UC academic publication is recognized for its contribution to the debate on the reduction of inequality
January 4, 2021
The text by the professor of the Faculty of Education Claudia Matus, addresses the relationship between the production of social problems in educational policy, the research practices necessary to inform the policy, and the daily production of normalities and differences in school contexts.
The book "Ethnography and Education Policy, A Critical Analysis of Normalcy and Difference in Schools", edited by the academic and researcher Claudia Matus, It is one of the featured posts. en SpringerLink for his contribution to the debate on the reduction of inequality, part of the Sustainable Development Goals.
For this, and seeking to support compliance with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)Through its platform, SpringerLink identifies those publications that are being widely used and that are linked to these objectives. Such is the case of “Ethnography and Education Policy, A Critical Analysis of Normalcy and Difference in Schools”, edited by Claudia Matus, associate professor at the Faculty of Education, researcher at UC Educational Justice Center and director of the NDE Interdisciplinary Research Platform.
“It is very gratifying when the research work contributes something to public policies, particularly when it comes to issues of inequality, inequality and justice”, explains Claudia Matus.
The book is one of the results of the Project Rings in Social Sciences and Humanities SOC1103 Normality, Difference and Education (2013-2015), the first to be awarded the academic as director of NDE. This project proposes that the difference is not an isolated or natural construction, as if it were available to make use of it, rather, it is a production that is carried out based on an imagined normality and sustained by specific institutions, discourses and practices. that can be traced to understand their effects and operations.
This, because insisting on investigating those groups that are defined and assigned as different, minority, marginal and vulnerable, without putting into the equation the normality by which these groups are evaluated only continues to reproduce inequality. In other words, the question that this research asks is: How is it that with the vast amount of research we have on vulnerable groups, we still can't talk about equality? The proposal then is produce knowledge of the relationship between normality and difference, and how it operates in particular in school spaces.
Analysis of social problems in education
Published in 2019, “Ethnography and Education Policy. A Critical Analysis of Normalcy and Difference in Schools”, addresses the relationship between the production of social problems in educational policy, the research practices necessary to inform policy, and the daily production of normalities and differences in school contexts. Furthermore, it informs about the opportunities and consequences for policy, research and practice when normality is stigmatized at the same level as difference.
Composed of ten chapters, the book employs a critical analysis that combines theories queer, feminists and post representational to understand the implications of the dominant ways of understanding the division between normal and different subjectivities and how they reiterate the structures of inequality in schools and society.
“With this investigation we were able to do teamwork with the Ministry of Education, particularly with the teams in charge of designing policies for the Educational Reform. This implied that the concept of normality was incorporated into the ways in which designers thought about inclusion and diversity issues in schools.Matus adds.
Currently, Claudia Matus is the director of the Project Rings in Social Sciences and Humanities, The production of the gender norm (2019-2021), which is investigating the ways in which we learn about gender and perpetuate inequities. It proposes that the so-called "gender differences" are the product of a differentiating organizational system and not the cause of it.
"In this second Project Rings, the objective is to document how gender operates in different areas, in order to show how, despite decades of studies in the area, we still continue to report data, such as the gender gap, and it seems to us to be a common place to talk about gender differences”, comments the researcher.
