyze why the arguments of these challengers have successfully influenced widespread changes in attitude toward affirmative action, concluding that the discourse and arguments over these policies are yet more unfortunate manifestations of the quest to preserve the racial status quo in the United States.

This book is an edited collection introducing the Education Policy and Social Inequality series, and presents chapters from authors on the editorial board. It investigates relations between educational policy and social inequality, not simply in terms of policy solutions for inequalities but also how education policy frames, creates and at times exacerbates social inequalities. It adopts a critical stance, encompassing innovative and interdisciplinary theoretical and conceptual studies – drawing on e.g. sociology, cultural studies, social and cultural geography, and history – as well as original empirical work that examines a range of educational contexts, including early years education, vocational and further education, informal education, K-12 schooling and higher education. The book argues that critique and policy studies can have a transformative function, positing new dimensions for understanding the role of education policy in connection with recurrent social problems and seeking the amelioration of social inequality in ways that challenge the possibility of equity in the liberal democratic state, as well as in other forms of governance and government.

Superdiversity explores processes of diversification and the complex, emergent social configurations that now supersede prior forms of diversity in societies around the world. Migration plays a key role in these processes, bringing changes not just in social, cultural, religious, and linguistic phenomena, but also in the ways that these phenomena combine with others like gender, age, and legal status. The concept of superdiversity has been adopted by scholars across the social sciences in order to address a variety of forms, modes, and outcomes of diversification. Central to this field is the relationship between social categorization and social organization, including stratification and inequality. Increasingly complex categories of social “difference” have significant impacts across scales, from entire societies to individual identities. While diversification is often met with simplifying stereotypes, threat narratives, and expressions of antagonism, superdiversity encourages a perspective on difference as comprising multiple social processes, flexible collective meanings, and overlapping personal and group identities. A superdiversity approach encourages the re-evaluation and recognition of social categories as multidimensional, unfixed, and porous as opposed to views based on hardened, one-dimensional thinking about groups. Diversification and increasing social complexity are bound to continue, if not intensify, in light of climate change. This will have profound impacts on the nature of global migration, social relations, and inequalities. Superdiversity presents a convincing case for recognizing new social formations created by changing migration patterns and calls for a re-thinking of public policy and social scientific approaches to social difference. This introduction to the multidisciplinary concept of superdiversity will be of considerable interest to students and researchers in a range of fields in the humanities and social sciences. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.