Conference Program

Transitions to university continue to be structured by classed, racialised, and gendered inequalities, even in systems marked by expansion and widening participation. For upwardly mobile students, entry into higher education is frequently tied to experiences of dislocation, misrecognition, and struggle (Bathmaker et al., 2016). Bourdieusian scholarship has been central to analysing these processes, particularly through the concepts of habitus, field, and capital (Reay, 2018). At the same time, Bourdieu has often been criticised for privileging reproduction over transformation and for leaving insufficient room for the contingent, conflictual, and psychosocial dimensions of practice (Rieger-Ladich, 2017). Consequently, scholars have sought to read Bourdieu in more dynamic ways. This includes, most prominently, Lahire’s work on dispositions (Lahire, 2003), as well as more recent contributions in the sociology of education that aim at grasping the complexity of subject formation under conditions of inequality (Manzano et al., 2026). This paper adds to these debates by bringing Bourdieu into dialogue with Judith Butler in order to develop a more differentiated account of educational upward mobility.

The paper draws on a biographical case study from a wider qualitative study on first-generation students in Austria (Petrik, 2025). Its empirical focus is the educational trajectory of a female student from a Turkish working-class family who enters university through a non-traditional route and encounters repeated forms of institutional and interpersonal devaluation. Methodologically, the paper works with biographical-narrative interview material and reconstructive interpretation. Theoretically, it asks how experiences of first-generation students can be understood when habitus-theoretical perspectives (Bourdieu, 1984) are connected to Butler’s account of subject formation (Butler, 1997).

Upward mobility is approached as a contradictory process of subjectivation unfolding in the tension between recognition and resistance. Bourdieu makes it possible to grasp how students’ dispositions are shaped by classed histories and how universities privilege forms of cultural ease and familiarity that first-generation students are less likely to inherit. Butler helps to sharpen the analysis of how students are called into being through powerful acts of interpellation: as deficient, unsuitable, extraordinary, or legitimate. This perspective directs attention to the question of how first-generation students become intelligible as students, how they are positioned within the university, and how they negotiate injurious and enabling interpellations.

The dialogue between Bourdieu and Butler proves particularly productive when approached through two concepts: dispositions and fields. Dispositions shape receptivity to acts of interpellation in both Butler’s sense of psychic disposition and Bourdieu’s understanding of a system of socially formed dispositions. In their interplay, they condition whether subjects become susceptible to forms of address that reproduce educational inequality or to those that enable them to overcome educational barriers. Acts of interpellation, however, do not unfold on neutral terrain. They are embedded in specific biographical, institutional, and social contexts that correspond to the social space. Bringing field theory into dialogue with a theory of subjectivation therefore allows educational transitions by upwardly mobile students to be analysed as powerful processes in which social (non-)reproduction and subject formation are mutually constituted.