Keynote Address - Crossing Boundaries: VET, the Labour Market and Social Justice

The lecture explores the relationship between vocational education and training (VET), the labour market and social justice. It places this discussion in the wider socio-economic and political context. This enables an exploration of the changing nature of waged labour in the current conjuncture, facilitating a discussion of its intensification, allied to the effective expulsion and marginalisation of particular groups of workers from employment. Importantly, such processes need to be placed in their localised and spatial context within particular social formations. This leads into a discussion that consider equity contrasted with equality models of social justice. The lecture examines the salience of VET in the current conjuncture as well as its significance for a post austerity democratic and radical politics. Such a position warrants a relational analysis that seeks to interrupt the patterns of inequality precipitated by neo-liberalism.