The Troubling Travel of Meritocracy Across Education

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

Meritocracy as both an ideology and a system is well institutionalized in education (Littler, 2017). While it offers the illusive promise of a level playing field and upward mobility, it also accepts inequality as a foundational premise and legitimates and naturalizes those who succeed or fail as deserving of their outcomes. In this session, we approach the topic from three distinct angles: looking broadly at the construction of merit based on educators and educational researchers’ uses and philosophical debates; looking inward to interrogate how colonial understandings of merit are constructed and persist in universities; and looking specifically at a context within universities to understand how elites’ embrace of meritocratic principles shapes their views on immigration, and perhaps other social policies.

Sub Unit

• Division L - Educational Policies and Politics / Division L - Section 7: Social Context and Structural Inequalities

Chair

• Wayne Au, University of Washington - Bothell

Papers

• What's Wrong With Meritocracy? Toward a Unifying Framework for Analyzing Meritocratic Infrastructure and Ideology - Alex Posecznick, University of Pennsylvania

• Merit as Race Talk: The Ontological Myopia of Merit Knowledge - prabhdeep singh kehal, Brown University

• "As Long as They Work": Meritocratic Logics in Elite College Students' Attitudes Toward Immigrants - Nadirah Farah Foley, Harvard University