Working-class student-hood and ‘job-readiness’: Affective relations of class, gender and employability policy in higher education

ABSTRACT

Past decades have seen increased emphasis on graduate employability as a driver of higher education policy. In the Australian context, employability discourses in the public domain have become inflected with anti-intellectual sentiment, serving to reproduce the perception that the humanities and social sciences are of less value to graduates’ employability than are science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine. Against this backdrop, and with particular reference to the Job-ready Graduates Package, we investigate how diverse notions of employability shape student-hood for working-class female students who are largely engaged in the social sciences. Attending to affective dynamics, we show how employability imperatives ‘land’ for these students, individually, and as an ‘equity group’. While employability policies are typically positioned as a salve for class inequalities, they can also discredit educational and employment endeavours of working-class students, and reproduce class tensions. To enhance employability policies, there is a need to move beyond reductionist models of job-readiness, towards responding to the complexities of policy as enacted through lived relations. We propose attending to the variability of both identity and value positions and recognising the contribution of affect and emotion to this complex set of policy dynamics.

KEYWORDS:

• social class
• employability
• affect
• gender
• higher education
• postgraduate education

Introduction

In this paper, we consider the human capital assumptions that currently underpin contemporary higher education (HE) policy making and their social class impacts. The imagined, individualised HE student – who accrues education only for the purpose of gaining high-paid employment – is wholly naturalised in policy discourse across the West (Kalfa and Taksa 2015; Lumb and Matthew 2021; Moore and Morton 2017; Tholen and Phillip 2017). Globally, graduate employability ‘has become synonymous with the ways in which the relationship between higher education and the economy is now understood’ (Tomlinson 2017, 1). Indicative of the global nature of employability agendas, for over two decades, the United Nations has encouraged nation states to review education-to-work transition policies (Matherly and Tillman 2015). The aim of this paper is to consider how working-class humanities and social sciences (HASS) graduates receive employability imperatives, and what this reception implies for employability policy and the broader program of widening participation. We do so with reference to a recent restructuring of funding for Australia’s HE that emphasises job-readiness, and prioritises science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine (STEMM) education.

We begin by introducing the policy context of increasing emphasis on employability, providing an outline of the Australian HE case. Against a backdrop in which there are pervasive calls for HE to better serve emergent knowledge economies, and a cultural landscape in which anti-intellectual post-truth narratives hold sway, we show that current concepts of employability have the potential to place undue pressure on working-class students. After outlining our theoretical and methodological approach, we analyse data generated through interviews with working-class women enrolled in postgraduate studies in Australia, asking how employability imperatives ‘land’, both individually, and as an ‘equity group’. Our analysis is predicated on the assumption that for widening participation policy agendas to take effect, positive affective relations between universities and working-class communities must be generated (Walkerdine 2021, 64). Through our relational approach that emphasises working-class capacities, we close by suggesting that if widening participation goals is to be progressed, a reparative approach to employability is needed, which attends to working-class values and positions.

Employability, anti-HASS sentiment and working-class dilemmas

As noted, there has been a global policy shift in HE towards employability. However, the Australian Government’s Job-ready Graduates Package (JRGP) stands out as a significant national reformation. Introduced by the then Morrison government in 2020, a central aim of the JRGP is to increase the number of students in areas predicted to have good employment prospects.¹ These ‘national priority’ disciplines were predominantly, science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine (STEMM) based. For these select fields, along with, for example, teaching and nursing, the government pays a greater contribution of course costs, reducing the loan debt students accrue. Meanwhile, government contribution amounts in other fields, including the social sciences, humanities and law, were decreased, leaving students to pay a greater proportion of the fees – more than double in some cases (Norton 2020). Three previous iterations of the legislation were voted down over a six year period, however, emphasising both the COVID-19 pandemic and risks of not keeping up with the technological changes needed for national productivity, a rhetoric of crisis was mobilised to see the policy pass into legislation (Molla and Cuthbert 2022). As such, the JRGP’s instantiation links to the long-running, global crisis narrative that sits behind the re-orientation of HE towards serving technology and science education industries – the purported risk of getting left behind in a knowledge economy (Olssen and Peters 2005). The need for innovation to attend to the knowledge economy is consistently invoked, but innovation is frequently ‘reduced to an economic barometer of big business … with scientific innovation being co-opted to the growth process’ (Craswell 2007, 380). Equating innovation and knowledge excellence only with scientific endeavours devalues a diversity of knowledge, including those associated with the humanities and social sciences (HASS).

The recent deepening of the ‘culture wars’ has brought on a second, quite different, ideological movement that similarly challenges the value of HASS knowledges. Post-truth discourses, where racism and sexism are espoused as common sense (Cover, Haw, and Thompson 2022; Ringrose 2018), position universities, and HASS disciplines in particular, as too progressive (Morris 2021), or as Blackmore (2022, 634) has it, as ‘havens of left-wing activism’. Frunzaru et al. (2018) have attempted to quantify the challenge of anti-intellectualism facing universities today, which they link to narrow employability measures that emphasise job-specific skills. By assessing anti-intellectualism, materialism and employability together, they demonstrate,

the more students aspire to materialistic [instrumental] goals, the less they value learning for its own sake and the less they are interested in intellectual development.

(Frunzaru et al. 2018, 388)

The pressure on universities to become labour market infrastructure (Hartmann and Komljenovic 2021), taking less of a role as a ‘public intellectual’ (Boden and Nedeva 2010, 50), risks producing ‘a voluminous but docile cohort of worker/consumers’ (ibid., p.41). Instrumentalising education towards employability, shifting it away from the types of critical thinking HASS promotes, has particular significance for working-class students. As Wheelahan (2010, 9) puts it, by having greater access to HASS knowledge, the middle classes have access to ‘theoretical abstract knowledge [which] provides them with the ability to … think the unthinkable and the not-yet-thought’. In the current climate, in which there is hostility to HASS disciplines, how do we ensure people of all class backgrounds are able to access HASS education, and find value in it? How do we immunise HASS knowledge producers against deepening class divides?

We would like to explore the potential social class ramifications of the devaluing of HASS briefly via remarks made by Australia’s former Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, which were reported locally under the headline ‘PM explains: there are unis and there are unis’ (Matchett 2022). Upon opening a new medical school and research centre at an Australian regional university, Morrison proclaimed that this was the type of university endeavour that:

sits at the heart of pretty much every successful economic regional plan you care to nominate anywhere in the world, let alone in Australia. But not any university that, you know, keeps itself separate from the rest of the community and walks around in gowns and looks down on everybody. And, you know, only looks at things that are [not] remotely interesting to anyone. It’s a university that’s very practical and understands the opportunities, whether it’s in science or medicine or in any other areas or fields of enquiry and research, and is raising up a workforce and a generation of people that can actually transform the region in which they’re living.

There are obviously two camps of universities and university workers delineated here. One camp is ‘very practical and understands the opportunities’. The second is elitist and ‘keeps itself separate from the rest of the community’. Via remarks such as these, knowledge-production with commercial potential is privileged (Lingard and Gale 2007; Ozga 2007). In this particular context, the economic disadvantages experienced in Australia’s regions become a trojan horse for the promotion of science as the only (commercial) opportunities regional and rural, working-class students should aspire to. Emphasis is placed on the urgency to turn university inputs into economic outputs in the regions, where a ‘transformation’ is needed. A moral dilemma is implied. Gravitating towards ‘too intellectual’ HASS, would be to go against, ‘transform[ing] the region in which they’re living’. Concomitantly, implicitly, the humanities and social sciences (HASS) are constructed as oppositional to economic success, and forms of impractical, middle-classed navel-gazing. There is semblance here with Threadgold and Gerrard’s (2022) analysis of the contemporary Australian context, where HE-educated people are often positioned within populist discourse as too intellectual, against both the national interest and ‘ordinary’ Australians.

Such messaging exacerbates existing pressure on working-class students to opt for trajectories that are perceived as more practical, and therefore, to engage in instrumental careerist strategies. While working-class students are motivated by a range of ideals (Scherer 2022), low SES students are more likely to be risk adverse in their post-school planning, and to be centrally guided by concerns that studies will lead to permanent work (Raciti 2019). This goes some way to explaining why education, engineering, IT and business are already popular choices for disadvantaged students in Australia (Edwards and Coates 2011). However, contra to human-capital informed employability policies, which present a picture of students as universally oriented to ‘maximisation of self-interest and the instrumental pursuit of HE for gaining well-paid careers’ (Lumb and Matthew 2021, 114), the choices made by first-in-family students are influenced by a complex web of factors, including ‘the strategic orientation of family capital, the profound stratification of schooling and universities, and the desperation to realise the investment of families in efforts to advance intergenerational social mobility’ (Guzmán-Valenzuela et al. 2022, 945). Employability and anti-intellectual discourses introduce yet greater complexity to decision-making, by casting doubt on the viability of HASS pathways.

It is notable also that a widening of employability policies has been occurring. While employability policies have historically been geared towards undergraduate programmes, it is increasingly oriented to graduate offerings (McGagh et al. 2016). Accordingly, we pursue our interest in employability policy in the wake of increased scrutiny on employment outcomes in postgraduate education, where attention to social class inequalities is often overlooked (Grant-Smith, Irmer, and Mayes 2020;). Rather than following the policies themselves (Craswell 2007; Cuthbert and Molla 2015), we attend to working-class graduate student (affective) responses to them.

Affective capacities and working-class subjectivities

In exploring graduate student responses to employability discourses, we attend to suggestions for the development of an ‘ecology of classed relations’ for higher education policy (Walkerdine 2021). We draw attention to the varied but distinct abilities of non-traditional students, orienting to questions of how ‘social position and access to resources mediate what ends are felt to be possible and desirable’ (Sellar and Gale 2011, 129, our emphasis). In this way, we hope that working-class capacities, rather than deficits, guide discussions of equity and mobility. Capacities are conceptualised here quite differently to the capabilities, skills and enterprising dispositions inferred under the rubric of graduate employability (e.g., Pool and Sewell 2007) and centrally concern attention to affect and emotion (Mulcahy and Martinussen 2023).

In line with enactment approaches to policy analysis (Ball, Maguire, and Braun 2012), including affective enactment approaches (Pitton and McKenzie 2022), we assume that policy is not ‘given’ to the student subject. Rather, policy acts in relation with students, in an emergent and contingent practice of materialisation. In the contexts of neoliberal governmentality, subjectivity ‘is a key site of political struggle’, including of refusal (Ball 2016, 1129). We attempt in our analysis to understand the affective responses and situated identities of higher education students in relation to contemporary employability policies, such as the Job-Ready Graduates Package. We ask, how are working-class women studying in postgraduate HASS-related disciplines responding to employability policy in the current Australian context?

Data, methodology and affective analytical approach

Data excerpts analysed in this article derive from a study exploring class relations in Australia and how they shape the experiences of women enrolled in postgraduate studies (domestically). The invitation to participate was also extended to those who had completed their postgraduate studies within the previous six months. Six of the twenty-five participants also fit the characteristics of ‘early career academic’, by having considerable responsibility for carrying out teaching or other research work, aside from their doctoral studies. Ethics approval was obtained from the Human Research Ethics Committee of The University of Melbourne (reference 2056680).

The research oriented to questions of how students from diverse social class histories come to feel in or out of ‘place’ at university. As such, despite the relatively small cohort, diversity was sought out. The advertisement made a call for financially disadvantaged, working class, or low socioeconomic postgraduate students, including ethnic minority women/womxn. Many participants understood themselves as transitioning between class categories, and for some, class was complicated by racialized identities. As ‘Kelly’, one queer, mixed-race Caribbean/Aboriginal woman put it: ‘It is finding little pockets to put [things] in but you have to accept that sometimes… I love the grey parts. We really sit in the grey parts − as Indigenous women, that’s where we live’. Although the following list elides the rich, grey hues to which Kelly refers, the sample might be categorised as such: 5 participants identified as coming from a ‘welfare-class’ background in which their families’ primary incomes were from government welfare services when they were growing up, 14 from a working-class background, and 6 from ‘lower-middle’. Around half of the interviewees, including all those who identified as coming from a welfare-class background, described traumatic events that occurred in their family or environmental factors that are considered ‘adverse childhood events’ (Emerging Minds & ANU Australia 2022). Almost two-thirds identified as having a disability, most of which were mental-health related. The age range of participants ran from 28 to 60, with a median of 34. Half of the universities in which participants were enrolled are part of Australia’s elite ‘Group of Eight’, the remainder were based in universities that are in urban centres, but which service regional areas. One aspect of the sample in which there is less diversity, is that of academic discipline, with 21 participants enrolled , or having recently completed degrees in, HASS-related studies, in fields such as education, media studies, creative arts, literature, sociology and law. Included in this figure also are three participants who were enrolled in public health, and used critical feminist and Indigenous standpoint theories.

The interviews were designed to capture the hybridity, dilemmas and competing subjectivities relating to gender, ethnicity and social class that are often involved in the social mobility of working-class students (Lucey, Melody, and Walkerdine 2003). As such, participants were invited to repeat, biographical-oriented interviews, and most took part in three interviews over the course of one year (2021). The analytic approach involved repeated reading of interview transcripts. Bringing different understandings of affect to bear, Author One predominantly read using an affective-discursive practice lens (Wetherell 2012) while Author Two mobilised materialist (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) concepts. Although underscored by different ontologies, when put into conversation with one another, these approaches assist to enlarge understandings of relations of class, gender and policy through exploration of moments of emergence, agencies as distributed and, most particularly, affect as political.

Wetherell’s (2012) affective-discursive practice theory centres human meaning-making and subject formation, placing emphasis on the practical and collaborative nature of affective practices. Contrasting with materialist and posthuman accounts of affect, as sketched below, where affect ‘overspills the individual’ (Massumi 2017, 1), how people fluidly combine everyday identity practices is considered central to configurations of power. How does employability get translated into situated practices, moment to moment, in affective episodes? We understand that people will enact ‘figuring and gathering’ activities (Wetherell 2012, 139), as affects are organised into (employable) subjectivities. Employability identities will be constantly negotiated and their shapes will shift, depending on the interactional contexts they are produced for. Identities crafted to serve different, possible versions of employability will also be modulated by the affective routines and practices expected in particular settings as well as personal histories. Notably, as identity practices are considered resources for living, this figuring work is capacitating. Those with non-normative employment or higher education trajectories may still have enormous capacities to account for themselves (as ‘good’, or ‘reasonable’ etc.).

Materialist and posthuman accounts of affect (indicatively, Braidotti 2021; Deleuze and Guattari 1987) provide resources for meeting, if not necessarily resolving, issues of social inequality and institutional responsibility, head on. We employ a social relational version of affect as developed through Deleuze’s (1988) reading of Spinoza ‒ affect as bodily ‘capacities to affect and be affected’. We ask of a concept such as employability, not what it is, but what it can do in a specific context: what are its capacities? Affects signify a change of state of an entity and its capacities, human and otherwise (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 256). Capacities can be increased or lessened, and it is this movement – the likelihood of leveraging its direction – that is key to their powers. When understood as increasing or decreasing powers to act, affect is ‘directly political’ (Massumi 2017, 1) and can be deployed to offset the normative meanings attaching to the discourse of employability mobilised through the JRGP.

One of the questions under investigation in the broader study was how participants’ social class positions might change throughout the course of their HE engagements. Class scholars have long shown the ‘hidden injuries’ of class transitions (Sennett and Cobb 1973), bringing into view feelings of guilt and shame that often occur through social mobility (Mahony and Zmroczek 1997; Michell, Wilson, and Archer 2015). We follow in the footsteps of those who articulate the ‘hybrid’ shapes these transitional, psychosocial formations take (Lucey, Melody, and Walkerdine 2003) while attuning affectively to material dimensions of this formation (e.g. the ‘pull’ of place and space). In showing how class transitions are dealt with, we emphasise the multiplicity of affective regimes that participants are entangled in, such as race, geographies, gender, but also those relating to constructions of ‘intellect’, ‘academic’, or ‘social justice’. The affective identity-work required to ameliorate competing conceptions of class for working-class, highly educated women also involves significantly navigation of class tensions around notions of employability.

Working class student-hood in HE: affective explorations

Most participants in this sample have taken non-linear trajectories into their present studies and vocations. Only four of the twenty-five were studying or working in the same area as their undergraduate studies. One participant had made changes in their academic foci, but their route from school, into undergraduate and then postgraduate education was relatively sequential. The remaining twenty took significant breaks from their studies and most worked in a range of jobs, switching their vocations, for example, from marketing into nursing, journalism into history, business studies into teaching and banking into medicine. Kelly, who we referred to earlier, had studied at seven different universities, stating also ‘I’ve had a million jobs in between’. Dominant temporalities of employability policy making conceive the future as ‘something to be filled with employable subjects and new discoveries’, and the present is imagined as ‘emptied out’ (Clegg 2010, 359). The rich diversity of work and study participation of this small sample is illustrative of the significant mismatch between future-oriented human capital-influenced policies and lived experience. Dominant employability policy cannot account for the past and accruing emotional investments that are continually drawn on in decision-making.

We begin now to examine in detail the routine work of ameliorating the disparate affective regimes surrounding intellect and (employability) skills, alongside the production of social class. The data excerpt we begin with is again from Kelly, who is carrying out her doctorate in law. She was one of a few participants who expressed discomfort around the public nature of graduation ceremonies.

I’ve never been to a graduation … I will probably go to my PhD but it’s just embarrassing to me to do that … I realise that I’ve also gotten a lot of criticism for my achievements. So, you can’t big-note yourself, you can’t talk about your qualifications, although you are expected to use them to support the people who are telling you NOT to big-note yourself.

(laughing)

Potentially, regardless of educational policies, a statement like the one above can be expected in Australia. In a colonial setting where egalitarianism is highly valued, Kelly’s high achievements may see her appraised as a ‘tall poppy’, sitting ‘above her station’ and needing to be brought down to size. However, Kelly’s words, as well as those of other participants who described graduation ceremonies as deeply uncomfortable, are indicative of a cultural milieu where higher education is positioned contradictorily. In this ‘ecology of classed relations’ (Walkerdine 2021, 60), as Kelly’s achievements become associated with multiple effective regimes, the resulting identity trouble requires that different capacities be put to use. Her legal expertise and understanding of colonial-centric bureaucracies may be needed at times, and animates an authority, provided through her education and professional standing. In other settings, the authority that comes with education must be downplayed. Kelly has succeeded in a wide range of professional roles and in her studies, in the face of multiple ‘disadvantages’—Aboriginal, Black, queer, disabled and growing up in poverty. Yet, her achievements have not only left uncelebrated at times, but also become a source of shame. Equity policies in HE aim to raise aspirations of equity-seeking students, but without attention to the affective-discursive realm, the emotional costs that come with accomplishing those aspirations are omitted (Bunn, Jane Burke, and Threadgold 2022). Similarly, as we show below, the JRGP may come with additional costs that are hidden without attention to affective practices.

Although the JRGP restated intentions towards equity for all Australians, it gives particular attention to raising aspiration for regional and remote Australians (Molla and Cuthbert 2022). In our small sample however, it was notable that regional participants felt the judgment of friends and community rather intensely. Olive, a casual lecturer and doctoral researcher in sociology summarises it thus:

That’s like ‘you’ve got tickets on yourself, you think you’re smarter than me’, ‘there’s some snob with a good education thinking they know better than us’, that kind of thing. And particularly because I live in a very, very agricultural, rural area there is a lot of antagonism to intellectuals and people who don’t work with their hands, basically.

Chay, who is based in a remote area and studied a range of social science disciplines and whose post-PhD work lies in public health policy, described some of her previous interactions with her siblings in this way:

They’d be like ‘this is the trouble with the university. They just like fill your head with this crap’ and ‘blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah’, as though I have no agency or decision-making, like thoughts of my own. Like somebody just like brainwashed me or something like that. And it was always amusing to me because they were always like, they would pretend as though going to university, getting more education, somehow made you ignorant.

Again, there is nothing particularly surprising about the described interactions; through reoccurring affective performances, both women are well-used to refuting the derogatory perceptions. Accusations of being a snob become ‘that kind of thing’ or ‘blah blah blah’. However, the current, elevated anti-HASS sentiment creates a social climate in which regional students in HASS become a ‘sticky’ surface (Ahmed 2004) and regional and remote areas have become sites where an everyday, familial politics of affect can play out (Massumi 2015).

In addition, Chay highlights a potentially gendered aspect of anti-HASS sentiment that is identifiable in other interviews, centred on naivety (‘as though I have no … thoughts of my own’). Eloise, who also works in public health and is based rurally, similarly claimed ‘my mother tells people I’m an airhead’, despite always achieving high academic success. The following excerpt emerged out of a conversation about feeling misunderstood by her mother and brother.

They believe that if you don’t get out there and work, shovelling dirt, you know, working on the chain gang from dawn till dusk, you’re not actually working. You know? That you’re not putting in an effort and you wouldn’t know what work (is) and you’re a socialist.

Eloise went on to report of her brother, who has a career in the trades, challenging her with, ‘If you’ve got a [undergraduate] degree in economics why aren’t you wealthy?’, the implication being, her shift into social-justice inspired public health research lacks obvious utility, particularly, economic success.

What the above suggests is that working-class students entering HASS today who reject the largely STEMM-focused pricing signals of the JRGP are engaging in a risky pathway. Those who choose to take it may become embodied sites of struggle over the meanings of HASS, which include its lack of usefulness (it doesn’t lead to economically viable work) or its damaging properties (it makes people naive). Shaping these family debates is an interplay between associations with the intellectual middle-classes, and long-standing patterns of gendering of the labour market. The social sciences, and their purportedly too-intellectual content, sit in contrast to the ‘recognizable training and career structures’ associated with ‘men’s work’ (Kenway 1993, 82). For working-class female-identifying students in HASS, perceived to be forging intellectual pathways, they may simultaneously be deemed both too clever and an ‘airhead’.

So far, we have discussed the effective patterning of gendered and classed dealings with anti-HASS sentiment in rather general terms. To follow, the narratives of two doctoral researchers are examined with a view to providing greater specificity of patterns of subjectivity, where employability is read from a biographical lens.

‘It’s always been education with an outcome’

Here, we meet Isabel, a White woman in her 30s who was based at a regional campus, near where she and her husband grew up. The interview extracts are from the second and third interviews. Although Isabel has class-transitioned financially, she strongly identifies as working class, related in large part to her links to her regional locality, which she describes as ‘very community minded’. Isabel is a ‘first in family’ student and finds it difficult to talk to some of her family members about her PhD studies, a media studies-centred project in English Literature. At this point in the conversation, Isabel is elaborating on a commentshe made in an earlier interview, in which she described her PhD studies as ‘fluffy’, explaining, ‘I feel like it’s valueless or something in a practical sense’.

Education has been done [in my community], but it’s always been ‘education with an outcome’, like it’s that career oriented- and so that was … One of the big things when I first decided to do the PhD was ‘well what do you get out of it?’ And I was sort of going ‘nothing’. Like I just was doing it because I want to do it. And they were all like ‘why?’ And I’m going ‘because I enjoy it’, you know? […] And I think that was really- lots of people didn’t get that at all. And then combined with the topic, as you say, which, you know, even my own parents would have issues with the things I say. And my sister. You know, not many people are fully onboard with all the feminist stuff. And then I was also bringing in race and ethnicity and you know, inherent racism and systemic racism, all that stuff that people are uncomfortable with anyway […] The education part of it is valued to a point, but they definitely don’t see the point of it if there is no tangible outcome.

As Isabel becomes a vector for competing ideologies, we see the affective dimensions of higher education policy framings. She centres her family’s line of questioning around the purported impracticality of her PhD, but it aligns also with public and policy perspectives found elsewhere that treat doctoral studies as arcane (Sin and Tavares 2020). Isabel positions herself as an outsider or anomaly in her community (‘lots of people didn’t get that at all’). Resonant with Reay’s (2013) autobiographical analysis of academic culture and feminine working-class subjectivity, Isabel’s narrative illustrates an intermixing of privilege (engaging in doctoral studies because you will enjoy it), along with the isolation and an ongoing sense of disloyalty that can come with social mobility.

It is from this complex positioning work that Isabel’s descriptor of her doctoral studies as ‘fluffy’ emerges. The inference of her non-present interlocutors is that studying for enjoyment’s sake is frivolous (‘What do you get out of it?’ ‘Why?’). Isabel reports acquiescing and replying that she will get ‘nothing’ out of her PhD. The topic of Isabel’s PhD also adds to her semi-outsider status; living in regional Australia ill affords imagining the work possibilities leading on from a doctorate in English literature, with a focus on media studies. Another set of meanings of ‘fluffy’ sticks to Isabel, and relates to her commitment to anti-sexism and anti-racism. The application of Isabel’s social-justice orientated research could stand as a defence of its practical utility. Instead, these become unspeakable topics for her, constituting ‘all that stuff that people are uncomfortable with anyway’.

Although Isabel struggles to maintain a sense of belonging in both working- and middle-class cultures, these negotiations may also be mobilising. Rather than interpreting Isabel’s struggles as engendering only ‘bad’ affects – isolation, feeling misunderstood and acquiescing to economic and social pressures – we suggest that her uneasy fit with her culture of origin is to some degree a socialised affective response, a surplus effect of belonging to other than her home community (affect economy). From these data alone, we cannot trace out exactly how Isabel’s status as regional and working-class pull her towards anti-sexist/racist programmes of study, but perhaps a lived sense of dislocation is an informing factor. It is not an attachment to productive economics that pulls her towards wanting to ‘actually transform the region in which [she’s] living’, but an embodied understanding of working-class viewpoints and values. Like other participants in the sample, she responds empathetically towards those who have not had the benefit of the critical awareness that is ideally cultivated in higher education. There was little inclination to judge: ‘You know, not many people are fully onboard with all the feminist stuff. And then I was also bringing in race and ethnicity … all that stuff that people are uncomfortable with anyway’. In her employability decision-making, she is affectively responsive to opinions expressed by family and community members.

The juggling of dominating and counter narratives is present in another unfolding of this story. The excerpt below is from a subsequent interview undertaken just six months before Isabel was due to complete her doctoral studies. It came to light that Isabel had pulled out of the programme, enrolling instead in a Master of Teaching course. She explained that a large part of her motivation for switching was down to the lack of opportunities to continue casual tutoring at her university. Further, working part-time, being the mother of three children and doing her PhD in the evenings, was causing significant stress. Isabel must engage material arrangements (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) that take in practical considerations concerning motherhood, work structures and study and work hours. These fall outside employability, as employability policy defines it – as job-ready skills. Isabel talked about how she imagined her family interpreting her new vocation:

They are STILL not going to understand that it’s FULL of humanities stuff. It’s full of social justice, it’s full of equity, you know? So essentially, I’m in the same field, I’ve just changed to a different age group. And that was also part of my motivation because I was like I’m going to be doing secondary [humanities teaching]. And to my mind, well, all the stuff that I was doing in the PhD I can implement in my teaching with real life, like, visible consequences, you know?

Isabel finds a more ‘liveable’ position, becoming legible to family and community through the profession of teaching. Her training in analysing creative works can now be carried out in a setting that is perhaps legible with regard to rurality. There may also be a pleasurable rebelliousness activated here. Her equity-related practice, and associated politics, will go undetected in a school classroom, in a way that was not possible when her family imagined her in the culturally-distant and pretentious setting of a university.

Isabel’s experiences suggest that the demands to prove one’s employability productivity are felt acutely in regional Australia. Economistic impulses would appear to trump commitments to social justice; Isabel must, it seems, dream less large if she is to thrive in her rural community. And yet, just as ‘there are unis and there are unis’ (Matchett 2022), there are economies and economies. The national economy and the instrumental employability ideology that promotes it is not the only field of practice in which Isabel is embedded. Her positive attachments to social justice become practices operating as affective economies (Ahmed 2004) where affects (empathy, care, loyalty) function as a form of capital, and Isabel’s biography is part of the relational field: ‘well, all the stuff that I was doing in the PhD I can implement in my teaching with real life, like, visible consequences’. Throughout both excerpts, Isabel is pulled in different directions, towards the ‘practical’ but within the ‘intellectual’ social science domain she has opted for. In the final excerpt, to follow, a sense of struggle is less apparent. We make use of one participant’s own analysis of how employability imperatives ‘land’, and negatively impact the lives of working-class actors.

Becoming educated about the failings of employability

Taylor is in her late twenties, White, grew up in an urban centre on the outskirts of a large city, and is from a background of intergenerational disadvantage. Her research is around disadvantage and gender in schools, and she understands her participants to be survivors of a violent education system, as is she. In the excerpt below, Taylor is relaying a conversation she had with someone who was shocked at the way she was managing her superannuation.

I was talking to her about super[annuation] and she was like, ‘Aren’t you worried about retirement? You have to work a 9 to 5 to be able to look after yourself when you’re old’. She was just spilling all of this really common language about, you know, justifications for why particular things happen or why things SHOULD be the way that they are and the idea that meeting two people who don’t want to work a 9 to 5 and don’t believe it is a good thing for people was just like, ‘What the hell?’ Like, blasphemy, right?! So, it’s in those moments – I’m educated so I can advocate for my choices and I can advocate against, you know, I can defend my position and not feel like it’s attacking my identity but that sort of language around, ‘Well, you’re not respectable in society. You’re not valuable in society unless you fit this category and middle-class ideal’ … So it’s like if you talk to me about what poverty is, that’s poverty of relationships, poverty of choices. You’re so stuck in that cycle that you can’t see that those things are really bad for you. You’re working so much that you get depression or you have all this anxiety or you’re carrying all these things with you. You go to counselling, that’s more money and that’s more time just to feel okay. That’s not a nice life, in my view. So, of course, I wouldn’t try to be aspiring to do that but I also know that by coming from chronic unemployed families, it’s like I didn’t have a thing that was like, ‘Well, you’re not good for society if you don’t have a fulltime job’. I didn’t carry that burden, like having to fit into that expectation. I was free from that. So my poverty gave me freedom in a lot of ways too because it’s like, ‘Well, society already said that I don’t fit so I don’t have the expectation to fit with them and the way that they want me to fit with them is actually really bad for my health’.

The focus of our analysis here is the middle-class assumptions built into employability policy such as the JRGP. Taylor provides a range of working-class responses to the middle-class emphasis on productive employability. In this rather complicated mix, her emergent sense of self as able to reject middle-classed attitudes towards money, is grafted onto longstanding associations of chronic unemployment, and concomitant societal rejection. There is a parallel to be made with Sellar and Gale’s (2011) sage analysis of inequities in higher education. They point out that widening participation policy fails because it invites working-class people into HE institutions, but ill affords their abilities to shape them. Similarly, Taylor has been invited to take up a middle-class life, complete with a respectable job in which poor quality of life and mental health present, with seemingly little recourse to negotiate its form.

The emphasis on productive employability may land differently across a range of heterogenous working-class actors, affecting who comes to work so much ‘that [they] get depression’. As Taylor notes, some can’t rely on constructing their identity with reference to respectability discourses in the same way that she now can (‘I’m educated so I can advocate for my choices’). Nevertheless, although class transitions are painful (Reay 2015), Taylor finds a way to capitalise on hers, for herself and others. In leveraging the direction of this transition away from middle-classed investments in productive employability, her powers to act are increased. Her critical view of herself as respectable, educated and having a specific knowledge of social discourses that only those who have endured environments of chronic intergenerational unemployment can have, becomes a tale of empowerment. Taylor encourages us to look beyond seeing only deficit in the chronically unemployed and to be open to the important lessons we may learn from them: ‘You’re so stuck in that cycle that you can’t see that those things are really bad for you’. With reference to the end of her doctoral-research looming, as well as her scholarship funding, she stated elsewhere in the same interview:

You take a job because it pays well. That’s not really on my prerequisite list and every time I’ve taken a job for the money or felt good about a job because of the way that it pays, I am thoroughly disappointed because other costs are not considered.

It might be imagined that the threat of post-PhD unemployment would be greater for someone who has been swimming against the tide of middle-classed culture for at least a decade – there is more ground to be lost. However, we see Taylor reach out to and strengthen her working-class knowledges and ties to her community, and through this, she refuses to see potential unemployment as a fall from grace. Similar to Isabel’s clear affinities to her community, Taylor makes use of her education in the social sciences, and mobilises its authority, to reframe poverty as a freedom from the tyranny of (over)work, for both her community and herself.

Job readied student-hood and subjectivities: ‘we really sit in the grey parts’

Bringing an affective lens to bear, we sought insight on how the policy shift towards employability, such as in the form of the Job-ready Graduates Package, ‘lands’ for working-class HASS graduate students. Addressing the question of these students’ response to this policy, we commence the discussion with a query as to the ultimate goal of producing the job-ready graduate student. The mismatch between the sampled students’ responses and the policy’s avowed intent and purpose runs throughout it. As does the ‘thread’ of working-class capacities, a less-told narrative, which is a chief focus here.

While working-class graduate students are targeted for needing to become job-ready, their financial disadvantage often requires that they are already, demonstrably, ‘job-readied’. Many of the students sampled had built an extensive job portfolio prior to and during studies and were adept at transitioning across jobs and disciplines. Thus, Isabel switches from a PhD programme and casual tutoring at her university to a teacher preparation programme and Taylor is weighing up her options for her next move. Changing track and taking ‘a million jobs’ over the course of studying, calls into question the project of producing the job-ready graduate student as an ultimate goal. Recent research parallels our reservations, indicating that ‘graduates in a wide range of disciplines, including arts, social sciences and humanities are highly employable and … attempts to drive students into some fields at the expense of others are misplaced’ (Bisley 2022, para. 4). We want to note also however, that while we have placed focus on working-class capacities, working ‘a million jobs’ while studying and negotiating the often painful consequences of social mobility (Abrahams and Ingram 2013; Friedman 2014) is something that middle-class students are typically more insulated from (Baglow and Gair 2019).

In line with our analysis, we suggest that the singular policy focus of job ready skills is reductive and reduces possibilities for working-class students. The employable policy subject is produced through a wide range of factors: affects, cultural norms (concepts of employability), material needs (money), material practices (shifting from university to university), work conditions (casual work), commitments (caring responsibilities), ideals and more all bundle together in what can be called an alternative employability assemblage. Job readiness is not just a matter of ‘jobs of national importance, such as teaching, nursing and STEM fields’ (Department of Education Skills and Employment 2020, 7). It is ‘profoundly ecological’ (Walkerdine 2021, 70), spanning people, places and predilections. Attempting to pick ‘winners among the disciplines for study to generate “job-ready” graduates’ is flawed, both, because it ignores the highly fluid nature of the workforce (Daly and Lewis 2020, 231), but also because it belies the affective attachment many higher education students have to HASS disciplinary domains.

The integrity of employability policy, then, might be improved by moving away from the reductionist approach of the job-ready model, towards a more ecological approach that recognises heterogeneity. If the markers of employability are not expanded to account for the specificity of students’ ethico-political and ‘othered’ identity positionings, we risk reproducing inequalities. An ecological approach would also better recognise that employability cannot be the sole, or even primary, responsibility of universities. National policies in many countries place universities at the locus of the problem of graduate employability, omitting the powerful role of employer behaviours and perceptions and labour market factors (Hartmann and Komljenovic 2021). Although we have used the Australian case, the need to challenge employability assumptions is therefore a global issue and concerns class dynamics that exceed universities.

In a number of ways, we have questioned the leitmotif of employability as a market, and taken-for-granted, good. As is the nature of policy, the Job-ready Graduates Package strives to set higher education students on a desired path. It has a telos. This path, however, is interpreted flexibly, worked around or not worked at all: ‘meeting two people who don’t want to work a 9 to 5 and don’t believe it is a good thing for people, was just like, “What the hell?”’ (Taylor). Sceptical about a neoliberal policy logic whereby ‘market-based competition, personal choice, and human capital’ are emphasised (Molla and Cuthbert 2022, para. 34, original emphasis), what the job readied students sampled attune to is a discourse of employment that provides opportunities for redressing social disadvantage and taking care of one’s self: ‘And to my mind, well, all the stuff that I was doing in the PhD I can implement in my teaching with real life, like visible consequences’ (Isabel) and ‘You’re not valuable in society unless you fit this … middle-class ideal … You’re so stuck in that cycle that you can’t see that those things are really bad for you’ (Taylor). Clearly, employability has a wider remit than the production of job-readiness.

Further to the issue of policy narrowing and governance is the inattention to what working-class students bring to higher education, their sensibilities and capacities. While there have been recent inroads towards greater recognition of the importance of connections between workplace learning and higher education (Römgens, Scoupe, and Beausaert 2020), the diversity of graduate students’ prior life and work experiences remains neglected. Working-class students are expressly absent from the processes of policy formulation; working-class actors are not imagined as holders of specific knowledge that we might defer to, as is the case for other marginalised communities (Walkerdine 2021). In a recent submission to the new Australian Labour government, equity practitioners in higher education call for taking ‘a holistic approach to supporting students from targeted equity groups’ (Equity Practitioners in Higher Education Australasia 2022, 2) which includes reference to this knowledge. The problem of leaving out working-class student knowledge is also pertinent to the postgraduate cohort, where policy attention to widening participation concerns is significantly lacking (McCulloch and Thomas 2013). This omission is perhaps indicative of the common misconception that working-classed people who engage with higher education wish to become middle-classed (Loveday 2015, 571).

As is the case with social class, the role and contribution of affect in employability policymaking tends to go unacknowledged. As multiple pushes and pulls are wrestled with - necessary when one occupies a space in the ‘grey parts’ - the ‘felt sense of the quality of life’ (Williams 1961, 63) comes into sharp focus. The affective jostling between subject positionings such as ‘employable, self-regarding subject’ and ‘employed (or not), other-regarding subject’ provides insight into working-class student-hood in HE and how it matters to the students in question. To provide expansive employment possibilities, we maintain that the space of affective jostling should be kept open towards displacing normative discourses of the job-ready student – a subjectivity that is too firmly set.

The shortcoming of a policy emphasis on employability and a JRGP framing of such is ‘not that it gets things wrong, generally speaking, but that it leaves a gap’ (Nissenbaum 2010, 9), with this gap being acutely felt by actors such as the study’s participants who are implicated in the directions set, yet unable to influence the course that these directions take. Framed as members of ‘equity groups’, individuals in their respective social positions (classed, gendered and raced) are not legible in the JRGP reform policy and process. Fundamental to why our participants continue in their studies are their affective investments in the humanities and social sciences, which afford attentiveness to inequalities. Their wish to feel less confined by economic precarity may also play into this continuity. There is a certain security in knowing that employment can be had in national interest areas, noting that a logic of employability can be mobilised judiciously, and care-fully.

Altogether, while employability policies are positioned as a salve for class inequalities, they can serve to discredit educational and employment endeavours and reproduce class tensions. As Taylor’s narrative well illustrates, affective aspects of employability are essential to refusing narrow definitions of employability, and are key to the reimagining of employability in the context of widening participation policies. Calls are being made currently (Bisley 2022; Molla and Denise 2022) to reconsider the Job-ready Graduate Package. The new Federal Government is being asked to reimagine the future and purpose of Australian higher education and to frame equity issues less reductively. We propose that the integrity of employability policy can be advanced through moving beyond the reductionist model of job-readiness. Attending to the identity and values positions of those who enact policy, and to the effective dynamics of policy, invites a reparative and holistic approach.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank those who generously gave their time to participate in this research. We, both authors, acknowledge that we live and work on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung of the Kulin Nations. We appreciate comments on an earlier version of this paper from Dr Anneleis Humphries.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maree Martinussen

Maree Martinussen is a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow within the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne. Working across sociology, critical social psychology and studies of affect and emotion, Maree’s approach to studying educational in/equalities attempts to highlight the ‘little moments’ that make up the embodied experience of everyday life. Her research explores how social class identities are done in higher education settings in concert with other racialised and gendered identities.

Dianne Mulcahy

Dianne Mulcahy a Senior Lecturer at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, ’s research and teaching interests centre on pedagogy, education policy and feminist materialist methodological approaches to research as examined and explored through empirical contexts. Issues of difference, disadvantage and in/exclusions are at the heart of these interests and studied chiefly using the conceptual resources of affect and critical materialist theories. Presently, Dianne is researching aspects of the ethics and politics of affect, and their implications for pedagogy and professional practice in school and museum settings.

Notes

1. Areas of expected employment growth and demand were identified by the Department of Education, Skills and Employment as teaching, nursing, clinical psychology, English and languages, agriculture, maths, science, health, architecture, environmental science, IT, and engineering. Incentivising higher education, students pay less to study in fields identified as supporting the ‘national interest’ (Department of Education Skills and Employment 2020, 7).