Signifying the Subaltern: Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity in Higher Education in USA, UK and India

• In Event: Navigating Digital Media Analysis in Multi-Sited Justice Seeking Research

Proposal

This research investigates how intersectional and subaltern identities are labelled, signified and negotiated through equal opportunity and affirmative action policies in international higher education. The multi-sited study looks at three countries – India, UK and USA – analysing three space-time and policy inflection points to interrogate how these policies articulate and negotiate the ‘subaltern’, while maintaining the underlying hegemonic systems of power they are meant to challenge. Essentialised along aspects of race, caste, coloniality and dominance in higher education in the 21st century, I hypothesise that the forms and policies only relabel identity categories as sites of imbalance. Meanwhile, the perpetuating logic of coloniality-modernity and a racialised global political economy persists in maintaining systems of inequality (de Sousa Santos, 2021; Gramsci et al., 2007; Mignolo & Walsh, 2018; Quijano, 2007).
The research looks at online postgraduate application forms available online in 70 universities based in the UK, USA and India and how they collect applicant information based on race, ethnicity, caste and class, as applicable. The three sites have been chosen for their distinct vantage points in time and in hegemonic constructions of subalternity. In USA, the study explores the collection of postgraduate applicant data on race and ethnicity for the year 2022-23. The data is analysed to reflect discourse pre and post the 2023 US Supreme Court ruling overturning race based college admissions. The Indian context is investigated following a 2023 Indian Supreme Court judgement upholding a 2019 constitutional amendment providing reservation for Economically Weaker Sections, separate from the caste and indigeneity based reservations already in place. The third site, UK, is investigated through its collection of postgraduate applicant data on race and ethnicity with no affirmative action policy in place. Interview data from the sites supplements the digital and critical discourse analysis of the forms and the policies.
The study borrows a critical feminist lens to unpack the consciousness of the subjugated and the dominant and analyses essentialist discourses on the hierarchization of created and colonially foregrounded hegemonies (Anzalduá, 2012; Bacchetta et al., 2018; Cusicanqui, 2012). It weaves a feminist understandings of the consciousness of the subjugated with the dominant, to see beyond the ebb and pull of who dominates and to understand why structures of domination persist. The research investigates how, and to what extent, this hegemony is maintained through reforms in education while renegotiating who is labelled the ‘subaltern’; how identity categories emanating from the logics of modernity-coloniality can interplay with neoliberal forces of social stratification to challenge or to maintain hegemonies and systemic inequities.

Author

• Shahnaaz Khan, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge