Whose knowledge counts? Reframing "demographic literacy" in Scottish widening access higher education through international and anti-oppressive perspectives

This review examines how demographic knowledge is framed and reimagined within a Scottish widening access higher education programme. Drawing on my positionality as a former international student and widening access graduate, alongside over 15 years of community-based work with disadvantaged Roma populations, I reflect on how notions of population “need” are often shaped by national policy priorities and narrow imaginaries of populations—typically white, Scottish, and urban. While these narratives reflect lived realities, they risk overlooking multilingual, racialised, and globally mobile populations increasingly present in both the student body and the communities that graduates will serve. Based on my work since 2021 in placement coordination and teaching, I outline how applied changes to placement partnerships, thematic content, and assessment practice can challenge and reframe these dominant narratives. Drawing on Foucault’s concepts of population, discipline, and control, and Esposito’s theorisation of community, immunity, and exclusion, and coupled with anti-oppressive pedagogies, I argue for a reorientation of demographic literacy toward more plural, critically engaged, and globally attuned understandings of population. In reframing demographic literacy as a site of justice, I move it beyond a technical skill of interpreting population data toward a critical practice of interrogating how populations are constructed, which groups are rendered visible or invisible, and how imaginaries of “need” shape inclusion and exclusion in higher education. Such a shift positions international students not only as beneficiaries of widening access but as active population actors whose experiences and knowledges expand the terms of justice and belonging in higher education.