Female students from backgrounds that qualify for full financial support at universities in South Africa have complex lives that do not disappear just because they have gone to university. Females from rural areas, who are predominantly Black and are from single-headed households, are often caregivers (and protectors) to other children in the household, provide ongoing financial assistance, and conduct household chores. Additionally, they have experienced hardships such as lack of food and sustenance, housing issues, and they navigate sexual abuse, violence, and bullying. Despite all of this, they have succeeded in getting an education sufficient to be accepted into university. The financial support given is enough to provide accommodation, food, and course-specific costs. This is where the support for students from low economic backgrounds begins and ends. Most of these female students do not know other people at university and are first-generation students. They are expected to adapt to their new environment and be able to navigate academia as well as the rest of their peers. Drawn from the HEAPS study, we interviewed 30 women from single-headed households. This presentation will discuss the barriers and issues these women faced to get to university. They gave an honest and open account of their childhoods, which are harrowing and difficult to hear. Therefore, this presentation will have trigger warnings, but we believe that these stories should be told so that we can recognize the struggles of gaining an education for female students in South Africa (and replicated around the world), and make changes to support their needs. We propose that taking into account a Bourdieusian perspective of habitus, female students can be supported better at university, reducing the likelihood of withdrawal, and increasing self-confidence, self-efficacy, and well-being, leading to higher rates of completion, and higher degree classifications.

The sociology of education has studied comprehensively the experiences of first-generation students and, to a lesser degree, of working-class academics. But how do first-generation students become academics? With our paper we contribute to this question by offering a multi-perspective lens on academic mentoring. By triangulating results from two research projects, we aim to unmask the way class is knit into meritocratic ideals and to shed light on social magic in academic settings.

Applying the relational praxeology of Pierre Bourdieu (1977a, 1990) and the concept of social magic (Bourdieu 1977b, Ingram & Allen 2019, Threadgold 2020) in particular, we ask in what moments and phases in academic careers do sticky affinities create a match between habitus and field, especially from the perspective of students, and what characterises a candidate for promotion from the perspective of professors. Consequently, we investigate how capitals in the field of academia are transfigured as social magic and what role social class plays for the realisation of academic mentoring relationships.

The empirical analysis is based on data from two research projects: First, a dataset of 17 biographical-narrative interviews and seven autobiographical texts by first-generation students from Austria and Germany from the study "Doing Class Transitions - First-Generation Students in Austrian and German Higher Education" (duration: 2019-2024; cf. Petrik 2022a; 2022b). Second, a sub-dataset of 12 professors of the social sciences, derived from a grounded theory study of the academic field of the social sciences in Germany (Keil 2020; 2023). Both datasets were coded according to the grounded theory methodology (Strauss & Corbin 1990) and triangulated for the interpretation (Flick 2018).

With our analysis, we can show how characteristics of promising young academics are based on class-specific understandings of education and field specific cultural capital. However, we also find that lesser volume of cultural capital is not necessarily determining academic experiences of first-generation students. In fact, university studies may be perceived as an enriching, empowering experience that opens up the space of possibilities. What is more, relationships to professors and lecturers from non-academic family background may promote academic advancement and lead to considering further academic studies, such as a doing a PhD. Social magic hence can happen, when students’ and professors’ working-class habitus match, but also when first-generation students adapt to the field and develop academic strategies and performances that match with those of professors from academic family background.

Our relational theoretical and methodological design allows us to look at promotion within academia from different angles. By illuminating both the perspectives of professors and students, we can depict mentoring relationships as ambivalent practices, situated within specific academic fields. However, these relationships do not unfold seamlessly or follow a linear logic. We can show, how social magic takes place in promotion settings based on and despite social gravity. In doing so, we not only contribute to a critical discussion on experiences of working-class academics, but also to a Bourdieusian analysis of the entanglement of social class and fields.

While Bourdieu’s conceptual tools have proved useful for studying both processes of social reproduction and social mobility, some theorists have pointed to the empirical limitations of Bourdieu’s conceptual synthesis of objective and subjective social structures. At the most critical end of the spectrum, concepts like habitus have been described as ‘black boxes’ that conceal the underlying social mechanisms that truly explain social action (Boudon, 1998). More nuanced critiques, while generally supportive of Bourdieu’s theoretical framework, have sought to amend his concepts to make them more amenable to study individual biographies by for instance disaggregating the habitus into unique sets of dispositional complexes with specific propensities to respond to a variety of social contexts (Lahire, 2003, 2011, 2019). Yet other scholars acknowledge the validity of some of these mild critiques, but tend to dismiss efforts to amend or change Bourdieu’s framework, seeing these as fundamentally misunderstanding the flexibility of his conceptual tools (Atkinson, 2021). Regardless of the legitimacy of these position-takings, the Bourdieusian research on social class, education and social mobility in recent years and the rich conceptual elaboration it has generated is a testament to the value of these debates.

This presentation builds upon our recent experiences using Bourdieu to study variations in educational aspirations, affective drives, and habitus outcomes among first-generation and working-class students (Ivemark & Ambrose, 2021, 2023; Ivemark, 2023, 2024). This research has occasionally necessitated an integration of other theoretical perspectives or a ‘loosening’ of Bourdieu’s concepts to elucidate otherwise obscured underlying processes. By presenting some concrete empirical cases from our work, we aim to show how these compromises with Bourdieu’s framework have provided us with a more nuanced understanding of experiences of social mobility and the educational choices individuals make as a result of their social background. We conclude by reflecting upon whether these compromises raise any concerns about the usefulness of Bourdieu's thinking tools, or whether the flexibility of these tools ultimately accomodate them.

Due to Pakistan’s post-colonial history, English plays a crucial role in social mobility by acting as a gatekeeper to access Higher Education (HE). Students from socially and economically disadvantaged backgrounds with lower English language skills struggle to access quality education (Mustafa, 2011). While English is not widely spoken in Pakistan, it is used in education, workplaces, bureaucracy, and courts as the country’s official language (Tayyaba, 2014). Access to English is a privilege only a few can afford, making it a form of linguistic capital (power) that holds symbolic value.

I apply Bourdieusian lens to understand the experiences of first-generation university students from disadvantaged backgrounds in relation to English linguistic capital and HE. For my PhD, I interviewed students who are studying at universities across Karachi. They all attended the same preparatory college in Karachi that aims to help students from disadvantaged backgrounds access HE. The research questions explore the role that students linguistic and cultural capital plays in their educational attainment, as well as the impact of factors such as socioeconomic status, social class, and ethnicity on their educational journeys.

My findings show that students’ experiences are shaped by post-colonial influences of English, differential prior experience of studying subjects such as mathematics and science in Urdu, and their status as first-generation university students. These themes are investigated using Bourdieu’s conceptual tools as participants shared how they felt out of place, how they felt their self-confidence shake due to a lack of linguistic and economic capital, and how they did not feel fully prepared for HE (Bourdieu, 1986, 1991). However, my participants also took pride in their background and in the struggles they faced to enter higher education.

Wanting to steer clear from a deficit lens, I studied at academics who argue against using Bourdieu’s theory of practice to understand inequities in education (Laura et al., 2021; Tara & Tara, 2005). According to these academics, Bourdieu’s concept of capital assumes that people from minority groups “lack the social and cultural capital required for social mobility” (Tara & Tara, 2005, p. 70). The balance is unfair to begin with and it seems to carry on as the dominant group has more chances of acquiring even more capital and continuing to unbalance the scales. I use critical race theory to understand how my research participants are impacted by the lack of dominant/mainstream cultural capital they may be bringing to their educational institutions. When applied to educational contexts, CRT “refutes dominant ideology” (Tara & Tara, 2005, p. 74) and this angle allows me to critique the deficit theory that Bourdieu’s concept of capital highlights. This means exploring Yosso’s concept of community cultural wealth in my research participants to understand how this angle tackles the deficit theory that Bourdieu’s concept of capital highlights. This angle of deficiency in marginalized groups places blame on students and their families for not having acquired the required cultural capital needed to perform well academically – the required cultural capital being that of the dominant student population that occupies HE.

In my contribution, I would like to present results, implications and perspectives from a project that offers an alternative approach to career choice processes from a Bourdieuian perspective (Holzmayer, 2023). The project investigated the fit between habitus and field in primary school teacher trainees in order to make the Bourdieu perspective fruitful for researching the career choice process. With the help of the newly developed method of sequence-analytical habitus reconstruction (Kramer, 2019), the individualized habitus of the students can be researched and contrasted with the requirements of the field. The reconstruction of students' professional habitus has shown the importance of matching habitus and the practical logic of the field for a successful career choice process (Holzmayer, 2023).

Simply looking at the sociological level of social background is not sufficient to explain social trajectory. The two different categories of social background and gender do not have a deterministic effect on habitus and career choice processes. Not all first-in-family students develop the same professional habitus. In addition, the subjective perspective of these students makes it clear that being FiF student is often not an issue for them. Not every FiF student develops a so-called cleft habitus, as suggested by current popular literature on the subject (Baron, 2020; Eribon, 2016; Ernaux, 2019; Louis, 2022). This may be due to the "degree generation", as Bathmaker et al. (2016) call it, which makes studying a matter of course. Or it may also be due to the specific characteristics of the primary school teaching profession. In any case, these findings support the view of Miethe (2023), who contradicts the perspective of an inevitable "cleft habitus" of FiF students.

The results show that first-generation students are not a homogeneous group, but offer a wide variety of habitual orientations, which therefore also move very differently in the field. These nuances in the experiences of first-generation and working-class students point to the diversity and changeability of the habitus and to the fact that the field allows a fundamental space for change (Bourdieu, 1999, p. 372).

According to Bourdieu (1998, pp. 55–66), career choice can be seen as the exploration of the universe of possibles and boundaries that are shaped by capital, habitus and field. The intersectional view of career choice allows gender to be included in the analysis. In connection with social background, gender is responsible for whether the primary school teaching profession appears in the universe of possible options. In this article, I would like to look at various aspects that have led to the opening of professional opportunities for students.

This is particularly evident in the case of Markus, for whom the primary school teaching profession as a male working-class child is far removed from the professional universe of possibles. Only various moments of crisis and the recognition of the need to adapt his professional orientation open the fixed boundaries of possibles for him. An accumulation of circumstances finally allows him, as a man from the working class, to take up a female-dominated profession (Holzmayer, 2023).