Compelling diversities, educational intersections: policy, practice, parity

The ninth international Gender and Education Association Conference Compelling Diversities, Educational Intersections hosted by the Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research, London South Bank University engages with key debates surrounding the interplay between dynamics of education, work, employment and society in the context of crisis, upheaval and cutbacks, which reconfigure axes of intersectional inequalities. In considering diversity in education, this conference looks at the relationship between new equality regimes and continued educational inequalities, exploring organisational ambivalence, change and resistance. Participants will be asking important questions about the role of feminist research at a time when education, and its variously placed subjects (academics, pupils, students, and policy-makers), wrestle with the commitments and contentions in doing diversity and being diverse. This brief commentary piece probes at what - and who - is being compelled into, through and for diversity and explores the promises, pay-offs and pains of diversity when siphoned off from equality, justice and parity as policy and practice goals.