Lianeri, Ioanna; (2013) Inclusive education in Greece :official policies alternative discourses and the antinomies of inclusion. Doctoral thesis , Institute of Education, University of London.

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Abstract

The concept of inclusion, despite the problems associated with its implementation both within and beyond the field of education, has become a central feature in the educational and social policy agendas of numerous national administrations and international human rights organisations. This thesis critically investigates the current form, content and function of inclusive policy and practice in the Greek educational system and wider social life, focusing predominantly on issues concerning disabled people. The thesis approaches inclusion as a contested concept, permeated by values and, thus, susceptible to a wide range of contextual meanings in the discourse of different social agents, involving endless disputes about its 'proper' meaning and uses. With this in mind, the study examines the discursive formulation of inclusion by three distinct social agents in the field of education: policy makers, disability theorists/activists and educationalists. By employing secondary research methods, including analysis of formal policy statements and literature review, and interviews, the thesis aims to expose the conflicting visions and contrasting agendas that exist under the outwardly unified banner of inclusion. The antinomies that underlie the making of inclusive schools and the intrinsic tensions within the conceptual framework of inclusion reveal a struggle between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic inclusion discourses. In contemporary educational and social policy, the humanitarian vocabulary of the inclusion movement has been colonised by dominant discourses of normalisation. As a result, the illusive concept of inclusion has been assimilated into governmental discourses and has become part of governance in an essentially unaltered exclusionary education system and society, rather than an emancipatory idea which opposes existing official models and prevailing policies of discrimination and exclusion. Hence, the struggle for the formulation of a truly inclusive social reality (in Greece and elsewhere) necessitates a shift of focus from moral imperatives onto the politics of disability, and from the unambiguous ideal of inclusion onto the material economic, political, social and cultural characteristics of the new world order to which the inclusion movement aspires.

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