The Identity Trap and the Reconstruction of Response Ethics In Higher Education

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 7:45 am - Gold 2
  In Roundtable Session: Healing, Sovereignty, and Relational Justice in Higher Education

Abstract

In contemporary higher education, recognition has shifted from ethical responsiveness to symbolic categorization. DEI frameworks, once aimed at justice, now often reduce identity to a measurable asset. This article theorizes identity as symbolic capital—performed, assessed, and institutionalized through diversity statements and admissions metrics. As competitive representation replaces dialogue, recognition becomes alienated from its ethical roots. Drawing on Taylor, Honneth, Bourdieu, Foucault, and Habermas, the study introduces response ethics: a relational, non-instrumental framework that reclaims recognition as an ethical encounter. It asks whether education can still sustain moral responsiveness amid identity-based governance, and how response ethics might enable more dialogical, just institutional futures.

Author

• xiaoyu qin, Xi An Univeristy of Technology