Affecting advantage: class relations in contemporary higher education

ABSTRACT

This article explores the role of affect in addressing the advantage conventionally accorded to high socio-economic status (SES) in higher education (HE) and how this advantage plays out for students from low SES backgrounds. Positioned as the ‘other’ to an assumed norm, the capacities of these students can be considered the ‘wrong’ capacities, such that privilege prevails. Drawing on interview data from a project undertaken in Australia with female postgraduate students from low SES backgrounds, we bring a pluralised affective capacities approach to bear. We argue that thinking class (dis)advantage with affect has considerable political potential. Affect emerges as a key site through which the normative and transformative capacities of the classed subject emerge. Attuning to affective dissonance, responsivity and capacities, we challenge the advantage afforded high socio-economic status in HE. We demonstrate how a focus on affective relations creates more complex constructions of ‘advantage’ and disrupts deficit framings – shifts the normative class positions on which HE relies and does so affirmatively.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• advantage
• class
• capacity
• social inequality
• higher education

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Centre for Health Equity, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, The University of Melbourne [McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellowship].

Notes on contributors

Dianne Mulcahy

Dianne Mulcahy A Senior Lecturer at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, Dianne Mulcahy’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.

Maree Martinussen

Maree Martinussen is McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow within 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 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.