Dr Joseph Maslen, Senior Lecturer in Education Studies, was invited to contribute to the University of Oxford’s special roundtable event on the issue of social mobility.
The event focused on the relationships between mechanisms and experiences of educational mobility.
At the gathering, Dr Maslen was able to speak to leading academics about the research done by himself and colleagues at Hope’s Centre for Education and Policy Analysis (CEPA). His talk focused on explaining how the goal of social mobility is part of a broader neoliberal power structure.
Speaking at Oxford enabled Dr Maslen to extend his published argument that, through a sophisticated use of language, governments seek to justify, disguise and normalise a highly-problematic common sense about society’s ‘unfortunates’ and how their problems can be solved. This perspective challenges the current framework for helping the poorest children in society, raising questions for educational policy and practice that are of major public interest in contemporary Britain.