Open AccessWorking‐class participation, middle‐class aspiration? Value, upward mobility and symbolic indebtedness in higher education
Author(s) -
Loveday Vik
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
the sociological review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.743
H-Index - 84
eISSN - 1467-954X
pISSN - 0038-0261
DOI - 10.1111/1467-954x.12167
Subject(s) - contest , sociology , working class , cultural capital , social mobility , value (mathematics) , middle class , social class , class (philosophy) , creditor , debt , gender studies , law , social science , economics , political science , epistemology , philosophy , finance , machine learning , politics , computer science
This paper interrogates the relationship between working‐class participation in higher education ( HE ) in E ngland and social and cultural mobility. It argues that embarking on a university education for working‐class people has been construed in governmental discourses as an instrumental means of achieving upward mobility, or of aspiring to ‘become middle class’. E ducation in this sense is thus not only understood as having the potential to confer value on individuals, as they pursue different ‘forms of capital’, or symbolic ‘mastery’ ( B ourdieu, 1986), but as incurring a form of debt to society. In this sense, the university can be understood as a type of ‘creditor’ to whom the working‐class participants are symbolically indebted, while the middle classes pass through unencumbered. Through the analysis of empirical research conducted with staff from working‐class backgrounds employed on a university W idening P articipation project in E ngland, 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. Challenging the problematic notion of ‘escape’ implicit in mobility discourses, this paper concludes by positing the alternative concept of ‘fugitivity’, to contest the accepted relationship in HE between creditor and debtor.