Affirmative action. Discrimination positive. Reservations. Quotas. Such policies aim to increase access to and equity within higher education. How do different national and social contexts affect how affirmative action policy is conceptualized, discussed, justified, and designed? Scholars from Brazil, Bulgaria, China, France, India, South Africa and the United States address this central question by seeking to understand how unique national contexts shape affirmative action for students in higher education around the world.

Laura Dudley Jenkins is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Cincinnati. Her research and publications focus on social justice policies in the context of culturally diverse democracies, especially India. Jenkins' book Identity and Identification in India: Defining the Disadvantaged (Routledge, 2003, 2009) examines competing demands for affirmative action on the basis of caste, religion, class and gender and the ways the government identifies various categories through the courts, census and official certificates. She was a Fulbright New Century Scholar in South Africa and India.

Michele S. Moses is Professor of Educational Foundations, Policy and Practice at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is a philosopher of education who is centrally concerned with education policy studies, especially as related to race, ethnicity, and equality of educational opportunity. Her current research is aimed at gaining a deeper understanding of the moral roots of the political debates over race-conscious policies that profoundly affect meaningful opportunities for higher education. Dr. Moses is the author of Embracing Race: Why We Need Race-Conscious Education Policy (Teachers College Press, 2002) and was a Fulbright Specialist and New Century Scholar in Brazil.

1. National vicissitudes in higher education affirmative action policies Michele S. Moses and Laura Dudley Jenkins 2. Assessing affirmative action programs on six continents Michele S. Moses, Laura Dudley Jenkins, Christina Paguyo and Laurel Wei 3. India: Beginning a new debate on reserved admissions for castes, tribes and "Other Backward Classes" Kavita A. Sharma and Laura Dudley Jenkins 4. Bulgaria: Social justice and privileged access to higher education in a totalitarian society, 1944-1989 Pepka Boyadjieva 5. The United States: The changing context of access to higher education Patricia Marin 6. South Africa: Affirming affirmative action through university alternate access programs Rudi Kimmie and Laura Dudley Jenkins 7. Brazil: Enhancing opportunity and justice through new affirmative action policies for black and mixed-race students Sandra Regina Sales and Michele S. Moses 8. France: Affirmative action in French higher education -squaring the circle Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin 9. Affirmative action matters: Social justice in the era of diversity Laura Dudley Jenkins and Michele S. Moses