Conference Program

The post-apartheid South African Higher Education landscape remains marked by profound inequalities that perpetuate historical patterns of exclusion despite formal democratisation and policy reforms aimed at transformation in pursuit of social justice (Agumba et al., 2023). While access to universities has expanded since 1994, educational attainment continues to reflect deep structural disparities, with Black African students, particularly women from rural and working-class backgrounds, experiencing multiple intersecting layers of marginalisation (Heleta, 2016). Black women navigate a complex matrix of oppression where patriarchal structures intersect with enduring racial hierarchies, creating unique barriers to both entry and success in higher education (Hlatshwayo, 2020). This marginalisation is reinforced by the symbolic violence operating within the education field —the subtle, normalised forms of domination embedded in institutional cultures, curricula, and pedagogical practices that systematically devalue their knowledge systems, languages, and lived experiences while privileging Western-centric, masculinist epistemologies.

Conceptually building upon this, in this paper, we show how sustained experiences of forms of violence - physical, sexual and symbolic - across the home and education field are internalised by the women in our study, and how this positions their conception of the world and their ways of being in it. Our analysis extends Bourdieusian conceptualisations of habitus clivé (Ingram, 2011; 2018; Friedman, 2016) by foregrounding trauma as an embodied, affective experience that leaves a lasting imprint on the habitus. Sustained and multi-generational exposure to physical, sexual, and symbolic violence across home and educational fields is internalised to form lasting perceptions and conceptions of the world. These deeply traumatic experiences can cause habitus rupture and a calling into question of taken-for-granted ways of being. This rupture is particularly pronounced in cases where the multiple fields in which a person lives their life, become misaligned with habitus (Brahic et al., 2025).

The extreme nature of the violence and abuse suffered by the women in our study is recognised in the present, and not dismissed as something that happened in the past when read through the lens of ruptured habitus. It offers a way of acknowledging the violence not as something they have overcome, but as something they have internalised as history, and now embody in their orientation towards their future. Our results discuss the need for targeted support within the South African education context to tackle gender-based violence for children in schools and communities. The results also highlight the need for the Higher Education system to recognise trauma experiences for women from the poorest financial backgrounds, and we suggest that expert support services are needed to promote equity in accessing higher education.