Thinking with and beyond Bourdieu in widening higher education participation

ABSTRACT

This article argues that to better investigate the enduring relationship between social class background and inequalities in post-compulsory education necessitates a more comprehensive approach to thinking with Bourdieu, but also a need to move beyond his seminal, much used concepts. Through meta-analysis, we review how Bourdieusian theory has been used in widening participation research in mainly Anglophone contexts, and consider how including concepts from his wider ‘toolbox’ can aid this pursuit. We consider new theories and concepts that have emerged largely after Bourdieu and their appropriateness for research in Australian higher education. We explore how a ‘practice-based’ theory of widening participation might be developed, drawing on the work of Schatzki and Kemmis which permits researchers to usefully consider the internal goods of a practice and the role of institutions and the non-human. We also suggest that incorporating intersectionality, as both a social theory of knowledge and an approach to analysis, facilitates exploration of routine practices and struggles and reveals the complexities, provisionality and becomingness of social positioning, subjectivities and change. Such theoretical extensions to Bourdieu’s legacy enable more nuanced understandings of how complex and intersecting social inequalities in higher education are realised or challenged in countries beyond the global north.

KEYWORDS:

• Access
• universities
• Bourdieusian
• theory
• equity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Sue Webb is Professor of Education at Monash University, Australia, and was previously Professor and Director of the Institute for Lifelong Learning at the University of Sheffield, UK. A joint editor of the International Journal of Lifelong Education, her research focuses on social inequality in access and participation in further/higher education and through migration. She has recently co-edited The Palgrave International Handbook on Adult and Lifelong Education and Learning.

Penny Jane Burke is Global Innovation Chair of Equity and Director of the Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher Education at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She is Editor of Teaching in Higher Education and has published extensively in the field of the sociology of higher education, with a focus on challenging inequalities. Penny is passionately dedicated to developing methodological, theoretical and pedagogical frameworks that support critical understanding and practice of equity and social justice in higher education.

Susan Nichols is an Associate Professor at the University of South Australia. Her research takes a lifelong learning approach to investigating learner experiences from early childhood through schooling and into adult life. She recently published Impactful Practitioner Inquiry with Teachers College Press and has a forthcoming edited book Learning Cities: Transdisciplinary interventions in the (sub)urbs with Springer.

Steve Roberts is a Senior Lecturer in sociology, at Monash University's School of Social Sciences. Steve's published works predominantly consider young people’s transitions to adulthood – their experiences of and aspirations for education, work, relationships and housing – and how and why these vary according to different social characteristics. Steve is co-editor of the BSA/Sage journal Sociological Research Online.

Garth Stahl, Ph.D. is a Senior Lecturer in Literacy and Sociology at the School of Education at the University of South Australia. His research interests lie on the nexus of neoliberalism and socio-cultural studies of education, identity, equity/inequality, and social change. Currently, his research projects and publications encompass theoretical and empirical studies of learner identities, gender and youth, sociology of schooling in a neoliberal age, gendered subjectivities, equity and difference, and educational reform. Of particular interest is the exploration of counternarratives to neoliberalism around ‘value' and ‘respectability' for working-class youth.

Steven Threadgold is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Anthropology at University of Newcastle, Australia. His recent books are the edited collection called Bourdieusian Prospects and the research monograph, Youth, Class and Everyday Struggles, both with Routledge.

Jane Wilkinson is an Associate Professor of Educational Leadership and Associate Dean, Graduate Research in the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Jane has published widely in the fields of practice theory, Bourdieu and leadership; gender and leadership; and refugee education.

ORCID

Jane Wilkinson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0727-0025

Notes

1. Others have been far more scathing. Sullivan (2002), for instance, describes habitus as ‘never clearly defined’, ‘feeble’, ‘vague’ and a concept that ‘utterly fails’.

2. In contrast to the Anglophone writing we discuss in this article, in the Swedish context the work of Börjesson et al. (2016) aims to draw on the full potential of Bourdieu’s sociology in their analysis of the social space of elite higher education and the distribution of cultural capital embodied by students of different classes, gender and age as their tastes are developed in this education field of power.

3. A similar rationale is given by von Holdt (2012) for bringing the work of Bourdieu, which he names as the sociology of the west, into play with the work of Fanon, which he names as the sociology of the colonial and post-colonial south, to understand the contentious politics of South Africa.