INTERSECTIONS, DIVISIONS, AND DISTINCTIONS

ABSTRACT

While there is a growing body of research which explores the dramatic changes of higher education, following recent policies of widening participation and ‘internationalisation’, to date much of the research has focused on discrete ‘non-traditional’ groups. Based on qualitative data gathered from international and widening participation students, we explore the crossovers and parallels of their experiences, which is not to say that both groups are the very same. Indeed, it is the resistance to a ‘fixing’ positioning that this paper charts, negotiating points of sameness and difference. We suggest that there is failure to consider widening participation and internationalisation as two, intersecting, agendas, (re)producing class and race. Theoretically, such an approach offers an insight into contemporary class analysis in the context of mobility and racism, to comprehend how social divisions are complexly lived, where middle-class ‘international’ students may risk losing (and gaining) privilege, in (dis)similar ways to their working-class ‘home’ counterparts.

Keywords:

• class
• race
• education
• widening participation
• internationalisation

Acknowledgements

This study was funded through the Faculty Futures programme at Newcastle University. An earlier version of this paper was presented by Yvette Taylor at the 2nd European Conference on the First Year Experience 2007, Sweden. We would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments.

Notes

¹Within a European context, these concerns reflect broader social, economic, and cultural changes around the conceptualisation and the practices of education, employment, and identity. Higher education continues to be acknowledged as one of the primary policy responsibilities of European nation-states, significantly influenced by European level policy developments, such as the Bologna Process, and is thus a key arena in which questions of diversity, difference, division, and citizenship are being debated, contested, and reconfigured across Europe (Walby 2009).

²In referring to ‘international students’, we use fee-paying status: students domiciled outside of the EU are classified as ‘overseas’ students for the purpose of tuition fees; EU students from outside the UK are classified as ‘home’ students. This definition is problematic, where the boundary of (not) belonging is financially constructed and regulated, also removing ‘home’ students from being part of an ‘international’ landscape.

³In interrogating points of ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’ across these groups, we propose a sensitivity to other formations within and between student groups, such as distinctions operating between ‘local’ and ‘non-local’ home students, as also possibly complicating the divide between ‘traditional’ students and ‘others’. This could usefully be followed up in further research.

⁴The UK Russell Group comprises 20 leading research institutions/universities in the UK. In the UK, ‘Red Brick’ institutions are those which achieved university status before the First World War. This term is applied more broadly to pre-1992 established institutions, denoting a certain style, prestige, and longevity. Post-1992 UK universities are ‘new’ universities, previously polytechnics or colleges of Higher Education.

⁵A website (http://www.studentdiversity.co.uk) was specifically set up for this project to provide a separate space from the official university sites. This site has since been removed.

⁶Seventy-seven female, 36 male; 4 lower working class, 27 working class, 21 lower middle class, 48 middle class, 7 upper middle class, 1 upper class, 5 other; 101 white British, 1 white Irish, 2 any other white background, 2 Pakistani, 2 Bangladeshi, 4 Chinese, 2 other Asian.

⁷‘International’ students interviewed came from the following countries: China (two), Taiwan (one), USA (one), Pakistan (one), Japan (one).

⁸Unlike other students in the study who were concerned with financial and tutorial support, John stated that in terms of support that could be offered to international students, the university could organise travel trips for overseas students, given what he described as ‘amazing low air fares’. The practical support which some international students articulated as needing, such as help in the language centre and help with accommodation, others dismissed as being ‘patronising’, given that they were ‘beyond that’.

⁹Under European Union law, nationals from other EU countries are entitled to pay the same fees as UK students for higher education as long as they have been resident within the European Economic Area (the countries of the EU plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway) or Switzerland for three years but not mainly for the purpose of receiving full-time education.

¹⁰These include the different epistemological and pedagogical styles of varying disciplinary ‘tribes’ within academia, which are rooted in contrasting models of scholarship and which value different skills and knowledges (see Bartram 2007).

¹¹Some international groups were particularly racialised and ‘grouped’ together regardless of intra-group differences. Across the data, Chinese students were often positioned in this way. At present, this study lacks data on experiences of Chinese students themselves. We are similarly unable to confirm whether these representations attach themselves to the actual presence of Chinese students (i.e. in seminars) or, as we suspect, are the imaginings/fantasies of the ‘other’ as always a racialised excess, out of place, signalled by particular bodies as always plural/mass. This merits further research. In these data, John positions as more like UK home students, where his own whiteness and the whiteness of the institution are both aligned and effaced. John states: ‘I'm just American and, you know, I thought we'd be very similar when I came here, and we are similar, and maybe the kids from, you know, Asia are more different than I am, and the kids here find that strange or different’ (John, upper middle class, USA).