Being-in-motion: the everyday (gendered and classed) embodied mobilities for UK university students who commute

Abstract

This article makes the case for a more robust mobilities approach to student geographies in the UK, in order to problematise the enduring binary of [im]mobility (‘going away’ vs. ‘staying local’) and to challenge the presumed linearity of educational (and mobility) transitions in higher education. Through a discussion of two UK-based studies, we make the case for considering the complex and multi-layered everyday mobilities of students who commute to illuminate a broader range of mobility practices that shape students’ experiences and identities, and which are embedded in multiple and intersecting embodiments of class, gender, age and ethnicity.

Keywords:

• Mobility
• local students
• commuting
• gender
• identity
• class

Notes

1. Primarily a US term, we make reference to commuter students here as a way of demonstrating that ‘local’ students are mobile, active agents, rather than necessarily static and ‘of’ their term-time location (Holdsworth 2009a).

2. We define micro-geographies as the process of ‘being in’ and ‘moving through’ locations (Büscher and Urry 2009).