The Psy-Security-Curriculum ensemble: British Values curriculum policy in English schools

Framed as being in response to terrorist attacks and concerns about religious bias in some English schools, ‘British Values’ (BV) curriculum policy forms part of the British Government’s Counter-Terrorism and Security Act, 2015. This includes a Duty on teachers in England to actively promote British Values to deter students from radicalisation. This paper, first, traces the history of Britishness in the curriculum to reveal a prevalence of nationalistic, colonial values. Next, an ensemble of recent policies and speeches focusing on British Values is analysed, using a psycho-political approach informed by anti-colonial scholarship. Finally, we interrogate two key critiques of the British Values curriculum discourse: the universality of British Values globally, and concerns over the securitisation of education. Findings indicate that the constitution of white British supremacist subjectivities operate through curriculum as a defence mechanism against perceived threats to white privilege, by normalising a racialised state-controlled social order. The focus is on ‘British’ values, but the analytic framework and findings have wider global significance

Racialized Architectural Space: A Critical Understanding of its Production, Perception and Evaluation

Academic inquiry into the concept of space as racialized can be traced back to at least as far as the turn of the twentieth century with sociologist W. E. B. Dubois’ promulgation of the “color-line” theory. More recently, numerous postmodern scholars from a variety of fields have elucidated the various ways in which physical space (i.e., the built environment), as a social product, embodies racialized ideologies exhibited and reproduced by segregation, economics and other social practices. The dialogue on race and space has primarily been limited to the urban scales of city, neighborhood, community and street. Socio-spatial research that centers around race rarely addresses this phenomenon at the scale of architecture – the individual building or a particular development. Such a failure to critically examine the role of the architectural product in the creation and reproduction of socio-spatial and socio-racial inequality yields the field of architectural practice exempt and blameless in its tangible contribution to the psychosocial and geospatial marginalization of communities of color, as in, for example, the case of gentrification. This paper attempts to illustrate the fact that architecture, like all of the built physical environment, is not ahistorical, apolitical – and certainly not race neutral – but, as a social product, is also understood clearly within these contexts, and its psychological and social impacts and outcomes must be examined with a racially critical lens, particularly in heterogeneous urban communities

Hypocrisy, State Policy, and African American Students With Disabilities: The Guise of Access

We critically examined the odds of earning a college preparatory diploma for African American high school seniors receiving special education services under Texas’s Top 10% Policy (TTPP). Critical policy analysis was used to explore the meritocratic guise of college access for African American youth with disabilities, and through DisCrit, theorized TTPP’s broader effect on the social stratification and creation of policy “winners” and “losers.” Results from multilevel logistic regression models indicate African American students are nearly twice as likely to be identified with disabilities as their peers and are the least likely to earn a college preparatory diploma in Texas