Description
Book SynopsisUnsettling the Gap: Race, Politics and Indigenous Education examines pressing issues of inequality in education. The notion of gapand the need to close itis used widely in public and policy debates to name the nature and scope of disadvantage. In the competitive world of education, gaps have become associated with students who are seen to be falling behind, failing or dropping out. A global deficit discourse is, therefore, mobilised and normalised. But this discourse has a history and is deeply political. Unsettling the Gap examines this history and how it is politically activated through an analysis of the Australian Closing the Gap in Indigenous Disadvantage policy. In this policy discourse the notion of gap serves as a complex and multiple signifier, attached to individuals, communities and to national history.
In unravelling these diverse modalities of gap, the text illuminates the types of ruling binaries that tend to direct dynamics of power and knowledge
Trade Review
"Unsettling the Gap: Race, Politics and Indigenous Education impressively examines and disrupts the governing colonial and racial logics of white supremacy in education. Empirically insightful and theoretically innovative, it indexes the concept of gap and its effects within a history of the present that analyzes the paradoxical role that education plays in structural inequalities and social justice possibilities. For those interested in challenging settler colonial dynamics in Australia and beyond, this is a must-read book." —Roland Sintos Coloma, Professor and Assistant Dean, Wayne State University; President, American Educational Studies Association
"Unsettling the Gap: Race, Politics and Indigenous Education invites readers into a difficult conversation about how educational policies can enact both material and epistemic dispossession. Sophie Rudolph makes an extremely important contribution to educational studies by offering a highly sophisticated analysis of knowledge production in the context of settler colonial relations. The book is a persuasive and carefully argued account of how investments in settler authority are mobilized to reproduce colonial injustices in Indigenous education." —Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change, The University of British Columbia
"In this book, Sophie Rudolph intelligently, and in an ethically aware way, historicizes ‘gap talk’ in contemporary Australian Indigenous education policy. As well as a thoroughly researched ‘history of the present,’ her analyses and pedagogical use of Indigenous artists’ images provoke and decolonize how we might think otherwise about Indigenous education. Unsettling the Gap: Race, Politics and Indigenous Education is a profound book and a must-read for all concerned with Indigenous schooling." —Bob Lingard, Emeritus Professor, School of Education, The University of Queensland
Table of Contents
List of Images – Abbreviations and Terminology – Acknowledgements – A Future with No More Gaps? – Racing the Gap: Concepts of Race in the (Settler) Colonial World – Questions of Time – Standing on the Bridge: Critical Encounters with Ethics and Power – Tracing the Gap: Constructions of Deficiency and Potential – Gauging the Gap: Converging Discourses of Measurement and Rank – The Right Side of the Gap: School, Nation, Inclusion, History – Beyond Closing the Gap: Provocations for Thinking Otherwise – Author Biography – Artist Biographies – Index.
