Challenges and Inequalities in Lifelong Learning and Social Justice

Susan Jackson is Professor of Lifelong Learning and Gender, and Pro-Vice-Master for Learning and Teaching at the Birkbeck University of London, UK. Her research focuses on the challenges, complexities and contestations in policies and practices of lifelong learning. In particular, her research looks at the intersections of multiple learner identities, including gender, social class and age. Recent publications include Lifelong Learning and Social Justice: communities, work and identities in a globalised world (2011); Gendered choices: learning, work, identities in lifelong learning (2011) (with Irene Malcolm and Kate Thomas); and Innovations in lifelong learning: critical perspectives on diversity, participation and vocational learning (2010).

Introduction: Lifelong learning and social justice 1. Learning to labour in regional Australia: gender, identity and place in lifelong learning 2. Raising expectations or constructing victims? Problems with promoting social inclusion through lifelong learning 3. Widening participation, social justice and injustice: part-time students in higher education in England 4. Personal stories: how students’ social and cultural life histories interact with the field of higher education 5. Parents, partners and peers: bearing the hidden costs of lifelong Learning 6. Later life learning for adults in Scotland: tracking the engagement with and impact of learning for working-class men and women 7. Learning by dispossession: democracy promotion and civic engagement in Iraq and the United States