Low completion rates amongst students from Black working-class backgrounds remain a persistent challenge to post-apartheid university transformation in South Africa. Notions of universities as colour-blind, meritocratic, and post-racial have developed around a deficit and victim-blaming majoritarian narrative that individualises educational…

This article explores the role of affect in addressing the advantage conventionally accorded to high socio-economic status (SES) in higher education (HE) and how this advantage plays out for students from low SES backgrounds. Positioned as the 'other' to an assumed norm, the capacities of these students can be considered the 'wrong' capacities,…

First-generation and working-class (FGWC) students bring a different set of life experiences to the classroom than students of privilege. As an instructor from an FGWC background, I use the poverty simulation game Spent! to make economic stratification understandable to students who have led lives of economic privilege and bring FGWC…

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…

A central element in the writing of marginal subjects is the personal and autobiographical voice they use to write about themselves and their experiences. This article uses a personal voice- autoethnography - to examine, in a multi-layered manner, one-stop of the author's educational biography and her path, as a working-class Mizrahi woman, to…

This paper will discuss the concepts of Bildung, subalternity, and physics- and engineering education and where these topics intersect and interact with one another. A central part of the concept of Bildung is educating citizens--active participators in society. At the same time, a central characteristic of subaltern groups is that their voices…

Global education policy discourse is based on an unshakable belief that more and improved skills will promote economic prosperity, global competitiveness and social inclusion. In England, the Further Education and Skills sector (FES) has emerged as the vehicle to deliver these skills. However, the portrayal of FES as focusing primarily on…

Research suggests that class-privileged students value learning for its own sake and study the liberal arts, while working-class students believe college is a means to an end. However, recent studies indicate that these associations are weakening. This paper investigates the link between class background, college values, and curricular choices,…

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…

Scant sociological attention has been given to the role of luck within social mobility/reproduction. This paper helps address this conceptual gap, drawing on insights from over 200 longitudinal interviews conducted with 20 working-class young people and 22 of their parents over an 11-year period, from age 10-21. We explore the potential…

Drawing on the dramaturgical theory of Erving Goffman, this paper explores undergraduate students' differing experiences of the Cambridge supervision system. Semi-structured interviews with fifteen undergraduate students were analysed to examine the dramaturgical demands of the supervision and students' perceived abilities to meet these. Findings…

Educational equity programs have been created to provide opportunities and resources for upward social mobility to low-SES individuals and students, students of color, historically marginalized students, and first-generation college students. This research study focused on educational equity programs recognized as the federally funded TRIO…

Objective: This article identifies how social class differences in undergraduates' relationships with their parents shaped their responses to educational disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Background: The mechanisms through which parents transmit class advantages to children are often hidden from view and therefore remain imperfectly…

This article explores whether pedagogies of dialogue and care are evidenced in how lecturers engage online with their students in teaching and learning on Learning Management Systems (LMSes). Many lecturers in the online higher education landscape predominantly come from affluent educational habitus, whereas many students come from working-class…

Studies in relation to working-class students at elite universities document on the one hand the role of 'mundane reflexivity' in dealing with class domination while on the other indicate a new form of domination and disadvantages working on these working-class 'exceptions' -- they may achieve academically at university but experience various…