Challenges and Inequalities in Lifelong Learning and Social Justice

The connections and interactions of lifelong learning and social justice are complex and contested. Both are seen as a means to unconditional good, with little account taken of the inequalities and equalities located in constructions of power. This book develops critical ways to engage with international debates about lifelong learning and social justice through a range of competing and contested definitions, setting out some of the complexities and challenges of linking the two concepts. In particular, it engages in debates about the equalities and inequalities of learner identities, displacement and place. Its chapters consider those marginalised in complex and multiple ways, including gender, social class, ethnicity, age and migration.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Lifelong Education.

Introduction: Lifelong learning and social justice 1. Learning to labour in regional Australia: gender, identity and place in lifelong learning 2. Raising expectations or constructing victims? Problems with promoting social inclusion through lifelong learning 3. Widening participation, social justice and injustice: part-time students in higher education in England4. Personal stories: how students’ social and cultural life histories interact with the field of higher education5. Parents, partners and peers: bearing the hidden costs of lifelong Learning6. Later life learning for adults in Scotland: tracking the engagement with and impact of learning for working-class men and women7. Learning by dispossession: democracy promotion and civic engagement in Iraq and the United States