From Redistribution to Recognition? Two Decades of Research on Education and Social Inequality in Indigenous Communities
Abstract
Indigenous peoples face persistent educational inequality, yet how research understands that inequality has changed. This study maps two decades of research on education and social inequality in Indigenous communities and asks whether the field has moved from concerns of redistribution towards concerns of recognition, in Nancy Fraser’s terms. A bibliometric analysis was conducted on 461 Scopus-indexed articles published between 2000 and 2025, combining performance analysis, author-keyword co-occurrence mapping in VOSviewer, and dictionary-based coding of eight inequality dimensions. Output grew by about 10.5% per year, and 46% of articles appeared in 2021–2025. Knowledge production is concentrated: 77% of articles involve authors from Australia, the United States, Canada or New Zealand, these articles are cited more often, and Southeast Asia contributes 2.8%. Eight thematic clusters emerged, centred on access and equity in higher education, racism and identity, cultural safety in professional education, and Indigenous knowledge and decolonisation. Articles framing inequality only in redistributive terms fell from 42.7% before 2018 to 27.2% after, while recognition-only articles rose from 18.7% to 33.8% and articles combining both rose to 29.7%. The rise of recognition was robust across five coding specifications; an apparent decline in attention to socioeconomic disadvantage was not. The field has added recognition to its agenda more than it has abandoned redistribution, but its growth is concentrated in recognition, and its concepts are developed largely in settler-colonial states. Research that integrates redistribution, recognition and representation, led from under-represented Indigenous contexts, is needed.
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