Ivan Au
DPhil Education, University of Oxford
 
​
In the three years since the COVID-19 pandemic, online synchronous teaching and learning (OSTL) has been regarded by many as more of a necessity than an alternative to traditional modes of study. While some studies examined student satisfaction with this mode of learning in relation to their digital literacy[1], other researchers have hinted on  OSTL’s role in facilitating  language learning[2],[3]. In particular, using breakout rooms is found to be a facilitative approach because of the reassuring effect of a less-public discussion space it entails[4]. Arguably, though, it is also documented that online learning has only been successful in some parts of the world due to the root cause of ‘digital poverty’[5]. The discussion of inequality has then primarily focused on how economic backgrounds of students has an impact on their restricted access to the curriculum due to ‘barriers of e-learning’ (e.g., insufficient or unstable internet connectivity, inadequate computer labs, and lack of computers or laptops)[6]. Whilst this remains a pressing issue, the emerging yet overlooked educational inequalities of the post-pandemic era, seem to lie in the deprivation of teacher autonomy in mode of delivery. 
 
The lack of teacher autonomy in post-pandemic classrooms stems from decision-makers’ overwhelming requests, often unjustified, for a hybrid delivery mode, as a result of their deliberate negligence of pedagogical expectations and enormous cognitive demands the policy may impose on teachers, particularly on those who teach in post-secondary institutes. It has been found that students hold the view and, thus, the expectation that frequent instructor ‘check-ins’ online could increase their productivity[7]. While such a belief raises obvious questions on the practicality and plausibility of teachers’ ‘omnipresence’ via digital or in-person mediums, recent studies[8],[9] have remarked that students and teachers generally differ in the perception of how online learning should be effectively done. On top of overcoming daily pedagogical challenges, teachers are also tasked to take into consideration intertwining factors such as learner attributes and motivation when they attempt to promote interactions in an online environment[10],[11],[12]. Yet, the reality of a classroom today with only a handful of students in the online session poses another practical question: the extent to which the instructors are or should be obliged to maintain the same level of expectations on OSTL outlined above. The discussion here is in no way to imply university teachers’ pedagogical incompetence – it is more of a warning, indicative of a system, in keeping with its associated ‘benchmarks’, that deprives teachers of their autonomy in delivery and, worse still, favours only teachers who are more well-versed in both online and face-to-face teaching in recruitment and promotion practices. In other words, as educators, old and new, face these new obstacles, it is reasonable to predict that some will experience a certain level of job insecurity and instability, depending on their digital competence.
Despite divided views on its pedagogical effectiveness and student perception[13][14][15],  OSTL seems to be inevitable and may have its own potential benefits. The way forward, building on the need to establish constructive conversations with frontline teachers, is to carefully articulate the role hybrid teaching and learning should play in higher education. Decision-makers should note that teachers’ digital competence hinges upon the accessibility of timely and relevant training in digital literacy and pedagogy. Only when instructors are adequately equipped and are autonomous can they genuinely exercise their creativity in delivery. When this criteria is met, schools and universities around the world may then sensibly expect a reasonable level of digital competence in teachers, but should still be cautious not to hold the unrealistic assumption that every teacher and every classroom, in the post-pandemic era, would benefit from hybrid modes of teaching and learning. One should be aware of the prejudice and inequality that come with these expectations. Future educational research should evaluate the effectiveness of the delivery mode specific to subject disciplines to advise on the necessity and practicality of the hybrid modes, which might impose immense pedagogical pressure on educators without consolidating student access to digital learning at all.


REFERENCES:

[1] Purushotham, S. L., & Swathi, C. (2020). Online learning and its effects on English language skills among higher education students amid the Covid-19 lockdown. Language in India, 20(9), 127-143.

[2] Kohnke, L., & Moorhouse, B. L. (2020). Facilitating Synchronous Online Language Learning through Zoom. https://doi.org/10.1177/0033688220937235 

[3] González‐Lloret, M. (2020). Collaborative tasks for online language teaching. Foreign language annals, 53(2), 260-269. https://doi.org/10.1111/flan.12466 

[4] Cornelius, S., & Gordon, C. (2013). Facilitating learning with web conferencing recommendations based on learners’ experiences. Education and Information Technologies, 18(2), 275-285. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-012-9241-9 

[5] Khan, M. A., Kamal, T., Illiyan, A., & Asif, M. (2021). School Students’ Perception and Challenges towards Online Classes during COVID-19 Pandemic in India: An Econometric Analysis. Sustainability, 13(9). https://doi.org/10.3390/su13094786 

[6] Zalat, M. M., Hamed, M. S., & Bolbol, S. A. (2021). The experiences, challenges, and acceptance of e-learning as a tool for teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic among university medical staff. PLoS One, 16(3), e0248758. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0248758 

[7] Moster, M., Kokinda, E., Rodeghero, P., & McNeese, N. (2023). Both Sides of the Story: Changing the "Pre-existing Culture of Dread" Surrounding Student Teamwork in Breakout Rooms. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 7(CSCW1), 1-33. https://doi.org/10.1145/3579463 

[8] Douglas, S. (2023). Achieving online dialogic learning using breakout rooms. Research in Learning Technology, 31. https://doi.org/10.25304/rlt.v31.2882 

[9] Chakraborty, P., Mittal, P., Gupta, M. S., Yadav, S., & Arora, A. (2020). Opinion of students on online education during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Human Behavior and Emerging Technologies, 3(3), 357-365. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbe2.240 

[10] Wilkins, S., Butt, M. M., Hazzam, J., & Marder, B. (2023). Collaborative learning in online breakout rooms: the effects of learner attributes on purposeful interpersonal interaction and perceived learning. International Journal of Educational Management, 37(2), 465-482. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijem-10-2022-0412

[11] Joia, L. A., & Lorenzo, M. (2021). Zoom In, Zoom Out: The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Classroom. Sustainability, 13(5). https://doi.org/10.3390/su13052531 

[12] Joshi, P., & Bodkha, P. (2020). A comparative evaluation of students' insight of face to face classroom lectures and virtual online lectures. National Journal of Physiology, Pharmacy and Pharmacology, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.5455/njppp.2021.10.08225202026082020 

[13] Read, D., M Barnes, S., Hughes, O., Ivanova, I., Sessions, A., & J Wilson, P. (2022). Supporting student collaboration in online breakout rooms through interactive group activities. New Directions in the Teaching of Physical Sciences(17). https://doi.org/10.29311/ndtps.v0i17.3946 

[14] Aslan, A. (2021). Problem- based learning in live online classes: Learning achievement, problem-solving skill, communication skill, and interaction. Computers & Education, 171. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2021.104237 

[15] Sahbaz, A. (2020). Views and Evaluations of University Students about Distance Education During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Educational Process: International Journal, 9(3), 185-198. https://doi.org/10.22521/edupij.2020.93.5  

Gavish Lohat
Department of Political Science, Hindu College, University of Delhi

Winston Churchill once said “Capitalism is unequally shared wealth, while Socialism is equally distributed poverty”. The nature of the Indian state emanated from the deliberations of the Constituent Assembly, consisting of both individualists and collectivists who often tried to strike a balance, lacking a revolutionary fervour and refraining to fight over ideological interests in a mood of sedate compromise. According to Palshikhar, the Indian state had retained from colonialism the responsibility to expand capitalist production relations and to provide a basis for capital accumulation in favour of the industrial sector as the hallmark of development. What began as an ‘enthusiastic welcome for welfare state apparatus evolved by the Constitution’ was turned into the state being a mere facilitator with the coming of the Liberalisation, Privatisation and Globalisation (LPG) policies of 1991 [1]. The term ‘socialist’ was only added into the Preamble in 1976 with the 42nd amendment. B.R. Ambedkar opined for a stronger state to  bring about social and economic justice but he differed from Nehru who deemed the strengthening of the state necessary for overall development, followed by automatic social justice. India’s forefathers posited faith in a welfare state to keep a check on the growth of capitalism and facilitate the decline of feudalism. However, the land reforms remained largely unsuccessful. Liberalisation was viewed as a practical corrective measure to the excessively interventionist state, to break away from the ‘licence-permit quota raj’ (LPQ).

Jayal writes about the project of the welfare-state being gradually undermined and discredited in the wake of the ideological struggle between state and the market and the shifts in the economic policy by the virtue of globalisation [2]. She goes on to say that welfare in the form of institutionalised charity disables citizens, making them lack the will to work to  become ‘freeloaders’. In the words of Amartya Sen, a Social Liberal, welfare needs to be concerned with capacity-building. In a country like India, a majority of the population would simply cease to survive without welfare.
 
Sinha opines that the economic reforms of the 1990s project a healthy retreat by an over-regulatory and intrusive state [3]. The failures of the developmental state (1947-80s) are attributed to a strong state with an ‘iron-fist’ of controls and higher growth rates are linked to the market forces of liberalisation. The reforms of 1991 led to the abolition of industrial licensing and led to the integration of the economy with the world. Jayal argues that coalition governments with a strong regional base very well represent a large country like India and thus help reformation. Moreover, a consensus among parties enables them to pursue the process with multiple centres of power in a competitive spirit, which is not the case when the PMO is a single source of policy initiatives. Furthermore, a regionalised coalition government is the ‘linkage mechanism’ that aligns national and state governments to pursue a common goal. Parallels can be drawn with the ‘cooperative federalism’ approach adopted by the NITI Ayog, which replaced the Planning Commission in 2015, the primary agent of state led planned economy.
 
More than being a ‘planned’ move, Kumar thinks that the LPG reforms came in as an imposition from the World Bank and IMF, as a means to set up neoliberalism in developing countries and sanctioning loans for them [4]. He alleges free trade to be biased against the developing world, which is used by the Global North as a dumping ground for its products but makes exporting into their own countries much more difficult [4]. In his words, powerful countries dominate WTO and the poorer countries are faced with a ‘take it or leave it’ choice. Neo-liberalism undermines democracy by making unaccountable markets and international organisations predominant, and benefits the elite by extracting from the poor majority which translates into widening of income inequality. Although neoliberal reforms have resulted in massive economic growth, exchange rate stability and increased FDI, the cost of unsustainable migration, decreasing wages, awful working conditions, withdrawal of public investment, environmental damage, commodification, consumerism and ‘foreign technology fetishism’ (obsession with stereotypical symbols of modernity) looms large. The government might justify privatisation by saying that it would lead to productive efficiency but Kumar points out that it dehumanises citizens as mere cogs in a machine. Even education is not devoid of neoliberalism as it gets reduced to ‘academic capitalism’ in a bourgeois economy. Additionally, political participation gets limited to token visits to the polling booth. Lastly, the author juxtaposes neoliberalism (globalisation) with imperialism (power exercised by one state on another) and goes on to propose the restoration of state to the ‘key’ aspects from where it has been ‘expelled’ as a solution.

Surprisingly, Patnaik talks about the tendency toward simple reproduction in the Indian economy under neoliberalism, which indicates the fact that neoliberalism has reached a dead end, not just in India but across the world [5], referring to the idea of capitalism ending up in a ‘stationary state’. Marx had used ‘simple reproduction’ to describe a state where there is no net addition to production capacity and the economy just reproduces itself at the same level period after period. The Indian economy appears to be headed for such a state.

The unorganised sector has come to comprise 90% of the economy and is devoid of welfare and employment security. India lacks efficient bureaucracy, robust laws to protect consumers and environment and safeguards against corruption to pull off its neoliberal gig and is thus inviting threats like monopoly by capitalist companies, economic inequality, leaving a big question mark on welfarism, which has been pushed to the hindsight. Even where it is promised, it fails to reach the targeted beneficiaries. The trajectory of the political economy in India began with statism under the veil of a mixed economy, along with ‘Non-alignment’ in the international arena but was tilted towards socialism. Having made a neoliberal transition, it finds itself situated along the lines of social liberalism today with welfarism as a feature. This review examines a promise made during independence and closes in after signifying the dangers of a neoliberal state in an unequal globalised world. It becomes imperative to understand the changing nature of the state to learn from historical mistakes and correct the flaws of contemporary times in order to bring about a brighter future.

 
References

[1]    S. Palshikar, (2008) "The Indian State Constitution and Beyond', in R. Bhargava (ed) Politics and Ethics of the Indian Constitution, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

[2]   N.G Jayal: (2001) The State and Democracy in India or What Happened to Welfare, Secularism, and Development' in NG Jayal (ed.), Democracy in India, New Delhi, Oxford University Press. Pp.2001 (sixth impression 2012).

[3]    A. Sinha (2010) An Institutional Perspective on the post-liberalization state in India" in Akhil Gupta and K. Sivaruma Krishnan (ed.), The State in India after Liberalization, An
Interdisciplinary Perspective. London: Routledge.

[4] Kumar, Rajiv. (2021). NEO liberalism and changing nature of Indian state (ch-6)

[5] Patnaik, Prabhat. (2022). “Indian Economy is on the Road to a Stable State of Zero Growth.” NewsClick.

Inequality 101 is a series of short articles written and curated by the Graduate Inequality Review aiming to provide an introduction to the foundations of inequality research and policy.
 
Many authors have thought, written and taught about inequality of all kinds over time, and this collective effort is the reason inequality research is such a vast field today. However, there are some scholars whose contributions have fundamentally altered our understanding of certain aspects of inequality- be it on the basis of income, gender, race, or international political economy. Read on for an introduction to the ideas of five authors that changed the way we think about inequality.
 
Claudia Goldin. Awarded with the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2023, Claudia Goldin (1946) is a Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Much of her work has focused on gender inequality and the labour market. In 1994, she published an article called The U-Shaped Female Labor Force Function in Economic Development and Economic History, providing evidence that the labour force participation rate of married women first declines and then rises as countries develop due to changing household-level economic incentives. Her 2002 article, co-authored with Lawrence F. Katz, The Power of the Pill: Oral Contraceptives and Women's Career and Marriage Decisions showed that the greater availability of the contraceptive pill in the late 1960s allowed women more autonomy over their own professional and reproductive choices.
 
Branko Milanovic. Born in Serbia but later naturalised as American, Branko Milanovic (1953) is a research professor at the City University of New York. The author of several books on income distribution and inequality, such as Worlds Apart (2005) and The Haves and Have-Nots (2011), he is best known for his “elephant-shaped curve”. The graph, showing the evolution in income for the entire world population, first appeared in his 2013 article Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession, co-written with Christoph Lakner. It shows that those in the 70th-90th percentile, mostly low- and middle-income people in the Global North, were the only ones who saw no increase in their real income over the twenty year period between 1988 and 2008.
 
Kimberlé Crenshaw. The only non-economist in this list, Kimberlé Crenshaw (1959) is an American civil rights advocate and a professor at the UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School. Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in her 1989 essay Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Anti-discrimination Doctrine Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. With this word, Crenshaw was expressing the idea that the American legal system treats discrimination along a single identity axis, such as gender or race. Therefore, it is badly-equipped to provide justice to Black women, who face specific discrimination that cannot be reduced to being discriminated only as Black or only as women. Since Crenshaw first wrote about intersectionality, it has gained wide popularity within different fields of inequality research.
 
Daron Acemoglu. Daron Acemoglu (1967) is a Turkish-born American economist and Professor at MIT who specialises in political economy. Much of his work has been developed and published with Simon Jonhson and James Robinson: in 2010, they published the article The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development, arguing that the character of the institutions set up in different colonised countries during colonial times explains many of their economic outcomes today. Acemoglu and Robinson synthesised all their research on institutional determinants of economic performance in their 2012 book Why Nations Fail, which explores the drivers of democratic regimes and how democracy promotes economic growth.
 
Thomas Piketty. A professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Thomas Piketty (1971) is a French economist whose work focuses on income and wealth inequality. Together with Emmanuel Saez, they pioneered the use of administrative and fiscal data for in-depth studies on income inequalities, which has the key advantage of not relying on self-reported income figures through surveys. In 2014, he published the book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, focusing on wealth and income inequality in Europe and the US since the 18th century. His main argument is that, when the rate of return to capital (r) is greater than the rate of economic growth (g), wealth accumulation and inequality is unavoidable unless compensated with state intervention and, particularly, extensive wealth taxation.
 

Elena Rollán Martín
University of Oxford

​The last twenty years have seen a notable increase in the public debate and interest over income and wealth inequality. Since the 2007-2008 financial crisis, many disciplines in the social sciences have taken up the mantle of analysing modern inequality––its causes, manifestations and consequences––to the point that it may seem further research on this area is akin to working away at an exhausted mine. I argue that there are still treasures to be discovered; the main one related to the dimension of geography.
Although the advent of new technologies seems to have rendered geography irrelevant, place is still a fundamental aspect of our lives. Where we live, where we work, and where we spend our free time determine many of the resources we can access, the people we can meet, and the opportunities we can enjoy. Space can act as a generator of inequality, as when these resources and opportunities are unequally distributed, but also as a mediator of inequality, because different skills and personal attributes will be rewarded or punished differently across geographic locations (1).

Indeed, the geographical aspect of inequality is, deservedly, receiving more attention in the existing social sciences literature. On this, I would point to the work done by Chetty et al (2) on the influence of geography in US intergenerational mobility as one of the influential and pioneering pieces of research on this topic. Nevertheless, the research still presents a range of knowledge gaps, and I believe that some truly groundbreaking work will be published in the years to come.

Perhaps the most important one is the incorporation of regional perspectives and localised knowledges in geographic research. It is well known that the development of the post-industrial economy has destroyed much of the manufacturing industry structure of high-income countries. Deindustrialization has hollowed out the middle class, as well-paying and stable jobs for low-skilled workers in factories have been substituted for precarious and low-paying roles across the service sector (3). The geographic dimension of this process is well documented, if not necessarily well understood. There is some work being done here (4), which finds important regional differences in opportunities across Europe. We should expect further research on this area in the next few years, exploiting the potential of administrative and granular data (5).

Importantly, income inequality is not the only challenge that needs to be considered from a regional geographic perspective. As welfare states have moved towards new policy paradigms for the new economic reality, they have tended to apply social investment strategies, policies that aim to train and prepare the population for a labour market where flexibility, precarity, and high skills are in demand (6). Nevertheless, these strategies falsely presuppose that citizens are able to take advantage of new opportunities––regardless of the structural barriers that often impact those of lower socioeconomic standing

There is literature on how these policies tend to benefit middle class people and leave poorer citizens further behind (7). In many cases, this happens because disadvantaged people lack the knowledge of how to access these programmes. The differing configurations of social and cultural capital that people have are also a big factor in how much they can navigate and enjoy these opportunities (2).

The literature on the risks and shortcoming of social investment is still emerging and has not reached a consensus. Taking this into account, I argue that the spatial perspective offers a new promising venue of research. If it is not so much the existence of opportunities but the ability to “hear about” them that influences their impact on the lower classes, then a thorough analysis of the networks of contacts and information that residential locations foster is key to understanding the potential for success of these strategies.

Indeed, recent studies find that, in the US, the share of high socioeconomic status Facebook friends among individuals with low socioeconomic status is the strongest predictor of upward social mobility (8). The database that the authors constructed for their paper is publicly available (link), and has ZIP code information that hints at the importance of geographic location.

These are two areas where a geographic perspective could deepen our understanding of inequality in all its manifestations. As data sources become more easily comparable across and within countries, we might even see a new shift in the literature, one that takes the given of physical space and leverages it to uncover valuable insights.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Elena Rollán is a Senior Editor at the Graduate Inequality Review and is currently studying for a MSc in Comparative Social Policy at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford.

​REFERENCES
(1) Galster, G. & Sharkey, P. (2017). Spatial Foundations of Inequality: A Conceptual Model and Empirical Overview. RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 3(2), 1–33. https://doi.org/10.7758/rsf.2017.3.2.01
(2) Chetty, R. et al. (2014) Where is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 129(4), pp. 1553–1623, https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qju022
(3) Castells, M. (1976). The Service Economy and Postindustrial Society: a Sociological Critique. International Journal of Health Services, 6(4), 595–607. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45120089
(3) Castells, M. (1976). The Service Economy and Postindustrial Society: a Sociological Critique. International Journal of Health Services, 6(4), 595–607. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45120089
(4) Granström, O., & Engzell, P. (2023). The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in Europe. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/gzwha
(5) Chapelle, G., Domenech Arumi, G. and Gobbi P. (2023). Housing, neighbourhoods and inequality. In: Zimmermann, K.F. (eds) Handbook of Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57365-6_424-1
(6) Bonoli, G. (2007). Time Matters: Postindustrialization, New Social Risks, and Welfare State Adaptation in Advanced Industrial Democracies. Comparative Political Studies, 40(5), 495-520. https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414005285755
(7) Cantillon, B., & Van Lancker, W. (2013). Three Shortcomings of the Social Investment Perspective. Social Policy and Society, 12(4), pp. 553-564. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1474746413000080
(8) Chetty, R. et al (2022). Social capital I: measurement and associations with economic mobility. Nature 608, 108–121 . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04996-4