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…

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…

This case study builds on Bourdieu's theory of practice to explore the ways in which two rural lower-class EFL learners--Andy and Xu--developed contrasting digital literacy trajectories in non-instructional and naturalistic settings. This study also seeks to examine how different online literacy trajectories impact rural lower-class students'…

Support for higher education is a known and well-documented venue for financial transfers within families, but practices of family support beyond college are less understood. Drawing on interviews with recent master's degrees recipients who have student debt, I find key class differences in the process and forms of family financial assistance for…

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…

This paper draws on both a theoretical understanding and a semi-autoethnographic approach of the lived experience of working class adult learners in higher education during the COVID-19 global pandemic. In particular, the paper warns of the doxic notion of current working class struggles being singularly attributed to COVID-19. Rather it is vital…

Brighton People's Theatre and Slung Low are at the forefront of the contemporary people's theatre movement in the United Kingdom. I examine these companies and the broader utility of a people's theatre, historically concerned with working class representation and/or performances of civic unity, in the context of economic austerity and inequality.…

Sociological research has long been interested in inequalities generated by and within educational institutions. Although relatively rich as a literature, less analytic focus has centered on educational mobility and inequality experiences within graduate training specifically. In this article, we draw on a combination of survey and open-ended…

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…

Given the widened access to Chinese higher education, a large proportion of students studying at Chinese colleges come from rural lower-class families and encounter different challenges in English language learning. By using Bourdieu's social theoretical lenses, this case study explores how the interplay of capital, habitus and social fields…

As Paulo Freire's education theory for social change and emancipation is being continually studied and disseminated in East Asia, it has faced skepticism as some educators are unfamiliar with its critical pedagogy or education for freedom concepts. In light of this, scholars have attempted to compare Freirean philosophies with concepts in Chinese…

The purpose of the article is to compare and contrast higher education and research among public relations and journalism students of middle-class and working-class origin. The paper applied Bourdieu's theory of "habitus" to analyze prejudices against the working class, explores whether working-class students express an anti-education…

This article extends Bourdieu's convertibility of different forms of capital to understand the patterns of study abroad by elite graduates from Peking University, China. We draw upon empirical data from a first-hand survey study involving 1,417 graduates from Peking University. The statistical analyses suggest a pattern of the conversions from…

Students attain cultural knowledge to navigate college admissions, yet few studies investigate when and how students activate this knowledge in a relatively transparent system. Drawing upon 26 Taiwanese student interviews, this study unveils how students strategically use available information to illuminate each step of the admission process. I…

International authors have argued that social class inequalities can influence parental engagement in education. Lareau argued that middle-class families possess the resources to actively cultivate their children to succeed academically, whereas working-class and poor families feel they lack such resources and allow their children to develop…