Much of the existing literature on social capital and university choice processes postulates that family networks of underrepresented students from poor and minority backgrounds are disadvantaged in university resources and in turn deficit in social capital returns. The literature implies that school-based networks are essential to fill the…

The evidence on why students from lower social origin are persistently underrepresented in higher education (HE) suggests social, educational and economic factors all play a role. We concentrate on the influence of monetary costs/benefits and how these are influenced by social origin. In particular, we consider the effect of a class-based wage…

This qualitative geographic study explores how the Black Radical Imagination is present in Ferguson's community-student activism. Ferguson activists were not only fighting against the police state that had taken the life of 18-year old Michael Brown, they were fighting against urban forms of capital accumulation and repressive residential and…

This paper draws on interviews of a mother and daughter concerning their experiences of working in higher education. It uses narrative research and its focus on temporality, sociality and place, to expose subject positionings, critical events, and the scope for 'activism' in the recent past and present. It is argued that the relationship between…

This study examined how working-class male students perceive their experiences during the first semester at a community college in order to identify strategies they employ to overcome challenges and achieve academic success. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven working-class male students who persisted to at least a second semester…

This paper aims to develop an approach on social deviance and Popular Education. In this sense, it assumes a basic analytical statement of the sociology of deviance: social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance, and by applying those rules to particular people and labelling them as outsiders. Labelling…

This paper proposes "perceptual multilingualism" as a research interest within the broader folk linguistic enterprise. By drawing on the geolinguistic mapping tasks popular in perceptual dialectology -- whereby participants are asked to draw and depict dialectal diversity in a given region -- we show that perceptual multilingualism can…

Organizations like the John Reed Clubs and the WPA Federal Writers' Project, as well as publications like "The New Masses" can be seen as "literacy sponsors" of the U.S. literary left in the 1930s, particularly the young, the working class, and African American writers. The vibrant, inclusionary, activist, literary culture of…

In this article, we report on a feminist memory work project conducted with 11 working-class women in Australia. Participants responded to the question: "what helps and hinders working-class women study social science degrees?" The women confirmed that to succeed at university, they needed opportunities, resources, support and…

While the literature on the experiences of working-class Students of Color at selective, historically White institutions has grown significantly over the past twenty-five years, how this student population is making sense of their social class identity as they gain access to dominant cultural and social capital at their institutions remains…

This study explores the complexity of school resistance by Chinese rural migrant children (RMC), which may contribute to their educational failure, as well as the school conditions informing their resistance. This study categorizes migrant children's school resistance into three patterns, based on their rationale for school behaviors: conformist…

While access to higher education (HE) has substantially increased over the past number of years, the evidence suggests that social inequalities continue to be reproduced in terms of course level, field of study and institutional status. This paper examines, through the lens of Social Reproduction Theory, the socio-economic background and HE access…

The crisis that began in 2008 in Greece was not simply a financial crisis but a multiple and plural crisis. This multiple crisis has had a profound impact on people's well-being and happiness, reaching far beyond the losses of jobs and income, and affecting citizens' satisfaction with their lives. This paper attempts, through a bottom-up approach…

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…

This article examines the existing relations between the social background, the cognitive skills, the sense of schooling experience, the relation to learning and the professional project in the construction of the meaning of their course choice for French boys living in working-class families and guided to vocational studies. It presents the…