Education, Racial Justice, and the Limits of Inclusion in Settler Colonial Australia

Abstract

Education both actively excludes (through suspensions and expulsions) and tries to include (through inclusion policies, programs, and pathways). Students who experience both exclusion and attempts at inclusion tend to be racialized Black, Brown, and/or Indigenous; identify as queer or trans; be experiencing poverty; and/or be living with a disability. These are also the young people who tend to experience incarceration in settler colonial states. In this article we draw on and develop the metaphor of the “school-to-prison pipeline,” which originated in the United States, to examine the contours and tensions of educational exclusion in Australia. In doing this we map a range of “modes of exclusion” that we illustrate are based on the interconnected racial logics of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. We propose a new research agenda for understanding the links between racial domination, criminality, carcerality, and educational exclusion in settler colonial contexts that seeks to go beyond normative models of inclusion.