Knowing Your Place: Student conceptualisations of higher education in local spaces Conference Presentation: Sheffield Bill Esmond

Overview For social theorists, those who grasp reflective modernity (Giddens, 1991) or engage in ‘lifelong learning’ can participate fully in ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman, 1992) Others are excluded, or exclude themselves.  Globalisation’s uneven mobilities  Of finance capital, with foreign direct investment (FDI) still flowing mainly from US, Europe, Japan (UNCTAD, 2013) and of commodity production/consumption  Of information and knowledge, with both increasingly commoditised  Of people, including HE participants, with differentiated institutions linked to different mobilities:  World-class institutions serving a global elite  Selective ‘national’ institutions with resident participation  ‘Local’ institutions, eg many post-92 and colleges within UK

 HE differentiation has social and spatial dimensions  Spatial dimension of student participation is linked to its class mobilities (Clayton, Crozier and Reay, 2009)  The disposition or ‘habitus’ of disadvantaged applicants to participate in higher education, either in local institutions or without breaking comprehensively from local communities, contributes to the reproduction of their disadvantage  Troubling assumption of cultural superiority of global and national institutions and the knowledge they reproduce  Accounts of ‘resistance’ in rural communities

EdD research: ‘identity’ of part-time students on ‘local’ HE courses (in post-industrial areas)  Sometimes I think of myself as a modern person. I think I move with the times. And I do fit into other classes like you've mentioned. But I think things are moving so quickly, people have got to change with the times and change with the environment and everything  Everybody around me has a different perspective than I have… I want to go in one direction, my family don't want to come with me. That's my biggest concern… I might have to sort of travel a bit further afield for that…  I keep saying, 'Shall we emigrate?' 'Oh, we'll see.' I expect my family to be a little more negative… I think it's just different, different backgrounds, different views, different dreams.  I probably wouldn't have left where I live. I probably wasn't adventurous enough… I just [said], ‘No, I wanted a job, I'm doing this the right way round.’ Where a lot of my friends live in different places now, because of where they went to university and everything. You know, I look back now and think I wish I'd done something like that, because I still live in the same village, same town, probably just for that reason… Choosing what you want to do is the hardest thing. I suppose where I work now I'm safe and everyone…

The limitations of the ‘local’ versus valid accounts of resistance/knowledge?  Social relations inflected by class influence the experience of students as they adapt to new socio ‐ cultural environments and negotiate the terms of their emergent identities. By indicating the ways in which HE experiences are classed, but also situated and connected across geographical locations, this paper examines the ties between forms of working ‐ class identity and the contexts through which they are reproduced. In different ways, the security of locality and of what and who is already known is seen here as critical in dealing with risky and often alien educational environments as a form of social capital.  (Clayton, Crozier and Reay, 2009)  Marxist teories of dependency and Weberian theories of modernizattion both tended to relegate cultural differences to a sign of underdevelopment that would be ovetrtaken by a progresive movement of modernity. Cultural differences have proved to be both more resilient and contradictory. (Papastergiadis, 2000: 94)

References – for full paper contact  Bauman, Z. (1992) Imitations of postmodernity. London: Routledge  Corbett, M. (2007) Learning to Leave: The Irony of Schcooling in a Coastal Community. Black Point, Nova Scotia: Fernwood.  Clayton, J., Crozier, G. and Reay, D. (2009) Home and away: risk, familiarity and the multiple geographies of the higher education experience. International Studies in Sociology of Education 19 (3-4)  Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-identity: self and society in the late modern age. Cambridge: Polity Press.  Papastergiadis, N. (2000). The Turbulence of Migration: Globalization, deterritorialization and hybridity. Cambridge: Polity Press.  Reay, D. (2004) ‘’It's All Becoming a Habitus': Beyond the Habitual Use of Habitus in Educational Research’, British Journal of Sociology of Education 25(4)  United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (2013). Inward and Outward Foreign Direct Investment Flows, [online] at