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‘Race’: the Missing Dimension in Social Policy Higher Education?

This chapter discusses the key analysis and messages from the Social Policy Association (SPA) race audit, looking at the challenges facing the discipline. The report was tasked with looking at social policy in terms of student composition, staff composition, conference/journal content, and curriculum content. Social policy has treated debates on ‘race’ and racism as marginal for too long, as reflected in the relative absence of ‘race’ from the major social policy journals. An important issue that has arisen is that the SPA has never made use of ethnic monitoring in membership applications, making it impossible to assess the representativeness or otherwise of its membership. The SPA clearly has some way to go to persuade social policy academics of the importance of confronting this challenge, and this is unlikely to happen without a major cultural shift within higher education institutions (HEIs) and the discipline more broadly.