Higher education should be a social good for everyone and, despite the intentions of university policy on inclusion and diversity with schemes on widening participation, the truth is that for working-class students, university is still a place where they encounter prejudices and feelings of exclusion. This article uses the method of…

A prominent feature of the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd has been the renewed call for schools to become antiracist. What can be learnt from past unsuccessful attempts to implement antiracist education? Specific critiques of the antiracist movement made by prominent academics such as Paul Gilroy are worth…

As organizations committed to providing upward social mobility and leadership development for academically high-achieving working-class youth of color, transitional school programs (TSPs) prepare students to transition from urban public schools to elite, mostly private high schools. However, TSPs' dependence on wealthy, White institutions to…

The sifting and sorting mechanisms of Australia's education system continue to work to the detriment of groups put at a disadvantage. For mainstream schools serving working-class communities in particular, the rejection of the offers and advantages of schooling continue to result in differential class consequences and inequalities for…

Current approaches to building inclusive classrooms for first-generation and working-class students tend to emphasize communicative strategies: receiving students with welcoming messages that acknowledge and value their life experience and promoting a growth mindset. These methods are important, but they do little to address structural sources of…

This collaborative autoethnography (Bochner and Ellis, 2016) has created a space for three women academics from working-class heritage, navigating the liminal and temporal space of the COVID-19 pandemic within a post-1992 Higher Education Institution, to explore the social relations of one Higher Education Institution and confront their lived…

This article deploys a materialist theoretical and methodological framework to analyse and discuss capitalism's disabling phenomena. It is my intention to demonstrate how Marx's concept of a "relative surplus population" may be used to scrutinise capitalism's symbols, meanings, images, and practices which reproduce ableism as the norm.…

This paper is about social class and initial teacher education, specifically the perspectives and experiences of those from lower socio-economic groups in an initial teacher education programme in Ireland. It draws on a qualitative study employing in-depth semi-structured interviews with 21 'working class' student teachers, exploring their…

Whilst the widening participation programme aims to increase the accessibility of undergraduate study for students with a lower socio-economic status, much less support is available for students wishing to progress to postgraduate study. Postgraduate study risks becoming a discipline exclusive to those from upper-middle class and upper-class…

Lower-class language, logics, and ways of being have been excluded from higher education, especially at selective universities. Fewer people from the lower classes enroll, and those who manage to matriculate do so as outsiders. To counter social reproduction perpetuated by educational inequality, this dissertation creates a program to restore…

Children's treatment in the school environment has barely changed over many decades. Norms of obedience, discipline and control persist to define their 'place' in hierarchies of schooling. This is in direct contrast with freedoms they enjoy outside of school from, for example, their use of information communication technology, use of time and…

In this article, I use concepts of "provenance," "value," and "representation" to trace how a working-class writing network, the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers, hoped and tried to preserve their writing for nearly forty years. Ultimately, their hope for an archive turned into a reality, as they…

In this poem the author explores a difficult mentoring session he had with a group of white male working-class pupils who were at risk of being permanently excluded from their secondary school. He describes and analyses the specific context which gave rise to the poem and explains why he found writing a poem a salutary experience.

This paper examines the relationship of working-class feminist academics to the Academy. Our paper interrogates tensions between resistance and submission from the perspective of four educationally successful working-class women who have become academics. The paper starts with an overview of the state of the Academy at the beginning of the…

Diversity in terms of class, sexual identity and migration background among medical students in high income countries has increased greatly in recent decades. Some research into the experiences of these new groups of doctors has been performed. However, no previous research into the experiences of psychiatry residents specifically, is known. This…