In the last decades, many countries have seen significant growth in the diversity and numbers of students attending university (OECD, 2022). This increasing volume of participants and apparent greater educational accessibility is largely perceived in positive ways, considered to evidence opportunity for social mobility and an assumed equitable capacity to achieve academic success. This presentation seeks to interrogate the ways in which attending university is experienced by learners from more disadvantaged or under-represented groups. Drawing on interviews and surveys with near completing undergraduate students all of whom were first in their family to attend university, the focus will be on the ways in which the students themselves considered the interplay of access and exclusion in their engagement with higher education, particularly the ways in which academic success and persistence was measured and articulated.

Drawing upon sociological perspectives (Bourdieu, 1986; Yosso, 2005) combined with philosophical understandings of social justice (Nussbaum, 2006; Sen, 1992), the session will provide rich insight into what individuals ‘actually do’ (or the capabilities and freedoms able to be accessed) that enables persistence at university. This theoretical framing usefully combines the concepts of capital, field and habitus with the capability approach’s three key elements: functionings, capabilities and agency. In summary, functionings relate to outcomes (which may be both tangible and intangible) and capabilities are the actual freedoms that enable individuals to achieve what they value (Sen, 1999). Agency is then regarded as the ability or capacity for individuals to achieve their desired goals and objectives. When combined with concepts of capital, field and habitus, the capability approach can offer a deep understanding of how individuals activate cultural and social ‘conversion factors’. This capital can be economic, social or cultural in nature, the latter including symbolic, educational and linguistic capital (Bourdieu, 1986). Individuals have different capital packages and capitals have different values depending on the field in which the individual is operating. The proposed theoretical fusion enables exploration of both what learners bring to this field (capitals) and how capabilities are actioned to enable success within the HE sector.

This focus provides an opportunity to foreground alternative and perhaps, hidden, understandings of valuable ‘fertile functionings’ within the HE persistence space. Such functionings may or may not fit with meritocratic or dominant understandings of what ‘successful persistence’ looks like nor how this is measured within the sector (O’Shea & Delahunty, 2018). Instead, any understanding of persistence needs to be situated closely within students’ own perspectives of how individual ‘fertile functionings’ are enacted and achieved. In other words, how learners themselves considered achievement is key to this theorisation particularly what it was that each individual valued, regardless of whether this value was recognised by the university they attended (Delahunty & O’Shea, 2019).

This theoretical framing is further contextualised by richly descriptive interview and survey data that draws upon the reflections of the students themselves. These perspectives provide alternative ways of thinking about how university participation is enacted, at a lived embodied level.

Despite that higher education (HE) has been accessible to most social classes in society, HE continues to be a propellor for reproduction of social inequality. Numerous studies have demonstrated how social differentiation, whose previous demarcation line was whether to pursue HE or not, has penetrated into the HE system (Bathmaker et al., 2016; Ingram, 2023; Persson, 2022).

This study (Persson, 2022) explored how a group of novice students navigated through an academic professional program positioned in the social mid-level of the Swedish HE hierarchy at one of the post99 universities. The students had different class backgrounds and different acquired educational capital (grades, SweSAT-results), which reflected the fragility of their positions as university students. In empirical terms, this meant that the students experienced social frictions both in relation to the HE field they entered and in relation to their social background. Four different combinations of frictions crystallized. Firstly, students who didn’t experienced any social frictions (Fish in Water), secondly, students who experienced social frictions both in relation to HE and social background (Two-Front Battle), thirdly, students who experienced social friction regarding their social background but not in relation to HE (Voluntary Exile), and fourthly, students who experienced social friction in relation to HE but not in relation to their social background (Behind Enemy Lines).

The study demonstrates how social frictions can be traced back to the chosen educational program and university’s social position in the Swedish HE field, a field that is not as overtly hierarchically organized as, for example, the British (Bathmaker et al., 2016) or French (Winkler & Sackmann). The results of the study show how social class differences are reproduced through the HE, even when formal barriers of a social nature have been eliminated. The study’s panel design further illustrates how class-related frictions and conflicts change as students gain experiences from university life. This involves both social frictions that are eliminated as well as amplified.

The observed social frictions and how they change can be understood as an expression of what Bourdieu has presented as hysteresis (e.g. Bourdieu, 1977[1972]; Bourdieu, 2000[1997]; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992), a concept borrowed from physics that describes how individuals continue to act as if they are living in a past social condition despite entering a new one. This type of behavior generates friction and conflict because the individual’s actions do not align with the social expectations and norms surrounding the individual. Bourdieu (2008[2004]) has described this state as the individual being equipped with a cleft habitus and which has since been used and developed within the sociology of education (e.g., Abrahams & Ingram, 2013; Decoteau, 2016; Friedman, 2014; Ingram, 2011; Persson, 2022; 2024).

The study also makes a scholarly contribution to how habitus can be used in empirical research without disregarding its inherent inertia or changing potential. Social frictions related to the social fields that individuals move between and how these changes over time (a temporal perspective) are a promising avenue in understanding how students approach an expanded and socially differentiated HE field.

While the persistence of educational levels has been extensively studied in the past, little is known about how individuals break the intergenerational cycle and what enables them to do so (Labede et al., 2020). Recent research in the sociology of education argues that exploring the dynamics within the family and their role in shaping educational pathways has been neglected in higher education studies so far (O’Shea et al., 2024; Lessky, 2023). For the school context, these dynamics have been illuminated more prominently. In this regard, scholars in this field argue that focusing on milieu and social class, as dominant factors influencing educational pathways, is important, but it simplifies the complexity of the social and cultural contexts in which students are embedded (Silkenbeumer & Wernet, 2017; Stahl & McDonald, 2022).

This study addresses this issue by shedding light on how familial dynamics shape First-in-Family students’ perceptions of university and what studying means to them. By drawing on the narratives of 31 students from four Austrian public universities (conducted between 2018 and 2024) and applying a theoretical understanding of familial interactions (Labede & Thiersch, 2014) and Bourdieu’s habitus theory (Bourdieu, 1990), this study illuminates the complex nature of familial dynamics and the ways they contribute to shaping the educational pathways of First-in-Family students and their perception of university.

Using a hermeneutical methodological approach (Wernet, 2014) to analyse the empirical data, a typology of what studying subjectively means to First-in-Family learners will be presented. In this presentation I will critically reflect on the potential challenges and opportunities that combining a Bourdieusian perspective with other theoretical and analytical tools present. By highlighting the importance of gaining a nuanced picture of First-in-Family students’ experiences and perceptions of university, I hope this study enriches discussions about which interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological approaches can be used for comprehending (educational) mobility.

Starting from a research started in 2017 on the transition to the university world of first-generation students, this contribution explores the experience of Amina, an Italian-born girl of Senegalese origin, whose biographical journey I have been able to follow longitudinally over the last 6 years. The aim is to show, through her trajectory and narrative, the social and symbolic boundaries that divide the university space and the way in which these boundaries are marked by elements that bring into play the emotional and affective dimension and, therefore, the processes of identity construction and projection into the future. Amina's story also provides multiple elements to explore how such boundaries can be negotiated, circumvented and overcome and, above all, what resources and conditions make this possible.

From a theoretical point of view, the contribution interweaves two different sensibilities. On the one hand, the Bourdieusian concepts habitus, cultural capital and field are used in order to highlight the dominant ways in which the university field defines legitimate criteria of inclusion/exclusion with reference to both the strictly academic and the social and relational dimensions (Bourdieu 1979, 1993; Bourdieu and Passeron 1964). These concepts are fundamental for introducing the dimension of power within the sociological reflection on educational transitions and in particular for the analysis of learning processes related to them (Collier and Morgan 2008; Coulon 2005). On the other hand, the contribution dialogues with the perspective of intersectionality (McCall 1992, 2005) by recognising the importance of looking at the specific ways in which Amina's different positioning along axes defined by gender, ethno-racial and class dimensions are combined. From this perspective, taking up and adapting for the research context the concept of Community-Wealth elaborated in the United States by Tara Yosso (2005), the intersectionality perspective also constitutes a starting point for looking at the ways in which Amina's intersectional identities and affiliations also represent spaces capable of generating resources ('non-dominant' forms of cultural and social capital, cf. O'Shea 2016) that are used to negotiate with the more or less visible rules, expectations and boundaries that characterise the university field.

The contribution examines three 'scenes' that are evoked in Amina's narrative and that constitute three particularly crucial moments in the definition of her study trajectory. These 'scenes' will be examined for what they reveal about the relationship between Amina and the academic field she is traversing. On the one hand, they highlight the different social and symbolic boundaries that define her 'place' at university. On the other, these scenes are used to show the intertwining of emotional and affective dimensions and how, therefore, the boundaries of the academic field construct Amina as an intersectional subjectivity simultaneously limited and enabled by her multiple social placements.

In the last two decades of HE expansion, a larger proportion of working-class young people are encouraged and happy to pursue Higher Education (HE). In analysis of interviews with educationally successful working-class FE students, who comprise ‘the degree generation’ (Bathmaker et al., 2016; Ingram et al., 2023), I analyse factors which inform young people’s attitudes to HE. I draw upon and qualify Ball et al.’s (2002) typology of contingent and embedded choosers. My key argument is that contingent choosers, hailing form working-class backgrounds and often without a family legacy of HE study, construct HE aspirations partially on the back of a capability to make new friends and invest in new practices at FE. I argue that they gain a sense of ‘moving on’ in doing so. This sense of ‘moving on’ that the making of new friends and practice represents is tantamount to what I advance as a proto-mobility.

This felt sense of movement has the effect of alerting to participants, or reinforcing to them, the idea that university in particular is a place where ‘fit’ can be found. It has an active force as a precursor to educational mobility, providing in particular the working-class, often would-be first-generation university students with an air of reassurance in regard to the alien world of (often high-ranking) universities. Here, I draw on Reay et al.’s (2010) distinction between social identities and learner identities. Whilst educational success thrusts these working-class students into A-level study, educational success alone does not amount to FE belonging. Finding a fit socially, amongst peers, is shown to be a requirement, too, for the confident pursuit of HE.

Glimpses of this argument are present in Bourdieu, but not central to his argument. For instance, he writes of the petit-bourgeoisie that their break from the working-class represents a ‘psychological boost [...] a thrust inscribed in the slope of the past trajectory which is the precondition for achievement of the future (1984: 332). I argue that this ‘psychological boost’ can be garnered in the felt sense of mobility that new friends and practices constitute. In this vein, and especially in the context of educational transitions, concrete ties are given an explicitly more central role than Bourdieu often allows for (Bottero and Crossley, 2011). In contemporary times, this is part of the picture when making sense of social mobility and social reproduction.