Silver Bullets for Glass Ceilings in Ivory Towers
Introducing the Vectors of Opportunity Framework (VoOF) to evaluate equity for (ab)normative university students
(content taken from 3 Minute Thesis speech)This project began with a puzzle – a perplexity, if you will – as to how claims for inclusion could be dismissed as a politics of identity; for aren’t everyone’s opportunities contingent on their identities? Is everyone not shaped by their characteristics, their resources, their experiences; don’t these define our life chances and how we can access them? Is identity not threatened and weaponised across the political spectrum to maintain and wield power, to form communities and sow division?
My aim was to reconceptualise – to complicate and disaggregate – how we view, measure and tell stories about identity’s relationship with opportunity. In academic terms it is an intersectional, decolonial, diversity-sensitive, disability and neurodivergence affirming, critical queer feminist approach; but I’m not telling the story like that. What matters is that it is a reflection of the everyday existence of university students, a model of lived experience defined by those living it themselves.
The liberal tradition delivered human rights on the basis of abstract philosophical individualism. Principally, our common humanity trumped the explicit exclusion of historical norms; but we know that in practice power embeds and perpetuates itself, especially when money is concerned.
Policymaking reduces us to datapoints; an increasingly complex world simplified into ones and zeros. These models are built on cognitive shortcuts about how we live, learn and make choices. Our policies assume a direct causal link between identity and opportunity but only for those whose identity diverges from those norms. Universities call these equity groups. Such models lead us to believe that difference means deficiencies and that diversity means dumbing it all down.
The framework I’ve developed complicates the relationship between identity and opportunity by introducing the vector element: experience. I’ve thematically coded identity characteristics, resource and network maps and experiences into four vectors: Security, that’s your basic needs; Dignity, relational needs; Responsibility, dependencies; and Capability, which is your capacity to aspire and achieve. That’s what we currently make education policy about.
892 questions are organised into 120 strata across 13 themes. The survey collects neutral, nominal – facts – data like number and type of guardians, as well as ordinal – feels – data about the experience of those facts. Participants defining direction and scale themselves ensures we assume neither what an experience is, nor its impact. A different identity or experience is not necessarily a deficient one, and more importantly perhaps, cannot be used as a simple proxy for the source of opportunity without its context. That context is thematically presented through the four vectors.
This is what I look like in this framework, and it doesn’t differ much when you disaggregate the three time frames (younger than 18, at uni, as an adult). Policy that endeavours to engage me on a capability front is necessarily inequitable, ineffective and inefficient, because that is not where I need the help. I need Bronte, a stable housing situation, flexible work based in trust, and communities who accept me as a chaotically creative, often brilliant but also ridiculous and bizarre human being. Contemporary policymaking can’t see this, but the VoOF is built for this purpose.
Policy relies on stories as to who we are and how we live. It is no longer an option to base these narratives on the assumptions, aggregates and aspirations of policymaking built on exclusion. Identity politics is just politics and a better future lies in recognising that.
Research Questions
Who is the normative student in Australian university policy?
Who is the everyday student in Australian universities?
How can policy reconcile who students are with who it believes them to be?