Whiteness and exclusion: An ethnography of the racialised discourse of the UK’s Widening Participation agenda

Abstract

The widening participation policy agenda in higher education – increasing participation for historically underrepresented groups – forms part of a broader picture of local and global transformations in higher education. In the UK, the focus on widening participation grew in momentum under the New Labour government in the latter years of the 1990s. Since this time, participation rates have increased significantly, in the UK and internationally. In the UK, this includes for those from Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) backgrounds. It is now reported that these students are more likely to attend university than their white peers. However, BME students tend to have less favourable experiences and outcomes than their white counterparts. Addressing these disparities, this thesis presents findings from an ethnographic study which investigated the racialised discourse of widening participation in UK higher education. Locating widening participation in an extended history of race and education policy, the study draws on critical race theory, critical whiteness studies and Foucauldian conceptualisations of discourse. The empirical research ‘followed’ the discursive practices – symbolic and material – of widening participation policy as it ‘travelled’ across multiple higher education settings. An analysis of participant observations, semi-structured interviews and focus groups with widening participation policy actors shows that the everyday implementation of the policy agenda reproduces and circulates racialised discourse. More specifically, the study shows how human difference is reified through widening participation discursive practice along racial lines and how white perspectives and dominance are normalised. Core to the study’s findings is the lack of a critical approach in widening participation policy that acknowledges histories of race and racism. This thesis calls for a committed focus on race in widening participation policy that engages with its logics of exclusion, relationship to whiteness, and histories of racism. More broadly, the study’s theoretical and methodological approach offers new ways of investigating racial phenomena in social research. Through its travelling design, the ethnographic research challenges the typical boundedness of anthropological analyses, exposing the systemic nature of whiteness across multiple sites. Similarly, the study’s theoretical framework challenges the social investigation of racial phenomena beyond that which is easily ‘seen’ by offering analytic tools to identify often hidden or erased racialised discourse in the everyday. The study’s contribution is thus threefold; it offers empirical, methodological and theoretical knowledge for addressing whiteness and exclusion in higher education.