Inclusion, Measurement and Relevance… and Covid-19

An earlier paper entitled ‘Inclusion in an age of mobility’ (Traxler 2016) written over 4 years ago made the case that the inclusion agenda of the UK higher education of 1990s was largely a failure in its own terms but had in any case been made irrelevant by the subsequent onset of pervasive and ubiquitous connectivity and mobility, profoundly transforming the production, ownership, distribution and nature of learning and knowing and problematising the role and status of universities and lecturers. [...]this was always going to be a tricky and contentious topic to some students, parents and employers having perhaps rather different ideas from others, those in some disciplines having rather different ideas from those in others, some on the political or economic left having different ideas from those on the right and different universities and departments having different ideas about their mission and market to others. In relation to the specific questions of measurement being addressed here, clearly our earlier analysis breaks into two perspectives, the first, inward-looking, and the second, outward-looking. Perhaps the global Covid-19 pandemic will reconfigure our understanding of these classifications as, for example, different economies, sectors and businesses recover—or not—differentially. Since the earlier paper, we have seen the emergence and consolidation of earlier economic, social, ecological, academic, technological and political trends and trajectories, both locally and globally.