An Essential Framework for Appreciating the Complexities
What you will learn
Become aware of the dangers of oversimplifying issues relating to equality and diversity
Learn about how PCS analysis can be a useful framework for making sense of the complexities
Be more confident in promoting equality and diversity
Appreciate that discrimination operates at different, but interesecting levels
Description
Neil Thompson is a highly respected and internationally renowned author. His work on equality and diversity has been the mainstay of course curricula at many universities. At the heart of his theoretical approach is PCS analysis. In this course he explains what PCS analysis is and shows how it can be used to make sense of the complexities involved. As such, it is an essential foundation for promoting equality and diversity.
The course is critical of approaches to equality and diversity that focus mainly or exclusively on the individual or personal level and have little or nothing to say about the wider context. The case is made for looking more holistically at situations involving discrimination by recognizing that much depends on the wider cultural level which is characterized by stereotypes, discriminatory assumptions and forms of language that stand in the way of genuine equality.
In turn, the cultural level needs to be understood as being shaped by wider structural factors – class, race/ethnicity and gender – and the ways in which these ‘social divisions’ reinforce and are reinforced by the common assumptions at the cultural level.
PCS analysis provides a helpful framework for understanding how these three different levels – personal, cultural and structural interact and contribute to discrimination and oppression.
Content