The project aims at providing new theoretical and evidence-based insights into:

a) the understanding of the complex character of social justice in participation in higher and adult education;

b) the dynamics of inequalities in participation in higher and adult education in a comparative perspective and

c) the multi-faceted socio-economic and cultural factors and consequences of inequalities in higher and adult education.

The project has the following objectives:

  1. to elaborate an innovative multi-disciplinary and multi-dimensional theoretical framework which allows reconsidering the social justice in participation in higher education and adult education by synthesizing ideas from the capability approach, the recognition theory and the political economy of education;

  2. to conceptualize higher and adult education as spheres of recognition and pathways for overcoming inequalities in redistribution, recognition and representation;

  3. to develop and test new methodological instruments which capture different dimensions of inequalities in participation in higher and adult education and their dynamics;

  4. to create the first systematic (comparative and covering different years) database with indicators and indexes for measuring social inequalities in participation in higher and adult education and the context-level indicators that might be associated with them;

  5. to provide a critical, theoretically inspired and empirically underpinned, comparative analysis of: i) factors at micro and macro level, which could explain differences at individual level and also between countries with regard to social justice in participation in higher and adult education; ii) effects of inequalities in participation in higher and adult education on some important public goods, e.g. social trust, social cohesion (level of redistribution of inequalities and social polarization), citizens’ pubic engagement;

  6. to create dynamic multi-dimensional social justice profiles of different countries of participation in higher and adult education (on initial education, gender, occupational status, place of residence, age).