Writing representations to life: higher education and the production of equity realities

This paper deconstructs the often ‘taken-for-granted’ character of categories, classifications and representations that haunt higher education equity research and writing. It argues that there are no innocent representations. Instead, representations are part of the production of divisions: of how categories, classifications and groups are imagined. Far from an objectivist account of ‘the real’, the category used to represent is a performance of its own production. To speak or write the category is to bring the category into being, making possible particular forms of understanding, knowledge, action and practice. This paper explores how these lead to forms of ‘representational violence’ in two forms. Firstly people are grouped into representations that are conducive to the ‘dominant imaginary’ (Lumb & Bunn 2021). In these, people are constructed by the most convenient forms for their control, measurement and regulation. Secondly, representations are produced through and between people in dominant positions, including policy-makers, researchers and institutional executives. This means that the very people being represented by a category rarely have the opportunity to be involved in the category’s construction. The paper thus concludes on the need to take the work of representation within equity writing seriously. Ignoring the need for radical deconstruction of categories as a part of equity writing, research and practice is very likely to lead to perpetuation of dominant representations that perpetuate cycles of inequality.