Avigail Eisenberg

Education and the Politics of Difference: Iris Young and the Politics of Education.

Three key contributions of Iris Young to democratic political theory, and three challenges that have arisen in response to Youngs theory, are examined here in relation to education. First, Young has argued that oppression and domination, not distributive inequality, ought to guide discussions about justice. Second, eliminating oppression requires establishing a politics that welcomes difference by dismantling and reforming structures, processes, concepts and categories that sustain difference‐blind, impartial, neutral, universal politics and policies. The infatuation with merit and standardized tests, both of which are central to measuring educational achievement, are chief amongst the targets in need of reform. Third, a politics of difference requires restructuring the division of labour and decision‐making so as to include disadvantaged social groups but allow them to contribute without foregoing their particularities. The challenges that have arisen in response to Youngs theory are first, that difference is merely another way of getting at inequality of resources or opportunities, and if it is not, then, second, a politics of difference values difference for the sake of difference rather than for the sake of alleviating social disadvantage. Third, in theory and in practice a politics that focuses on difference putatively jeopardizes a politics whose aim is to improve the redistribution of resources.

Diversity and Equality: Three Approaches to Cultural and Sexual Difference

One of the leading issues in contemporary constitutionalism is how to adjudicate conflicts, which occur between communities that are ethnically or nationally different from each other, without being blind or insensitive to these differences. It is fairly safe to speculate that courts have always had to adjudicate conflicts in light of ethnic and national differences. But the more self-consciously post-national or multinational the state becomes (or the more the state is replaced by ‘complex-state’ entities 1 ), the greater is the need to develop a legitimate means of adjudicating conflicts when they arise between political communities that are different on the basis of ethnicity, nationhood or even religion. The dilemma between protecting sexual equality and protecting cultural autonomy has recently attracted the attention of numerous legal and political theorists and practitioners partly because it vividly captures the challenges posed for adjudicating conflicts across ethnic, national or religious lines. Two dominant approaches have emerged to resolve conflicts that arise between measures to protect sexual equality and those that advance cultural autonomy. First, advocates of a rights-based approach frame debates about cultural autonomy and sexual equality in terms of a conflict between fundamental and irreconcilable values. 2 Second, advocates of the process-based approach emphasize the need for communities to resolve such conflicts themselves through internal decision-making procedures or at least through procedures that the community endorses (e.g. third party arbitrars). Here I examine each of these approaches and suggest a third approach which I call the difference-based approach. The difference-based approach provides a means by which adjudication can take place, when it needs to take place, without being blind or insensitive to the national or ethnic differences that exist between the communities in conflict. The approach asks that we view such conflicts * Thanks to Matt James, Colin Macleod, Margaret Moore, Jeff Spinner-Halev, James Tully and the participants in the Exeter Colloquium on Constitutionalism, Democracy and Citizenship for their helpful comments on the ideas contained in this paper. Also thanks to Jo Shaw and Antje Wiener for their suggestions. 1 Thanks to Jo Shaw for this useful term. 2

The Public Assessment of Indigenous Identity

Those who are sceptical about identity politics often point to cases about indigenous rights as exemplary of the problems with it. On the one hand, identity claims,1 including claims made by indigenous peoples for entitlements, power or resources based on something important about their identity, are an unavoidable part of public decision-making. There is often a gap between the abstract commitments found in legal and political documents and the specific, often quite practical regulations over land use, fisheries, taxation, child welfare, education, and so on, that are supposed to flow from these general commitments. This gap is filled, in part, when decision-makers translate abstract entitlements in light of what specific groups claim is important and distinctive about their identity. On the other hand, the assessments of these claims by courts or other public decision-makers are often taken as exemplary of the serious problems with cultural rights.

The limited resources of liberal multiculturalism: A response to Patrick Loobuyck

Miller, D. (2002) ‘Group Rights, Human Rights and Citizenship’, European Journal of Philosophy 10(2): 178–95. Modood, T. (1998) ‘Anti-essentialism, Multiculturalism and the “Recognition” of Religious Groups’, The Journal of Political Philosophy 6(4): 378–99. Parekh, B. (2000) Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory. New York: Palgrave. Räikkä, J., ed. (1996) Do we need minority rights? Conceptual Issues. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Rawls, J. (1971) A Theory of Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rawls, J. (1988) ‘The Priority of Right and Ideas of the Good’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 17(4): 251–76. Raz, J. (1994) ‘Multiculturalism : A Liberal Perspective’, in J. Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain, pp. 170–91. Oxford: Clarendon press. Richmond, A. (1994) Global Apartheid: Refugees, Racism, and the New World Order. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tamir, Y. (1993) Liberal Nationalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Taylor, C. (1992) ‘The Politics of Recognition’, in A. Gutmann (ed.) Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition, pp. 25–73. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University press. Tully, J. (1995) Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Young, I. (1989) ‘Polity and Group Difference: A Critique of the Ideal of Universal Citizenship’, Ethics 99(2): 250–74. Young, I. (1990) Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

The theory and politics of the second-class citizenship

There is a trend across many states to create multiple classes of citizenship, according to which some citizens have access to a full complement of rights, whereas the rights of many others are restricted. This special issue brings together four articles that use political theoretic methodologies to evaluate the moral challenges that accompany attempts today to create “second-class” citizenship. The four different cases explored here reveal a worrying trend whereby democratic states – despite a nominal commitment to the equality of all citizens – establish laws and regulations that effectively create “classes” of citizenship delimited by differentiated rights. In 1989, Iris Marion Young argued for a group-differentiated approach to citizenship in response to what she perceived as the corrosion of the ideal of universal citizenship in the postwar period (Young 1989). According to Young, differences in class and cultural identity could be predicted to intersect with public policies, with the effect of denying access for some people to certain key benefits of citizenship and thereby creating a de facto class of the second-class citizenship. Her goal was to expose these exclusions as a direct result of the pursuit of universal citizenship and to propose group-differentiated citizenship as a remedy. In contrast, today, second-class citizenship is explicitly written into the legislation of several western states. For instance, many democratic states are adopting or reinvigorating legislation that permits the state to strip citizenship from those who are convicted of, or in some cases merely suspected of, engaging in counter-state activities. In France, court decisions have denied citizenship applications to those who appear to fail to conform to French republican ideals. Temporary foreign-worker programs, across North America and Europe, are increasingly a refined means by which states can access an army of workers while denying these workers a clear pathway to citizenship. As in Canada and the United States, recent European reforms to these programs offer limited access to citizenship on the condition that workers display “good behavior” of various sorts. These programs join many others, to present an increasingly long list of conditions that migrants must meet in order to attain citizenship status. For instance, the rewriting of citizenship tests across European states to emphasize shared norms and values; the entrenched refusal to reconsider disenfranchizing felons across many states in the United States (who are predominantly African American); and the attempts to ban traditional forms of Muslim dress from the public sphere can all be read as means of placing conditions

The challenges of structural injustice to reconciliation: truth and reconciliation in Canada

ABSTRACT Lu’s distinction between interactional and structural injustice helps to clarify both the normative significance and some of the shortcomings of recommendations adopted by Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). At the same time, the TRC highlights three challenges to addressing structural injustice in the context of reconciliation.

Identity Politics and the Risks of Essentialism

Over the past several years, studies have shown that public decisionmakers in multicultural states sometimes essentialise the identities of cultural and religious minorities (Volpp, 2000; Renteln, 2005; Phillips, 2007; Song, 2007). In some cases, judges and legislators appear to be in the grip of cultural, racial and gendered biases that distort their decisions in ways that stereotype groups. States that adopt multicultural policies exacerbate these tendencies by providing incentives for citizens to use their cultural and religious identities strategically by exaggerating the importance or uniformity of a particular practice or belief in order to secure concessions from the state. In what is by now an extensive scholarship about the risks associated with decision making in multicultural contexts, several critics have proposed alternative approaches to responding to cultural diversity which specifically address the problem of essentialism. This chapter examines three alter-native approaches, each of which aims at avoiding essentialism. The first approach avoids essentialism by favouring individual self-identification over collective identity markers to establish the importance of a practice or tradition to an individual’s identity; the second approach asks that individual equality rather than cultural difference is the focus of protection; and the third approach situates minority rights in a framework of collective self-determination rather than cultural accommodation.