Education and social research seminar series

The ‘Asian Student’ in Australian Education Cultures: Racialised Anxieties and Local Inequalities

• Shanthi Robertson, University of Western Sydney

The figure of the ‘Asian student’ occupies an increasingly complex and contested place in educational cultures in Australia.

This presentation unpacks some of the discourses surrounding two groups usually studied separately – Asian international students in universities and Asian first and second generation migrant students in public secondary schooling – to reveal the local inequalities and racialized anxieties that are produced through neoliberal education and migration regimes in a White settler society.

Fee-paying international students, predominantly from Asia, have, since the 1990s, been the market-based solution to state defunding of the Australian university sector. Asian international students have been repeatedly criticised from both within and beyond the university system as ‘cash cows’, ‘backdoor migrants’ and ‘deficit learners’, or in contrast, positioned as victims of local racism and exploitative education and labour regimes.

In the secondary system, first and second generation migrant children of Asian heritage academically out-perform other ethnic groups. They make up the vast majority of students in selective schools – government schools that enrol via testing of academic ability – and dominate the most competitive university places.

However, the success of Asian-heritage students is frequently pathologized in public and educational discourse as ‘overachievement’, the result of cultures of ‘tiger parenting’.

In this presentation, Shanti uses these two contrasting cases to argue that neoliberal education and migration regimes create pervasive and often racialized discourses of the Asian student which pattern public debates about inequality in education in particular ways.

She shows how education cultures and regimes shape social and economic changes outside the education system – transnational real estate economies, patterns of migrant settlement, new brokerage industries and new forms of labour – which also become interwoven with the racialized anxieties and local inequalities surrounding Asian students, particularly in Australian cities.

• Shanthi Robertson is an associate professor in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts and an Institute Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University. A sociologist specializing in migration, youth studies and urban social change, her current funded projects focus on: the outcomes of transnational youth mobility for young people moving into and out of Australia for work, leisure and study; the role of autonomous technology in the social inclusion of migrants living with disability in Sydney; and changing social and civic practices in Sydney suburbs with high numbers of Chinese heritage residents. Her most recent publications appear in Population Space & Place, Global Networks, Geoforum, Current Sociology, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and Journal of Youth Studies. Her second book, Temporality in Mobile Lives: Contemporary Asia-Australia Migration and Everyday Time will be published by Bristol University Press in 2021.

Old or New Inequalities in Science? Education, Training and Pandemic Immobility

• David Cairns, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa

Mobility has long been a taken for granted aspect of education and training, with spatial circulation an integral feature of many scientific career trajectories.

An exchange of ideas and transfer of funding and personnel takes place at international and inter-regional levels, albeit with flows gravitating towards a small number of globally visible knowledge hubs.

With inequalities between scientific institutions and within countries and regions self-evident, this presentation will focus on the mobility of individuals, specifically trainee scientists in the early stages of their careers. Traditionally, this cohort have faced challenges relating to mobility in science reflecting neo-liberal values, including the breaking down of a migration trajectory into piecemeal mobility episodes, commodified and marketed by universities and training agencies as internationalized learning opportunities.

Not only are costs privatized, minimal support is provided to protean scientists who are codified as ‘mobile’ rather than migrants, and also required to engage in a complicated reflexive decision-making process in order to respond to mobility imperatives that are often grounded in inequalities relating to socio-demographic characteristics and/or spatial location.

This process has recently been thrown into disarray by the Covid-19 pandemic, with mobility in education, training and work having essentially broken down, with the responsibility of managing stalled careers once again foisted onto individuals rather than host institutions or the state.

Using work-in-progress from a project on scientific careers in Portugal, first impressions from interviewees provide insight into the challenges created by existing and emerging inequalities among trainee scientists, many of whom have engaged in local and global mobility.

Preliminary analysis takes in the scientific field of the interviewees, their past and present geographical locations and socio-demographic variables, including gender and family background, with a view to illustrating old and new inequalities in mobility-dependent scientific careers and identifying possible mean of moving beyond the current impasse.

• David Cairns is a principal researcher at ISCTE-University Institute of Lisbon, Portugal. His research interests include youth, mobility, education, employment and participation. He has participated in numerous projects, including two large scale European Commission studies, and is currently working on a project entitled Circulation of Science, looking at the impact of precariousness on scientific careers. To date, he has over 100 publications, including seven books and numerous articles in peer reviewed journals, including International Migration, British Journal of Sociology of Education, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Social and Cultural Geography, Journal of Youth Studies, Children’s Geographies and Young, and is the editor of the forthcoming Palgrave Handbook of Youth Mobility and Educational Migration.

Students’ everyday mobilities in the new HE: COVID-19, commuting and the student bubble

• Kirsty Finn, Manchester Metropolitan

COVID-19 raises new and pertinent questions for university students, as the Higher Education (HE) experience is increasingly framed as one of geographical as much as social mobility.

While a focus on has been on the restricted and politicised mobilities of international students in the wake of Coronavirus (Basken 2020), ‘local’ students and their mobility practices are not exempt from new (and old) inequalities that will likely become heightened in a post-pandemic context.

‘Commuter students’ are a small but growing cohort within the UK and their increase has been attributed to a range of socio-economic and policy factors which have given rise to more instrumental and highly responsible modes of participation (Finn and Holton 2019).

Unlike other national contexts in which studying at a local university is more common, in the UK residential relocation is regarded as integral to the student experience (Holdsworth 2006). As such, alternate ways of being and belonging at university – particularly those which are anchored in localism – are understood as ‘second best’ if not ‘second rate’.

Moreover, institutional initiatives around engagement, inclusion and student support are often designed on the presupposition that students are young, living away from home and living on or close to campus.

COVID-19, and the proposition that students may be organised into small groups of ‘protective bubbles’ which may include sharing accommodation with people taking the same course (UUK 2020), is yet another example of policy which fails to seriously engage with the everyday lives, mobilities and modes of belonging that are common to commuter students.

In this presentation Kirsty considers whether and how post-pandemic policymaking might at last productively engage with commuter students, their emotional geographies and interpretations of the student experience. She argues that continuing to privilege residential relocation, even during the current health crisis, creates a hierarchy of experience and fertile ground for inequalities.

• Kirsty Finn is a reader in education, learning and teaching at Manchester Metropolitan. A sociologist of higher education, Kirsty undertakes research around student and graduate experiences of transition, (im)mobility and personal life and belonging. She is author of two books, Personal life, young women and higher education: A relational approach to student and graduate experiences (Palgrave 2015) and Everyday mobile belonging: Theorising higher education student mobilities (Bloomsbury 2019).

Universities as ‘conducive contexts’ for sexual violence? Exploring institutional encounters and responses to sexual harassment and violence

I present findings from the first UK study on institutional perspectives and encounters with so-called ‘lad culture’ in universities (Jackson & Sundaram, 2020) and from a large European project (Universities Supporting Survivors of Sexual Violence) to explore the notion that universities are ‘conducive contexts’ for sexual harassment and sexual violence.

I argue that lad culture - which can be more specifically characterised as sexism, sexual harassment and sexual violence - is prevalent in a range of contexts in universities, including accommodation halls, social venues, sports arenas and teaching and learning spaces. These practices are enacted in person as well as through online and digital platforms.

However, the prevalence, severity and impact of ‘lad culture’ is trivialised and dismissed by staff working in a range of roles within universities. Gendered norms and expectations are drawn on to trivialise experiences and disclosures of sexual harassment, and this in turn reinforces a perception that sexual harassment and violence ‘isn’t really a problem here’.

On the other hand staff with more direct welfare responsibility for students note that sexual harassment is so common that reporting it would seem absurd - its ubiquity renders it normalised and perhaps not worthy of report. Thus, the lack of reporting either through trivialisation or dismissal, or through its ubiquity, renders sexual harassment and violence invisible to the university.

When cases of sexual harassment and violence are picked up the by the university it tends to be more extreme, high-profile cases, which reinforces the perception that this is fairly uncommon, and that this type of behaviour is perpetrated by just a few ‘bad apples’ rather than it being a reflection of systemic, institutionalised gender inequality.

Locating this research within the context of the current pandemic, I consider the ways in which the pattern, nature and contexts in which sexual harassment and violence may have changed, as well as the amplified barriers to challenging these practices within the university.

• Vanita Sundaram is Professor of Education at the University of York. Her research broadly covers gender and education, focusing more specifically on gender-based violence and teenagers; tackling everyday sexism, harassment and abuse in education across the lifecourse; and sexual violence in higher education. She is the author of numerous publications on these issues, including the newly-published Lad culture in higher education: Sexism, sexual harassment and violence (Routledge)(with Prof Carolyn Jackson); Global debates and key perspectives on sex and relationships education: Addressing issues of gender, sexuality, plurality and power (2016); and Preventing youth violence: Rethinking the role of gender in schools (2014). She is co-chair of the international Gender and Education Association.

Affective class relations and everyday struggles

• Steve Threadgold, University of Newcastle Australia

This seminar paper contributes to thinking about affective aspects of class. It brings together several research projects to discuss the immanence of class relations in everyday moments.

Theoretically, the paper develops a Bourdieusian perspective to considerations of affect, and vice versa, to establish affective practice as a concept for thinking about how we make our way through social spaces.

New theories of labour have highlighted how youth, gender, sexuality, and aesthetics have become increasingly important to value extraction processes in late capitalism, where the affects created by one’s very subjectivity contribute to what is for sale across an array of industries, platforms and spaces.

The centrality of class relations in these processes is especially important, where youthful knowledge of what is edgy, cool, and transgressive are mined and co-opted.

Class is made and remade in these everyday relations in exchanges between hospitality workers and ‘punters’ in bars; in the ‘homologies of snark’ and forms of ‘dank distinction’ online; in the consumption of figures such as hipsters and bogans; and through processes of affective violence when a prime minister tells international students that they can ‘go home’ when a pandemic hits.

• Steven Threadgold is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Anthropology, in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at University of Newcastle. Since completing his PhD in 2009, Steven has attracted global attention for his work in youth sociology. He co-convenes the Newcastle Youth Studies Group and is on the executive board of the Journal of Youth Studies. His book, Youth Class and Everyday Struggles, was awarded the Raewyn Connell Prize by The Australian Sociological Association (TASA) in 2020. Youth Class and Everyday Struggles brings together findings from two of Threadgold’s research projects. The first looking at young musicians from the underground music scene across the east coast of Australia and a project focusing on how class is represented in the media via the frequently used figures of hipster and bogan. In the book, Threadgold uses these research projects as case studies to look at how class is represented in day-to-day interactions through the concepts of popular sociological theorist Pierre Bourdieu.

Tackling social class inequality in challenging times: Reflections on the use and limits of critical research

• Steve Threadgold, University of Newcastle Australia

The Irish higher education (HE) system has expanded at a remarkable rate for over forty years and we now have one of the highest participation rates in the OECD.

Alongside this there has been over twenty years of formal access policies aimed at widening participation with the explicit aim of tackling social and educational class inequalities (Fleming et al, 2017).

While sectoral expansion and access initiatives have certainly led to meaningful changes in institutions and individuals’ lives it has certainly not had the sort of general social impact that was imagined by policymakers. Class inequalities continue, in new and old forms, to define HE.

In this paper I want to explore the role research has played, and could play, in tackling class inequalities. I will do this in two parts.

The first part with offer a summary and critique of the way research has been used to frame working class access to Irish HE.

The second part of the paper will offer a critically reflexive account of the empirical research I have done with working class students and graduates exploring their experiences in Irish HE and in the labour market (Finnegan, 2016, 2017, 2021; Fleming et al, 2017; O’Neill & Finnegan, 2019) and what I have learnt from trying to build on this research to effect changes in policy and practice.

Most of the research on class and access to HE in Ireland has been empiricist rather than critical. It should be noted has been very effective in making social class inequality a major concern in policy circles but that this has also created obstacles to advancing working class access.

Namely, it has sought to name, define and incrementally mitigate disadvantage without a sustained analysis of 1) the structured nature of class inequality inside and outside HE and without 2) any exploration of the needs and desires of working class people on their own terms.

This categorical, atheoretical and ‘top-down’ approach to class in research now underpins higher education access policies. It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that the policy goals and institutional initiatives which build on such research remain yoked to a deep and completely unrealistic faith that education will, over time and as a matter of course, overcome significant class inequalities.

Furthermore, the neoliberalisation of HE has further reified access work; tackling class inequalities is reduced to meeting a set of institutional ‘targets’ without any reference to a wider trends.

In this sort of context critical research can only proceed by confronting the limits of current research, policy and practice with a fully developed account of the socio-historical formation of class power (Bourdieu, 1984; Jessop, 2012; Lefebvre, 1991) in education and society which is attentive to the complex, diverse and often unpredictable ways agency is exercised (Williams, 1977).

However, although the elaboration of a theoretically developed and empirically grounded account of class and education is necessary it is not sufficient for critical research as I understand it.

To put it in the terms of this seminar series I want to suggest critical research requires a double confrontation: a confrontation with the assumptions and concepts which are hegemonic in the research field as a whole but also confronting reflexively the limits of one’s own research within this field.

In the second part of the paper I want to look at what has and what has not been achieved over the course of twelve years.

In particular, I want to explore the demands of doing collaborative qualitative research (Finnegan, 2018, 2020; Grummell & Finnegan, 2020) and how the rhythms and imperatives of academic work (especially related to funding and dissemination) can serve to push critical research towards sterile ‘scholasticism’ (Bourdieu, 2000).

As part of this I will briefly consider my attempts to effect small changes in access programmes, academic departments, schools and policy based on my research.

I will conclude with some comments on how these challenges might be fruitfully met by: articulating an explicit theory of progressive egalitarian change to help frame and define the role and limits of academic research; building on emergent practices in adult and higher education; and developing collective research projects with groups and movements.

• Fergal Finnegan is a lecturer at the Department of Adult and Community Education, Maynooth, National University of Ireland and is a co-director of the Doctorate in Higher and Adult Education and the PhD in Adult and Community Education programmes. Before becoming an academic he was a community adult educator and literacy worker for a decade and these experiences have strongly shaped him. His research interests include biographical methods, social class, access and equality in higher education, popular education and social movements as well as critical realism and Pierre Bourdieu.

Vocational and Higher Education, University of Birmingham UKClass, place and mobility in the lives of young graduates in England

• Ann-Marie Bathmaker, University of Birmingham

The promise that higher education (HE) would lead to social mobility for all has been central to the project of widening participation across the globe.

However, in the twenty-first century, graduate employment opportunities have not kept up with high rates of HE participation, so that a degree is no guarantee of well-paid, high-skilled or secure employment.

There is now renewed concern about social class inequality and the role of education in the (re)production of life-chances.

But what does this mean in the everyday experiences of young people at the present time? This presentation draws on current research into social class and mobility in England, which forms part of the Paired Peers project.

The project followed students studying at the two universities in Bristol from the start of their undergraduate degree, through to four years after graduation (2010–2017).

Here I consider the ‘classed journeys’ of participants in the project, their understandings of their class location, their experience of constructing a graduate career future, and the significance of place and spatial mobility in realising both desired and viable futures.

• Ann-Marie Bathmaker is Professor of Vocational and Higher Education at the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on questions of equity and inequalities in vocational, post-compulsory and higher education. Current and recent research projects include: social class and social mobility through HE in England (the Paired Peers project); questions of equity in undergraduate degrees in vocational institutions in Australia; Local Higher Education in a global marketplace: Everyday mobility and local capital in island Higher Education in the UK; the processes and practices of governing further education colleges in the four countries of the UK. She is editor of the Journal of Vocational Education and Training along with Leesa Wheelahan and Kevin Orr, and co-convenor of the Technical, Professional and Vocational Higher Education Network at SRHE (the Society for Research in Higher Education). She is a trustee of the Edge Foundation, a UK based education charity whose mission is to promote a coherent, unified and holistic education system which can support social equity. She was the specialist advisor to the House of Lords Select Committee on Social Mobility School to Work (2015-2016).

Diversity and the European higher education student: policy influencers’ narratives of difference

• Rachel Brooks (University of Surrey)

Comparative studies of European social policy have pointed to significant differences with respect to the way in which diversity is valued and understood, contrasting nations that have adopted strongly compulsory and integrationist policies with others that have pursued more voluntary and pluralistic approaches.

Within the higher education sector specifically, although there have been numerous European-level initiatives to encourage national governments to take action to widen access to university, we know relatively little about how key policy actors conceptualise diversity with respect to the student population, and the extent to which such understandings are shared across national borders.

Drawing on in-depth interviews with a range of ‘policy influencers’ in six European countries and an analysis of relevant policy documents, this article suggests that dimensions of difference are not always valued equally and that, despite policy imperatives promoting higher education homogenisation across the continent, some significant differences between nation-states endure.

• Rachel Brooks is Professor of Sociology at the University of Surrey, an executive editor of the British Journal of Sociology of Education, and co-editor of the Routledge/SRHE ‘Research into Higher Education’ book series. She has published widely on the sociology of education and, to a lesser extent, on the sociology of the family. Her recent books include: Reimagining the Higher Education Student (2021, with Sarah O’Shea); Sharing Care: Equal and Primary Carer Fathers and Early Years Parenting (2020, with Paul Hodkinson); and Education and Society: Places, Policies, Processes (2019).

Black British men in elite UK universities: The use of third objects prompts when researching counternarrative experiences

• Constantino Dumangane (University of York)

‘At [university name] I’ve been through that and I know I’ve heard statements like that my entire life and I suspect that, like with most things I try and talk through them.’ (Alex, Middle Class, British African, Russell Group Grad)

‘I just laughed it off even though it wasn’t really that funny. I shrugged it off at the time.’ (Damien, Working Class, British Caribbean, Russell Group Graduate)

‘I haven’t got time. I’m trying to get a degree.’ (Edmund, Working Class, British African, Russell Group Graduate)

These quotes are a few examples of Black male student’s responses to discriminatory experiences they encountered at University from my ESRC funded PhD that explored British African Caribbean males’ experiences attending elite UK institutions.

It is uncontested that there are minimal numbers on Black British students attending most Russell Group universities.

And although recent Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) data indicates that the numbers are finally beginning to increase at some of these elite institutions, there is a long way to go in terms reducing inequality and widening participation – particularly in most of the Russell Group.

The journey for the few Black students who are admitted and decide to attend can be precarious and problematic – as admission does not necessarily equate to acceptance and welcome-ness by students and faculty.

Black male students are often the mark of subtle verbal and racially influenced slights and offenses. In affiliation with the recently published Qualitative Research articlei this presentation discusses the benefits of using third object prompts while listening to the counterstories of Black British males’ experiences in elite UK universities.

Critical Race Theory, intersectionality and Bourdieu’s concepts of field, habitus, and bodily hexis were used to unearth these Black men’s experiences with microaggressions/symbolic violence, othering, double consciousness (moderate blackness performativity) and also gain an understanding of some of the capitals these men identified as beneficial to them in managing their verbal and physical reactions to stigma and discriminatory offences in order to ensure that they could ‘get on’ and ‘get through’ elite universities and pursue their future goals.

• Since June 2019 Constantino has been a lecturer in the Education Department at the University of York where he is the Programme leader for the MA in Social Justice in Education and the BA in Sociology and Education. Constantino also supervises undergraduate and postgraduate students. In 2020 he developed a module on Race, Equity, Equality in Difference which is now a requirement for all Social Justice Masters students to complete. As a member of the Centre for Research on Education and Social Justice (CRESJ), Constantino employs Critical Race Theory and Bourdieusian concepts as primary theoretical frameworks in my research. He has an ongoing interest in developing transparent and comprehensive understandings of how the intersectionality (Crenshaw) of ‘race’, class, gender and faith impact Black and Minority Ethnic young people’s secondary and higher education trajectories. Inequalities in these areas are routinely reproduced over time yet are seldom acknowledged or addressed. Constantino uses social theory, social justice concepts and visual methods to expose and inform his analysis and understanding of BAME young people’s perspectives. Constantino is a member of the staff-student group Decolonising Education Collective that works to decolonise curricula while actively improving inclusivity and recognition of BAME contributions to education. He is also an Advisory Group member of the Network for Evaluating and Researching. University Participation Interventions (NERUPI) that works to maximise the evaluation and impact of widening participation interventions. Constantino has previously held research appointments addressing inequalities in secondary and post-secondary education in domestic and global contexts at Cardiff University and the University of Newcastle, Australia and Pearson plc, UK.

talk by María José Álvarez Rivadulla

• María José Álvarez Rivadulla (Universidad de los Andes, Colombia)

What happens when unequals get together? This presentation addresses the main results of a research project I have been conducting for the last four years on lower class students massively entering an elite university changing the opportunities for cross-class interactions.

In a socioeconomically fragmented society such as the Colombian one, there are few opportunities for a meeting of the classes in conditions of relative equality.

From 2015 to 2019, the Colombian Government provided condonable loans/scholarships for ten thousand low-income students per year to enter higher education.

Many of them entered elite private universities. Using a mixed-methods approach, including a survey, 63 in-depth interviews, and ethnographic observation, I analyze students friendship networks and subjective integration experiences in one of the most exclusive universities of the country and the Latin American region.

Contrary to the literature, I find lower class students were not more isolated or less central to their networks than students of upper social classes.

Yet, although they befriended the middle class, economic and cultural capital gaps made their friendships with upper SES students less likely, which limited their social capital acquisition.

More importantly, objective measures of friendship hide the intense integration burden and relational work that lower class students have to assume to camouflage and fit in.

Focusing on economic, social and cultural capitals, I unpack the emotional mobility costs they silently assume.