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Precariat Insurgency by Jasmine Holad Gilbert (PDF)

A means to improve structures of inclusivity in Higher Education. If the field of higher education is to actively commit to improving the engagement and retention of non-traditional students, embedded structures of inequality must be recognized and transformed. This chapter has been developed around research into a widening participation project that aims to do exactly that.

Embodying Deficiency Through “Affective Practice”: Shame, Relationality, and the Lived Experience of Social Class and Gender in Higher Education

This article examines the lived experience of shame. Building on a feminist Bourdieusian approach to social class analysis, the article contends that ‘struggles for value’ within the field of higher education precipitate classed judgements, which have the potential to generate shame. Through an examination of the ‘affective practice’ of judgement, the article explores the contingencies that precipitate shame and the embodiment of deficiency. The article links the classed and gendered dimensions of shame with valuation, arguing that the fundamental relationality of social class and gender is not only generative of shame, but that shame helps in turn to structure both working-class experience and a view of the working classes as ‘deficient’.

Working-Class Participation, Middle-Class Aspiration? Value, Upward Mobility and Symbolic Indebtedness in Higher Education

Through the analysis of empirical research conducted with staff from working-class backgrounds employed on a university Widening Participation project in England, the article examines resistance to dominant educational discourses, which understand working-class culture as ‘deficient’ and working-class participation in HE as an instrumental means of securing upward mobility.