Walker, Melanie; Unterhalter, Elaine; (2007) The capability approach: Its potential for work in education. In: Walker, Melanie and Unterhalter, Elaine, (eds.) Amartya Sen's Capability Approach and Social Justice in Education. (pp. 1-18). Palgrave Macmillan: New York, NY, USA.

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Abstract

Amartya Sen is one of the key thinkers and commentators of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Influential as a Nobel Prize-winning economist and a political philosopher, Sen is a key contributor to identifying, detailing, and campaigning against forms of global inequality. A major theme of his work is how to evaluate human wellbeing. His ideas on evaluation, equality, freedom, and rights stand at the center of the capability approach, which is generally associated with his name, having its origins in lectures he delivered in the late 1970s (Sen 1980). The capability approach rests on a critique of other approaches to thinking about human well-being in welfare economics and political philosophy, which are concerned with commodities, a standard of living, and justice as fairness. The capability approach challenges elements of these formulations and entails a consideration of evaluation, policy, and action that has had considerable impact both within the disciplines in which it emerged and within development theory concerned with analyses of poverty. An emerging literature has considered the implications of the capability approach for education; this book brings together conceptual and empirical writings on this theme.

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