Reconceptualising Widening Participation
Professor Penny Jane Burke, Chair of Education, Roehampton University

This keynote interrogates the underpinning values, perspectives and meanings that shape current policy discourses and practices of widening participation (WP). It seeks to expose the complex politics of identity at play in higher educational fields and the ways these shape struggles over access and participation. WP is primarily about addressing the under-representation of certain socio-economic groups in higher education in relation to inequalities of age, class, disability, ethnicity, gender, and race. Yet, despite substantial levels of investment in the WP agenda over the past decade, certain patterns of under-representation continue to persist. This keynote will explore why that might be and will offer a reconceptualisation of WP that seeks to shift and disrupt deeply embedded relations of inequality and misrecognition at play in higher education. 

Reconceptualising WP